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(1823-1827)

  • 1 сборник судебных решений по Онтарио

    Law: Taylor's Reports (составитель Тейлор, 1823-1827)

    Универсальный русско-английский словарь > сборник судебных решений по Онтарио

  • 2 сборник судебных решений по Онтарио, составитель Тейлор

    Универсальный русско-английский словарь > сборник судебных решений по Онтарио, составитель Тейлор

  • 3 Brown, Samuel

    [br]
    b. unknown
    d. 1849 England
    [br]
    English cooper, inventor of a gas vacuum engine.
    [br]
    Between the years 1823 and 1833, Brown achieved a number of a firsts as a pioneer of internal-combustion engines. In 1824 he built a full-scale working model of a pumping engine; in 1826, a vehicle fitted with a gas vacuum engine ascended Shooters Hill in Kent; and in 1827 he conducted trials of a motor-driven boat on the Thames that were witnessed by Lords of the Admiralty. The principle of Brown's engine had been demonstrated by Cecil in 1820. A burning gas flame was extinguished within a closed cylinder, creating a partial vacuum; atmospheric pressure was then utilized to produce the working stroke. By 1832 a number of Brown's engines in use for pumping water were reported, the most notable being at Croydon Canal. However, high fuel consumption and running costs prevented a wide acceptance of Brown's engines, and a company formed in 1825 was dissolved only two years later. Brown continued alone with his work until his death.
    [br]
    Bibliography
    1823, British patent no. 4,874 (gas vacuum engine).
    1826, British patent no. 5,350 (improved gas vacuum engine).
    1846, British patent no. 11,076, "Improvements in Gas Engines and in Propelling Carriages and Vessels" (no specification was enrolled).
    Further Reading
    Various discussions of Brown's engines can be found in Mechanics Magazine (1824) 2:360, 385; (1825) 3:6; (1825) 4:19, 309; (1826) 5:145; (1826) 6:79; (1827) 7:82–134; (1832) 17:273.
    The Engineer 182:214.
    A.K.Bruce, Samuel Brown and the Gas Engine.
    Dugald Clerk, 1895, The Gas and Oil Engine, 6th edn, London, pp. 2–3.
    KAB

