transactions+of+the+newcomen+society

SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

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James Pickard, the Birmingham button maker, also owned a flour mill at Snow Hill, in 1780, where Matthew Wasborough installed one of his rotative engines with ratchet gear and a flywheel. In August 1780, Pickard obtained a patent (no. 1263) for an application to make a rotative engine with a crank as well as gearwheels, one of which was weighted to help return the piston in the atmospheric cylinder during the dead stroke and overcome the dead centres of the crank. Wasborough's flywheel made the counterweight unnecessary, and engines were built with this and Pickard's crank. Several Birmingham business people seem to have been involved in the patent, and William Chapman of Newcastle upon Tyne was assigned the sole rights of erecting engines on the Wasborough-Pickard system in the counties of Northumberland, Durham and York. Wasborough was building engines in the south until his death the following year. The patentees tried to bargain with Boulton \& Watt to exchange the use of the crank for that of the separate condenser, but Boulton \& Watt would not agree, probably because James Watt claimed that one of his workers had stolen the idea of the crank and divulged it to Pickard. To avoid infringing Pickard's patent, Watt patented his sun-and-planet motion for his rotative engines.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology, Public utilities, Telecommunications

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After education at King's College, London, in 1852 Preece entered the office of Edwin Clark with the intention of becoming a civil engineer, but graduate studies at the Royal Institution under Faraday fired his enthusiasm for things electrical. His earliest work, as connected with telegraphy and in particular its application for securing the safe working of railways; in 1853 he obtained an appointment with the Electric and National Telegraph Company. In 1856 he became Superintendent of that company's southern district, but four years later he moved to telegraph work with the London and South West Railway. From 1858 to 1862 he was also Engineer to the Channel Islands Telegraph Company. When the various telegraph companies in Britain were transferred to the State in 1870, Preece became a Divisional Engineer in the General Post Office (GPO). Promotion followed in 1877, when he was appointed Chief Electrician to the Post Office. One of the first specimens of Bell's telephone was brought to England by Preece and exhibited at the British Association meeting in 1877. From 1892 to 1899 he served as Engineer-in-Chief to the Post Office. During this time he made a number of important contributions to telegraphy, including the use of water as part of telegraph circuits across the Solent (1882) and the Bristol Channel (1888). He also discovered the existence of inductive effects between parallel wires, and with Fleming showed that a current (thermionic) flowed between the hot filament and a cold conductor in an incandescent lamp.

Preece was distinguished by his administrative ability, some scientific insight, considerable engineering intuition and immense energy. He held erroneous views about telephone transmission and, not accepting the work of Oliver Heaviside, made many errors when planning trunk circuits. Prior to the successful use of Hertzian waves for wireless communication Preece carried out experiments, often on a large scale, in attempts at wireless communication by inductive methods. These became of historic interest only when the work of Maxwell and Hertz was developed by Guglielmo Marconi. It is to Preece that credit should be given for encouraging Marconi in 1896 and collaborating with him in his early experimental work on radio telegraphy.

While still employed by the Post Office, Preece contributed to the development of numerous early public electricity schemes, acting as Consultant and often supervising their construction. At Worcester he was responsible for Britain's largest nineteenth-century public hydro-electric station. He received a knighthood on his retirement in 1899, after which he continued his consulting practice in association with his two sons and Major Philip Cardew. Preece contributed some 136 papers and printed lectures to scientific journals, ninety-nine during the period 1877 to 1894.

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GW / KF

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Torricelli was the eldest child of a textile artisan. Between 1625 and 1626 he attended the Jesuit school at Faenza, where he showed such outstanding aptitude in mathematics and philosophy that his uncle was persuaded to send him to Rome to a school run by Benedetto Castelli, a mathematician and engineer and a former pupil of Galileo Galilei. Between 1630 and 1641, Torricelli was possibly Secretary to Giovanni Ciampoli, Galileo's friend and protector. In 1641 Torricelli wrote a treatise, De motugravium, amplifying Galileo's doctrine on the motion of projectiles, and Galileo accepted him as a pupil. On Galileo's death in 1642, he was appointed as mathematician and philosopher to the court of Grand Duke Ferdinando II of Tuscany. He remained in Florence until his early death in 1647, possibly from typhoid fever. He wrote a great number of mathematical papers on conic sections, the cycloid, the logarithmic curve and other subjects, which made him well known.

By 1642 Torricelli was producing good lenses for telescopes; he subsequently improved them, and attained near optical perfection. He also constructed a simple microscope with a small glass sphere as a lens. Galileo had looked at problems of raising water with suction pumps, and also with a siphon in 1630. Torricelli brought up the subject again in 1640 and later produced his most important invention, the barometer. He used mercury to fill a glass tube that was sealed at one end and inverted it. He found that the height of mercury in the tube adjusted itself to a well-defined level of about 76 cm (30 in.), higher than the free surface outside. He realized that this must be due to the pressure of the air on the outside surface and predicted that it would fall with increasing altitude. He thus demonstrated the pressure of the atmosphere and the existence of a vacuum on top of the mercury, publishing his findings in 1644. He later noticed that changes in the height of the mercury were related to changes in the weather.

