CRANE encyclopedia topics

crane fly, true fly resembling a mosquito, often called daddy longlegs because of its six long, delicate legs. (The harvestman, also called daddy longlegs, belongs to an unrelated order.) Most species of crane flies have a single pair of wings and slender bodies. They feed upon plant substances and frequent damp places in pastures and meadows. Crane flies belong to the phylum Arthropoda, class Insecta, order Diptera, family Tipulidae.

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crane

crane, large wading bird found in marshes in the Northern Hemisphere and in Africa. Although sometimes confused with herons, cranes are more closely related to rails and limpkins. Cranes are known for their loud trumpeting call that can be heard for miles and for the rhythmic, jumping dances both males and females perform during mating season. They eat small animals, grain, and other vegetable matter. The North American whooping crane, a white bird almost 5 ft (1.5 m) tall, was nearly extinct by the 1940s. Many have since been raised in captivity and new populations in the wild have been fostered, although the bird is still endangered. Most migratory whooping cranes winter at Aransas Bay, Tex. The sandhill crane, about 4 ft (1.2 m) tall with gray plumage, is becoming rare; it winters west of the Mississippi River. The crowned crane of Africa has bright, contrasting colors. At the beginning of the 21st cent. there were 15 species of crane in the world, 11 of them endangered. Cranes are classified in the phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, class Aves, order Gruiformes, family Gruidae.

See P. Matthiesen, The Birds of Heaven: Travels With Cranes (2001).

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crane

crane, hoisting machine for lifting heavy loads and transferring them from one place to another, ordinarily over distances of not more than 200 ft (60 m). Cranes have a long reach and can lift loads to great heights. Powered by manual or animal power, cranes have been in use from early times. Modern cranes are of varied types and sizes; they may be actuated by steam, electricity, diesel, or hydraulic power as well as by manual power, and they are indispensable in industries where heavy materials are handled constantly. The overhead traveling crane, a type of bridge crane, is used inside buildings or in outdoor storage yards. Two or more parallel girders span its working area. Another girder, called the bridge, stretches between them and rolls along them on wheels; this girder, in turn, supports a carriage from which a lifting attachment is lowered by pulleys. On a stacking crane the pulleys are replaced by a stiff, rotating column on which a pair of forks ride up and down. The gantry crane, another type of bridge crane, has a bridge supported by vertical structures that move along tracks. Gantries are used on piers or in shipyards. The jib crane has a horizontal load-supporting boom fastened to a rotating vertical column, either attached to a wall or extending from floor to ceiling; when the column is held only at the bottom it is called a pillar crane. The derrick is a crane equipped either with a vertical mast held by struts, as on barges, or with guy wires, as in building construction. The boom is attached to the bottom of the mast by a pivot and is raised and lowered by a cable reaching from the top of the mast to the end of the boom. A crawler crane is a self-propelled crane that moves on caterpillar treads.

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Crane, Walter

Crane, Walter, 1845-1915, English designer, illustrator, and painter. As a painter he is grouped with the later Pre-Raphaelites, but he is better known for his illustrations of the works of Spenser and of Hawthorne's Wonder Book and Grimm's Fairy Tales. Seeking with William Morris to ally art with everyday life, he designed textiles, glass windows, tapestries, and house decorations. Crane's interest in socialism is expressed in his cartoons for Commonweal and Justice. In 1888 he founded the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society of London.

See his memoirs, An Artist's Reminiscences (1907); G. Smith, ed., Walter Crane, 1845-1915 (1989).

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Crane, Stephen

Crane, Stephen, 1871-1900, American novelist, poet, and short-story writer, b. Newark, N.J. Often designated the first modern American writer, Crane is ranked among the authors who introduced realism into American literature. The 14th child of a Methodist minister, he grew up in Port Jervis, N.Y., and briefly attended Lafayette College and Syracuse Univ. He moved to New York City in 1890 and for five years lived in poverty as a free-lance writer.

