(1854-1858)

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Robert Kay improved his father John's flying shuttle by inventing the drop box, in which up to four shuttles could be stored one below the other. The weaver's left hand controlled levers and catches to raise or lower the drop box in order to bring the appropriate shuttle into line with the shuttle race on the slay. The shuttle could then be driven across the loom, leaving its particular type or colour of weft. On the earliest power looms of Edmund Cartwright in 1785, and for many years later, it was possible to use only one shuttle. In 1845 Squire Diggle of Bury, Lancashire, took out a patent for mechanizing the drop box so that different types or colours of weft could be woven without the weaver attending to the shuttles. He used an endless chain on which plates of different heights could be fixed to raise the boxes to the required height; later this would be operated by either the dobby or Jacquard pattern-selecting mechanisms. He took out further patents for improvements to looms. One, in 1854, was for taking up the cloth with a positive motion. Two more, in 1858, improved his drop box mechanism: the first was for actually operating the drop box, while the second was for tappet chains which operated the timing for raising the boxes.

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See also: Kay, John

SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

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A trained scientist and engineer, Barsanti became acquainted with a distinguished engineer, Felice Matteucci, in 1851. Their combined talents enabled them to produce a number of so-called free-piston atmospheric engines from 1854 onwards. Using a principle demonstrated by the Swiss engineer Isaac de Rivaz in 1827, the troublesome explosive shocks encountered by other pioneers were avoided. A piston attached to a long toothed rack was propelled from beneath by the expansion of burning gas and allowed unrestricted movement. A resulting partial vacuum enabled atmospheric pressure to return the piston and produce the working stroke. Electric ignition was a feature of all the Italian engines.

With many successful applications, a company was formed in 1860. A 20 hp (15 kW) engine stimulated much interest. Attempts by John Cockerill of Belgium to mass-produce small power units of up to 4 hp (3 kW) came to an abrupt end; during the negotiations Barsanti contracted typhoid fever and later died. The project was abandoned, but the working principle of the Italian engine was used successfully in the Otto-Langen engine of 1867.

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See also: Langen, Eugen; Otto, Nikolaus August

SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Weapons and armour

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His family came from Germany and he was the son of a music master. He first became interested in science at the age of 14, when visiting his mineralogist uncle in Hamburg, and studied chemistry at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London. In 1845 he became one of the twenty-six founding students, under A.W.von Hofmann, of the Royal College of Chemistry. Such was his aptitude for the subject that within two years he became von Hermann's assistant and demonstrator. In 1851 Abel was appointed Lecturer in Chemistry, succeeding Michael Faraday, at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and it was while there that he wrote his Handbook of Chemistry, which was co-authored by his assistant, Charles Bloxam.

Abel's four years at the Royal Military Academy served to foster his interest in explosives, but it was during his thirty-four years, beginning in 1854, as Ordnance Chemist at the Royal Arsenal and at Woolwich that he consolidated and developed his reputation as one of the international leaders in his field. In 1860 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, but it was his studies during the 1870s into the chemical changes that occur during explosions, and which were the subject of numerous papers, that formed the backbone of his work. It was he who established the means of storing gun-cotton without the danger of spontaneous explosion, but he also developed devices (the Abel Open Test and Close Test) for measuring the flashpoint of petroleum. He also became interested in metal alloys, carrying out much useful work on their composition. A further avenue of research occurred in 1881 when he was appointed a member of the Royal Commission set up to investigate safety in mines after the explosion that year in the Sealham Colliery. His resultant study on dangerous dusts did much to further understanding on the use of explosives underground and to improve the safety record of the coal-mining industry. The achievement for which he is most remembered, however, came in 1889, when, in conjunction with Sir James Dewar, he invented cordite. This stable explosive, made of wood fibre, nitric acid and glycerine, had the vital advantage of being a "smokeless powder", which meant that, unlike the traditional ammunition propellant, gunpowder ("black powder"), the firer's position was not given away when the weapon was discharged. Although much of the preliminary work had been done by the Frenchman Paul Vieille, it was Abel who perfected it, with the result that cordite quickly became the British Army's standard explosive.

