An Engine That Lifted Our Spirits!

&Nbsp; In the turbulent 1960s, America looked beautiful on the surface, with wide highways traversed by the middle class in their four-wheeled fishtailed boats, but a deep ugliness, like gangrene, festered in the south. America was living a contradiction, and nowhere was this more evident than in Alabama, a state that epitomized this contradiction and dysfunction. Despite the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1864, a hundred years later, Alabama, like the other southern states, was reluctant to relinquish their "plantation culture." In fact, a mere 80 years later, during WWII manufacturing, racial tensions boiled over in Mobile, Alabama, at the Alabama Dry Dock & Shipbuilding Company. Twenty years later, in the '60s, segregation persisted under acrimonious conditions, but the Civil Rights Movement had come into full ferment. It is quite astounding, and hard to digest that this kind of racist segregation and bigotry did not exist in the Roman Empire, over two thousand years ago, till it became a religious one under Constantine.

It is sardonic that Mobile was the venue where a racially segregated American workforce built warships to destroy the racist regime in Germany. The antipodean reality in the '60s was this: as the U.S. was poised to take a giant leap into the future with its space program, it was still shackled with a ball-and-chain mentality in Alabama, where once again, the government had setup Mr. Werhner Von Braun (who ironically escaped from the Nazi regime) and company, to fire up the US ascent to the moon. It was a sad paradox, that while the surrounding society wallowed in primitive behavior, the engines of progress could not be held back in Huntsville, Alabama.

"The segregated armed forces of the U.S. landed in Normandy, to fight and destroy the racist war machine of the Nazis...if this is not an epigrammatic oxymoron, I don't know what it is." - Raju Peddada

An eerie similitude subsisted between the obstinate machine and its human creators. The story of the F-1 is as intriguing as a classic tale of survival by Emile Zola. What makes this story rather fantastic is the reality. The flaws and unique quirks are the elements that shape an individual. It is ironic that the perfectionist engineers had birthed an engine in their own image, with a human persona, with belligerent and stubborn "quirks" they could not extirpate. It was as if the engine, once given life, chimerically and metaphorically, assumed the human dimension of control, and flatly refused to be corrected, like any proud entity. The struggles persisted with this big stubborn engine, till its creators coaxed out most of its dysfunction, but for one: the combustion inefficiency. Engineers were forced to adapt around it. And, with this flaw, like a personality trait intact, the F-1s managed to serve their creators faithfully, without a breakdown. The black smoke and the 800-foot-long flapping flame, trailing the engines after lift-off, seemed to collectively exclaim: "See, we could do it!

Surface area of a cone calculator

Instructions for using the calculator

This surface area of a cone calculator below is very simple to use.

Just enter the radius of the circle and the height of the cone

Then click on the button that says calculate

Do not enter numbers with a slash (/)! If you do, the wrong answer will be computed

Therefore, convert all fractions into decimals before entering numbers

Enjoy the calculator!