Drakensberg Vdra-konz-.berkN Zulu Kwathlamba \'kwat-'lam-ba\ Mountain range, southern Africa. It rises to more than 11,400 ft (3,475
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© 2006 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
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m) and extends from southwest to northeast in Lesotho and southeastern South Africa, separating the extensive high plateaus of the interior from the lower lands along the coast. It is an area of many game reserves and national parks.
Draper, Charles Stark (b. Oct. 2, 1901, Windsor, Mo., U.S.—d. July 25, 1987, Cambridge, Mass.) U.S. aeronautical engineer. He taught at MIT from 1935, where he developed a gunsight for naval anti-aircraft guns that was installed on most U.S. naval vessels in World War II. His iner¬ tial guidance system, called spatial inertial reference equipment (SPIRE), allowed planes, submarines, and ballistic missiles to travel thousands of miles to their destinations without reference to outside navigational aids, such as radio or the positions of celestial bodies. His group at the Mas¬ sachusetts Institute of Technology also developed guidance systems for the Apollo program. He is memorialized in the annual Charles Stark Draper Prize for achievement in engineering.
Draper, Ruth (b. Dec. 2,1884, New York, N.Y., U.S.—d. Dec. 30,1956, New York City) U.S. monologist. She began her career by writing dramatic sketches about people she had observed and performing them at parties. She made her New York debut (1917) in a series of one-act pieces. Her London debut (1920) established her as a master monologist. She per¬ formed worldwide, playing on a bare stage with few props and creating characters and settings by subtle modulation of feature, gesture, and voice.
Drau River See Drava River
Drava River Vdra-vo\ German Drau \'drau\ River, south-central Europe. It rises in the Camic Alps and flows east through Austria, where it forms the Drautal, the longest longitudinal valley of the Alps. Flowing southeast, it passes through Slovenia and forms part of the Croatian- Hungarian border. The Drava is 447 mi (719 km) long and a major tribu¬ tary of the Danube River. Its valley was the chief passage through which invaders penetrated the Alpine countries.
Dravidian Vdro-'vi-de-onV languages Family of 23 languages indig¬ enous to and spoken principally in South Asia by more than 210 million people. The four major Dravidian languages of southern India— Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam —have independent scripts and long docu¬ mented histories. They account for the overwhelming majority of all Dravidian-speakers, and they form the basis of the linguistic states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Kerala. All have borrowed liberally from Sanskrit. The only Dravidian language spoken entirely out¬ side of India is Brahui, with fewer than two million speakers mainly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Of the Dravidian languages, Tamil has the greatest geographical extension and the richest and most ancient litera¬ ture, which is paralleled in India only by that of Sanskrit. The Dravidian family, with no demonstrated relationship to other language families, is assumed to have covered a much more extensive area of South Asia before the spread of Indo-Aryan and was the source of loanwords into early Indo-Aryan dialects.
drawing Art or technique of producing images on a surface, usually paper, by means of marks in graphite, ink, chalk, charcoal, or crayon. It is often a preliminary stage to work in other media. According to Gior¬ gio Vasari, disegno (drawing and design) was the foundation of the three arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Beginning in the Italian Renaissance, debate arose regarding the role of drawing, as some saw it as an independent art form and others saw it as a preliminary stage in creating a painting or sculpture. By the 17th century, drawings had defi¬ nite market value; connoisseurs specialized in collecting them, and forg¬ ers began to exploit the demand. In the 20th century, the drawing became fully autonomous as an art form, figuring significantly among the works of virtually every major artist, and the line itself was exploited both for its representational and its purely expressive qualities.
drawing or drafting In yarn manufacture, process of attenuating a loose assemblage of fibres. These fibres, called sliver, pass through a series of rollers, which straighten the individual fibres and make them more par¬ allel. Each pair of rollers spins faster than the previous one. Drawing reduces a soft mass of fibres to a firm uniform strand of usable size. For synthetic fibres, drawing is a stretching process applied to fibres in the plas¬ tic state, increasing orientation and reducing size. In metalworking, draw¬ ing refers to the process of shaping sheet metal into complex, three- dimensional forms with metal dies. See also carding, wire drawing.
drawing frame or spinning frame Machine for drawing, twisting, and winding yarn. Invented in the 1730s by Lewis Paul and John Wyatt,
the spinning machine operated by drawing cotton or wool through pairs of successively faster rollers. It was eventually superseded by R. Ark¬ wright’s water frame.
Dreadnought, HMS British battleship launched in 1906 that estab¬ lished the pattern of the warships that dominated the world’s navies for the next 35 years. It was equipped entirely with big guns because recent improvements in naval gunnery had made preparation for short-range battle unnecessary. Powered by steam turbines instead of the steam pis¬ tons then common, it sailed at a record top speed of 21 knots. It displaced 18,000 tons (16,300 metric tons), was 526 ft (160 m) long, and carried a crew of about 800. By World War I it was nearly outclassed by faster “superdreadnoughts” carrying bigger guns. It was placed on reserve in 1919 and broken up for scrap in 1923.
dream Series of thoughts, images, or emotions occurring during sleep, particularly sleep accompanied by rapid eye movement (REM sleep). Dream reports range from the very ordinary and realistic to the fantastic and surreal. Humans have always attached great importance to dreams, which have been variously viewed as windows to the sacred, the past and the future, or the world of the dead. Dreams have provided creative solu¬ tions to intellectual and emotional problems and have offered ideas for artistic pursuits. A type of cognitive synthesis that facilitates conscious insight may occur subconsciously during dreaming. The most famous theory of the significance of dreams is the psychoanalytic model of Sig¬ mund Freud; in Freud’s view, desires that are ordinarily repressed (hidden from consciousness) because they represent forbidden impulses are given expression in dreams, though often in disguised (i.e., symbolic) form.
Dreaming, the or Dream-Time In the religion of the Australian Aborigines, the mythological time of the Creation. In the Dreaming the environment was shaped and humanized by mythic beings, many of whom took animal or human form. Some could change form at will. They took long journeys and created human life and the social order. In Aboriginal belief, these beings are eternal and continue to exist, although they may have traveled beyond the lands of the people who sing about them or may have metamorphosed into natural features such as rocky outcrops or water holes. The landscape is thus sacred to Aboriginal peoples. See also Aus¬ tralian RELIGION.
Dred Scott decision formally Dred Scott v. Sandford 1857 rul¬ ing of the Supreme Court of the United States that made slavery legal in all U.S. territories. Scott was a slave whose master had taken him in 1834 from a slave state (Missouri) to a free state and a free territory, then back to Missouri. Scott sued for his freedom in Missouri in 1846, claiming his residence in a free state and a free territory made him free. The opinion of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that Scott was not entitled to rights as a U.S. citizen and, in fact, had “no rights which any white man was bound to respect”. Taney and six other justices struck down the Mis¬ souri Compromise as unconstitutional, maintaining that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories (see states' rights). The deci¬ sion, a clear victory for the South, increased Northern antislavery senti¬ ment, strengthened the new Republican Party, and fed the sectional strife that led to war in 1861.