Fred Whipple, a famous american astronomer, has died last Monday, August 30, 2004, in Cambridge MA at the age of 97. He predicted the composition of comets and invented a device in 1946, long before space flight, that would protect satellites from the impact of meteors. The thin metal foil is still in use today and is known as "Whipple shield". Six comets and an astronomy institute are also named after him.
In 1966, he was invited to visit Moscow for a scientific exchange project, a unique chance as it was not so easy to travel behind the Iron Curtain for an American during the Cold War. While he met his fellow astronomers, his wife Babette went looking for posters. Much later, in 1999, she found two of them again in a cupboard, and contacted me, as she had noticed the Poster Page on the internet, even before Google. I was quite impressed to receive email from a lady in her eighties, and even more so when she decided to donate the posters to my collection, and I feel very honoured to count Babette and Fred Whipple among the first supporters of the Poster Page:
Poster by Boris Nepomniashchi, b. 1939 Moi trud vlivaetsia, v trud moei respubliki (My work will flow into the work of my republic) Printed in Moscow, 1966 Edition 62'000 copies, price 10 Kopek |
Poster by Leonid Reshetnikov, b. 1921 Zdravstvui leto! (Hello summertime!) Printed in Kalinin (Soviet Union), 1966 Edition 196'000 copies, price 10 Kopek |