His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a grimly realistic story of slum life, was unpopular but gained the young writer the friendship of Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells. Crane's next novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895, restored ed. 1982), brought him wide and deserved fame. Set during the Civil War, the novel traces the development of a young recruit, Henry Fleming, through fear, illusion, panic, and cowardice, to a quiet, humble heroism. This remarkable account of the emotions of a soldier under fire is all the more amazing since Crane had never been in battle. On the strength of the novel he served as a foreign correspondent in Cuba and in Greece.

Around 1897 Crane married Cora Taylor, who ran a brothel in Florida. His marriage, coupled with his unorthodox personality, aroused scandalous rumors, including those that he was a drug addict and a satanist. Because of this slander Crane spent his last years abroad; he died of tuberculosis in Germany at the age of 28.

Crane was a superb literary stylist who emphasized irony and paradox and made innovative use of imagery and symbolism. Thus, although realistic, his novels are highly individual. Crane also wrote superb short stories and poems. The title stories of The Open Boat and Other Tales (1898) and The Monster and Other Stories (1899) are considered among the finest stories in English. His two books of epigrammatic free verse, The Black Rider (1895) and War Is Kind (1899), anticipated several strains of 20th-century poetry.

See his works, ed. by F. Bowers (10 vol., 1969-76); letters, ed. by S. Wertheim and P. Sorrentino (2 vol., 1988); biographies by J. Berryman (1950, repr. 1975), R. W. Stallman (1968), and L. H. Davis (1998); studies by M. Holton (1972), R. M. Weatherford, ed. (1973), F. Bergon (1975), D. Halliburton (1989), and C. Benfey (1992); bibliography by R. W. Stallman (1972).

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Crane, Hart

Crane, Hart (Harold Hart Crane), 1899-1932, American poet, b. Garrettsville, Ohio. He published only two volumes of poetry during his lifetime, but those works established Crane as one of the most original and vital American poets of the 20th cent. His extraordinarily complex, visionary, and sonorous poetry, with its rich imagery, verbal ingenuity, frequent obscurity, and meticulous craftsmanship, combines ecstatic optimism with a sense of haunted alienation. White Buildings (1926), his first collection of poems, was inspired by his experience of New York City, where he had gone to live at the age of 17. His most ambitious work is The Bridge (1930), a series of closely related long poems on the United States in which the Brooklyn Bridge serves as a mystical unifying symbol of civilization's evolution.

Crane's personal life was anguished and turbulent. After an unhappy childhood during which he was torn between estranged parents, he held a variety of uninteresting jobs, always, however, returning to New York City and his writing. An alcoholic and a homosexual, he was constantly plagued by money problems and was often a severe trial to friends who tried to help him. In 1931 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Mexico to work on a long poem about Latin America; a year later, returning by ship to the United States, the poem not even started, he jumped overboard and drowned. His collected poems were published in 1933.

See Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters (2006), ed. by L. Hammer; letters ed. by T. S. W. Lewis (1974); O My Land, My Friends (1997), selected letters, ed. by L. Hammer and B. Weber; The Correspondence Between Hart Crane and Waldo Frank (1998), ed. by S. H. Cook; biographies by P. Horton (new ed. 1957), J. Unterecker (1969, repr. 1987), P. Mariani (1999), and C. Fisher (2002); studies by R. W. B. Lewis (1967), M. D. Uroff (1974), R. Combs (1978), D. R. Clark, ed. (1982), A. Trachtenberg, ed. (1982), H. Bloom, ed. (1986), M. F. Bennett (1987), W. Berthoff (1989), T. E. Yingling (1990), B. Reed (2006), and G. A. Tapper (2006).

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Brinton, Crane

Brinton, Crane (Clarence Crane Brinton), 1898-1968, American historian, b. Winsted, Conn. He received his Ph.D. from Oxford in 1923 and began teaching at Harvard the same year, becoming full professor in 1942. He wrote extensively on the history of Western political and moral philosophy and was an expert on the dynamics of revolutionary movements. His many books include A Decade of Revolution (1934), The Anatomy of Revolution (1938, rev. ed. 1965), Ideas and Men (1950, 2d ed. 1963), A History of Western Morals (1959), The Shaping of Modern Thought (1963), and The Americans and the French (1968).

