biographical details

biografische details

◙ םייפרגויב םיטרפ◄

biografiska detaljer

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Although born in Hungary, Petzval was the son of German schoolteacher. He studied engineering at the University of Budapest and after graduation was appointed to the staff as a lecturer. In 1835 he became the University's Professor of Higher Mathematics. Within a year he was offered a similar position at the more prestigious University of Vienna, a chair he was to occupy until 1884.

The earliest photographic cameras were fitted with lenses originally designed for other optical instruments. All were characterized by small apertures, and the long exposures required by the early process were in part due to the "slow" lenses. As early as 1839, Petzval began calculations with the idea of producing a fast achromatic objective for photographic work. For technical advice he turned to the Viennese optician Peter Voigtländer, who went on to make the first Petzval portrait lens in 1840. It had a short focal length but an extremely large aperture for the day, enabling exposure times to be reduced to at least one tenth of that required with other contemporary lenses. The Petzval portrait lens was to become the basic design for years to come and was probably the single most important development in making portrait photography possible; by capturing public imagination, portrait photography was to drive photographic innovation during the early years.

Petzval later fell out with Voigtländer and severed his connection with the company in 1845. When Petzval was encouraged to design a landscape lens in the 1850s, the work was entrusted to another Viennese optician, Dietzler. Using some early calculations by Petzval, Voigtländer was able to produce a similar lens, which he marketed in competition, and an acrimonious dispute ensued. Petzval, embittered by the quarrel and depressed by a burglary which destroyed years of records of his optical work, abandoned optics completely in 1862 and devoted himself to acoustics. He retired from his professorship on his seventieth birthday, respected by his colleagues but unloved, and lived the life of a recluse until his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Few biographical details are known of Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg, yet it has been said that he was responsible for Germany's most notable contribution to civilization. He was a goldsmith by trade, of a patrician family of the city of Mainz. He seems to have begun experiments on printing while a political exile in Strasbourg c. 1440. He returned to Mainz between 1444 and 1448 and continued his experiments, until by 1450 he had perfected his invention sufficiently to justify raising capital for its commercial exploitation.

Circumstances were propitious for the invention of printing at that time. Rises in literacy and prosperity had led to the formation of a social class with the time and resources to develop a taste for reading, and the demand for reading matter had outstripped the ability of the scribes to satisfy it. The various technologies required were well established, and finally the flourishing textile industry was producing enough waste material, rag, to make paper, the only satisfactory and cheap medium for printing. There were others working along similar lines, but it was Gutenberg who achieved the successful adaptation and combination of technologies to arrive at a process by which many identical copies of a text could be produced in a wide variety of forms, of which the book was the most important. Gutenberg did make several technical innovations, however. The two-piece adjustable mould for casting types of varying width, from T to "M", was ingenious. Then he had to devise an oil-based ink suitable for inking metal type, derived from the painting materials developed by contemporary Flemish artists. Finally, probably after many experiments, he arrived at a metal alloy of distinctive composition suitable for casting type.

In 1450 Gutenberg borrowed 800 guldens from Johannes Fust, a lawyer of Mainz, and two years later Fust advanced a further 800 guldens, securing for himself a partnership in Gutenberg's business. But in 1455 Fust foreclosed and the bulk of Gutenberg's equipment passed to Peter Schöffer, who was in the service of Fust and later married his daughter. Like most early printers, Gutenberg seems not to have appreciated, or at any rate to have been able to provide for, the great dilemma of the publishing trade, namely the outlay of considerable capital in advance of each publication and the slowness of the return. Gutenberg probably retained only the type for the 42- and 36-line bibles and possibly the Catholicon of 1460, an encyclopedic work compiled in the thirteenth century and whose production pointed the way to printing's role as a means of spreading knowledge. The work concluded with a short descriptive piece, or colophon, which is probably by Gutenberg himself and is the only output of his mind that we have; it manages to omit the names of both author and printer.

Gutenberg seems to have abandoned printing after 1460, perhaps due to failing eyesight as well as for financial reasons, and he suffered further loss in the sack of Mainz in 1462. He received a kind of pension from the Archbishop in 1465, and on his death was buried in the Franciscan church in Mainz. The only major work to have issued for certain from Gutenberg's workshop is the great 42-line bible, begun in 1452 and completed by August 1456. The quality of this Graaf piece of printing is a tribute to Gutenberg's ability as a printer, and the soundness of his invention is borne out by the survival of the process as he left it to the world, unchanged for over three hundred years save in minor details.

