PA

At the site of the first water pumping station providing water and sewage systems to the City of Erie in 1868, the Chestnut Street Pumping Station houses one of the largest steam engines, which pumped 20 million gallons a day. The triple-expansion steam reciprocating engine, which pumped water from the filter plant to the city reservoir, was typical of those used in municipal water pumping stations throughout the country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The William H. Chandler Chemistry Laboratory was conceived and planned by William Henry Chandler (1841-1906), professor, chairman, librarian, and acting president of Lehigh University. Designed by Philadelphia architect Addison Hutton and erected between 1884 and 1885 at a cost of $200,000, the building set the standard for laboratory construction for the next half century.

The first known pumping system providing drinking and wash water in the North American colonies. The building (still standing) is dated 1761, but it was preceded by an experimental frame building dated 1754. Before the Bethlehem built its system, assigned carriers would daily haul water up the hill from a well near the city gate. A wooden waterwheel, driven by the flow of Monocacy Creek, drove wooden pumps which lifted the water through wooden pipes to the top of the hill where the water was distributed by gravity.

In an era when roads and canals were the most common means of overland transportation, the Allegheny Portage Railroad provided a novel alternative. The railway carried fully-loaded canal boats over the steep grades of the Allegheny Mountain. The 36-mile system rose almost 2,300 feet above sea level at its summit - the highest level to which canal boats had ever been carried. The project included ten double-tracked inclined planes, powered by steam engines. Its 900-foot Staple Bend Tunnel, cut from solid rock, was the first railroad tunnel constructed in America.

This is the first extremely smooth, surgically implantable, seam-free pulsatile blood pump to receive widespread clinical use. In its use in more than 250 patients, it has been responsible for saving numerous lives. When used as a bridge to transplant, the pump has a success rate greater than 90 percent. There has never been a device-failure-related fatality of any of these patients. A successful heart-assist pump could save an estimated fifteen thousand individuals annually.

The 4,620-horsepower GG1 was primarily a passenger locomotive, routinely operating at over 100 miles per hour, but was used in freight service as well. Conceived by the Pennsylvania Railroad and built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works and General Electric Company, No. 4800 logged nearly 5 million miles in its forty-five-year life. It was the prototype for a 139-unit fleet built during a decade to serve on the PRR's electrified lines, and the only one with a riveted body shell; the remainder were welded.

Steroid chemists often refer to the 1930s as the Decade of the Sex Hormones, when the molecular structures of certain sex hormones were determined and first introduced to medical practice as drugs. Russell Marker achieved the first practical synthesis of the pregnancy hormone, progesterone, by what now is known as the "Marker Degradation." Produced from starting material in a species of Mexican yam, Marker’s progesterone eventually became the preferred precursor in the industrial preparation of the anti-inflammatory drug cortisone.