Czechoslovakia, as a successor state of Austria-Hungary, was forced to deal with the loss of the large protected domestic market that had been provided by membership of the former empire. Several trade missions were organised in the early 1920s in order to seek new areas of activity for Czechoslovak exports and imports, often in hitherto unknown markets. The missions were initiated by the Ministry of Trade or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The paper describes a mission organised by Václav Girsa, which was led by Josef Hříbek. The Hříbek mission was a Czechoslovak legionaries' mission, organised as a by-product of the return of the Legions en route from Vladivostok to Europe. The mission aimed at providing a first hand analysis of the Turkestan area. The route led from Vladivostok, through Bombay, to British Balochistan and then from Eastern Persia to Turkestan. ongoing local conflicts caused a major change in the mission's plans and the group undertook an economic and political study of persia instead., Adéla Jůnová Macková., and Obsahuje bibliografii
The history of lasers at the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the ASCR in Brno (ISI) has begun 1249 days after the worldwide premiere of laser. The first to be put into operation at ISI was the He-Ne laser (16 October 1963). Highest attention was then paid to its further development making possible a large number of its applications. The He-Ne laser was followed by a ruby laser (4 March 1964), He-Cd laser (1970), and Nd:YAG laser (1973). The article presents all achievements concerning lasers at ISI accompanied by historic photos, their applications and routes to production at national companies. Nowadays many of these instruments and techniques are in use and are further being perfected, such as interferometric distance measurements with sub-nanometer resolution, methods of comparison of metrological etalons by femtosecond lasers, utilization of laser light for manipulations with micro-object combined with laser micro-spectroscopy., P. Zemánek, J. Lazar, O. Číp, L. Oprchalová, J. Kršek, D. Vavrouch., and Obsahuje bibliografii