    Biographical history of technology > Brown, Samuel

  • 4 Stephenson, George

    [br]
    b. 9 June 1781 Wylam, Northumberland, England
    d. 12 August 1848 Tapton House, Chesterfield, England
    [br]
    English engineer, "the father of railways".
    [br]
    George Stephenson was the son of the fireman of the pumping engine at Wylam colliery, and horses drew wagons of coal along the wooden rails of the Wylam wagonway past the house in which he was born and spent his earliest childhood. While still a child he worked as a cowherd, but soon moved to working at coal pits. At 17 years of age he showed sufficient mechanical talent to be placed in charge of a new pumping engine, and had already achieved a job more responsible than that of his father. Despite his position he was still illiterate, although he subsequently learned to read and write. He was largely self-educated.
    In 1801 he was appointed Brakesman of the winding engine at Black Callerton pit, with responsibility for lowering the miners safely to their work. Then, about two years later, he became Brakesman of a new winding engine erected by Robert Hawthorn at Willington Quay on the Tyne. Returning collier brigs discharged ballast into wagons and the engine drew the wagons up an inclined plane to the top of "Ballast Hill" for their contents to be tipped; this was one of the earliest applications of steam power to transport, other than experimentally.
    In 1804 Stephenson moved to West Moor pit, Killingworth, again as Brakesman. In 1811 he demonstrated his mechanical skill by successfully modifying a new and unsatisfactory atmospheric engine, a task that had defeated the efforts of others, to enable it to pump a drowned pit clear of water. The following year he was appointed Enginewright at Killingworth, in charge of the machinery in all the collieries of the "Grand Allies", the prominent coal-owning families of Wortley, Liddell and Bowes, with authorization also to work for others. He built many stationary engines and he closely examined locomotives of John Blenkinsop's type on the Kenton \& Coxlodge wagonway, as well as those of William Hedley at Wylam.
    It was in 1813 that Sir Thomas Liddell requested George Stephenson to build a steam locomotive for the Killingworth wagonway: Blucher made its first trial run on 25 July 1814 and was based on Blenkinsop's locomotives, although it lacked their rack-and-pinion drive. George Stephenson is credited with building the first locomotive both to run on edge rails and be driven by adhesion, an arrangement that has been the conventional one ever since. Yet Blucher was far from perfect and over the next few years, while other engineers ignored the steam locomotive, Stephenson built a succession of them, each an improvement on the last.
    During this period many lives were lost in coalmines from explosions of gas ignited by miners' lamps. By observation and experiment (sometimes at great personal risk) Stephenson invented a satisfactory safety lamp, working independently of the noted scientist Sir Humphry Davy who also invented such a lamp around the same time.
    In 1817 George Stephenson designed his first locomotive for an outside customer, the Kilmarnock \& Troon Railway, and in 1819 he laid out the Hetton Colliery Railway in County Durham, for which his brother Robert was Resident Engineer. This was the first railway to be worked entirely without animal traction: it used inclined planes with stationary engines, self-acting inclined planes powered by gravity, and locomotives.
    On 19 April 1821 Stephenson was introduced to Edward Pease, one of the main promoters of the Stockton \& Darlington Railway (S \& DR), which by coincidence received its Act of Parliament the same day. George Stephenson carried out a further survey, to improve the proposed line, and in this he was assisted by his 18-year-old son, Robert Stephenson, whom he had ensured received the theoretical education which he himself lacked. It is doubtful whether either could have succeeded without the other; together they were to make the steam railway practicable.
    At George Stephenson's instance, much of the S \& DR was laid with wrought-iron rails recently developed by John Birkinshaw at Bedlington Ironworks, Morpeth. These were longer than cast-iron rails and were not brittle: they made a track well suited for locomotives. In June 1823 George and Robert Stephenson, with other partners, founded a firm in Newcastle upon Tyne to build locomotives and rolling stock and to do general engineering work: after its Managing Partner, the firm was called Robert Stephenson \& Co.
