(1843-1844)

сокр. от Davison and Merivale's Queen's Bench Reports

сокр. от Drury's Irish Chancery Reports temp. Sugden

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: Electricity, Metallurgy

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The son of a Birmingham chemist, Woolrich was educated at King Edward's Grammar School, Birmingham, and later became a lecturer in chemistry. As an alternative to primary cells for the supply of current for electroplating, he devised a magneto generator.

His original machine had a single compound permanent magnet; the distance between the revolving armature and the magnet could be varied to adjust the rate of deposition of metal. A more ambitious machine designed by Woolrich was constructed by Thomas Prime \& Sons in 1844 and for many years was used at their Birmingham electroplating works. Faraday, on a visit to see the machine at work, is said to have expressed delight at his discovery of electromagnetic induction being put to practical use so soon. Similar machines were in use by Elkington's, Fern and others in Birmingham and Sheffield. One of Woolrich's machines is preserved in the Birmingham Science Museum.

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 ♦ ( ENG Millerites)

   последователи Уильяма Миллера (1782- 1849), к-рый основал адвентистское движение (см. Адвентизм) и предсказал, что Второе пришествие Иисуса Христа произойдет в 1843 или 1844.

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Land transport, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Ports and shipping, Public utilities, Railways and locomotives

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The son of Marc Isambard Brunel and Sophia Kingdom, he was educated at a private boarding-school in Hove. At the age of 14 he went to the College of Caen and then to the Lycée Henri-Quatre in Paris, after which he was apprenticed to Louis Breguet. In 1822 he returned from France and started working in his father's office, while spending much of his time at the works of Maudslay, Sons \& Field.

From 1825 to 1828 he worked under his father on the construction of the latter's Thames Tunnel, occupying the position of Engineer-in-Charge, exhibiting great courage and presence of mind in the emergencies which occurred not infrequently. These culminated in January 1828 in the flooding of the tunnel and work was suspended for seven years. For the next five years the young engineer made abortive attempts to find a suitable outlet for his talents, but to little avail. Eventually, in 1831, his design for a suspension bridge over the River Avon at Clifton Gorge was accepted and he was appointed Engineer. (The bridge was eventually finished five years after Brunel's death, as a memorial to him, the delay being due to inadequate financing.) He next planned and supervised improvements to the Bristol docks. In March 1833 he was appointed Engineer of the Bristol Railway, later called the Great Western Railway. He immediately started to survey the route between London and Bristol that was completed by late August that year. On 5 July 1836 he married Mary Horsley and settled into 18 Duke Street, Westminster, London, where he also had his office. Work on the Bristol Railway started in 1836. The foundation stone of the Clifton Suspension Bridge was laid the same year. Whereas George Stephenson had based his standard railway gauge as 4 ft 8½ in (1.44 m), that or a similar gauge being usual for colliery wagonways in the Newcastle area, Brunel adopted the broader gauge of 7 ft (2.13 m). The first stretch of the line, from Paddington to Maidenhead, was opened to traffic on 4 June 1838, and the whole line from London to Bristol was opened in June 1841. The continuation of the line through to Exeter was completed and opened on 1 May 1844. The normal time for the 194-mile (312 km) run from Paddington to Exeter was 5 hours, at an average speed of 38.8 mph (62.4 km/h) including stops. The Great Western line included the Box Tunnel, the longest tunnel to that date at nearly two miles (3.2 km).

Brunel was the engineer of most of the railways in the West Country, in South Wales and much of Southern Ireland. As railway networks developed, the frequent break of gauge became more of a problem and on 9 July 1845 a Royal Commission was appointed to look into it. In spite of comparative tests, run between Paddington-Didcot and Darlington-York, which showed in favour of Brunel's arrangement, the enquiry ruled in favour of the narrow gauge, 274 miles (441 km) of the former having been built against 1,901 miles (3,059 km) of the latter to that date. The Gauge Act of 1846 forbade the building of any further railways in Britain to any gauge other than 4 ft 8 1/2 in (1.44 m).

