"Incorporation of fibres leads to only a slight increase in the compressive strength of foamed concrete; however, it can significantly improve the (up to 4 times), tensile strength (up to 3 times) and impact strength (up to 6 times)."

"Various types of fibres allow the reduction of... autogenous shrinkage [by] a factor of 1.2–1.8 and drying shrinkage by a factor of 1.3–1.8."

"Several factors... affect the mechanical properties of FRFC, namely: fresh and hardened densities, particle size distribution, percentage of ic material... and volume of chemical foam agent. ...rheological properties ...are influenced by the properties of both fibres and foam; therefore, it is necessary to apply an additional dosage of a foam agent to enhance the adhesion and cohesion between the foam agent and the cementitious filler in comparison with materials without fibres."

"Foamed concrete (FC) is a high-quality building material with densities from 300 to 1850 kg/m3, which can have potential use in civil engineering, both as insulation from heat and sound, and for load-bearing structures. However, due to the nature of the cement material and its high porosity, FC is very weak in withstanding tensile loads; therefore, it often cracks in a plastic state, during shrinkage while drying, and also in a solid state."

"Even foamed concrete with a compressive strength of 70 MPa can be made by the addition of polypropylene fiber and fine and used in high-performance cement..."

"The components of foamed concrete (type of cement... water... water/binder ratio... additives... and admixtures...) have a significant effect on its properties..."

"[F]oamed concrete has the potential to become a mainstream material that uses waste material successfully as a replacement for cement or fine aggregate..."

"Amran et al... Fadila et al... Kang... Fernando et al... and Portal et al... produced foamed concrete for use in wall panels. Rum et al... used foamed concrete as a component in a profiled composite slab. Kadela et al.., Drusa et al.., Tian et al... and Lee at al... used foamed concrete in a pavement or floor structure to transmit a load on a subsoil, including weak soil. Moreover, foamed concrete has been used in building foundations..."

"The compressive strength ranges from 0.21 to 10.34 MPa for a density of 300 to 1600 kg/m³ ...[in] typical application."

"Foamed concrete is characterized by its ability to flow, self-compact and self-level as well excellent thermal and acoustic insulation..."

"Foamed concrete was made using the pre-foaming method with physical foaming or mixing and the foaming method with chemical foaming..."

"Foamed concrete (FC) is classified as lightweight concrete with a density ranging from 280 to 1800 kg/m³... and with a minimum of 20% of air pore volume in the cementitious mix..."

"Due to sustainable development and the related reduction in energy consumption and CO2 emission... lightweight concrete, aerated concrete and foamed concrete are increasingly used..."

"Outwards from London, Glasgow, Amsterdam and Hamburg there radiated the lines - shipping lines, railway lines, telegraph lines - that were the sinews of Western imperial power. Regular steamships connected the great commercial centres to every corner of the globe. They criss-crossed the oceans; they plied its great lakes; they chugged up and down its navigable rivers. At the ports where they loaded and unloaded their passengers and cargoes, there were railway stations, and from these emanated the second great network of the Victorian age: the iron rails, along which ran rhythmically, in accordance with scrupulously detailed timetables, a clunking cavalcade of steam trains. A third network, of copper and rubber rather than iron, enabled the rapid telegraphic communication of orders of all kinds: orders to be obeyed by imperial functionaries, orders to be filled by overseas merchants - even holy orders could use the telegraph to communicate with the thousands of missionaries earnestly disseminating West European creeds and ancillary beneficial knowledge to the heathen. These networks bound the world together as never before, seeming to 'annihilate distance' and thereby creating truly global markets for commodities, manufactures, labour and capital. In turn, it was these markets that peopled the prairies of the American Mid-West and the steppe of Siberia, grew rubber in Malaya and tea in Ceylon, bred sheep in Queensland and cattle in the pampas, dug diamonds from the pipes of Kimberley and gold from the rich seams of the Rand."

"The military played a significant role in the application of line telegraphy, not only in providing funds for development but also in testing the new ideas in the rigorous environment of military campaigns."

"Let me remind you that this great country was virtually created one hundred years ago by two inventions. Without them, the United States was impossible, with them, it was inevitable. Those inventions were, of course, the railroad and the electric telegraph. Today we are seeing, on a global scale, an almost exact parallel to that situation. What the railroads and the telegraph did here a century ago, the jets and communication satellites are doing now to all the world."

