Massachusetts USA

Massachusetts [ˌmæsəˈtʃuːsıts; -səts; US auch -zəts] s Massachusetts n (Staat im Nordosten der USA)

Mass. abk Massachusetts

n. Massachusetts (staat in de USA)

n. Massachusetts (stat i USA)

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Railways and locomotives

[br]

[br]

[br]

The son of a lawyer, he entered an academy in Cape Cod and, at the age of 19, the English Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, for five terms. He was then in the employ of Samuel L. Fenton of Charlestown, Massachusetts. He served a three-year apprenticeship, then went to the Windsor White River Division of the Vermont Central Railroad. He was Resident Engineer of the Cheshire Railroad at Walpote, New Hampshire, from 1847 to 1849, and then worked in independent practice as a civil engineer and surveyor until his death. He was involved with nearly all the railroads running out of Boston, especially the Boston \& Maine. In April 1863 he was appointed Chief Engineer of the Hoosac Tunnel, which was already being built. He introduced new engineering methods, relocated the line of the tunnel and achieved great accuracy in the meeting of the borings. He was largely responsible for the development in the USA of the advanced system of tunnelling with machinery and explosives, and pioneered the use of compressed air in the USA. In 1869 he was Chief Engineer of the Burlington \& Missouri River Railroad in Nebraska, laying down some 240 miles (386 km) of track in four years. During this period he became interested in the building of a Congregational College at Crete, Nebraska, for which he gave the land and which was named after him. In 1873 he returned to Charlestown and was again appointed Chief Engineer of the Hoosac Tunnel. At the final opening of the tunnel on 9 February 1875 he drove the first engine through. He remained in charge of construction for a further two years.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

[br]

[br]

[br]

Bigelow was born in West Boyleston, Massachusetts, where his father struggled as a farmer, wheelwright, and chairmaker. Before he was 20, Bigelow had many different jobs, among them farm labourer, clerk, violin player and cotton-mill employee. In 1830, he went to Leicester Academy, Massachusetts, but he could not afford to go on to Harvard. He sought work in Boston, New York and elsewhere, making various inventions.

The most important of his early inventions was the power loom of 1837 for making coach lace. This loom contained all the essential features of his carpet looms, which he developed and patented two years later. He formed the Clinton Company for manufacturing carpets at Leicester, Massachusetts, but the factory became so large that its name was adopted for the town. The next twenty years saw various mechanical discoveries, while his range of looms was extended to cover Brussels, Wilton, tapestry and velvet carpets. Bigelow has been justly described as the originator of every fundamental device in these machines, which were amongst the largest textile machines of their time. The automatic insertion and withdrawal of strong wires with looped ends was the means employed to raise the looped pile of the Brussels carpets, while thinner wires with a knife blade at the end raised and then severed the loops to create the rich Wilton pile. At the Great Exhibition in 1851, it was declared that his looms made better carpets than any from hand looms. He also developed other looms for special materials.

He became a noted American economist, writing two books about tariff problems, advocating that the United States should not abandon its protectionist policies. In 1860 he was narrowly defeated in a Congress election. The following year he was a member of the committee that established the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Horology

[br]

[br]

[br]

Warren studied electrical engineering at the Boston Institute of Technology (later to become the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and graduated in 1894. In 1912 he formed the Warren Electric Clock Company to make a battery-powered clock that he had patented a few years earlier. The name was changed to the Warren Telechron (time at a distance) Company after he had started to produce synchronous clocks.

In 1840 Charles Wheatstone had produced an electric master clock that produced an alternating current with a frequency of one cycle per second and which was used to drive slave dials. This system was not successful, but when Ferranti introduced the first alternating current power generator at Deptford in 1895 Hope-Jones saw in it a means of distributing time. This did not materialize immediately because the power generators did not control the frequency of the current with sufficient accuracy, and a reliable motor whose speed was related to this frequency was not available. In 1916 Warren solved both problems: he produced a reliable self-starting synchronous electric motor and he also made a master clock which could be used at the power station to control accurately the frequency of the supply. Initially the power-generating companies were reluctant to support the synchronous clock because it imposed a liability to control the frequency of the supply and the gain was likely to be small because it was very frugal in its use of power. However, with the advent of the grid system, when several generators were connected together, it became imperative to control the frequency; it was realized that although the power consumption of individual clocks was small, collectively it could be significant as they ran continuously. By the end of the 1930s more than half the clocks sold in the USA were of the synchronous type. The Warren synchronous clock was introduced into Great Britain in 1927, following the setting up of a grid system by the Electricity Commission.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