The existence of long and severe gradients on the South Devon Railway led to Brunel's adoption of the atmospheric railway developed by Samuel Clegg and later by the Samuda brothers. In this a pipe of 9 in. (23 cm) or more in diameter was laid between the rails, along the top of which ran a continuous hinged flap of leather backed with iron. At intervals of about 3 miles (4.8 km) were pumping stations to exhaust the pipe. Much trouble was experienced with the flap valve and its lubrication—freezing of the leather in winter, the lubricant being sucked into the pipe or eaten by rats at other times—and the experiment was abandoned at considerable cost.

Brunel is to be remembered for his two great West Country tubular bridges, the Chepstow and the Tamar Bridge at Saltash, with the latter opened in May 1859, having two main spans of 465 ft (142 m) and a central pier extending 80 ft (24 m) below high water mark and allowing 100 ft (30 m) of headroom above the same. His timber viaducts throughout Devon and Cornwall became a feature of the landscape. The line was extended ultimately to Penzance.

As early as 1835 Brunel had the idea of extending the line westwards across the Atlantic from Bristol to New York by means of a steamship. In 1836 building commenced and the hull left Bristol in July 1837 for fitting out at Wapping. On 31 March 1838 the ship left again for Bristol but the boiler lagging caught fire and Brunel was injured in the subsequent confusion. On 8 April the ship set sail for New York (under steam), its rival, the 703-ton Sirius, having left four days earlier. The 1,340-ton Great Western arrived only a few hours after the Sirius. The hull was of wood, and was copper-sheathed. In 1838 Brunel planned a larger ship, some 3,000 tons, the Great Britain, which was to have an iron hull.

The Great Britain was screwdriven and was launched on 19 July 1843,289 ft (88 m) long by 51 ft (15.5 m) at its widest. The ship's first voyage, from Liverpool to New York, began on 26 August 1845. In 1846 it ran aground in Dundrum Bay, County Down, and was later sold for use on the Australian run, on which it sailed no fewer than thirty-two times in twenty-three years, also serving as a troop-ship in the Crimean War. During this war, Brunel designed a 1,000-bed hospital which was shipped out to Renkioi ready for assembly and complete with shower-baths and vapour-baths with printed instructions on how to use them, beds and bedding and water closets with a supply of toilet paper! Brunel's last, largest and most extravagantly conceived ship was the Great Leviathan, eventually named The Great Eastern, which had a double-skinned iron hull, together with both paddles and screw propeller. Brunel designed the ship to carry sufficient coal for the round trip to Australia without refuelling, thus saving the need for and the cost of bunkering, as there were then few bunkering ports throughout the world. The ship's construction was started by John Scott Russell in his yard at Millwall on the Thames, but the building was completed by Brunel due to Russell's bankruptcy in 1856. The hull of the huge vessel was laid down so as to be launched sideways into the river and then to be floated on the tide. Brunel's plan for hydraulic launching gear had been turned down by the directors on the grounds of cost, an economy that proved false in the event. The sideways launch with over 4,000 tons of hydraulic power together with steam winches and floating tugs on the river took over two months, from 3 November 1857 until 13 January 1858. The ship was 680 ft (207 m) long, 83 ft (25 m) beam and 58 ft (18 m) deep; the screw was 24 ft (7.3 m) in diameter and paddles 60 ft (18.3 m) in diameter. Its displacement was 32,000 tons (32,500 tonnes).

The strain of overwork and the huge responsibilities that lay on Brunel began to tell. He was diagnosed as suffering from Bright's disease, or nephritis, and spent the winter travelling in the Mediterranean and Egypt, returning to England in May 1859. On 5 September he suffered a stroke which left him partially paralysed, and he died ten days later at his Duke Street home.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Sir John MacNeill became a pupil of Thomas Telford and served under him as Superintendent of the Southern Division of the Holyhead Road from London to Shrewsbury. In this capacity he invented a "Road Indicator" or dynamometer. Like other Telford followers, he viewed the advent of railways with some antipathy, but after the death of Telford in 1834 he quickly became involved in railway construction and in 1837 he was retained by the Irish Railway Commissioners to build railways in the north of Ireland (Vignoles received the commission for the south). Much of his subsequent career was devoted to schemes for Irish railways, both those envisaged by the Commissioners and other private lines with more immediately commercial objectives. He was knighted in 1844 on the completion of the Dublin \& Drogheda Railway along the east coast of Ireland. In 1845 MacNeill lodged plans for over 800 miles (1,300 km) of Irish railways. Not all of these were built, many falling victim to Irish poverty in the years after the Famine, but he maintained a large staff and became financially embarrassed. His other schemes included the Grangemouth Docks in Scotland, the Liverpool \& Bury Railway, and the Belfast Waterworks, the latter completed in 1843 and subsequently extended by Bateman.