"... Few persons, probably, even among ornithologists realize what an enormous number of birds are killed by flying against these wires, which now form a murderous net-work over the greater part of the country. Until recently, I had myself no adequate idea of the destruction that is so quietly, insidiously, and uninterruptedly accomplished. My observations do not enable me to form even an approximate estimate of the annual mortality, and I suppose we shall never possess accurate data; but I am satisfied that many hundred thousand birds are yearly killed by the telegraph."

"Sir James Anderson and his crew on the ship Great Eastern attempted to lay down the second transatlantic cable in 1865, starting in the Irish island of Valentia. After about 1,062 miles of cable were laid down under the ocean, the cable snapped at the stern of the ship, halting the mission A second attempt was successfully made by the Great Eastern in the following year. On this journey, the crew also retrieved the lost end of the first cable and reconnected it to its original end. By the end of 1866, North America and Europe had two operating cables for telegraphic communications. Telegrams could be transmitted between North America and Europe at the average rate of 0.1 words per minute and at the cost of 10 dollars per page."

"In August 1858 President Buchanan exchanged greetings with Queen Victoria by means of the newly completed Atlantic cable. Commemorating that happy occasion, it is a pleasure to send best wishes to you on the one hundredth anniversary of the completion of the first Trans-Atlantic Cable. The development of international communications has brought the peoples of the world into close neighborhood. It is our hope that these means of communication will serve increasingly as a carrier of the message of peace for which we both work and pray."

"Edison exhibited at the International Electrical Exhibition of Philadelphia an automatic telegraph for fac-simile transmission of despatches in Roman letters."

"If it be asked what telegraphic system is specifically announced as the most developed and extended throughout the world, the answer would seem to be definitely and summarily given in the proceedings of the International Telegraphic Convention held in Paris in March, 1865, composed of the representatives of twenty of the principal nations of Europe, assembled for the special purpose of examining the various projects, in order to adopt a uniform system, and to regulate international telegraphy for their common benefit. They thus decree in their third article; "L'appareil Morse reste provisoirement adopté pour le service des fils internationaux." Concise as is this announcement, as the result of their deliberations, it proclaims that the Morse system—an American system—is preferred for special international service throughout Europe."

"... Gauss and Weber developed an electrical two wires telegraph in 1833 for the synchronisation of observations and tested the transmission of words through an elaborate code (Stevens et al. 1838). Their scientific breakthrough led to the first commercial patent by Wheatstone in 1837 for a five wires telegraph leading immediately to the exploitation of lines between London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham along the new railroad network. This telegraph was using a code able to transmit 20 letters, the other ones having to be omitted. The continental testing of this system in 1840 involved the Director of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Quetelet and Gauss. The scientific objective being network science coordinating magnetic observatories (Quetelet, 1840). Similar developments in the United States led Morse to design a stable telegraph with a coding system able to transmit many more characters which the US Supreme Court recognized in 1854 as the only patented telegraph system."

"During the voyage of the packet ship Sully from Havre to New York, in October, 1832, a conversation arose one day in the cabin upon electricity and magnetism. Dr. Charles T. Jackson, of Boston, described an experiment recently made in Paris with an electro-magnet, by means of which electricity had been transmitted through a great length of wire, arranged in circles around the walls of a large apartment. The transmission had been instantaneous, and it seemed as though the flight of electricity was too rapid to be measured. Among the group of passengers no one listened more attentively to Dr. Jackson's recital than a New York artist, named Samuel Finley Breece Morse, who was returning from a three years' residence in Europe, whither he had gone for improvement in his art. ... "Why," said he, when the doctor had finished, "if that is so, and the presence of electricity could be made visible in any desired part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence might not be transmitted instantaneously by electricity." "How convenient it would be," added one of the passengers, "if we could send news in that manner." "Why can't we?" asked Morse, fascinated by the idea. From that hour the subject occupied his thoughts, and he began to exercise his Yankee ingenuity in devising the requisite apparatus."

"Every day the telegraph lines over the whole country cease work for a short time for the passage of a signal which is sent out from the Observatory at Greenwich exactly at 9 a.m. At the Observatory there is a Standard Clock, and that Standard Clock is the Earth itself. The sky is the dial. Its figures are the stars, and the line of sight of a telescope is the hand which points the hours."