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SUBJECT AREA: Synthetic materials, Textiles

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Bevan began his working life as a chemist in a soap works at Runcorn, but later studied chemistry at Owens College, Manchester. It was there that he met and formed a friendship with C.F. Cross, with whom he started to work on cellulose. Bevan moved to a paper mill in Scotland but then went south to London, where he and Cross set up a partnership in 1885 as consulting and analytical chemists. Their work was mainly concerned with the industrial utilization of cellulose, and with the problems of the paper and jute industries. Their joint publication, A Text-book of Paper-making, which first appeared in 1888 and went into several editions, became the standard reference and textbook on the subject. The book has a long introductory chapter on cellulose.

In 1892 Cross, Bevan and Clayton Beadle discovered viscose, or sodium cellulose xanthate, and took out the patent which was to be the foundation of the "viscose rayon" industry. They had their own laboratory at Station Avenue, Kew Gardens, where they carried out much work that eventually resulted in viscose: cellulose, usually in the form of wood pulp, was treated first with caustic soda and then with carbon disulphide to form the xanthate, which was then dissolved in a solution of dilute caustic soda to produce a viscous liquid. After being aged, the viscose was extruded through fine holes in a spinneret and coagulated in a dilute acid to regenerate the cellulose as spinnable fibres. At first there was no suggestion of spinning it into fibre, but the hope was to use it for filaments in incandescent electric light bulbs. The sheen on the fibres suggested their possible use in textiles and the term "artificial silk" was later introduced. Cross and Bevan also discovered the acetate "Celanese", which was cellulose triacetate dissolved in acetone and spun in air, but both inventions needed much development before they could be produced commercially.

In 1892 Bevan turned from cellulose to food and drugs and left the partnership to become Public Analyst to Middlesex County Council, a post he held until his death, although in 1895 he and Cross published their important work Cellulose. He was prominent in the affairs of the Society of Public Analysts and became one of its officials.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Synthetic materials, Textiles

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Cross was educated at the universities of London, Zurich and Manchester. It was at Owens College, Manchester, that Cross first met E.J. Bevan and where these two first worked together on the nature of cellulose. After gaining some industrial experience, Cross joined Bevan to set up a partnership in London as analytical and consulting chemists, specializing in the chemistry and technology of cellulose and lignin. They were at the Jodrell laboratory, Kew Gardens, for a time and then set up their own laboratory at Station Avenue, Kew Gardens. In 1888, the first edition of their joint publication A Textbook of Paper-making, appeared. It went into several editions and became the standard reference and textbook on the subject. The long introductory chapter is a discourse on cellulose.

In 1892, Cross, Bevan and Clayton Beadle took out their historic patent on the solution and regeneration of cellulose. The modern artificial-fibre industry stems from this patent. They made their discovery at New Court, Carey Street, London: wood-pulp (or another cheap form of cellulose) was dissolved in a mixture of carbon disulphide and aqueous alkali to produce sodium xanthate. After maturing, it was squirted through fine holes into dilute acid, which set the liquid to give spinnable fibres of "viscose". However, it was many years before the process became a commercial operation, partly because the use of a natural raw material such as wood involved variations in chemical content and each batch might react differently. At first it was thought that viscose might be suitable for incandescent lamp filaments, and C.H.Stearn, a collaborator with Cross, continued to investigate this possibility, but the sheen on the fibres suggested that viscose might be made into artificial silk. The original Viscose Spinning Syndicate was formed in 1894 and a place was rented at Erith in Kent. However, it was not until some skeins of artificial silk (a term to which Cross himself objected) were displayed in Paris that textile manufacturers began to take an interest in it. It was then that Courtaulds decided to investigate this new fibre, although it was not until 1904 that they bought the English patents and developed the first artificial silk that was later called "rayon". Cross was also concerned with the development of viscose films and of cellulose acetate, which became a rival to rayon in the form of "Celanese". He retained his interest in the paper industry and in publishing, in 1895 again collaborating with Bevan and publishing a book on Cellulose and other technical articles. He was a cultured man and a good musician. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1917.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Metallurgy, Public utilities, Telecommunications

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Born Carl Wilhelm, he attended craft schools in Lübeck and Magdeburg, followed by an intensive course in natural science at Göttingen as a pupil of Weber. At the age of 19 Siemens travelled to England and sold an electroplating process developed by his brother Werner Siemens to Richard Elkington, who was already established in the plating business. From 1843 to 1844 he obtained practical experience in the Magdeburg works of Count Stolburg. He settled in England in 1844 and later assumed British nationality, but maintained close contact with his brother Werner, who in 1847 had co-founded the firm Siemens \& Halske in Berlin to manufacture telegraphic equipment. William began to develop his regenerative principle of waste-heat recovery and in 1856 his brother Frederick (1826–1904) took out a British patent for heat regeneration, by which hot waste gases were passed through a honeycomb of fire-bricks. When they became hot, the gases were switched to a second mass of fire-bricks and incoming air and fuel gas were led through the hot bricks. By alternating the two gas flows, high temperatures could be reached and considerable fuel economies achieved. By 1861 the two brothers had incorporated producer gas fuel, made by gasifying low-grade coal.

Heat regeneration was first applied in ironmaking by Cowper in 1857 for heating the air blast in blast furnaces. The first regenerative furnace was set up in Birmingham in 1860 for glassmaking. The first such furnace for making steel was developed in France by Pierre Martin and his father, Emile, in 1863. Siemens found British steelmakers reluctant to adopt the principle so in 1866 he rented a small works in Birmingham to develop his open-hearth steelmaking furnace, which he patented the following year. The process gradually made headway; as well as achieving high temperatures and saving fuel, it was slower than Bessemer's process, permitting greater control over the content of the steel. By 1900 the tonnage of open-hearth steel exceeded that produced by the Bessemer process.