Abel married, and was widowed, twice. He had no children, but died heaped in both scientific honours and those from a grateful country.

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

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Joseph Whitworth received his early education in a school kept by his father, but from the age of 12 he attended a school near Leeds. At 14 he joined his uncle's mill near Ambergate, Derbyshire, to learn the business of cotton spinning. In the four years he spent there he realized that he was more interested in the machinery than in managing a cotton mill. In 1821 he obtained employment as a mechanic with Crighton \& Co., Manchester. In 1825 he moved to London and worked for Henry Maudslay and later for the Holtzapffels and Joseph Clement. After these years spent gaining experience, he returned to Manchester in 1833 and set up in a small workshop under a sign "Joseph Whitworth, Tool Maker, from London".

The business expanded steadily and the firm made machine tools of all types and other engineering products including steam engines. From 1834 Whitworth obtained many patents in the fields of machine tools, textile and knitting machinery and road-sweeping machines. By 1851 the company was generally regarded as the leading manufacturer of machine tools in the country. Whitworth was a pioneer of precise measurement and demonstrated the fundamental mode of producing a true plane by making surface plates in sets of three. He advocated the use of the decimal system and made use of limit gauges, and he established a standard screw thread which was adopted as the national standard. In 1853 Whitworth visited America as a member of a Royal Commission and reported on American industry. At the time of the Crimean War in 1854 he was asked to provide machinery for manufacturing rifles and this led him to design an improved rifle of his own. Although tests in 1857 showed this to be much superior to all others, it was not adopted by the War Office. Whitworth's experiments with small arms led on to the construction of big guns and projectiles. To improve the quality of the steel used for these guns, he subjected the molten metal to pressure during its solidification, this fluid-compressed steel being then known as "Whitworth steel".

In 1868 Whitworth established thirty annual scholarships for engineering students. After his death his executors permanently endowed the Whitworth Scholarships and distributed his estate of nearly half a million pounds to various educational and charitable institutions. Whitworth was elected an Associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1841 and a Member in 1848 and served on its Council for many years. He was elected a Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1847, the year of its foundation.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Born of Scottish parents, Fairbairn was apprenticed at the age of 14 to John Casson, a mill-wright and engineer at the Percy Main Colliery, Newcastle upon Tyne, and remained there until 1821 when he went to work for his brother William in Manchester. After going to various other places, including Messrs Rennie in London and on the European continent, he eventually moved in 1829 to Leeds where Marshall helped him set up the Wellington Foundry and so laid the foundations for the colossal establishment which was to employ over one thousand workers. To begin with he devoted his attention to improving wool-weaving machinery, substituting iron for wood in the construction of the textile machines. He also worked on machinery for flax, incorporating many of Philippe de Girard's ideas. He assisted Henry Houldsworth in the application of the differential to roving frames, and it was to these machines that he added his own inventions. The longer fibres of wool and flax need to have some form of support and control between the rollers when they are being drawn out, and inserting a little twist helps. However, if the roving is too tightly twisted before passing through the first pair of rollers, it cannot be drawn out, while if there is insufficient twist, the fibres do not receive enough support in the drafting zone. One solution is to twist the fibres together while they are actually in the drafting zone between the rollers. In 1834, Fairbairn patented an arrangement consisting of a revolving tube placed between the drawing rollers. The tube inserted a "middle" or "false" twist in the material. As stated in the specification, it was "a well-known contrivance… for twisting and untwisting any roving passing through it". It had been used earlier in 1822 by J. Goulding of the USA and a similar idea had been developed by C.Danforth in America and patented in Britain in 1825 by J.C. Dyer. Fairbairn's machine, however, was said to make a very superior article. He was also involved with waste-silk spinning and rope-yarn machinery.