"At this time ambassadors remained essential due to the slowness of communications. It could take a month for a letter to travel from London to St. Petersburg; in 1822 the record for an urgent dispatch to Vienna was one week. But in the 1840s and 1850s railways started to spread across the Continent, while steamships dramatically reduced the duration of sea voyages. After the introduction of the electric telegraph in the 1870s, ciphered telegrams replaced written dispatches for urgent business. Now that messages could be sent and answered within hours, the embassies in far-flung capitals could be subject to daily supervision. In 1904 the British diplomat Sir Francis Bertie complained that an ambassador had been reduced to the status of a “damned marionette,” with the Foreign Office pulling the wires."

"Tous ceux qui se sont occupés de l'application pratique de la télégraphie électrique s'accordent facilement sur ce point, savoir, que l'immense majorité des perturbations sont sujets aux télégraphes électriques proviennent des variations dans l'intensité des courants employés. La cause des variations réside, soit dans la source des courants, soit dans les conditions variables du circuit conducteur. La première de ces causes peut être éliminée en faisant usage de sources constantes. Je me contente d'observer à cet égard que je donne la préférence à la pile de Daniell."

"(All those who have been concerned with the practical application of electrical telegraphy readily agree on this point, namely, that the immense majority of the disturbances which affect electrical telegraphs arise from variations in the intensity of the currents employed. The cause of the variations lies either in the source of the currents or in the varying conditions of the conductor circuit. The first of these causes can be eliminated by making use of constant sources. I am content, in this regard, to observe that I give preference to the Daniell cell.)"

"... once, after I came to Fort Sedgwick, the wires were said to be "down," and no communication could be had with other posts in the upper country. It was feared that the Indians had been tampering with the wires, and torn them down. But the operators went out under an escort of soldiers to see what the difficulty was. They came back again in a couple of days, and reported that the Indians had not meddled with the wires at all. But it seemed that some buffaloes in a large drove had taken the privilege of scratching their rumps against the poles, and thus tore them down; and getting their horns entangled in the wires, the wild creatures had carried off about four miles of telegraph-wire!"

"Wavelets were developed independently by mathematicians, quantum physicists, electrical engineers and geologists, but collaborations among these fields during the last decade have led to new and varied applications. What are wavelets, and why might they be useful to you? The fundamental idea behind wavelets is to analyze according to scale. Indeed, some researchers feel that using wavelets means adopting a whole new mind-set or perspective in processing data. Wavelets are functions that satisfy certain mathematical requirements and are used in representing data or other functions."

"On the one hand, the concept of wavelets can be viewed as a synthesis of ideas which originated during the last twenty or thirty years in engineering (subbing coding), physics (coherent states, renormalization group), and pure mathematics (study of Calderón-Zygmund operators). As a conseuqence of these interdiscplinary origins, wavelets appeal to scientists and engineers of many different backgrounds. On the other hand, wavelets are a fairly simple mathematical tool with a great variety of possible applications."

"Wavelets are everywhere nowadays. Whether in signal or image processing, in astronomy, in fluid dynamics (turbulence), or in condensed matter physics, wavelets have found applications in almost every corner of physics. Furthermore, wavelet methods have become standard fare in applied mathematics, numerical analysis, and approximation theory."

"A Haar wavelet is the simplest type of wavelet. In discrete form, Haar wavelets are related to a mathematical operation called the Haar transform. The Haar transform serves as a prototype for all other wavelet transforms."

"Wavelets were introduced at the beginning of the 'eighties by J. Morlet, a French geophysicist at Elf-Aquitaine, as a tool for signal analysis in view of applications for the analysis of seismic data. The numerical success of Morlet prompted A. Grossmann to make a more detailed study of the wavelet transform, which resulted in a paper giving the mathematical foundations (see Grossmann & Morlet ..., where the title of the paper still shows the name wavelets of constant shape. In 1985, the harmonic analyst Y. Meyer became aware of this theory and he recognised many classical results inside it. Meyer pointed out to Grossmann and Morlet that there was a connection between their signal analysis methods and existing, powerful techniques in the mathematical study of singular integral operators. Then Ingrid Daubechies became involved, and all this resulted in the first construction of a special type of frames (see Daubechies, Grossmann & Meyer ..), (the concept frame generalizes the concept basis in a Hilbert space). It was also the start of a cross-fertilization between the signal analysis applications and the purely mathematical aspects of techniques based on dilations and translations."