In 1872 Siemens played a major part in founding the Society of Telegraph Engineers (from which the Institution of Electrical Engineers evolved), serving as its first President. He became President for the second time in 1878. He built a cable works at Charlton, London, where the cable could be loaded directly into the holds of ships moored on the Thames. In 1873, together with William Froude, a British shipbuilder, he designed the Faraday, the first specialized vessel for Atlantic cable laying. The successful laying of a cable from Europe to the United States was completed in 1875, and a further five transatlantic cables were laid by the Faraday over the following decade.

The Siemens factory in Charlton also supplied equipment for some of the earliest electric-lighting installations in London, including the British Museum in 1879 and the Savoy Theatre in 1882, the first theatre in Britain to be fully illuminated by electricity. The pioneer electric-tramway system of 1883 at Portrush, Northern Ireland, was an opportunity for the Siemens company to demonstrate its equipment.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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His father was a mason and brickmaker but, anxious to improve himself, Cort set up in London in 1765 as a navy agent, said to have been a profitable business. He recognized that, at that time, the conversion of pig iron to malleable or wrought iron, which was needed in increasing quantities as developments in industry and mechanical engineering gathered pace, presented a bottleneck in the ironmaking process. The finery hearth was still in use, slow and inefficient and requiring the scarce charcoal as fuel. To tackle this problem, Cort gave up his business and acquired a furnace and slitting mill at Fontley, near Fareham in Hampshire. In 1784 he patented his puddling process, by which molten pig iron on the bed of a reverberatory furnace was stirred with an iron bar and, by the action of the flame and the oxygen in the air, the carbon in the pig iron was oxidized, leaving nearly pure iron, which could be forged to remove slag. In this type of furnace, the fuel and the molten iron were separated, so that the cheaper coal could be used as fuel. It was the stirring action with the iron bar that gave the name "puddling" to the process. Others had realized the problem and reached a similar solution, notably the brothers Thomas and George Cranage, but only Cort succeeded in developing a commercially viable process. The laborious hammering of the ball of iron thus produced was much reduced by an invention of the previous year, 1783. This too was patented. The iron was passed between grooved rollers to form it into bars. Cort entered into an agreement with Samuel Jellico to set up an ironworks at Gosport to exploit his inventions. Samuel's father Adam, Deputy Paymaster of the Navy, advanced capital for this venture, Cort having expended much of his own resources in the experimental work that preceded his inventions. However, it transpired that Jellico senior had, unknown to Cort, used public money to advance the capital; the Admiralty acted to recover the money and Cort lost heavily, including the benefits from his patents. Rival ironmasters were quick to pillage the patents. In 1790, and again the following year, Cort offered unsuccessfully to work for the military. Finally, in 1794, at the instigation of the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, Cort was paid a pension of £200 per year in recognition of the value of his improvements in the technology of ironmaking, although this was reduced by deductions to £160. After his death, the pension to his widow was halved, while some of his children received a pittance. Without the advances made by Cort, however, the iron trade could not have met the rapidly increasing demand for iron during the industrial revolution.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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As a youth, Dyer constructed an unsinkable life-boat but did not immediately pursue his mechanical bent, for at 16 he entered the counting-house of a French refugee named Nancrède and succeeded to part of the business. He first went to England in 1801 and finally settled in 1811 when he married Ellen Jones (d. 1842) of Gower Street, London. Dyer was already linked with American inventors and brought to England Perkins's plan for steel engraving in 1809, shearing and nail-making machines in 1811, and also received plans and specifications for Fulton's steamboats. He seems to have acted as a sort of British patent agent for American inventors, and in 1811 took out a patent for carding engines and a card clothing machine. In 1813 there was a patent for spinning long-fibred substances such as hemp, flax or grasses, and in 1825 there was a further patent for card making machinery. Joshua Field, on his tour through Britain in 1821, saw a wire drawing machine and a leather splitting machine at Dyer's works as well as the card-making machines. At first Dyer lived in Camden Town, London, but he had a card clothing business in Birmingham. He moved to Manchester c.1816, where he developed an extensive engineering works under the name "Joseph C.Dyer, patent card manufacturers, 8 Stanley Street, Dale Street". In 1832 he founded another works at Gamaches, Somme, France, but this enterprise was closed in 1848 with heavy losses through the mismanagement of an agent. In 1825 Dyer improved on Danforth's roving frame and started to manufacture it. While it was still a comparatively crude machine when com-pared with later versions, it had the merit of turning out a large quantity of work and was very popular, realizing a large sum of money. He patented the machine that year and must have continued his interest in these machines as further patents followed in 1830 and 1835. In 1821 Dyer had been involved in the foundation of the Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) and he was linked with the construction of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway. He was not so successful with the ill-fated Bank of Manchester, of which he was a director and in which he lost £98,000. Dyer played an active role in the community and presented many papers to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. He helped to establish the Royal Institution in London and the Mechanics Institution in Manchester. In 1830 he was a member of the delegation to Paris to take contributions from the town of Manchester for the relief of those wounded in the July revolution and to congratulate Louis-Philippe on his accession. He called for the reform of Parliament and helped to form the Anti-Corn Law League. He hated slavery and wrote several articles on the subject, both prior to and during the American Civil War.