At the age of seventeen Goddard climbed a tree and, seeing the view from above, he became determined to make some device with which to ascend towards the planets. In an autobiography, published in 1959 in the journal Astronautics, he stated, "I was a different boy when I descended the ladder. Life now had a purpose for me." His first idea was to launch a projectile by centrifugal force, but in 1909 he started to design a rocket that was to be multi-stage and fuelled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. Not long before the First World War he produced a report, "A method of reaching extreme altitudes", which was for the Smithsonian Institution and was published in book form in 1919. During the war he worked on solid-fuelled rockets as weapons. His book contained notes on the amount of fuel required to raise 1 lb (454 g) of payload to an infinite altitude. He incurred ridicule as "the moon man" when he proposed the use of flash powder to indicate successful arrival on the moon. In 1923 he severed his connections with military work and returned to the University of Massachusetts. On 16 March 1926 he launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket from his aunt's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts; powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen, it flew to a height of 12 m (40 ft) and travelled 54 m (177 ft) in 2.4 seconds.

In November 1929 he met the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who persuaded both the Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Institute to support Goddard's experiments financially. He moved to the more suitable location of the Mescalere Ranch, near Roswell, New Mexico, where he worked until 1941. His liquid-fuelled rockets reached speeds of 1,100 km/h (700 mph) and heights of 2,500 m (8,000ft). He investigated the use of the gyroscope to steady his rockets and the assembly of power units in clusters to increase the total thrust. In 1941 he moved to the naval establishment at Annapolis, Maryland, working on liquid-fuelled rockets to assist the take-off of aircraft from carriers. He worked for the US Government on this and the development of military rockets until his death from throat cancer in 1945. In all, he was granted 214 patents, roughly three per year of his life.

In 1960 the US Government admitted infringement of Goddard's patents during the rocket programme of the 1950s and awarded his widow a payment of $1,000,000, while the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) honoured him by naming the Goddard Spaceflight Center near Washington, DC, after him. The Goddard Memorial Library at Clark University, in his home town of Worcester, Massachusetts, was also named in his honour.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

Edward Payson Bullard served his apprenticeship at the Whitin Machine Works, Whitinsville, Massachusetts, and worked at the Colt Armory in Hartford, Connecticut, until 1863; he then entered the employ of Pratt \& Whitney, also in Hartford. He later formed a partnership with J.H.Prest and William Parsons manufacturing millwork and tools, the firm being known as Bullard \& Prest. In 1866 Bullard organized the Norwalk Iron Works Company of Norwalk, Connecticut, but afterwards withdrew and continued the business in Hartford. In 1868 the firm of Bullard \& Prest was dissolved and Bullard became Superintendent of a large machine shop in Athens, Georgia. He later organized the machine tool department of Post \& Co. at Cincinnati, and in 1872 he was made General Superintendent of the Gill Car Works at Columbus, Ohio. In 1875 he established a machinery business in Beekman Street, New York, under the name of Allis, Bullard \& Co. Mr Allis withdrew in 1877, and the Bullard Machine Company was organized.

In 1880 Bullard secured entire control of the business and also became owner of the Bridgeport Machine Tool Works, Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 1883 he designed his first vertical boring and turning mill with a single head and belt feed and a 37 in. (94 cm) capacity; this was the first small boring machine designed to do the accurate work previously done on the face plate of a lathe. In 1889 Bullard gave up his New York interests and concentrated his entire attention on manufacturing at Bridgeport, the business being incorporated in 1894 as the Bullard Machine Tool Company. The company specialized in the construction of boring machines, the design being developed so that it became essentially a vertical turret lathe. After Bullard's death, his son Edward Payson Bullard II (b. 10 July 1872 Columbus, Ohio, USA; d. 26 June 1953 Fairfield, Connecticut, USA) continued as head of the company and further developed the boring machine into a vertical multi-spindle automatic lathe which he called the "Mult-au-matic" lathe. Both father and son were members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