"Wavelet theory is nowadays a very active field of approximation theory with a wide impact on signal analysis, high-performance imaging applications, and adaptive transversal filter theory. It is concerned with the modeling of univariate and multivariate signals with a set of specific signals. The specific signals are just the wavelets. Families of wavelets are used to approximate a given signal (with respect to the L2 norm, say), and each element in the wavelet set is constructed from the same original window, the mother wavelet."

"At a lab at Johns Hopkins University, researchers are building a prosthetic hand unlike any other: It can sense pain. It’s easy to understand why you might want a prosthesis that can feel the squishiness of a grape or the warmth of another person’s hand. But pain? Well, pain could be useful, too. “If you think about how we humans use pain, it’s to protect our bodies, to prevent damage,” says Luke Osborn, a graduate student in Nitish Thakor’s lab at Hopkins, who co-authored a new paper on the pain-sensitive hand. People born without the ability to feel pain stumble through life with dangerous freedom. Babies who do not feel pain are known to chew their fingers raw; children without pain will plunge their hands into boiling water. Pain is a signal that says, Hey, watch out. “People do damage their prosthetic limbs a lot. They use them as tools they weren’t designed to be used as,” says Levi Hargrove, a bioengineer at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, who was not involved in the study. It’s easy, for example, to bang an unfeeling piece of plastic and metal against a table. Pain could make a prosthesis feel more real, more lifelike—less a tool and more like a natural part of the body."

"For the first time, artificial limbs were being mass-produced in response to the enormous number of casualties in World War One. In the US, the Walter Reed Army Hospital produced a large number of artificial limbs for the returning veterans. This example is of a welding attachment and other tools integrated into the limbs for amputees to return to work after the war. It wasn’t all work, however. Also in the collection of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, USA, is an attachment for playing baseball. The Walter Reed Army Hospital is still a centre for artificial limb production in the US, 100 years later. The technology continued to develop after WW1. DW Dorrance invented the split hook artificial hand shortly before World War I. It became popular with labourers after the war who were able to return to work using the attachment because of its ability to grip and manipulate objects. It’s one of the few designs that have remained relatively unchanged over the past century. Dorrance demonstrated its multi-functionality in the 1930s by driving a car using the arm. In the UK, Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton, became a centre for manufacturing artificial limbs in the World War Two. It opened in 1939. In its first year, 10,987 war pensioners attended the centre, with an additional 16,251 limbs being sent by post. At the outbreak of war, the factory was expanded because of the realisation that 40,000 UK servicemen had lost limbs in WW1. However in WW2 there was around half the number of amputees. As Leon Gillis, QMH Consultant Surgeon from 1943-1967, observed, advances in surgical techniques, treatment of infections and the availability of blood transfusion after WW1 all reduced the need for amputation."

"[H]uge number of casualties in the American Civil War caused demand for artificial limbs to skyrocket. Many veterans turned to designing their own prosthetics as a response to the limiting capabilities of the limbs on offer."

"Q: Being so focused on other people’s limbs all the time, I wonder, what’s your relationship with your own limbs like?"

"Q: Do the clients always know what they want?"

"There is a moment when each ultra-realistic prosthetic limb crafted by Sophie de Oliveira Barata transitions from a hunk of silicon into something more. “It happens around this point,” the artist explained, gesturing to a half-finished leg jutting mid-kick from her work bench. “I’ll know it’s happened when I handle a limb a bit roughly, and I find myself apologizing to it: ‘Oh, sorry!’” It’s an easy mistake to make. With precision molding, hand-painted veins, and real human hairs, the limbs scattered around Sophie’s studio look uncannily real: legs on the verge of dancing and hands ready to burst into applause. With these prostheses, Sophie enables her customers to conceal their absences and blend in. But the artist also caters to another kind of clientele: amputees wanting to stand out. She works with these clients to imagine the missing parts of their bodies as fantastical works of art: an arm housing a motorized coiling snake, a jewel-studded leg with embedded stereo, a bird-wing arm with a metal hook for a talon. “Instead of seeing what’s missing,” she remarked, “you see what’s there.”"