    In 1824 the promoters of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway (L \& MR) invited George Stephenson to resurvey their proposed line in order to reduce opposition to it. William James, a wealthy land agent who had become a visionary protagonist of a national railway network and had seen Stephenson's locomotives at Killingworth, had promoted the L \& MR with some merchants of Liverpool and had carried out the first survey; however, he overreached himself in business and, shortly after the invitation to Stephenson, became bankrupt. In his own survey, however, George Stephenson lacked the assistance of his son Robert, who had left for South America, and he delegated much of the detailed work to incompetent assistants. During a devastating Parliamentary examination in the spring of 1825, much of his survey was shown to be seriously inaccurate and the L \& MR's application for an Act of Parliament was refused. The railway's promoters discharged Stephenson and had their line surveyed yet again, by C.B. Vignoles.
    The Stockton \& Darlington Railway was, however, triumphantly opened in the presence of vast crowds in September 1825, with Stephenson himself driving the locomotive Locomotion, which had been built at Robert Stephenson \& Co.'s Newcastle works. Once the railway was at work, horse-drawn and gravity-powered traffic shared the line with locomotives: in 1828 Stephenson invented the horse dandy, a wagon at the back of a train in which a horse could travel over the gravity-operated stretches, instead of trotting behind.
    Meanwhile, in May 1826, the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway had successfully obtained its Act of Parliament. Stephenson was appointed Engineer in June, and since he and Vignoles proved incompatible the latter left early in 1827. The railway was built by Stephenson and his staff, using direct labour. A considerable controversy arose c. 1828 over the motive power to be used: the traffic anticipated was too great for horses, but the performance of the reciprocal system of cable haulage developed by Benjamin Thompson appeared in many respects superior to that of contemporary locomotives. The company instituted a prize competition for a better locomotive and the Rainhill Trials were held in October 1829.
    Robert Stephenson had been working on improved locomotive designs since his return from America in 1827, but it was the L \& MR's Treasurer, Henry Booth, who suggested the multi-tubular boiler to George Stephenson. This was incorporated into a locomotive built by Robert Stephenson for the trials: Rocket was entered by the three men in partnership. The other principal entrants were Novelty, entered by John Braithwaite and John Ericsson, and Sans Pareil, entered by Timothy Hackworth, but only Rocket, driven by George Stephenson, met all the organizers' demands; indeed, it far surpassed them and demonstrated the practicability of the long-distance steam railway. With the opening of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway in 1830, the age of railways began.
    Stephenson was active in many aspects. He advised on the construction of the Belgian State Railway, of which the Brussels-Malines section, opened in 1835, was the first all-steam railway on the European continent. In England, proposals to link the L \& MR with the Midlands had culminated in an Act of Parliament for the Grand Junction Railway in 1833: this was to run from Warrington, which was already linked to the L \& MR, to Birmingham. George Stephenson had been in charge of the surveys, and for the railway's construction he and J.U. Rastrick were initially Principal Engineers, with Stephenson's former pupil Joseph Locke under them; by 1835 both Stephenson and Rastrick had withdrawn and Locke was Engineer-in-Chief. Stephenson remained much in demand elsewhere: he was particularly associated with the construction of the North Midland Railway (Derby to Leeds) and related lines. He was active in many other places and carried out, for instance, preliminary surveys for the Chester \& Holyhead and Newcastle \& Berwick Railways, which were important links in the lines of communication between London and, respectively, Dublin and Edinburgh.
    He eventually retired to Tapton House, Chesterfield, overlooking the North Midland. A man who was self-made (with great success) against colossal odds, he was ever reluctant, regrettably, to give others their due credit, although in retirement, immensely wealthy and full of honour, he was still able to mingle with people of all ranks.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    President, Institution of Mechanical Engineers, on its formation in 1847. Order of Leopold (Belgium) 1835. Stephenson refused both a knighthood and Fellowship of the Royal Society.
    Bibliography
    1815, jointly with Ralph Dodd, British patent no. 3,887 (locomotive drive by connecting rods directly to the wheels).
    1817, jointly with William Losh, British patent no. 4,067 (steam springs for locomotives, and improvements to track).
    Further Reading
    L.T.C.Rolt, 1960, George and Robert Stephenson, Longman (the best modern biography; includes a bibliography).
    S.Smiles, 1874, The Lives of George and Robert Stephenson, rev. edn, London (although sycophantic, this is probably the best nineteenthcentury biography).
    PJGR