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whooping crane

Whooping crane (Grus americana).

Migratory North American bird (Grus americana) and one of the world's rarest birds, on the verge of extinction. The tallest North American bird, it is almost 5 ft (150 cm) tall and has a wingspread of about 7 ft (210 cm). It is white with black-tipped wings, black legs, and a bare red face and crown. Its shrill, whooping call can be heard for 2 miles (3 km). Almost exterminated in the early 20th century, it became the object of intensive conservation efforts; by century's end there were still fewer than 300 wild and captive individuals. Seealso sandhill crane.

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crane fly

Harmless, slow-flying dipteran (family Tipulidae) usually found around water or abundant vegetation. It ranges in size from tiny to slightly over 1 in. (2.5 cm) long. Larvae of the range crane fly (Tipula simplex) are called leatherjackets because of their tough brown skin. In northern latitudes a wingless crane-fly species is found on snow. The crane fly is also called daddy longlegs in English-speaking countries other than the U.S. (in the U.S., daddy longlegs refers to an arachnid).

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bird-of-paradise

or crane flower

Ornamental plant (Strelitzia reginae) of the family Strelitziaceae. All five species of the genus Strelitzia are native to southern Africa. The large, showy Strelitzia flower has two erect, pointed petals and five stamens. One main bract, shaped like a boat, is green with red borders. It holds many long-stemmed orange and bright blue flowers, each resembling the crest and beak of a crane, giving the plant its common names.

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Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

crane

Crowned crane (Balearica pavonina [regulorum]).

Any of 15 species (family Gruidae) of tall wading birds that resemble herons but are usually larger and have a partly naked head, a heavier bill, more-compact plumage, and an elevated hind toe. In flight, the long neck stretches out in front and the stiltlike legs trail behind. Cranes are found worldwide, living in marshes and on plains, except in South America. Many populations are endangered by hunting and habitat destruction. Cranes eat small animals, grain, and grass shoots. Two well-known species are the whooping crane and the sandhill crane.

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Crane, Walter

(born Aug. 15, 1845, Liverpool, Eng.—died March 14, 1915, Horsham) English illustrator, painter, and designer. The son of a portrait painter, he studied Italian Old Masters and Japanese prints. The ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites and John Ruskin inspired his early paintings. He achieved international popularity designing Art Nouveau textiles and wallpapers but is chiefly known for his illustrations of children's books. In 1894 he worked with William Morris on The Story of the Glittering Plain, a book printed in the style of 16th-century German and Italian woodcuts. He belonged to the Art Workers' Guild, and in 1888 he founded the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Seealso Arts and Crafts Movement.

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Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Crane, Stephen

Stephen Crane, detail of a painting by C.K. Linson, 1896.

(born Nov. 1, 1871, Newark, N.J., U.S.—died June 5, 1900, Badenweiler, Baden, Ger.) U.S. novelist and short-story writer. Crane briefly attended college before moving to New York City. His Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a sympathetic study of a slum girl's descent into prostitution, was a milestone of literary naturalism. He achieved international fame with his masterwork, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), depicting the psychological turmoil of a young Civil War soldier, and with his first book of poems, The Black Riders (1895). While traveling as a war correspondent, his ship sank and he almost drowned, resulting in his great story “The Open Boat” (1898). His story collections include The Little Regiment (1896), The Monster (1899), and Whilomville Stories (1900). He died at 28 of tuberculosis.

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Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Crane, (Harold) Hart

(born July 21, 1899, Garrettsville, Ohio, U.S.—died April 27, 1932, at sea, Caribbean Sea) U.S. poet. Crane worked at a variety of jobs before settling in New York City. White Buildings (1926), his first book, includes “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.” His desire to respond to the cultural pessimism of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land resulted in the long and difficult poem The Bridge (1930), which attempts to create an epic myth of the American experience, celebrating the richness of modern life with visionary intensity. Alcoholic and despondent over his homosexuality, he committed suicide at 32 by jumping overboard from a ship in the Caribbean.

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Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.