MacNeill was an engineer of originality, being the person who introduced iron-lattice bridges into Britain, employing the theoretical and experimental work of Fairbairn and Eaton Hodgkinson (the Boyne Bridge at Drogheda had two such spans of 250ft (76m) each). He also devised the Irish railway gauge of 5 ft 2 in. (1.57 m). Consulted by the Board of Trinity College, Dublin, regarding a School of Engineering in 1842, he was made an Honorary LLD of the University and appointed the first Professor of Civil Engineering, but he relinquished the chair to his assistant, Samuel Downing, in 1846. MacNeill was a large and genial man, but not, we are told, "of methodical and business habit": he relied heavily on his subordinates. Blindness obliged him to retire from practice several years before his death. He was an early member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, joining in 1827, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1838.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Of Scottish stock, McKay was the son of a farmer and the grandson of a loyalist officer who had left the United States after the War of Independence. After some elementary shipwright training in Nova Scotia, McKay travelled to New York to apprentice to the great American shipbuilder Isaac Webb, then building some of the outstanding ships of the nineteenth century. At the age of 21 and a fully fledged journeyman, McKay again set out and worked in various shipyards before joining William Currier in 1841 to establish a yard in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He moved on again in 1843 to form another venture, the yard of McKay and Pickett in the same locality.

In 1844 McKay came to know Enoch Train of Boston, then proprietor of a fleet of fast clipper ships on the US A-to-Liverpool run. He persuaded McKay to set out on his own and promised to support him with orders for ships. The partnership with Pickett was dissolved amicably and Donald McKay opened the yard in East Boston, from which some of the world's fastest ships were to be launched. McKay's natural ability as a shipwright had been enhanced by the study of mathematics and engineering drawing, something he had learned from his wife Albenia Boole, the daughter of another shipbuilder. He was not too proud to learn from other masters on the East Coast such as William H.Webb and John Willis Griffiths. The first ships from East Boston included the Washington Irvine of 1845 and the Anglo Saxon of 1846; they were well built and had especially comfortable emigrant accommodation. However, faster ships were to follow, almost all three-masted, fully rigged ships with very fine or "extreme" lines, including the Flying Cloud for the Californian gold rush of 1851, the four-masted barque Great Republic; then, c. 1854, the Lightning was ordered by James Baines of Liverpool for his Black Ball Line. The Lightning holds to this day the speed record for a square-rigged ship's daily run. As the years passed the shipbuilding scene changed, and while McKay's did build some iron ships for the US Navy, they became much less profitable and in 1875 the yard closed down, with McKay retiring to take up farming.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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Although primarily an engineer, William Pole was a man of many and varied talents, being amongst other things an accomplished musician (his doctorate was in music) and an authority on whist. He served an apprenticeship at the Horsley Company in Birmingham, and moved to London in 1836, when he was employed first as Manager to a gasworks. In 1844 he published a study of the Cornish pumping engine, and he also accepted an appointment as the first Professor of Engineering in the Elphinstone College at Bombay. He spent three pioneering years in this post, and undertook the survey work for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway. Before returning to London in 1848 he married Matilda Gauntlett, the daughter of a clergyman.