    Biographical history of technology > Stephenson, George

  • 5 Vignoles, Charles Blacker

    [br]
    b. 31 May 1793 Woodbrook, Co. Wexford, Ireland
    d. 17 November 1875 Hythe, Hampshire, England
    [br]
    English surveyor and civil engineer, pioneer of railways.
    [br]
    Vignoles, who was of Huguenot descent, was orphaned in infancy and brought up in the family of his grandfather, Dr Charles Hutton FRS, Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. After service in the Army he travelled to America, arriving in South Carolina in 1817. He was appointed Assistant to the state's Civil Engineer and surveyed much of South Carolina and subsequently Florida. After his return to England in 1823 he established himself as a civil engineer in London, and obtained work from the brothers George and John Rennie.
    In 1825 the promoters of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway (L \& MR) lost their application for an Act of Parliament, discharged their engineer George Stephenson and appointed the Rennie brothers in his place. They in turn employed Vignoles to resurvey the railway, taking a route that would minimize objections. With Vignoles's route, the company obtained its Act in 1826 and appointed Vignoles to supervise the start of construction. After Stephenson was reappointed Chief Engineer, however, he and Vignoles proved incompatible, with the result that Vignoles left the L \& MR early in 1827.
    Nevertheless, Vignoles did not sever all connection with the L \& MR. He supported John Braithwaite and John Ericsson in the construction of the locomotive Novelty and was present when it competed in the Rainhill Trials in 1829. He attended the opening of the L \& MR in 1830 and was appointed Engineer to two railways which connected with it, the St Helens \& Runcorn Gap and the Wigan Branch (later extended to Preston as the North Union); he supervised the construction of these.
    After the death of the Engineer to the Dublin \& Kingstown Railway, Vignoles supervised construction: the railway, the first in Ireland, was opened in 1834. He was subsequently employed in surveying and constructing many railways in the British Isles and on the European continent; these included the Eastern Counties, the Midland Counties, the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyme \& Manchester (which proved for him a financial disaster from which he took many years to recover), and the Waterford \& Limerick. He probably discussed rail of flat-bottom section with R.L. Stevens during the winter of 1830–1 and brought it into use in the UK for the first time in 1836 on the London \& Croydon Railway: subsequently rail of this section became known as "Vignoles rail". He considered that a broader gauge than 4 ft 8½ in. (1.44 m) was desirable for railways, although most of those he built were to this gauge so that they might connect with others. He supported the atmospheric system of propulsion during the 1840s and was instrumental in its early installation on the Dublin \& Kingstown Railway's Dalkey extension. Between 1847 and 1853 he designed and built the noted multi-span suspension bridge at Kiev, Russia, over the River Dnieper, which is more than half a mile (800 m) wide at that point.
    Between 1857 and 1863 he surveyed and then supervised the construction of the 155- mile (250 km) Tudela \& Bilbao Railway, which crosses the Cantabrian Pyrenees at an altitude of 2,163 ft (659 m) above sea level. Vignoles outlived his most famous contemporaries to become the grand old man of his profession.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society 1829. FRS 1855. President, Institution of Civil Engineers 1869–70.
    Bibliography
    1830, jointly with John Ericsson, British patent no. 5,995 (a device to increase the capability of steam locomotives on grades, in which rollers gripped a third rail).
    1823, Observations upon the Floridas, New York: Bliss \& White.
    1870, Address on His Election as President of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
    Further Reading
    K.H.Vignoles, 1982, Charles Blacker Vignoles: Romantic Engineer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (good modern biography by his great-grandson).
    PJGR

    Biographical history of technology > Vignoles, Charles Blacker

  • 6 Babbage, Charles

    [br]
    b. 26 December 1791 Walworth, Surrey, England
    d. 18 October 1871 London, England
    [br]
    English mathematician who invented the forerunner of the modern computer.
    [br]
    Charles Babbage was the son of a banker, Benjamin Babbage, and was a sickly child who had a rather haphazard education at private schools near Exeter and later at Enfield. Even as a child, he was inordinately fond of algebra, which he taught himself. He was conversant with several advanced mathematical texts, so by the time he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1811, he was ahead of his tutors. In his third year he moved to Peterhouse, whence he graduated in 1814, taking his MA in 1817. He first contributed to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1815, and was elected a fellow of that body in 1816. He was one of the founders of the Astronomical Society in 1820 and served in high office in it.
    While he was still at Cambridge, in 1812, he had the first idea of calculating numerical tables by machinery. This was his first difference engine, which worked on the principle of repeatedly adding a common difference. He built a small model of an engine working on this principle between 1820 and 1822, and in July of the latter year he read an enthusiastically received note about it to the Astronomical Society. The following year he was awarded the Society's first gold medal. He submitted details of his invention to Sir Humphry Davy, President of the Royal Society; the Society reported favourably and the Government became interested, and following a meeting with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Babbage was awarded a grant of £1,500. Work proceeded and was carried on for four years under the direction of Joseph Clement.
    In 1827 Babbage went abroad for a year on medical advice. There he studied foreign workshops and factories, and in 1832 he published his observations in On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures. While abroad, he received the news that he had been appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. He held the Chair until 1839, although he neither resided in College nor gave any lectures. For this he was paid between £80 and £90 a year! Differences arose between Babbage and Clement. Manufacture was moved from Clement's works in Lambeth, London, to new, fireproof buildings specially erected by the Government near Babbage's house in Dorset Square, London. Clement made a large claim for compensation and, when it was refused, withdrew his workers as well as all the special tools he had made up for the job. No work was possible for the next fifteen months, during which Babbage conceived the idea of his "analytical engine". He approached the Government with this, but it was not until eight years later, in 1842, that he received the reply that the expense was considered too great for further backing and that the Government was abandoning the project. This was in spite of the demonstration and perfectly satisfactory operation of a small section of the analytical engine at the International Exhibition of 1862. It is said that the demands made on manufacture in the production of his engines had an appreciable influence in improving the standard of machine tools, whilst similar benefits accrued from his development of a system of notation for the movements of machine elements. His opposition to street organ-grinders was a notable eccentricity; he estimated that a quarter of his mental effort was wasted by the effect of noise on his concentration.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    FRS 1816. Astronomical Society Gold Medal 1823.
    Bibliography
    Babbage wrote eighty works, including: 1864, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher.
    July 1822, Letter to Sir Humphry Davy, PRS, on the Application of Machinery to the purpose of calculating and printing Mathematical Tables.
    Further Reading
    1961, Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings by Charles Babbage and Others, eds Philip and Emily Morrison, New York: Dover Publications.
    IMcN