From 1868 to 1896 George Alden was head of the steam and mechanical engineering departments at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts. He made a donation in 1910 to establish a hydraulic laboratory at the Institute, and later a further donation for an extension of the laboratory which was completed in 1925. He was Chairman of the Board of Norton (Abrasives) Company and made a significant contribution to the theory of grinding in his paper in 1914 to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He was a member of that society from 1880, the year of its foundation, and took an active part in its proceedings.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

[br]

[br]

[br]

The condenser method of spinning was developed chiefly by manufacturers and machine makers in eastern Massachusetts between 1824 and 1826. John Goulding, a machinist from Dedham in Massachusetts, combined the ring doffer, patented by Ezekiel Hale in 1825, and the revolving twist tube, patented by George Danforth in 1824; with the addition of twisting keys in the tubes, the carded woollen sliver could be divided and then completely and continuously twisted. He divided the carded web longitudinally with the ring doffer and twisted these strips to consolidate them into slubbings. The dividing was carried out by covering the periphery of the doffer cylinder with separate rings of card clothing and spacing these rings apart by rings of leather, so that instead of width-way detached strips leaving the card, the strips were continuous and did not require piecing. The strips were passed through rotating tubes and wound on bobbins, and although the twist was false it sufficed to compress the fibres together ready for spinning. Goulding patented his invention in both Britain and the USA in 1826, but while his condensers were very successful and within twenty years had been adopted by a high proportion of woollen mills in America, they were not adopted in Britain until much later. Goulding also worked on other improvements to woollen machinery: he developed friction drums, on which the spools of roving from the condenser cards were placed to help transform the woollen jenny into the woollen mule or jack.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors, Textiles

[br]

[br]

[br]

Son of Elias Howe, a farmer, he acquired his mechanical knowledge in his father's mill. He left school at 12 years of age and was apprenticed for two years in a machine shop in Lowell, Massachusetts, and later to an instrument maker, Ari Davis in Boston, Massachusetts, where his master's services were much in demand by Harvard University. Fired by a desire to invent a sewing machine, he utilized the experience gained in Lowell to devise a shuttle carrying a lower thread and a needle carrying an upper thread to make lock-stitch in straight lines. His attempts were so rewarding that he left his job and was sustained first by his father and then by a partner. By 1845 he had built a machine that worked at 250 stitches per minute, and the following year he patented an improved machine. The invention of the sewing machine had an enormous impact on the textile industry, stimulating demand for cloth because making up garments became so much quicker. The sewing machine was one of the first mass-produced consumer durables and was essentially an American invention. William Thomas, a London manufacturer of shoes, umbrellas and corsets, secured the British rights and persuaded Howe to come to England to apply it to the making of shoes. This Howe did, but he quarrelled with Thomas after less than one year. He returned to America to face with his partner, G.W.Bliss, a bigger fight over his patent (see I.M. Singer), which was being widely infringed. Not until 1854 was the case settled in his favour. This litigation threatened the very existence of the new industry, but the Great Sewing Machine Combination, the first important patent-pooling arrangement in American history, changed all this. For a fee of $5 on every domestically-sold machine and $1 on every exported one, Howe contributed to the pool his patent of 1846 for a grooved eye-pointed needle used in conjunction with a lock-stitch-forming shuttle. Howe's patent was renewed in 1861; he organized and equipped a regiment during the Civil War with the royalties. When the war ended he founded the Howe Machine Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

He was uncle of Elias Howe and spent his youth in the neighbourhood of his birthplace, primarily as a farmer. In 1838 he was commissioned to build a bridge at Warren, Massachusetts, for the Boston \& Albany Railway. He worked on this for two years, incorporating some novel features for which he applied for patents. His design was a truss with wooden diagonals and vertical iron ties in single and double systems which was said to be an improvement on the Long type of truss, introduced by Colonel Stephen Long in 1830. Howe was the first to incorporate the rectangular truss frame. Soon after this, he was to use his patent truss over the Connecticut River at Springfield for the Western Railroad. So successful was he that he became engaged for the rest of his life in the design of bridges and roof trusses, which, together with selling royalties for the rights to his patents, brought to him a considerable fortune. Many Howe truss bridges were built until the introduction of the iron bridge. In 1846 he took out a third patent for an improvement in the original rectangular truss, consisting of a curved timber member rising from each buttress to the centre of the span and greatly adding to the strength.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