"In France and Switzerland, from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, a variety of custom-designed limbs were built. Made of combinations of wood, metal, Leather|leather, and other materials, some of these designs were truly fantastic. Controlled by cables, gears, cranks, and springs, these limbs could be rotated and bent. There were prosthetic fingers made to grip objects. The limbs were not completely practical, as they had to be operated by a different hand, but they had their uses. For example, a hand could be cranked shut around a pen or fork. Flexing, spring-loaded legs were also available. These fantastic objects were ahead of their time: cable control was a precursor to the standard post-World War II design. Following those early designs, prosthetic limbs improved by leaps and bounds. World Wars I and II, as well as other large-scale conflicts, such as Vietnam, unfortunately increased demand for prosthetics, leading to improvements."

"A 3000-year-old mummy was recently discovered sporting a prosthetic big toe. The wooden toe had been meticulously fit to the woman’s foot, with attachment straps designed for comfort. The craftsmanship was extraordinary; the toe could even flex. The toe is one of the oldest examples, but from pirates’ peg legs to Tycho Brahe’s metal nose, replacement body parts have a long and inventive history. Even before the toe’s discovery, prosthetics were known to be ancient technology. Replacement body parts are mentioned prominently in the classical literature of multiple cultures. The mythical Greek hero Pelops, accidentally ingested by the Gods, sported an ivory shoulder after his reconstruction. Herodotus mentions warriors with wooden feet, and there are examples from Asia and Rome as well."

"People have used all sorts of artificial devices probably from the beginnings of human history to help them compensate for the loss of a limb. Thus in very ancient times, the first and simplest prosthesis may have been a forked tree that was used as a crutch to help someone walk whose leg may have been badly damaged or lost in an accident or to a disease. What began as a modified crutch with a wooden or leather cup and progressed through many metamorphoses has now developed into a highly sophisticated prosthetic limb made of space-age materials."

"In China, King-his Tse, invented in the 500 b. C. a flying magpie of wood and bam-boo, and a wooden horse able to jump. Around year 200 B.C., Philo of Byzantium, inventor of the repetitive catapult, constructed an aquatic robot. In 206 B.C., the first Han Emperor found the Chin Shih Hueng Ti's treasure. It included a mechanical toy orchestra that moved independently. In old Greece, Archytas of Tarento (referenced in [English]] as Archytas of Tarentum, and in some references in Spanish as Architas de Tarento), philosopher, mathematician and contemporary politician of Plato, considered the father of mechanical engineering and precursory of the robotics, in-vented the [w:Screw|screw]] and the pulley, among other many devices. The materials used for the construction of robots were wood (parts with form), iron (fixed structure, supports, hinges), copper (which is mouldable and allowed the construction of thinner parts), leather (cables, footwear) and fabrics. The first models used the application of direct force to make movements, facilitated with sets of pulleys, gears and handles. In this phase the robots were replicas of the human being that made a series of simple movements. The machines began assuming tasks of aid to the man and ended up repelling their conception of the world and animated beings. The mechanics affected the study of nature, spreading to the anatomy science; of which agreed models with that conception were elaborated, such as “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (On the workings of the human body) from Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) who conceived the man as a complex mechanical structure."

"One of the earliest written references to prosthetics is found in a book published in France in 1579. That year, French surgeon Ambrose Pare (1510–1590) published his complete works, part of which described some of the artificial limbs he fitted on his amputees. As a military surgeon, Paré had re-moved many a soldier's shattered arm or leg, and he eventually began designing and building artificial limbs to help the men who had been maimed. Ambroise Paré was the official royal surgeon to four successive kings, and earned his position by practicing medicine on the battlefield, attempting to save, or at least treat, wounded soldiers. As a doctor, he was most disturbed by the reaction of some of the people whom he had saved. He found that some soldiers took their own lives rather than live without limbs, or with terrible wounds. To try to combat this problem, Paré began crafting artificial limbs. This was not new. There is evidence for the use of prostheses from the times of the ancient Egyptians. Prostheses were developed for function, cosmetic appearance and a psycho-spiritual sense of wholeness. Amputation was often feared more than death in some cultures. It was believed that it not only affected the amputee on earth, but also in the afterlife. The ablated limbs were buried and then disinterred and reburied at the time of the amputee’s death so the amputee could be whole for eternal life. One of the earliest examples comes from the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt in the reign of Amenhotep II in the fifteenth century B.C. A mummy in the Cairo Museum has clearly had the great toe of the right foot amputated and replaced with a prosthesis manufactured from leather and wood. The first true rehabilitation aids that could be recognised as prostheses were made during the civilisations of Greece and Rome. During this period, prostheses for battle and hiding deformity were heavy, crude devices made of available materials—wood, metal and leather. Records of ancient prosthesis can be found all over the world."

