starting his first venture in textiles, a man founded Suzlon Energy which has become a US$10 billion worth (market cap) wind power based company. now he has been conferred with CIF Chanchlani Global India award 2009 in Toronto for his outstanding contributions to promote non-conventional sources of energy.
learn more on wikipedia link
I apologize for being so overdue for this blog to my dearest readers but I think I will make up for it as what I am going write has not only technical but aesthetical and sentimental components involved in itself.
The technology of ancient India, the original technologies…
I week before I was reading about damask steel the hardest known steel for a few centuries and the technical aspects of the material ,you will be shocked to hear that this material has internally woven nanotubes and nanowires of carbon which are still the hardest material on earth and are difficult to produce even with modern technologies ,although it may be said that it was merely a chance that ancient metallurgists produced this kind of structures but still it would have required years of experiment and studies. By the way we have not been able to reconstruct this material again even with all our so called modern wonders.
Dr. A.P.J Kalam refers to a certain wall painting at NASA in his book wings of fire, it depicts two armies fighting each other and one of them is firing rockets at the other ,this picture has an Indian ambience and the ones firing rockets are not white but black , the legendary rockets of Tipu Sultan . Hence it was more than a century before Dr. Von Braun made V2 rockets for Germany during 2nd world war we Indians were already using them .
Sultan’s rockets were made of iron tubes and bamboo strips .they could be used as incendiary or like flying scythes .Rockets could be of various sizes, but usually consisted of a tube of soft hammered iron about 8″ long and 1½ – 3″ diameter, closed at one end and strapped to a shaft of bamboo about 4ft. long. The iron tube acted as a combustion chamber and contained well packed black powder propellant. A rocket carrying about one pound of powder could travel almost 1,000 yards. The range of this system was 2.4 km approx. which is quite a good range when compared to European rockets which were built decades later.
Later after his defeat Tipu’s rockets were taken by British and they finally became a basis for the Congreve rockets of British army.
To be continued…