    Biographical history of technology > Babbage, Charles

  • 7 Barlow, Peter

    SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping
    [br]
    b. 13 October 1776 Norwich, England
    d. 1 March 1862 Kent, England
    [br]
    English mathematician, physicist and optician.
    [br]
    Barlow had little formal academic education, but by his own efforts rectified this deficiency. His contributions to various periodicals ensured that he became recognized as a man of considerable scientific understanding. In 1801, through competitive examination, he became Assistant Mathematics Master at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and some years later was promoted to Professor. He resigned from this post in 1847, but retained full salary in recognition of his many public services.
    He is remembered for several notable achievements, and for some experiments designed to overcome problems such as the deviation of compasses in iron ships. Here, he proposed the use of small iron plates designed to overcome other attractions: these were used by both the British and Russian navies. Optical experiments commenced around 1827 and in later years he carried out tests to optimize the size and shape of many parts used in the railways that were spreading throughout Britain and elsewhere at that time.
    In 1814 he published mathematical tables of squares, cubes, square roots, cube roots and reciprocals of all integers from 1 to 10,000. This volume was of great value in ship design and other engineering processes where heavy numerical effort is required; it was reprinted many times, the last being in 1965 when it had been all but superseded by the calculator and the computer. In the preface to the original edition, Barlow wrote, "the only motive which prompted me to engage in this unprofitable task was the utility that I conceived might result from my labour… if I have succeeded in facilitating abstruse arithmetical calculations, then I have obtained the object in view."
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    FRS 1823; Copley Medal (for discoveries in magnetism) 1825. Honorary Member, Institution of Civil Engineers 1820.
    Bibliography
    1811, An Elementary Investigation of the Theory of Numbers.
    1814, Barlow's Tables (these have continued to be published until recently, one edition being in 1965 (London: Spon); later editions have taken the integers up to 12,500).
    1817, Essay on the Strength of Timber and Other Materials.
    Further Reading
    Dictionary of National Biography.
    FMW