Fairbairn later began constructing machine tools, and at the beginning of the Crimean War was asked by the Government to make special tools for the manufacture of armaments. He supplied some of these, such as cannon rifling machines, to the arsenals at Woolwich and Enfield. He then made a considerable number of tools for the manufacture of the Armstrong gun. He was involved in the life of his adopted city and was elected to Leeds town council in 1832 for ten years. He was elected an alderman in 1854 and was Mayor of Leeds from 1857 to 1859, when he was knighted by Queen Victoria at the opening of the new town hall. He was twice married, first to Margaret Kennedy and then to Rachel Anne Brindling.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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

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SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

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A distinguished hydraulic engineer, Matteucci is more widely known for his work on early internal-combustion engines. In 1851, during a landreclamation project in Florence, he became acquainted with Eugenio Barsanti. Together they succeeded in designing and producing a number of the first type of gas engines to produce a vacuum within a closed cylinder, atmospheric pressure then being utilized to produce the power stroke. The principle was demonstrated by Cecil in 1820 and was used by Samuel Brown in 1827 and by N.A. Otto in 1867. The company Società Promotrice del Nuovo Motore Barsanti e Matteucci was formed in 1860, but ill health forced Matteucci to resign in 1862, and in 1864 Barsanti, whilst negotiating mass production of engines with Cockerill of Seraing, Belgium, contracted typhoid and later died. Efforts to continue the business in Italy subsequently failed and Matteucci returned to his engineering practice.

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SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

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Dedicated to the relief of suffering, Florence Nightingale spent her early years visiting civil and military hospitals all over Europe. She then attended a course of formal training at Kaiserwerth in Germany and with the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul in Paris.

She had returned to London and was managing, after having reformed, a hostel for invalid gentlewomen when in 1854 the appalling conditions of the wounded in Turkey during the Crimean War led to her taking a party of thirty-eight nurses out to Scutari. The application of principles of hygiene and sanitation resulted in dramatic improvements in conditions and on her return to England in 1856 she applied the large sums which had been raised in her honour to the founding in 1861 of the St Thomas's School of Nursing.

From this base she acted as adviser, goad and promoter of sound nursing common sense for the remainder of a long life marred by a chronic invalidism quite out of keeping with the rigorousness of her role in the nursing field. It was not only in the training and conduct of nursing that her influence was primal. Many concepts of hospital technology relating to hygiene, ventilation and ward design are to be attributed to her forthright common sense. The "Nightingale ward", for a time the target of progressive reformers, has been shown still to have abiding virtues.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping, Steam and internal combustion engines

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Sickels was educated in New York City, where his father was a practising physician. As he showed mechanical aptitude, at the age of 16 he joined the Harlem Railroad as a rod man, and a year later became a machinist in the Allaire Works in New York, studying physics and mechanics in his spare time. He perfected his cut-off mechanism for drop valves in 1841 and patented it the following year. The liberating mechanism allowed the valve to fall quickly onto its seat and so eliminated "wire-drawing" of the steam, and Sickels arranged a dashpot to prevent the valve hitting the seat violently. Through further improvements patented in 1843 and 1845, he gained a considerable fortune, but he subsequently lost it through fighting patent infringements because his valve gear was copied extensively.

In 1846 he turned his attention to using a steam engine to assist the steering in ships. He filed a patent application in 1849 and completed a machine in 1854, but he could not find any ship owner willing to try it until 1858, when it was fitted to the August. A patent was granted in 1860, but as no American ship owners showed interest Sickels went to England, where he obtained three British patents; once again, however, he found no interest. He returned to the United States in 1867 and continued his fruitless efforts until he was financially ruined. He patented improved compound engines in 1875 and also contributed improvements in sinking pneumatic piles. He turned to civil engineering and engaged in railway and bridge construction in the west. In about 1890 he was made Consulting Engineer to the National Water Works Company of New York and in 1891 became Chief Engineer of its operations at Kansas City.

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