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See also: Arnold, Aza

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Metallurgy, Steam and internal combustion engines

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He was the son of a cloth mill worker in Leeds and at the age of 10 he joined his father at the mill. Showing a mechanical inclination, he was apprenticed to a firm of machine-tool makers, Smith, Beacock and Tannett. There he rose to become Foreman and Traveller, and designed and patented tools for cutting bevelled gears. With his brother and one Refitt, he set up the Silver Cross engineering works for making special machine tools. In 1874 he founded the Leeds Forge Company, acting as Managing Director until 1896 and then as Chairman until shortly before his death.

It was in 1877 that he patented his most important invention, the corrugated furnace for steam-boilers. These furnaces could withstand much higher pressures than the conventional form, and higher working pressures in marine boilers enabled triple-expansion engines to be installed, greatly improving the performance of steamships, and the outcome was the great ocean-going liners of the twentieth century. The first vessel to be equipped with the corrugated furnace was the Pretoria of 1878. At first the furnaces were made by hammering iron plates using swage blocks under a steam hammer. A plant for rolling corrugated plates was set up at Essen in Germany, and Fox installed a similar mill at his works in Leeds in 1882.

In 1886 Fox installed a Siemens steelmaking plant and he was notable in the movement for replacing wrought iron with steel. He took out several patents for making pressed-steel underframes for railway wagons. The business prospered and Fox opened a works near Chicago in the USA, where in addition to wagon underframes he manufactured the first American pressed-steel carriages. He later added a works at Pittsburgh.

Fox was the first in England to use water gas for his metallurgical operations and for lighting, with a saving in cost as it was cheaper than coal gas. He was also a pioneer in the acetylene industry, producing in 1894 the first calcium carbide, from which the gas is made.

Fox took an active part in public life in and around Leeds, being thrice elected Mayor of Harrogate. As a music lover, he was a benefactor of musicians, contributing no less than £45,000 towards the cost of building the Royal College of Music in London, opened in 1894. In 1897 he sued for libel the author Jerome K.Jerome and the publishers of the Today magazine for accusing him of misusing his great generosity to the College to give a misleading impression of his commercial methods and prosperity. He won the case but was not awarded costs.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Telecommunications

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Halske moved to Berlin when he was a young man, and in 1844 was working for the university, at first independently and then jointly with F. Bötticher, developing and building electric medical appliances. In 1845 he met Werner von Siemens and together they became founder members of the Berlin Physics Society. It was in Halske's workshop that Siemens, assisted by the skill of the former, was able to work out his inventions in telegraphy. In 1847 the two men entered into partnership to manufacture telegraph equipment, laying the foundations of the successful firm of Siemens \& Halske. At the outset, before Werner von Siemens gave up his army career, Halske acted as the sole manager of the firm and was also involved in testing the products. Inventions they developed included electric measuring instruments and railway signalling equipment, and they installed many telegraph lines, notably those for the Russian Government. When gutta-percha became available on the market, the two men soon developed an extrusion process for applying this new material to copper conductors. To the disappointment of Halske, who was opposed to mass production, the firm introduced series production and piece wages in 1857. The expansion of the business, particularly into submarine cable laying, caused some anxiety to Halske, who left the firm on amicable terms in 1867. He then worked for a few years developing the Arts and Crafts Museum in Berlin and became a town councillor.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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James Hargreaves was first a carpenter and then a hand-loom weaver at Stanhill, Blackburn, probably making Blackburn Checks or Greys from linen warps and cotton weft. An invention ascribed to him doubled production in the preparatory carding process before spinning. Two or three cards were nailed to the same stock and the upper one was suspended from the ceiling by a cord and counterweight. Around 1762 Robert Peel (1750–1830) sought his assistance in constructing a carding engine with cylinders that may have originated with Daniel Bourn, but this was not successful. In 1764, inspired by seeing a spinning wheel that continued to revolve after it had been knocked over accidentally, Hargreaves invented his spinning jenny. The first jennies had horizontal wheels and could spin eight threads at once. To spin on this machine required a great deal of skill. A length of roving was passed through the clamp or clove. The left hand was used to close this and draw the roving away from the spindles which were rotated by the spinner turning the horizontal wheel with the right hand. The spindles twisted the fibres as they were being drawn out. At the end of the draw, the spindles continued to be rotated until sufficient twist had been put into the fibres to make the finished yarn. This was backed off from the tips of the spindles by reversing them and then, with the spindles turning in the spinning direction once more, the yarn was wound on by the right hand rotating the spindles, the left hand pushing the clove back towards them and one foot operating a pedal which guided the yarn onto the spindles by a faller wire. A piecer was needed to rejoin the yarns when they broke. At first Hargreaves's jenny was worked only by his family, but then he sold two or three of them, possibly to Peel. In 1768, local opposition and a riot in which his house was gutted forced him to flee to Nottingham. He entered into partnership there with Thomas James and established a cotton mill. In 1770 he followed Arkwright's example and sought to patent his machine and brought an action for infringement against some Lancashire manufacturers, who offered £3,000 in settlement. Hargreaves held out for £4,000, but he was unable to enforce his patent because he had sold jennies before leaving Lancashire. Arkwright's "water twist" was more suitable for the Nottingham hosiery industry trade than jenny yarn and in 1777 Hargreaves replaced his own machines with Arkwright's. When he died the following year, he is said to have left property valued at £7,000 and his widow received £400 for her share in the business. Once the jenny had been made public, it was quickly improved by other inventors and the number of spindles per machine increased. In 1784, there were reputed to be 20,000 jennies of 80 spindles each at work. The jenny greatly eased the shortage of cotton weft for weavers.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Railways and locomotives, Steam and internal combustion engines