    Biographical history of technology > Barlow, Peter

  • 8 Gurney, Sir Goldsworthy

    [br]
    b. 14 February 1793 Treator, near Padstow, Cornwall, England
    d. 28 February 1875 Reeds, near Bude, Cornwall, England
    [br]
    English pioneer of steam road transport.
    [br]
    Educated at Truro Grammar School, he then studied under Dr Avery at Wadebridge to become a doctor of medicine. He settled as a surgeon in Wadebridge, spending his leisure time in building an organ and in the study of chemistry and mechanical science. He married Elizabeth Symons in 1814, and in 1820 moved with his wife to London. He delivered a course of lectures at the Surrey Institution on the elements of chemical science, attended by, amongst others, the young Michael Faraday. While there, Gurney made his first invention, the oxyhydrogen blowpipe. For this he received the Gold Medal of the Society of Arts. He experimented with lime and magnesia for the production of an illuminant for lighthouses with some success. He invented a musical instrument of glasses played like a piano.
    In 1823 he started experiments related to steam and locomotion which necessitated taking a partner in to his medical practice, from which he resigned shortly after. His objective was to produce a steam-driven vehicle to run on common roads. His invention of the steam-jet of blast greatly improved the performance of the steam engine. In 1827 he took his steam carriage to Cyfarthfa at the request of Mr Crawshaw, and while there applied his steam-jet to the blast furnaces, greatly improving their performance in the manufacture of iron. Much of the success of George Stephenson's steam engine, the Rocket was due to Gurney's steam blast.
    In July 1829 Gurney made a historic trip with his road locomotive. This was from London to Bath and back, which was accomplished at a speed of 18 mph (29 km/h) and was made at the instigation of the Quartermaster-General of the Army. So successful was the carriage that Sir Charles Dance started to run a regular service with it between Gloucester and Cheltenham. This ran for three months without accident, until Parliament introduced prohibitive taxation on all self-propelled vehicles. A House of Commons committee proposed that these should be abolished as inhibiting progress, but this was not done. Sir Goldsworthy petitioned Parliament on the harm being done to him, but nothing was done and the coming of the railways put the matter beyond consideration. He devoted his time to finding other uses for the steam-jet: it was used for extinguishing fires in coal-mines, some of which had been burning for many years; he developed a stove for the production of gas from oil and other fatty substances, intended for lighthouses; he was responsible for the heating and the lighting of both the old and the new Houses of Parliament. His evidence after a colliery explosion resulted in an Act of Parliament requiring all mines to have two shafts. He was knighted in 1863, the same year that he suffered a stroke which incapacitated him. He retired to his house at Reeds, near Bude, where he was looked after by his daughter, Anna.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Knighted 1863. Society of Arts Gold Medal.
    IMcN

    Biographical history of technology > Gurney, Sir Goldsworthy

  • 9 McAdam, John Loudon

    [br]
    b. 21 September 1756 Ayr, Ayrshire, Scotland
    d. 26 November 1836 Moffat, Dumfriesshire, Scotland
    [br]
    Scottish road builder, inventor of the macadam road surface.
    [br]
    McAdam was the son of one of the founder of the first bank in Ayr. As an infant, he nearly died in a fire which destroyed the family's house of Laywyne, in Carsphairn parish; the family then moved to Blairquhan, near Straiton. Thence he went to the parish school in Maybole, where he is said to have made a model section of a local road. In 1770, when his father died, he was sent to America where he was brought up by an uncle who was a merchant in New York. He stayed in America until the close of the revolution, becoming an agent for the sale of prizes and managing to amass a considerable fortune. He returned to Scotland where he settled at Sauchrie in Ayrshire. There he was a magistrate, Deputy-Lieutenant of the county and a road trustee, spending thirteen years there. In 1798 he moved to Falmouth in Devon, England, on his appointment as agent for revictualling of the Royal Navy in western ports.
    He continued the series of experiments started in Ayrshire on the construction of roads. From these he concluded that a road should be built on a raised foundation with drains formed on either side, and should be composed of a number of layers of hard stone broken into angular fragments of roughly cubical shape; the bottom layer would be larger rocks, with layers of progressively smaller rocks above, all bound together with fine gravel. This would become compacted and almost impermeable to water by the action of the traffic passing over it. In 1815 he was appointed Surveyor-General of Bristol's roads and put his theories to the test.
    In 1823 a Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to consider the use of "macadamized" roads in larger towns; McAdam gave evidence to this committee, and it voted to give him £10,000 for his past work. In 1827 he was appointed Surveyor-General of Roads and moved to Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire. From there he made yearly visits to Scotland and it was while returning from one of these that he died, at Moffat in the Scottish Borders. He had married twice, both times to American women; his first wife was the mother of all seven of his children.
    McAdam's method of road construction was much cheaper than that of Thomas Telford, and did much to ease travel and communications; it was therefore adopted by the majority of Turnpike Trusts in Britain, and the macadamization process quickly spread to other countries.
    [br]
    Bibliography
    1819. A Practical Essay on the Scientific Repair and Preservation of Roads.
    1820. Present State of Road-Making.
    Further Reading
    R.Devereux, 1936, John Loudon McAdam: A Chapter from the History of Highways, London: Oxford University Press.
    IMcN

