This single volume affords instant access to more than 35,000 individual biographies of the people whose activities are shaping today's world. Among those profiled are prominent government figures, high-ranking military officers, leaders of the largest corporations in each country, heads of religious organizations, pioneers in science & the arts & many more.

The role of large-scale business enterprise—big business and its managers—during the formative years of modern capitalism (from the 1850s until the 1920s) is delineated in this pathmarking book. Alfred Chandler, Jr., the distinguished business historian, sets forth the reasons for the dominance of big business in American transportation, communications, and the central sectors of production and distribution.

This handbook is a both a description of the current practice at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and a compilation of the theory and lore of gauge block calibration. Most of the chapters are nearly self-contained so that the interested reader can, for example, get information on the cleaning and handling of gauge blocks without having to read the chapters on measurement schemes or process control, etc. This partitioning of the material has led to some unavoidable repetition of material between chapters. The basic structure of the handbook is from the theoretical to the practical. Chapter 1: basic concepts and definitions of length and units; Chapter 2: history of gauge blocks, appropriate definitions and a discussion of pertinent national and international standards; Chapter 3: physical characteristics of gauge blocks, including thermal, mechanical and optical properties; Chapter 4: a description of statistical process control (SPC) and measurement assurance (MA) concepts; and Chapters 5 and 6: details of the mechanical comparisons and interferometric techniques used for gauge block calibrations. Full discussions of the related uncertainties and corrections are included. Finally, the appendices cover in more detail some important topics in metrology and gauge block calibration.