(1850-1859)

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

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

[br]

[br]

[br]

Francis Crossley was the youngest of three brothers employed in their father's carpet-weaving business in Halifax and who took over the running of the company on their father's death in 1837. Francis seems to have been the one with technical ability, for it was he who saw the possibilities of weaving by power. Growth of the company was rapid through his policy of acquiring patents and then improving them, and it was soon at the forefront of the carpet-manufacturing trade. He had taken out rights on the patents of John Hill of Manchester, but his experiments with Hill's looms for weaving carpets were not successful.

In the spring of 1850 Francis asked a textile inventor, George Collier of Barnsley, to develop a power loom for carpet manufacture. Collier produced a model that was a distinct advance on earlier looms, and Francis engaged him to perfect a power loom for weaving tapestry and Brussels carpets. After a great deal of money had been expended, a patent was taken out in 1850 in the name of his brother, Joseph Crossley, for a loom that could weave velvet as well as carpets and included some of the ideas of the American E.B. Bigelow. This new loom proved to be a great advance on all the earlier ones, and thus brought the Crossleys a great fortune from both sales of patent rights and the production of carpets from their mills, which were soon enlarged.

According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Francis Crossley was Mayor of Halifax in 1849 and 1850, but Hogg gives this position to his elder brother John. In 1852 Francis was returned to Parliament as the Liberal member for Halifax, and in 1859 he became the member for the West Riding. Among his benefactions, in 1855 he gave to the town of Halifax a twelve-acre park that cost £41,300; a statue of him was erected there. In the same year he endowed twenty-one almshouses. In 1863 a baronetcy was conferred upon him in recognition of his commercial and public services, which he continued to perform until his death. In 1870 he gave the London Missionary Society £20,000, their largest single donation up to that time, and another £10,000 to the Congregational Pastor's Retiring Fund. He became ill when on a journey to the Holy Land in 1869, but although he made a partial recovery he grew worse again towards the end of 1871 and died early in the following year. He left £800,000 in his will.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

[br]

[br]

[br]

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.

[br]

тж abolitionism

см тж abolition soldiers, American Colonization Society, Civil War, Compromise of 1850, Conscience Whigs, Free-Soil Party, Fugitive Slave Act, Liberty Party; Missouri Compromise; slavery, Texas Compromise; Uncle Tom, Underground Railroad

тж Gold Fever, gold rush

см тж Labor Omnia Vincit, mistletoe, Oklahoma!, redbud, Sooners, Sooner State

см тж Oregon grape, Oregon, My Oregon, meadowlark, Douglas fir

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

Very little is known about the life of James Fox, but according to Samuel Smiles (1863) he was as a young man a butler in the service of the Reverend Thomas Gisborne of Foxhall Lodge, Staffordshire. His mechanical abilities were evident from his spare-time activities in the handling of tools and so impressed his employer that he supplied the capital to enable Fox to set up a business in Derby for the manufacture of machinery for the textile and lacemaking industries. To construct this machinery, Fox had to build his own machine tools and later, in the early nineteenth century, made them for sale, some being exported to France, Germany and Poland. He was renowned for his lathes, some of which were quite large; one built in 1830 has been preserved and is 22 ft (6.7 m) long with a swing of 27 in. (69 cm). He was responsible for many improve-ments in the design of the lathe and he also built some of the earliest planing machines (the first, it has been claimed, as early as 1814) and a gear-cutting machine, although this was apparently for cutting wooden patterns for cast gears. The business was continued by his sons Joseph and James (who died in 1859 aged 69) and into the 1860s by the sons of Joseph.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

[br]

[br]

[br]

Born of Quaker stock, he was educated at home and apprenticed in 1845 to Caleb Williams, apothecary and surgeon of York. It was during this period that he developed and described his spirometer, which he had used in testing 121 sailors, 24 pugilists and wrestlers and 4 giants and dwarfs.

In 1850 he left York to complete his medical training at St Bartholomew's Hospital. By 1859 he was on the staff of the London Hospital as well as the many other specialist hospitals, including the Royal London Ophthalmic, the Blackfriars Hospital for Skin Diseases and the Royal Lock, the multiplicity of which reflected the very wide variety of his interests and expertise.

By 1863, having obtained the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, he had been appointed full Surgeon to London Hospital and was also responsible for medical ophthalmology. In 1883 he was appointed Emeritus Professor, and for many years after was deeply involved in a wide variety of medical interests. A vivid and memorable teacher, his name has been given to a large number of conditions, particularly in the fields of syphilis and ophthalmology. His special gift was an acuity of observation coupled with the accumulation and collation of clinical facts.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Telecommunications

[br]

[br]

[br]

Reis entered the Garniers Institute in Friedrichsdorf in 1844 and then the Hassels Institute in Frankfurt. There he developed an interest in science, but on leaving school in 1850 he was apprenticed to the colour trade by his uncle. This involved study at the trade school and Dr Poppe's Institute in Frankfurt; while there he joined the Frankfurt Physical Society. Following military service in 1855 he studied to be a teacher. After his graduation he obtained a post at Garniers, where he began to pursue experiments with electricity and the development of hearing aids. In 1859 he sent a paper on the radiation of electricity to the editor of Annalen der Physik, but this was rejected, as was a later submission. Undeterred, he continued his experiments and by 1861 he had designed several instruments for the transmission of sound. The transmitter consisted of a membrane on which rested a metal strip that made contact with a metal point and completed an electrical circuit under the action of sound. The receiver consisted of an iron needle surrounded by a coil and resting on a sounding box, the operation probably being achieved by magnetostriction. The invention, which he described in a lecture to the Frankfurt Physical Society on 26 October 1861 and in a published paper, could produce tones and probably also speech, but was largely rejected by the scientific fraternity. The claim to produce speech was discounted in subsequent court cases that upheld the patents of Alexander Bell.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Electricity

[br]

[br]

[br]

Weber began scientific experiments at an early age and entered the University of Halle, where he came under the influence of J.S.C.Schweigger, inventor of the galvanometer. Completing his education with a dissertation on the theory of organ pipes and making important contributions to the science of acoustics, he was awarded a lectureship and later an assistant professorship at Halle. Weber was offered the Chair of Physics at Göttingen in 1831 and jointly with Gauss began investigations into the precision measurement of magnetic quantities. In 1841 he invented the electrodynamometer type of electrical measuring instrument. This was a development of the galvanometer in which, instead of a needle, a small coil was suspended within an outer coil. A current flowing through both coils tended to turn the inner coil, the sine of the angle through which the suspending wires were twisted being proportional to the square of the strength of the current. A variation of the electrodynamometer was capable of measuring directly the power in electrical circuits.

The introduction by Weber of a system of absolute units for the measurement of electrical quantities was a most important step in electrical science. He had a considerable influence on the British Association committees on electrical standards organized in 1861 to promote a coherent system of electrical units. Weber's ideas also led him to define elementary electric particles, ascribing mass and charge to them. His name was used for a time before 1883 as the unit of electric current, until the name "ampere" was proposed by Helmholtz. Since 1948 the term "weber" has been used for the SI unit of magnetic flux.

[br]