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Matthew Murray was apprenticed at the age of 14 to a blacksmith who probably also did millwrighting work. He then worked as a journeyman mechanic at Stockton-on-Tees, where he had experience with machinery for a flax mill at Darlington. Trade in the Stockton area became slack in 1788 and Murray sought work in Leeds, where he was employed by John Marshall, who owned a flax mill at Adel, located about 5 miles (8 km) from Leeds. He soon became Marshall's chief mechanic, and when in 1790 a new mill was built in the Holbeck district of Leeds by Marshall and his partner Benyon, Murray was responsible for the installation of the machinery. At about this time he took out two patents relating to improvements in textile machinery.

In 1795 he left Marshall's employment and, in partnership with David Wood (1761– 1820), established a general engineering and millwrighting business at Mill Green, Holbeck. In the following year the firm moved to a larger site at Water Lane, Holbeck, and additional capital was provided by two new partners, James Fenton (1754–1834) and William Lister (1796–1811). Lister was a sleeping partner and the firm was known as Fenton, Murray \& Wood and was organized so that Fenton kept the accounts, Wood was the administrator and took charge of the workshops, while Murray provided the technical expertise. The factory was extended in 1802 by the construction of a fitting shop of circular form, after which the establishment became known as the "Round Foundry".

In addition to textile machinery, the firm soon began the manufacture of machine tools and steam-engines. In this field it became a serious rival to Boulton \& Watt, who privately acknowledged Murray's superior craftsmanship, particularly in foundry work, and resorted to some industrial espionage to discover details of his techniques. Murray obtained patents for improvements in steam engines in 1799, 1801 and 1802. These included automatic regulation of draught, a mechanical stoker and his short-D slide valve. The patent of 1801 was successfully opposed by Boulton \& Watt. An important contribution of Murray to the development of the steam engine was the use of a bedplate so that the engine became a compact, self-contained unit instead of separate components built into an en-gine-house.

Murray was one of the first, if not the very first, to build machine tools for sale. However, this was not the case with the planing machine, which he is said to have invented to produce flat surfaces for his slide valves. Rather than being patented, this machine was kept secret, although it was apparently in use before 1814.

In 1812 Murray was engaged by John Blenkinsop (1783–1831) to build locomotives for his rack railway from Middleton Colliery to Leeds (about 3 1/2 miles or 5.6 km). Murray was responsible for their design and they were fitted with two double-acting cylinders and cranks at right angles, an important step in the development of the steam locomotive. About six of these locomotives were built for the Middleton and other colliery railways and some were in use for over twenty years. Murray also supplied engines for many early steamboats. In addition, he built some hydraulic machinery and in 1814 patented a hydraulic press for baling cloth.

Murray's son-in-law, Richard Jackson, later became a partner in the firm, which was then styled Fenton, Murray \& Jackson. The firm went out of business in 1843.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Arkwright was the youngest of thirteen children and was apprenticed to a barber; when he was about 18, he followed this trade in Bol ton. In 1755 he married Patients Holt, who bore him a son before she died, and he remarried in 1761, to Margaret Biggins. He prospered until he took a public house as well as his barber shop and began to lose money. After this failure, he travelled around buying women's hair for wigs.

In the late 1760s he began spinning experiments at Preston. It is not clear how much Arkwright copied earlier inventions or was helped by Thomas Highs and John Kay but in 1768 he left Preston for Nottingham, where, with John Smalley and David Thornley as partners, he took out his first patent. They set up a mill worked by a horse where machine-spun yarn was produced successfully. The essential part of this process lay in drawing out the cotton by rollers before it was twisted by a flyer and wound onto the bobbin. The partners' resources were not sufficient for developing their patent so Arkwright found new partners in Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt, hosiers of Nottingham and Derby. Much experiment was necessary before they produced satisfactory yarn, and in 1771 a water-driven mill was built at Cromford, where the spinning process was perfected (hence the name "waterframe" was given to his spinning machine); some of this first yarn was used in the hosiery trade. Sales of all-cotton cloth were initially limited because of the high tax on calicoes, but the tax was lowered in 1774 by Act of Parliament, marking the beginning of the phenomenal growth of the cotton industry. In the evidence for this Act, Arkwright claimed that he had spent £12,000 on his machine. Once Arkwright had solved the problem of mechanical spinning, a bottleneck in the preliminary stages would have formed but for another patent taken out in 1775. This covered all preparatory processing, including some ideas not invented by Arkwright, with the result that it was disputed in 1783 and finally annulled in 1785. It contained the "crank and comb" for removing the cotton web off carding engines which was developed at Cromford and solved the difficulty in carding. By this patent, Arkwright had mechanized all the preparatory and spinning processes, and he began to establish water-powered cotton mills even as far away as Scotland. His success encouraged many others to copy him, so he had great difficulty in enforcing his patent Need died in 1781 and the partnership with Strutt ended soon after. Arkwright became very rich and financed other spinning ventures beyond his immediate control, such as that with Samuel Oldknow. It was estimated that 30,000 people were employed in 1785 in establishments using Arkwright's patents. In 1786 he received a knighthood for delivering an address of thanks when an attempt to assassinate George III failed, and the following year he became High Sheriff of Derbyshire. He purchased the manor of Cromford, where he died in 1792.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Behr trained as an engineer in Britain and had several railway engineering appointments before becoming associated with C.F.M.-T. Lartigue in promoting the Lartigue monorail system in the British Isles. In Lartigue's system, a single rail was supported on trestles; vehicles ran on the rail, their bodies suspended pannier-fashion, stabilized by horizontal rollers running against light guide rails fixed to the sides of the trestles. Behr became Managing Director of the Listowel \& Ballybunion Railway Company, which in 1888 opened its Lartigue system line between those two places in the south-west of Ireland. Three locomotives designed by J.T.A. Mallet were built for the line by Hunslet Engine Company, each with two horizontal boilers, one either side of the track. Coaches and wagons likewise were in two parts. Technically the railway was successful, but lack of traffic caused the company to go bankrupt in 1897: the railway continued to operate until 1924.

