Ronald Henderson

In 1973 there were approximately 150 Fire Brigades protecting the United Kingdom – all with their own ideas on how to design and specify fire engines. However, local government reorganisation the following year was about to change that. This book is a unique photographic record by distinguished fire engine photographers John Toomey, who came especially from New York, and Andrew Henry. It documents the amazing diversity of British post-war fire engines. Captions and an expert commentary are provided by the highly respected Fire Brigade author and historian Ron Henderson.

This is the fascinating story of the development of early British steam fire engines by a renowned expert on emergency services vehicles and equipment. Ronald Henderson, a member of the Fire Brigade Society and an expert on steam engines, covers the history of the early inventions that coupled steam with fire pumps. This includes the concepts created by firms such as Braithwaite & Ericsson and their steam fire pump and also further inventions by Merryweather & Sons and Shand, Mason & Co., including hand-drawn and horse-drawn fire engines. This book will appeal to all steam enthusiasts and to those who are interested in early industrial technology. It provides a fascinating insight into the way that steam was harnessed to improve the efficiency of firefighting services and how that led to the modern fire engines of today.

Tackle the Challenges of Parallel Programming in the Visual Effects IndustryIn Multithreading for Visual Effects, developers from DreamWorks Animation, Pixar, Side Effects, Intel, and AMD share their successes and failures in the messy real-world application area of production software. They provide practical advice on multithreading techniques and visual effects used in popular visual effects libraries (such as Bullet, OpenVDB, and OpenSubdiv), one of the industry’s leading visual effects packages (Houdini), and proprietary animation systems. This information is valuable not just to those in the visual effects arena, but also to developers of high performance software looking to increase performance of their code.Diverse Solutions to Solve Performance Problems After an introductory chapter, each subsequent chapter presents a case study that illustrates how the authors used multithreading techniques to achieve better performance. The authors discuss the problems that occurred and explain how they solved them. The case studies encompass solutions for shaving milliseconds, solutions for optimizing longer running tasks, multithreading techniques for modern CPU architectures, and massive parallelism using GPUs. Some of the case studies include open source projects so you can try out these techniques for yourself and see how well they work.