[br]

[br]

[br]

He received his dental training at Baltimore College of Dental Surgery and by 1842 was in a short-lived partnership with Horace Wells. Following the latter's successful dental anaesthesia using nitrous oxide in 1844 and his later failures of general anaesthesia, Morton embarked on a period of medical training at Massachusetts Medical College. The use of ether had been suggested by an acquaintance, Charles Jackson, a chemist and geologist, and in 1846 Morton commenced his investigations with a dog, himself and two assistants as subjects. The first major operation under ether general anaesthesia was performed at the Massachusetts General Hospital in October 1846. The technique speedily gained widespread acceptance in America and Europe. Morton's later life was bedevilled by prolonged acrimony over the question of priority of the discovery.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

The son of Caleb and Sally Pratt, Thomas Pratt attended public school in Boston before going on to the Rensselaer School (now the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) in Troy, New York. While at school, his spare time was spent assisting his father, a well-known architect, in his practice. He is said to have drawn a complete set of plans for a substantial house when only 12 years old. At the conclusion of his studies, he was offered a teaching position at Rensselaer but turned it down as he was planning an engineering career; he became a government assistant on the construction of dry docks at Charleston, South Carolina, and Norfolk, Virginia.

After this experience of government work, he turned to railroad construction, first with the Boston and Lowell and Boston and Maine railroads, followed by many others. In this work, he became involved in bridge construction, mostly as consulting engineer. His best-known bridge was that over the Merrimack River at Newburyport, Massachusetts, which he built with six long timber spans and a metal drawspan. He also invented a new method of ship propulsion, a form of steam boiler, an equalizer for drawbridge supports and an improved form of combined timber and steel truss; he is best known, however, for the Pratt truss. This did not truly come into its own until the inception of all-metal construction for bridges, by which time it was too late for Pratt to gain much financial reward from it.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Telecommunications

[br]

[br]

[br]

At the age of 15 Field left home to seek his fortune in New York, starting work on Broadway as an errand boy for $1 per week. Returning to Massachusetts, in 1838 he became an assistant to his brother Matthew, a paper-maker, leaving to set up his own business two years later. By the age of 21 he was also a partner in a New York firm of paper wholesalers, but this firm collapsed because of large debts. Out of the wreckage he set up Cyrus W.Field \& Co., and by 1852 he had paid off all the debts. With $250,000 in the bank he therefore retired and travelled in South America. Returning to the USA, he then became involved with the construction of a telegraph line in Newfoundland by an English engineer, F.N. Osborne. Although the company collapsed, he had been fired by the dream of a transatlantic cable and in 1854 was one of the founders of the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company. He began to promote surveys and hold discussions with British telegraph pioneers and with Isambard Brunel, who was then building the Great Eastern steamship. In 1856 he helped to set up the Atlantic Telegraph Company in Britain and, as a result of his efforts and those of the British physicist and inventor Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), work began in 1857 on the laying of the first transatlantic cable from Newfoundland to Ireland. After many tribulations the cable was completed on 5 August 1857, but it failed after barely a month. Following several unsuccessful attempts to repair and replace it, the cable was finally completed on 27 July 1866. Building upon his success, Field expanded his business interests. In 1877 he bought a controlling interest in and was President of the New York Elevated Railroad Company. He also helped develop the Wabash Railroad and became owner of the New York Mail and Express newspaper; however, he subsequently suffered large financial losses.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology, Recording, Telecommunications

[br]

[br]

[br]

Black graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, in 1921 and joined the Western Electric Company laboratories (later the Bell Telephone Laboratories) in New York City. There he worked on a variety of electronic-communication problems. His major contribution was the discovery in 1927 that the application of negative feedback to an amplifier, whereby a fraction of the output signal is fed back to the input in the opposite phase, not only increases the stability of the amplifier but also has the effect of reducing the magnitude of any distortion introduced by it. This discovery has found wide application in the design of audio hi-fi amplifiers and various control systems, and has also given valuable insight into the way in which many animal control functions operate.