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1) General subject: biographical details (АД)

2) Military: background information (личного дега)

3) Advertising: biographical information

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Merica graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1908. Before proceeding to the University of Berlin, he spent some time teaching in Wisconsin and in China. He obtained his doctorate in Berlin in 1914, and in that year he joined the US National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Washington. During his five years there, he investigated the causes of the phenomenon of age-hardening of the important new alloy of aluminium, Duralumin.

This phenomenon had been discovered not long before by Dr Alfred Wilm, a German research metallurgist. During the early years of the twentieth century, Wilm had been seeking a suitable light alloy for making cartridge cases for the Prussian government. In the autumn of 1909 he heated and quenched an aluminium alloy containing 3.5 per cent copper and 0.5 per cent magnesium and found its properties unremarkable. He happened to test it again some days later and was impressed to find its hardness and strength were much improved: Wilm had accidentally discovered age-hardening. He patented the alloy, but he made his rights over to Durener Metallwerke, who marketed it as Duralumin. This light and strong alloy was taken up by aircraft makers during the First World War, first for Zeppelins and then for other aircraft.

Although age-hardened alloys found important uses, the explanation of the phenomenon eluded metallurgists until in 1919 Merica and his colleagues at the NBS gave the first rational explanation of age-hardening in light alloys. When these alloys were heated to temperatures near their melting points, the alloying constituents were taken into solution by the matrix. Quenching retained the alloying metals in supersaturated solid solution. At room temperature very small crystals of various intermetallic compounds were precipitated and, by inserting themselves in the aluminium lattice, had the effect of increasing the hardness and strength of the alloy. Merica's theory stimulated an intensive study of hardening and the mechanism that brought it about, with important consequences for the development of new alloys with special properties.

In 1919 Merica joined the International Nickel Company as Director of Research, a post he held for thirty years and followed by a three-year period as President. He remained in association with the company until his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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He was the son of David Bruce, typefounder, who introduced stereotyping into the USA. As a boy, he was employed on various tasks about the typefoundry and printing works of D. \& G. Bruce until 1819, when he was apprenticed to William Fry of Philadelphia, at that time the most eminent printer in America. However, he ran away from Fry and returned to his father, from whom he continued to learn the typefounder's trade. Around 1828 he moved to Albany, where he took charge of a typefoundry. Two years later he was back in New York and joined the firm of George Bruce \& Co. In 1834 he moved to New Jersey, where he set about producing the improved form of typecasting machine for which he is chiefly known. Having achieved success, he set up in business again in New York and remained there until his retirement some twenty-five years before his death. Bruce in fact invented the first effective typecasting machine in New York in 1838 and patented it the same year. His machine incorporated a force pump to drive the molten metal from the pot into the mould. The machine, operated by a wheel turned by hand, could produce forty sorts of various sizes per minute. The machine speeded up the production of type: between 3,000 and 7,000 pieces of type could be cast by hand, whereas these figures were raised to between 12,000 and 20,000 by the casting machine. The Bruce caster was not introduced into Britain until 1853. It was later supplanted by improved machines, notably that invented by Wicks.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology, Recording, Telecommunications

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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.

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See also: Bode, Hendrik Wade; Nyquist, Harry

SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Blickensderfer was educated at the academy in Erie and at Allegheny College. He seems to have followed a business career, and in the course of his travels he became aware of the need for a simple, durable, but portable typewriter. He was in business in Stanford, Connecticut, where he developed but did not patent a number of typewriters, including a machine in which a type wheel could print short words such as "an" and "as" by depressing a single key. In 1889 he set up the Blickensderfer Manufacturing Company to perfect and mass-produce the machine he had in mind. He needed two years to test and perfect the model, and in 1891 work started on the factory that was to manufacture it. On the verge of mass-production in 1893, he produced a few machines for the Chicago World Exhibition in that year. Their success was sensational, and the "Blickensderfer" received the highest accolades from the judges, who hailed it as "extraordinary progress in the art of typewriting". The "Blickensderfer" appeared with successive modifications in the following years: they were durable, lightweight machines, with interchangeable type wheels, and were the first widely-used readily-portable typewriters.