    Biographical history of technology > McAdam, John Loudon

  • 10 Palmer, Henry Robinson

    [br]
    b. 1795 Hackney, London, England
    d. 12 September 1844
    [br]
    English civil engineer and monorail pioneer.
    [br]
    Palmer was an assistant to Thomas Telford for ten years from 1816. In 1818 he arranged a meeting of young engineers from which the Institution of Civil Engineers originated. In the early 1820s he invented a monorail system, the first of its kind, in which a single rail of wood, with an iron strip spiked on top to form a running surface, was supported on posts. Wagon bodies were supported pannier fashion from a frame attached to grooved wheels and were propelled by men or horses. An important object was to minimize friction, and short lines were built on this principle at Deptford and Cheshunt. In 1826 Palmer was appointed Resident Engineer to the London Docks and was responsible for the construction of many of them. He was subsequently consulted about many important engineering works.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    FRS 1831. Vice-President, Institution of Civil Engineers.
    Bibliography
    1821, British patent no. 4,618 (monorail).
    1823, Description of a Railway on a New Principle…, London (describes his monorail).
    Further Reading
    Obituary, 1845, Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers 4. C.von Oeynhausen and H.von Dechen, 1971, Railways in England 1826 and 1827, London: Newcomen Society (a contemporary description of the monorails). M.J.T.Lewis, 1970, Early Wooden Railways, London: Routledge \& Kegan Paul.
    PJGR