Meanwhile Behr had been thinking in terms far more ambitious than a country branch line. Railway speeds of 150mph (240km/h) or more then lay far in the future: engineers were uncertain whether normal railway vehicles would even be stable at such speeds. Behr was convinced that a high-speed electric vehicle on a substantial Lartigue monorail track would be stable. In 1897 he demonstrated such a vehicle on a 3mile (4.8km) test track at the Brussels International Exhibition. By keeping the weight of the motors low, he was able to place the seats above rail level. Although the generating station provided by the Exhibition authorities never operated at full power, speeds over 75mph (120 km/h) were achieved.

Behr then promoted the Manchester-Liverpool Express Railway, on which monorail trains of this type running at speeds up to 110mph (177km/h) were to link the two cities in twenty minutes. Despite strong opposition from established railway companies, an Act of Parliament authorizing it was made in 1901. The Act also contained provision for the Board of Trade to require experiments to prove the system's safety. In practice this meant that seven miles of line, and a complete generating station to enable trains to travel at full speed, must be built before it was known whether the Board would give its approval for the railway or not. Such a condition was too severe for the scheme to attract investors and it remained stillborn.

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See also: Brennan, Louis

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Daniel Bourn may well have been a native of Lancashire. He set up a fourth Paul-Wyatt cotton-spinning mill at Leominster, Herefordshire, possibly in 1744, although the earliest mention of it is in 1748. His only known partner in this mill was Henry Morris, a yarn dealer who in 1743 had bought a grant of spindles from Paul at the low rate of 30 shillings or 40 shillings per spindle when the current price was £3 or £4. When Bourn patented his carding engine in 1748, he asked Wyatt for a grant of spindles, to which Wyatt agreed because £100 was offered immedi-ately. The mill, which was probably the only one outside the control of Paul and his backers, was destroyed by fire in 1754 and was not rebuilt, although Bourn and his partners had considerable hopes for it. Bourn was said to have lost over £1,600 in the venture.

Daniel Bourn described himself as a wool and cotton dealer of Leominster in his patent of 1748 for his carding engine. The significance of this invention is the use of rotating cylinders covered with wire clothing. The patent drawing shows four cylinders, one following the other to tease out the wool, but Bourn was unable to discover a satisfactory method of removing the fibres from the last cylinder. It is possible that Robert Peel in Lancashire obtained one of these engines through Morris, and that James Hargreaves tried to improve it; if so, then some of the early carding engines in the cotton industry were derived from Bourn's.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Domestic appliances and interiors, Land transport, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Public utilities

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Bramah was the son of a tenant farmer and was educated at the village school before being apprenticed to a local carpenter, Thomas Allot. He walked to London c.1773 and found work with a Mr Allen that included the repair of some of the comparatively rare water-closets of the period. He invented and patented one of his own, which was followed by a water cock in 1783. His next invention, a greatly improved lock, involved the devising of a number of special machine tools, for it was one of the first devices involving interchangeable components in its manufacture. In this he had the help of Henry Maudslay, then a young and unknown engineer, who became Bramah's foreman before setting up business on his own. In 1784 he moved his premises from Denmark Street, St Giles, to 124 Piccadilly, which was later used as a showroom when he set up a factory in Pimlico. He invented an engine for putting out fires in 1785 and 1793, in effect a reciprocating rotary-vane pump. He undertook the refurbishment and modernization of Norwich waterworks c.1793, but fell out with Robert Mylne, who was acting as Consultant to the Norwich Corporation and had produced a remarkably vague specification. This was Bramah's only venture into the field of civil engineering.

In 1797 he acted as an expert witness for Hornblower \& Maberley in the patent infringement case brought against them by Boulton and Watt. Having been cut short by the judge, he published his proposed evidence in "Letter to the Rt Hon. Sir James Eyre, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas…etc". In 1795 he was granted his most important patent, based on Pascal's Hydrostatic Paradox, for the hydraulic press which also incorporated the concept of hydraulics for the transmission of both power and motion and was the foundation of the whole subsequent hydraulic industry. There is no truth in the oft-repeated assertion originating from Samuel Smiles's Industrial Biography (1863) that the hydraulic press could not be made to work until Henry Maudslay invented the self-sealing neck leather. Bramah used a single-acting upstroking ram, sealed only at its base with a U-leather. There was no need for a neck leather.