Around 1902 Blickensderfer produced the first electric typewriter. A few electric machines were produced and some were sent to Europe, including England, but they are now very rare. One Blick Electric has been preserved in the Beeching Typewriter Collection in Bournemouth, England.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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John Deere was the son of a tailor, and first worked as a tanner before becoming apprenticed to a blacksmith. He married Demarius Lamb in 1827, but it appears that competition for blacksmiths was fierce, and the Deere family moved frequently. Two attempts to establish forges ended in fires, and changing partnerships and arguments over debts were to be a feature of Deere's working life. In 1836 John Deere moved west on his own, in an attempt to establish himself. He settled in Grand Detour, Illinois. In this new frontier a blacksmith's skills were sought after, and the blacksmith, with no ready supply of raw materials, had to be able to operate both a furnace for melting metal and a forge for working it. Deere was sufficiently successful for his family to be able to join him. A chance visit to a sawmill and the acquisition of a broken saw blade led to the making of a plough that was to establish John Deere in manufacturing. There were two distinctive features associated with the plough: the soil in the area failed to stick to the steel blade, with obvious benefits to the draught of the implement; and second, the shape of the working mouldboard was square. The reputation that developed with his first three ploughs established that Deere had made the transition from blacksmith to manufacturer.

Over the next decade he had a number of partnerships and eventually set up a factory in Moline, Illinois, in 1848. The following year he sold 2,136 ploughs, and by early 1850 he was producing 350 ploughs per month. Deere was devastated by the loss of his eldest son in the year that the company moved to Moline. However, his second son, Charles, joined him in 1851 and was to be a major influence on the way in which the company developed over the next half-century. The company branched out into the production of cultivators, harrows, drills and wagons. John Deere himself played an active part in the company, but also played an increasing role in public life, with a particular interest in education. The company was incorporated in 1868.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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The son of a Quaker merchant, John Fowler entered the business of a county corn merchant on leaving school, but he found this dull and left as soon as he came of age, joining the Middlesbrough company of Gilkes, Wilson \& Hopkins, railway locomotive manufacturers. In 1849, at the age of 23, Fowler visited Ireland and was so distressed by the state of Irish agriculture that he determined to develop a system to deal with the drainage of land. He designed an implement which he patented in 1850 after a period of experimentation. It was able to lay wooden pipes to a depth of two feet, and was awarded the Silver Medal at the 1850 Royal Agriculture Show. By 1854, using a steam engine made by Clayton \& Shuttleworth, he had applied steam power to his invention and gained another award that year at the Royal Show. The following year he turned his attention to steam ploughing. He first developed a single-engined system that used a double windlass with which to haul a plough backwards and forwards across fields. In 1856 he patented his balance plough, and the following year he read a paper to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers at their Birmingham premises, describing the system. In 1858 he won the Royal Agricultural Society award with a plough built for him by Ransomes. Fowler founded the Steam Plough Works in Leeds and in 1862 production began in partnership with William Watson Hewitson. Within two years they were producing the first of a series of engines which were to make the name Fowler known worldwide. John Fowler saw little of his success because he died in 1864 at his Yorkshire home as a result of tetanus contracted after a riding accident.

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SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors

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Few biographical details are known of Hans Haupt, other than that he invented the telescopic umbrella in Berlin in 1930. His device gave protection from rain and sun similar to that provided by Samuel Fox's lightweight steel-framed device of 1874, but it was much more compact when folded.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Weapons and armour