During the Second World War he developed a form of pulse code modulation (PCM) to provide a practicable, secure telephony system for the US Army Signal Corps. From 1963–6, after his retirement from the Bell Labs, he was Principal Research Scientist with General Precision Inc., Little Falls, New Jersey, following which he became an independent consultant in communications. At the time of his death he held over 300 patents.

[br]

See also: Bode, Hendrik Wade; Nyquist, Harry

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

After leaving school at the age of 17, George Bond taught in local schools for a few years before starting an apprenticeship in a machine shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He then worked as a machinist with Phoenix Furniture Company in that city until his savings permitted him to enter the Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1876. He graduated with the degree of Mechanical Engineer in 1880. In his final year he assisted William A.Rogers, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the design of a comparator for checking standards of length. In 1880 he joined the Pratt \& Whitney Company, Hartford, Connecticut, and was Manager of the Standards and Gauge Department from then until 1902. During this period he developed cylindrical, calliper, snap, limit, thread and other gauges. He also designed the Bond Standard Measuring Machine. Bond was elected a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1881 and of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1887, and served on many of their committees relating to standards and units of measurement.

[br]

See also: Pratt, Francis Ashbury; Whitney, Amos

SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Metallurgy

[br]

[br]

[br]

Coolidge obtained his BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1896, and his PhD (physics) from the University of Leipzig in 1899. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT in 1904, and in 1905 he joined the staff of the General Electric Company's research laboratory at Schenectady. In 1905 Schenectady was trying to make tungsten-filament lamps to counter the competition of the tantalum-filament lamps then being produced by their German rival Siemens. The first tungsten lamps made by Just and Hanaman in Vienna in 1904 had been too fragile for general use. Coolidge and his life-long collaborator, Colin G. Fink, succeeded in 1910 by hot-working directly dense sintered tungsten compacts into wire. This success was the result of a flash of insight by Coolidge, who first perceived that fully recrystallized tungsten wire was always brittle and that only partially work-hardened wire retained a measure of ductility. This grasped, a process was developed which induced ductility into the wire by hot-working at temperatures below those required for full recrystallization, so that an elongated fibrous grain structure was progressively developed. Sintered tungsten ingots were swaged to bar at temperatures around 1,500°C and at the end of the process ductile tungsten filament wire was drawn through diamond dies around 550°C. This process allowed General Electric to dominate the world lamp market. Tungsten lamps consumed only one-third the energy of carbon lamps, and for the first time the cost of electric lighting was reduced to that of gas. Between 1911 and 1914, manufacturing licences for the General Electric patents had been granted for most of the developed work. The validity of the General Electric monopoly was bitterly contested, though in all the litigation that followed, Coolidge's fibering principle was upheld. Commercial arrangements between General Electric and European producers such as Siemens led to the name "Osram" being commonly applied to any lamp with a drawn tungsten filament. In 1910 Coolidge patented the use of thoria as a particular additive that greatly improved the high-temperature strength of tungsten filaments. From this development sprang the technique of "dispersion strengthening", still being widely used in the development of high-temperature alloys in the 1990s. In 1913 Coolidge introduced the first controllable hot-cathode X-ray tube, which had a tungsten target and operated in vacuo rather than in a gaseous atmosphere. With this equipment, medical radiography could for the first time be safely practised on a routine basis. During the First World War, Coolidge developed portable X-ray units for use in field hospitals, and between the First and Second World Wars he introduced between 1 and 2 million X-ray machines for cancer treatment and for industrial radiography. He became Director of the Schenectady laboratory in 1932, and from 1940 until 1944 he was Vice-President and Director of Research. After retirement he was retained as an X-ray consultant, and in this capacity he attended the Bikini atom bomb trials in 1946. Throughout the Second World War he was a member of the National Defence Research Committee.

[br]