"The earliest known prosthesis, dating possibly as far back as 950 B.C., was discovered in Cairo on the mummified body of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman. The prosthesis is made largely of wood, molded and stained, its components bound together with leather thread. It is, as prostheses go, tiny. Because it is a toe. The prosthetic digit—the oldest little piggy in the world—is extraordinarily lifelike, its curved nail sunken into a similarly curved bed. Which is, in its way, remarkable. A toe! One that is several thousand years old! And it's not just a toe-sized peg—a little device that would have made mobility more manageable for someone who was, by reasons of birth or amputation, missing her big toe. The prosthesis is, as much as it possibly could be, humanoid: maximally lifelike and maximally toe-like. The "Cairo Toe," as it's been dubbed, is prosthetic and cosmetic at once—evidence not just of ancient manufacturing stepping in where biology was limited, but of manufacturing engaging in an ancient form of biomimcry. Compare the Cairo Toe to today's prostheses, many of which—especially those that dominate the public imagination—seem to be inspired less by "man," and more by the Bionic Man. The blades. The hooks. The exoskeletons. This week alone has brought news of a roboticized prosthetic hand that, possibly inspired by the workings of the claw crane, foregoes five fingers for three. It has brought news of a woman who created her own prosthetic leg ... out of LEGOs. Those stories come as part of a flood of coverage of the next generation of prostheses, in which technologies from adjacent fields—3D-printing, robotics, chemistry—are helping humans to transcend nature's narrow definition of humanity."

"In a 2013 interview with The New York Times, De Oliveira Barata described her work on prosthetics as outside of engineering or medicine—the industries with which artificial limb-making are typically associated. “Making an alternative limb is like entering a child’s imagination and playing with their alter ego,” she said. “You’re trying to find the essence of the person.” She works with clients to figure out how they want to look. “It’s their choice of how to complete their body—whether that means having a realistic match or something from an unexplored imagination,” she told The Times. These sculptures aren’t accessible to everyone. Wright says she would love a custom leg, but it’s out of reach for her. “I’ve inquired about getting one,” she told me, “but it’s very ex-pensive! Crazy expensive.” Depending on what the limbs are made of, they can cost anywhere from $4,600 to $21,000. But even if not every amputee gets or wants a spike leg or a feathery suit of armor or even the curved cheetah leg, the fact that people see these alternative bodies out in the world seems to have helped push a cultural shift in how people think about normalcy. That is, at least, in Western nations. In many countries, the stigma against disability and amputation remains. In the United States, Mullins says that today’s kids don’t question her normalcy the way her peers once did, they don’t see her as disabled at all. “They see a rebuilt body as something powerful. If I’m walking around in carbon fiber or titanium or bionics, standing on a street corner, and some little kid is walking by, they presume power. They want to know if I can fly, how fast I can run.”"

"For a long time the history of prosthetics has been inextricably linked with the history of war, and thus of men. After World War II, when soldiers were returning from the battlefield, there was a collective anxiety about whether they’d be able to re-enter their families and workplaces. Many people wanted soldiers to come back, and for everything to go back to normal. But an amputation was a physical reminder that things were not the same. “Physicians, therapists, psychologists, and ordinary citizens alike often regarded veterans as men whose recent amputation was physical proof of emasculation or general incompetence, or else a kind of monstrous de-familiarization of the 'normal' male body,” writes the professor David Serlin in the book Artificial Parts, Practical Lives. Serlin describes the ways in which the media and the military talked about these soldiers, pushing for them to be seen as “normal” in the eyes of the public. In 1946, the comic Gasoline Alley featured a man named Bix whose prosthetic lets him be a “normal American guy.” The comic shows Bix stocking shelves, and features a very surprised boss who exclaims, “I didn’t expect he’d be perfectly normal”—before hiring the man on the spot. Professional photographs taken at Walter Reed Army hospital depicted men with prosthetic devices doing “normal” male activities like lighting a cigarette and reading the sports page, their prosthetic legs adorned with “tattoos” of pinup girls."