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Frederick W.Howe attended local schools until the age of 16 and then entered the machine shop of Gay \& Silver at North Chelmsford, Massachusetts, as an apprentice and remained with that firm for nine years. He then joined Robbins, Kendall \& Lawrence of Windsor, Vermont, as Assistant to Richard S. Lawrence in designing machine tools. A year later (1848) he was made Plant Superintendent. During his time with this firm, Howe designed a profiling machine which was used in all gun shops in the United States: a barrel-drilling and rifling machine, and the first commercially successful milling machine. Robbins \& Lawrence took to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, England, a set of rifles built on the interchangeable system. The interest this created resulted in a visit of some members of the British Royal Small Arms Commission to America and subsequently in an order for 150 machine tools, jigs and fixtures from Robbins \& Lawrence, to be installed at the small-arms factory at Enfield. From 1853 to 1856 Howe was in charge of the design and building of these machines. In 1856 he established his own armoury at Newark, New Jersey, but transferred after two years to Middletown, Connecticut, where he continued the manufacture of small arms until the outbreak of the Civil War. He then became Superintendent of the armoury of the Providence Tool Company at Providence, Rhode Island, and served in that capacity until the end of the war. In 1865 he went to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to assist Elias Howe with the manufacture of his sewing machine. After the death of Elias Howe, Frederick Howe returned to Providence to join the Brown \& Sharpe Manufacturing Company. As Superintendent of that establishment he worked with Joseph R. Brown in the development of many of the firm's products, including machinery for the Wilcox \& Gibbs sewing machine then being made by Brown \& Sharpe. From 1876 Howe was in business on his own account as a consulting mechanical engineer and in his later years he was engaged in the development of shoe machinery and in designing a one-finger typewriter, which, however, was never completed. He was granted several patents, mainly in the fields of machine tools and firearms. As a designer, Howe was said to have been a perfectionist, making frequent improvements; when completed, his designs were always sound.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Weapons and armour

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After an elementary education, Elisha K.Root was apprenticed as a machinist and worked in that occupation at Ware and Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts. In 1832 he went to Collinsville, Connecticut, to join the Collins Company, manufacturers of axes. He started as a lathe hand but soon became Foreman and, in 1845, Superintendent. While with the company, he devised and patented special-purpose machinery for forming axes which transformed the establishment from a primitive workshop to a modern factory.

In 1849 Root was offered positions by four different manufacturers and accepted the post of Superintendent of the armoury then being planned at Hartford, Connecticut, by Samuel Colt for the manufacture of his revolver pistol, which he had invented in 1835. Initial acceptance of the revolver was slow, but by the mid1840s Colt had received sufficient orders to justify the establishment of a new factory and Root was engaged to design and install the machinery. The principle of interchangeable manufacture was adopted, and Root devised special machines for boring, rifling, making cartridges, etc., and a system of jigs, fixtures, tools and gauges. One of these special machines was a drop hammer that he invented and patented in 1853 and which established the art of die-forging on a modern basis. He was also associated with F.A. Pratt in the design of the "Lincoln" milling machine in 1855.

When Colt died in 1862, Root became President of the company and continued in that capacity until his own death. It was said that he was one of the ablest and most highly paid mechanics from New England and that he was largely responsible for the success of both the Collins and the Colt companies.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Soon after his birth, Senefelder's family moved to Mannheim, where his father, an actor, had obtained a position in the state theatre. He was educated there, until he gained a scholarship to the university of Ingolstadt. The young Senefelder wanted to follow his father on to the stage, but the latter insisted that he study law. He nevertheless found time to write short pieces for the theatre. One of these, when he was 18 years old, was an encouraging success. When his father died in 1791, he gave up his studies and took to a new life as poet and actor. However, the wandering life of a repertory actor palled after two years and he settled for the more comfortable pursuit of playwriting. He had some of his work printed, which acquainted him with the art of printing, but he fell out with his bookseller. He therefore resolved to carry out his own printing, but he could not afford the equipment of a conventional letterpress printer. He began to explore other ways of printing and so set out on the path that was to lead to an entirely new method.

He tried writing in reverse on a copper plate with some acid-resisting material and etching the plate, to leave a relief image that could then be inked and printed. He knew that oily substances would resist acid, but it required many experiments to arrive at a composition of wax, soap and charcoal dust dissolved in rainwater. The plates wore down with repeated polishing, so he substituted stone plates. He continued to etch them and managed to make good prints with them, but he went on to make the surprising discovery that etching was unnecessary. If the image to be printed was made with the oily composition and the stone moistened, he found that only the oily image received the ink while the moistened part rejected it. The printing surface was neither raised (as in letterpress printing) nor incised (as in intaglio printing): Senefelder had discovered the third method of printing.