Back in Britain, Pole was employed by James Simpson, J.M.Rendel and Robert Stephenson, the latter engaging him to assist with calculations on the Britannia Bridge. In 1858 he set up his own practice. He kept a very small office, choosing not to delegate work to subordinates but taking on a bewildering variety of commissions for government and private companies. In the first category, he made calculations for government officials of the main drainage of the metropolis and for its water supply. He lectured on engineering to the Royal Engineers' institution at Chatham, and served on a Select Committee to enquire into the armour of warships and fortifications. He became a member of the Royal Commission on the Railways of Great Britain and Ireland (the Devonshire Commission, 1867) and reported to the War Office on the MartiniHenry rifle. He also advised the India Office about examinations for engineering students. The drafting and writing up of reports was frequently left to Pole, who also made distinguished contributions to the official Lives of Robert Stephenson (1864), I.K. Brunel (1870) and William Fairbairn (1877). For other bodies, he acted as Consulting Engineer in England to the Japanese government, and he assisted W.H.Barlow in calculations for a bridge at Queensferry on the Firth of Forth (1873). He was consulted about many urban water supplies.

Pole joined the Institution of Civil Engineers as an Associate in 1840 and became a Member in 1856. He became a Member of Council, Honorary Secretary (succeeding Manby in 1885–96) and Honorary Member of the Institution. He was interested in astronomy and photography, he was fluent in several languages, was an expert on music, and became the world authority on whist. In 1859 he was appointed Professor of Civil Engineering at University College London, serving in this office until 1867. Pole, whose dates coincided closely with those of Queen Victoria, was one of the great Victorian engineers: he was a polymath, able to apply his great abilities to an amazing range of different tasks. In engineering history, he deserves to be remembered as an outstanding communicator and popularizer.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping, Railways and locomotives

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Joseph Samuda studied as a engineer under his elder brother Jacob and formed a partnership with him in 1832 as builders of marine steam engines. In 1838, with Samuel Clegg, they took out a patent for an atmospheric railway system. In this system a cast-iron tube, with a continuous sealed slot along the top, was laid between the rails; trains were attached to a piston within the tube by an arm, the slot being opened and resealed before and behind it. The tube ahead of the piston was exhausted by a stationary steam engine and the train propelled by atmospheric pressure. The system appeared to offer clean, fast travel and was taken up by noted contemporary railway engineers such as I.K. Brunel and C.B. Vignoles, but it eventually proved a failure as no satisfactory means of sealing the slot could at that time be found. It did, however, lead to experiments in the 1860s with underground, pneumatic-tube railways, in which the vehicle would be its own piston, and Samuda Bros, supplied cast-iron tubes for such a line. Meanwhile, Samuda Bros, had commenced building iron steamships in 1843, and although Jacob Samuda lost his life in 1844 as the result of an accident aboard one of the earliest built, the firm survived to become noted London builders of steamships of many types over the ensuing four decades. Joseph Samuda became a founder member of the Institution of Naval Architects in 1860, and was MP for Tavistock from 1865 to 1868 and for Tower Hamlets from 1868 to 1880.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Railways and locomotives

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Turner's first glasshouse commission was for the Palm House at the Botanic Gardens in Belfast, begun in 1839; this structure was designed by Charles Lanyon, Turner being responsible for the ironwork construction. The Belfast Palm House was followed in 1843 by the Palm House for the Royal Dublin Society, but the structure for which Turner is best known is the famous Palm House in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew Gardens in London. This was originally designed in 1844 by the architect Decimus Burton, but his concept was rejected and Turner was asked to design a new one. Burton tried again, basing his new design upon that of Turner but also incorporating features that made it more similar to the famous Great Conservatory by Paxton at Chatsworth. Finally, Turner was contracted to build the Palm Stove in collaboration with Burton. Completed in 1848, the Kew Palm House is the finest example of the glasshouses of that era. This remarkable structure is simple but impressive: it is 362 ft (110 m) long and is covered by 45,000 ft2 (4,180 m²) of greenish glass. Inside, in the central taller part, a decorative, cast-iron, spiral staircase gives access to an upper gallery, from where tall plants may be clearly viewed; the roof rises to 62 ft (19 m). The curving, glazed panels, set in ribs of wrought iron, rise from a low masonry wall. The ingenious method of construction of these ribs was patented by Turner in 1846. It consists of wrought-iron tie rods inserted into hollow cast-iron tubes; these can be tightened after the erection of the building is complete, so producing a stable, balanced structure not unlike the concept of a timber-trussed roof. The Palm Stove has only recently undergone extensive adaptation to modern needs.

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