He also used the concept of the weight-loaded, in this case as a public-house beer-engine. He devised machinery for carbonating soda water. The first banknote-numbering machine was of his design and was bought by the Bank of England. His development of a machine to cut twelve nibs from one goose quill started a patent specification which ended with the invention of the fountain pen, patented in 1809. His coach brakes were an innovation that was followed bv a form of hydropneumatic carriage suspension that was somewhat in advance of its time, as was his patent of 1812. This foresaw the introduction of hydraulic power mains in major cities and included the telescopic ram and the air-loaded accumulator.

In all Joseph Bramah was granted eighteen patents. On 22 March 1813 he demonstrated a hydraulic machine for pulling up trees by the roots in Hyde Park before a large crowd headed by the Duke of York. Using the same machine in Alice Holt Forest in Hampshire to fell timber for ships for the Navy, he caught a chill and died soon after at his home in Pimlico.

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SUBJECT AREA: Railways and locomotives

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Brotan, who was Chief Engineer of the main workshops of the Royal Austrian State Railways at Gmund, found that locomotive inner fireboxes of the usual type were both expensive, because the copper from which they were made had to be imported, and short-lived, because of corrosion resulting from the use of coal with high sulphur content. He designed a firebox of which the side and rear walls comprised rows of vertical watertubes, expanded at their lower ends into a tubular foundation ring and at the top into a longitudinal water/steam drum. This projected forward above the boiler barrel (which was of the usual firetube type, though of small diameter), to which it was connected. Copper plates were eliminated, as were firebox stays.

The first boiler to incorporate a Brotan firebox was built at Gmund under the inventor's supervision and replaced the earlier boiler of a 0−6−0 in 1901. The increased radiantly heated surface was found to produce a boiler with very good steaming qualities, while the working pressure too could be increased, with consequent fuel economies. Further locomotives in Austria and, experimentally, elsewhere were equipped with Brotan boilers.

Disadvantages of the boiler were the necessity of keeping the tubes clear of scale, and a degree of structural weakness. The Swiss engineer E. Deffner improved the latter aspect by eliminating the forward extension of the water/steam drum, replacing it with a large-diameter boiler barrel with the rear section of tapered wagon-top type so that the front of the water/steam drum could be joined directly to the rear tubeplate. The first locomotives to be fitted with this Brotan-Deffner boiler were two 4−6−0s for the Swiss Federal Railways in 1908 and showed very favourable results. However, steam locomotive development ceased in Switzerland a few years later in favour of electrification, but boilers of the Brotan-Deffner type and further developments of it were used in many other European countries, notably Hungary, where more than 1,000 were built. They were also used experimentally in the USA: for instance, Samuel Vauclain, as President of Baldwin Locomotive Works, sent his senior design engineer to study Hungarian experience and then had a high-powered 4−8−0 built with a watertube firebox. On stationary test this produced the very high figure of 4,515 ihp (3,370 kW), but further development work was frustrated by the trade depression commencing in 1929. In France, Gaston du Bousquet had obtained good results from experimental installations of Brotan-Deffner-type boilers, and incorporated one into one of his high-powered 4−6−4s of 1910. Experiments were terminated suddenly by his death, followed by the First World War, but thirty-five years later André Chapelon proposed using a watertube firebox to obtain the high pressure needed for a triple-expansion, high-powered, steam locomotive, development of which was overtaken by electrification.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Chapelon's technical education at the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, Paris, was interrupted by extended military service during the First World War. From experience of observing artillery from the basket of a captive balloon, he developed a method of artillery fire control which was more accurate than that in use and which was adopted by the French army.

In 1925 he joined the motive-power and rolling-stock department of the Paris-Orléans Railway under Chief Mechanical Engineer Maurice Lacoin and was given the task of improving the performance of its main-line 4–6–2 locomotives, most of them compounds. He had already made an intensive study of steam locomotive design and in 1926 introduced his Kylchap exhaust system, based in part on the earlier work of the Finnish engineer Kyläla. Chapelon improved the entrainment of the hot gases in the smokebox by the exhaust steam and so minimized back pressure in the cylinders, increasing the power of a locomotive substantially. He also greatly increased the cross-sectional area of steam passages, used poppet valves instead of piston valves and increased superheating of steam. PO (Paris-Orléans) 4–6–2s rebuilt on these principles from 1929 onwards proved able to haul 800-ton trains, in place of the previous 500-ton trains, and to do so to accelerated schedules with reduced coal consumption. Commencing in 1932, some were converted, at the time of rebuilding, into 4–8–0s to increase adhesive weight for hauling heavy trains over the steeply graded Paris-Toulouse line.

Chapelon's principles were quickly adopted on other French railways and elsewhere.