    Biographical history of technology > Palmer, Henry Robinson

  • 11 Stephenson, Robert

    [br]
    b. 16 October 1803 Willington Quay, Northumberland, England
    d. 12 October 1859 London, England
    [br]
    English engineer who built the locomotive Rocket and constructed many important early trunk railways.
    [br]
    Robert Stephenson's father was George Stephenson, who ensured that his son was educated to obtain the theoretical knowledge he lacked himself. In 1821 Robert Stephenson assisted his father in his survey of the Stockton \& Darlington Railway and in 1822 he assisted William James in the first survey of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway. He then went to Edinburgh University for six months, and the following year Robert Stephenson \& Co. was named after him as Managing Partner when it was formed by himself, his father and others. The firm was to build stationary engines, locomotives and railway rolling stock; in its early years it also built paper-making machinery and did general engineering.
    In 1824, however, Robert Stephenson accepted, perhaps in reaction to an excess of parental control, an invitation by a group of London speculators called the Colombian Mining Association to lead an expedition to South America to use steam power to reopen gold and silver mines. He subsequently visited North America before returning to England in 1827 to rejoin his father as an equal and again take charge of Robert Stephenson \& Co. There he set about altering the design of steam locomotives to improve both their riding and their steam-generating capacity. Lancashire Witch, completed in July 1828, was the first locomotive mounted on steel springs and had twin furnace tubes through the boiler to produce a large heating surface. Later that year Robert Stephenson \& Co. supplied the Stockton \& Darlington Railway with a wagon, mounted for the first time on springs and with outside bearings. It was to be the prototype of the standard British railway wagon. Between April and September 1829 Robert Stephenson built, not without difficulty, a multi-tubular boiler, as suggested by Henry Booth to George Stephenson, and incorporated it into the locomotive Rocket which the three men entered in the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway's Rainhill Trials in October. Rocket, was outstandingly successful and demonstrated that the long-distance steam railway was practicable.
    Robert Stephenson continued to develop the locomotive. Northumbrian, built in 1830, had for the first time, a smokebox at the front of the boiler and also the firebox built integrally with the rear of the boiler. Then in Planet, built later the same year, he adopted a layout for the working parts used earlier by steam road-coach pioneer Goldsworthy Gurney, placing the cylinders, for the first time, in a nearly horizontal position beneath the smokebox, with the connecting rods driving a cranked axle. He had evolved the definitive form for the steam locomotive.
    Also in 1830, Robert Stephenson surveyed the London \& Birmingham Railway, which was authorized by Act of Parliament in 1833. Stephenson became Engineer for construction of the 112-mile (180 km) railway, probably at that date the greatest task ever undertaken in of civil engineering. In this he was greatly assisted by G.P.Bidder, who as a child prodigy had been known as "The Calculating Boy", and the two men were to be associated in many subsequent projects. On the London \& Birmingham Railway there were long and deep cuttings to be excavated and difficult tunnels to be bored, notoriously at Kilsby. The line was opened in 1838.
    In 1837 Stephenson provided facilities for W.F. Cooke to make an experimental electrictelegraph installation at London Euston. The directors of the London \& Birmingham Railway company, however, did not accept his recommendation that they should adopt the electric telegraph and it was left to I.K. Brunel to instigate the first permanent installation, alongside the Great Western Railway. After Cooke formed the Electric Telegraph Company, Stephenson became a shareholder and was Chairman during 1857–8.
    Earlier, in the 1830s, Robert Stephenson assisted his father in advising on railways in Belgium and came to be increasingly in demand as a consultant. In 1840, however, he was almost ruined financially as a result of the collapse of the Stanhope \& Tyne Rail Road; in return for acting as Engineer-in-Chief he had unwisely accepted shares, with unlimited liability, instead of a fee.
    During the late 1840s Stephenson's greatest achievements were the design and construction of four great bridges, as part of railways for which he was responsible. The High Level Bridge over the Tyne at Newcastle and the Royal Border Bridge over the Tweed at Berwick were the links needed to complete the East Coast Route from London to Scotland. For the Chester \& Holyhead Railway to cross the Menai Strait, a bridge with spans as long-as 460 ft (140 m) was needed: Stephenson designed them as wrought-iron tubes of rectangular cross-section, through which the trains would pass, and eventually joined the spans together into a tube 1,511 ft (460 m) long from shore to shore. Extensive testing was done beforehand by shipbuilder William Fairbairn to prove the method, and as a preliminary it was first used for a 400 ft (122 m) span bridge at Conway.
    In 1847 Robert Stephenson was elected MP for Whitby, a position he held until his death, and he was one of the exhibition commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the early 1850s he was Engineer-in-Chief for the Norwegian Trunk Railway, the first railway in Norway, and he also built the Alexandria \& Cairo Railway, the first railway in Africa. This included two tubular bridges with the railway running on top of the tubes. The railway was extended to Suez in 1858 and for several years provided a link in the route from Britain to India, until superseded by the Suez Canal, which Stephenson had opposed in Parliament. The greatest of all his tubular bridges was the Victoria Bridge across the River St Lawrence at Montreal: after inspecting the site in 1852 he was appointed Engineer-in-Chief for the bridge, which was 1 1/2 miles (2 km) long and was designed in his London offices. Sadly he, like Brunel, died young from self-imposed overwork, before the bridge was completed in 1859.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    FRS 1849. President, Institution of Mechanical Engineers 1849. President, Institution of Civil Engineers 1856. Order of St Olaf (Norway). Order of Leopold (Belgium). Like his father, Robert Stephenson refused a knighthood.
    Further Reading
    L.T.C.Rolt, 1960, George and Robert Stephenson, London: Longman (a good modern biography).
    J.C.Jeaffreson, 1864, The Life of Robert Stephenson, London: Longman (the standard nine-teenth-century biography).
    M.R.Bailey, 1979, "Robert Stephenson \& Co. 1823–1829", Transactions of the Newcomen Society 50 (provides details of the early products of that company).
    J.Kieve, 1973, The Electric Telegraph, Newton Abbot: David \& Charles.
    PJGR

    Biographical history of technology > Stephenson, Robert

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