He arrived at a workable process over the years 1796 to 1799, and in 1800 he was granted an English patent. In the same year, lithography (or "writing on stone") was introduced into France and Senefelder himself took it to England, but it was some time before it became widespread; it was taken up by artists especially for high-quality printing of art works. Meanwhile, Senefelder improved his techniques, finding that other materials, even paper, could be used in place of stone. In fact, zinc plates were widely used from the 1820s, but the name "lithography" stuck. Although he won world renown and was honoured by most of the crowned heads of Europe, he never became rich because he dissipated his profits through restless experimenting.

With the later application of the offset principle, initiated by Barclay, lithography has become the most widely used method of printing.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Smith was the only son of Charles Smith, Postmaster at Hythe, and his wife Sarah (née Pettit). After education at a private school in Ashford, Kent, he took to farming, first on Romney Marsh, then at Hendon, Middlesex. As a boy, he showed much skill in the construction of model boats, especially in devising their means of propulsion. He maintained this interest into adult life and in 1835 he made a model propelled by a screw driven by a spring. This worked so well that he became convinced that the screw propeller offered a better method of propulsion than the paddle wheels that were then in general use. This notion so fired his enthusiasm that he virtually gave up farming to devote himself to perfecting his invention. The following year he produced a better model, which he successfully demonstrated to friends on his farm at Hendon and afterwards to the public at the Adelaide Gallery in London. On 31 May 1836 Smith was granted a patent for the propulsion of vessels by means of a screw.

The idea of screw propulsion was not new, however, for it had been mooted as early as the seventeenth century and since then several proposals had been advanced, but without successful practical application. Indeed, simultaneously but quite independently of Smith, the Swedish engineer John Ericsson had invented the ship's propeller and obtained a patent on 13 July 1836, just weeks after Smith. But Smith was completely unaware of this and pursued his own device in the belief that he was the sole inventor.

With some financial and technical backing, Smith was able to construct a 10 ton boat driven by a screw and powered by a steam engine of about 6 hp (4.5 kW). After showing it off to the public, Smith tried it out at sea, from Ramsgate round to Dover and Hythe, returning in stormy weather. The screw performed well in both calm and rough water. The engineering world seemed opposed to the new method of propulsion, but the Admiralty gave cautious encouragement in 1839 by ordering that the 237 ton Archimedes be equipped with a screw. It showed itself superior to the Vulcan, one of the fastest paddle-driven ships in the Navy. The ship was put through its paces in several ports, including Bristol, where Isambard Kingdom Brunel was constructing his Great Britain, the first large iron ocean-going vessel. Brunel was so impressed that he adapted his ship for screw propulsion.

Meanwhile, in spite of favourable reports, the Admiralty were dragging their feet and ordered further trials, fitting Smith's four-bladed propeller to the Rattler, then under construction and completed in 1844. The trials were a complete success and propelled their lordships of the Admiralty to a decision to equip twenty ships with screw propulsion, under Smith's supervision.

At last the superiority of screw propulsion was generally accepted and virtually universally adopted. Yet Smith gained little financial reward for his invention and in 1850 he retired to Guernsey to resume his farming life. In 1860 financial pressures compelled him to accept the position of Curator of Patent Models at the Patent Museum in South Kensington, London, a post he held until his death. Belated recognition by the Government, then headed by Lord Palmerston, came in 1855 with the grant of an annual pension of £200. Two years later Smith received unofficial recognition when he was presented with a national testimonial, consisting of a service of plate and nearly £3,000 in cash subscribed largely by the shipbuilding and engineering community. Finally, in 1871 Smith was honoured with a knighthood.

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1) General subject: biographical particulars, biographical information, personal information, personal details

2) Economy: biographical data

3) Business: personal data, profile

4) EBRD: curriculum vitae (CV), resume

5) Makarov: background

notice [nɔtis]

( = préface, résumé) note ; ( = mode d'emploi) instructions

► notice d'emploi directions for use

► notice explicative directions for use

► notice technique specification sheet

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1) ( exposé) note

2) ( instructions) instructions (pl)

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1) (biographique) note

2) (= brochure)

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notice nf

1 ( exposé) note;

2 ( instructions) instructions (pl); notice de montage assembly instructions; notice explicative instructions (pl) (for use).

notice biographique biographical information ¢; notice nécrologique obituary.

[nɔtis] nom féminin

1. [résumé] note

a. [brochure] advertising brochure

b. [annonce] advertisement

2. [instructions]