H.N. Gresley was particularly influenced by them. After formation of the French National Railways (SNCF) in 1938, Chapelon produced in 1941 a prototype rebuilt PO 2–10–0 freight locomotive as a six-cylinder compound, with four low-pressure cylinders to maximize expansive use of steam and with all cylinders steam-jacketed to minimize heat loss by condensation and radiation. War conditions delayed extended testing until 1948–52. Meanwhile Chapelon had, by rebuilding, produced in 1946 a high-powered, three-cylinder, compound 4–8–4 intended as a stage in development of a proposed range of powerful and thermally efficient steam locomotives for the postwar SNCF: a high-speed 4–6–4 in this range was to run at sustained speeds of 125 mph (200 km/h). However, plans for improved steam locomotives were then overtaken in France by electriflcation and dieselization, though the performance of the 4–8–4, which produced 4,000 hp (3,000 kW) at the drawbar for the first time in Europe, prompted modification of electric locomotives, already on order, to increase their power.

Chapelon retired from the SNCF in 1953, but continued to act as a consultant. His principles were incorporated into steam locomotives built in France for export to South America, and even after the energy crisis of 1973 he was consulted on projects to build improved, high-powered steam locomotives for countries with reserves of cheap coal. The eventual fall in oil prices brought these to an end.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Churchward was articled to the Locomotive Superintendent of the South Devon Railway in 1873, and when the South Devon was absorbed by the Great Western Railway in 1876 he moved to the latter's Swindon works. There he rose by successive promotions to become Works Manager in 1896, and in 1897 Chief Assistant to William Dean, who was Locomotive Carriage and Wagon Superintendent, in which capacity Churchward was allowed extensive freedom of action. Churchward eventually succeeded Dean in 1902: his title changed to Chief Mechanical Engineer in 1916.

In locomotive design, Churchward adopted the flat-topped firebox invented by A.J.Belpaire of the Belgian State Railways and added a tapered barrel to improve circulation of water between the barrel and the firebox legs. He designed valves with a longer stroke and a greater lap than usual, to achieve full opening to exhaust. Passenger-train weights had been increasing rapidly, and Churchward produced his first 4–6– 0 express locomotive in 1902. However, he was still developing the details—he had a flair for selecting good engineering practices—and to aid his development work Churchward installed at Swindon in 1904 a stationary testing plant for locomotives. This was the first of its kind in Britain and was based on the work of Professor W.F.M.Goss, who had installed the first such plant at Purdue University, USA, in 1891. For comparison with his own locomotives Churchward obtained from France three 4–4–2 compound locomotives of the type developed by A. de Glehn and G. du Bousquet. He decided against compounding, but he did perpetuate many of the details of the French locomotives, notably the divided drive between the first and second pairs of driving wheels, when he introduced his four-cylinder 4–6–0 (the Star class) in 1907. He built a lone 4–6–2, the Great Bear, in 1908: the wheel arrangement enabled it to have a wide firebox, but the type was not perpetuated because Welsh coal suited narrow grates and 4–6–0 locomotives were adequate for the traffic. After Churchward retired in 1921 his successor, C.B.Collett, was to enlarge the Star class into the Castle class and then the King class, both 4–6–0s, which lasted almost as long as steam locomotives survived in service. In Church ward's time, however, the Great Western Railway was the first in Britain to adopt six-coupled locomotives on a large scale for passenger trains in place of four-coupled locomotives. The 4–6–0 classes, however, were but the most celebrated of a whole range of standard locomotives of advanced design for all types of traffic and shared between them many standardized components, particularly boilers, cylinders and valve gear.

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See also: Gresley, Sir Herbert Nigel; Stanier, Sir William Arthur

SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

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Corliss's father was a physician and surgeon. The son was educated at Greenwich, New York, but while he showed an aptitude for mathematics and mechanics he first of all became a storekeeper and then clerk, bookkeeper, salesperson and official measurer and inspector of the cloth produced at W.Mowbray \& Son. He went to the Castleton Academy, Vermont, for three years and at the age of 21 returned to a store of his own in Greenwich. Complaints about stitching in the boots he sold led him to patent a sewing machine. He approached Fairbanks, Bancroft \& Co., Providence, Rhode Island, machine and steam engine builders, about producing his machine, but they agreed to take him on as a draughtsman providing he abandoned it. Corliss moved to Providence with his family and soon revolutionized the design and construction of steam engines. Although he started working out ideas for his engine in 1846 and completed one in 1848 for the Providence Dyeing, Bleaching and Calendering Company, it was not until March 1849 that he obtained a patent. By that time he had joined John Barstow and E.J.Nightingale to form a new company, Corliss Nightingale \& Co., to build his design of steam-engines. He used paired valves, two inlet and two exhaust, placed on opposite sides of the cylinder, which gave good thermal properties in the flow of steam. His wrist-plate operating mechanism gave quick opening and his trip mechanism allowed the governor to regulate the closure of the inlet valve, giving maximum expansion for any load. It has been claimed that Corliss should rank equally with James Watt in the development of the steam-engine. The new company bought land in Providence for a factory which was completed in 1856 when the Corliss Engine Company was incorporated. Corliss directed the business activities as well as technical improvements. He took out further patents modifying his valve gear in 1851, 1852, 1859, 1867, 1875, 1880. The business grew until well over 1,000 workers were employed. The cylindrical oscillating valve normally associated with the Corliss engine did not make its appearance until 1850 and was included in the 1859 patent. The impressive beam engine designed for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition by E. Reynolds was the product of Corliss's works. Corliss also patented gear-cutting machines, boilers, condensing apparatus and a pumping engine for waterworks. While having little interest in politics, he represented North Providence in the General Assembly of Rhode Island between 1868 and 1870.

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