(1880-1884)

сокр. от Dorion's Quebec Bench Reports

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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During his long life Eiffel, together with a number of architects, was responsible for the design and construction of a wide variety of bridges, viaducts, harbour installations, exhibition halls, galleries and department stores; he set up his own firm in 1867 to handle such construction. Of particular note were his great arched bridges, such as the 530 ft (162 m) span arch over the River Douro at Oporto in Portugal (1877–9) and the 550 ft (168 m) span of the Pont de Garabit over the Truyère in France (1880–4). He was responsible in 1884 for the protective iron-work for the Statue of Liberty in New York and, a year later, for the great dome over the Nice Observatory. In 1876 he had collaborated with Boileau to build the Bon Marché department store in Paris. The predominant material for all these structures was iron, and, in some cases glass was important. The famous Eiffel Tower in Paris is entirely of wrought iron, and the legs are supported on masonry piers that are each set into concrete beneath the ground. The idea of the tower was first conceived in 1884 by Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nougier, and Eiffel won a competition for the commission to built the structure. His imaginative and practical scheme was for a strong lightweight construction 984 ft (300 m) high, with its 12,000 sections to be prefabricated and riveted together largely before erection; the open, perforated design reduced the problems of wind resistance. The tower was constructed on schedule by 1889 to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the French Revolution and was the tallest structure in the world until the erection of the Empire State Building in New York in 1930–2.

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см тж cloture, filibuster

см тж Gem State, mountain bluebird, syringa, Western White Pine, Esto Perpetua, Here We Have Idaho

см тж Black Rock; Flatiron Building; John Hancock Center; Masonic Temple Building; Monadnock Building; Pan Am Building; Peachtree Center; Prudential Building; Pyramid; Rockefeller Center; Seagram Building; Waldorf-Astoria

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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The young Eastman was a clerk-bookkeeper in the Rochester Savings Bank when in 1877 he took up photography. Taking lessons in the wet-plate process, he became an enthusiastic amateur photographer. However, the cumbersome equipment and noxious chemicals used in the process proved an obstacle, as he said, "It seemed to be that one ought to be able to carry less than a pack-horse load." Then he came across an account of the new gelatine dry-plate process in the British Journal of Photography of March 1878. He experimented in coating glass plates with the new emulsions, and was soon so successful that he decided to go into commercial manufacture. He devised a machine to simplify the coating of the plates, and travelled to England in July 1879 to patent it. In April 1880 he prepared to begin manufacture in a rented building in Rochester, and contacted the leading American photographic supply house, E. \& H.T.Anthony, offering them an option as agents. A local whip manufacturer, Henry A.Strong, invested $1,000 in the enterprise and the Eastman Dry Plate Company was formed on 1 January 1881. Still working at the Savings Bank, he ran the business in his spare time, and demand grew for the quality product he was producing. The fledgling company survived a near disaster in 1882 when the quality of the emulsions dropped alarmingly. Eastman later discovered this was due to impurities in the gelatine used, and this led him to test all raw materials rigorously for quality. In 1884 the company became a corporation, the Eastman Dry Plate \& Film Company, and a new product was announced. Mindful of his desire to simplify photography, Eastman, with a camera maker, William H.Walker, designed a roll-holder in which the heavy glass plates were replaced by a roll of emulsion-coated paper. The holders were made in sizes suitable for most plate cameras. Eastman designed and patented a coating machine for the large-scale production of the paper film, bringing costs down dramatically, the roll-holders were acclaimed by photographers worldwide, and prizes and medals were awarded, but Eastman was still not satisfied. The next step was to incorporate the roll-holder in a smaller, hand-held camera. His first successful design was launched in June 1888: the Kodak camera. A small box camera, it held enough paper film for 100 circular exposures, and was bought ready-loaded. After the film had been exposed, the camera was returned to Eastman's factory, where the film was removed, processed and printed, and the camera reloaded. This developing and printing service was the most revolutionary part of his invention, since at that time photographers were expected to process their own photographs, which required access to a darkroom and appropriate chemicals. The Kodak camera put photography into the hands of the countless thousands who wanted photographs without complications. Eastman's marketing slogan neatly summed up the advantage: "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest." The Kodak camera was the last product in the design of which Eastman was personally involved. His company was growing rapidly, and he recruited the most talented scientists and technicians available. New products emerged regularly—notably the first commercially produced celluloid roll film for the Kodak cameras in July 1889; this material made possible the introduction of cinematography a few years later. Eastman's philosophy of simplifying photography and reducing its costs continued to influence products: for example, the introduction of the one dollar, or five shilling, Brownie camera in 1900, which put photography in the hands of almost everyone. Over the years the Eastman Kodak Company, as it now was, grew into a giant multinational corporation with manufacturing and marketing organizations throughout the world. Eastman continued to guide the company; he pursued an enlightened policy of employee welfare and profit sharing decades before this was common in industry. He made massive donations to many concerns, notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and supported schemes for the education of black people, dental welfare, calendar reform, music and many other causes, he withdrew from the day-to-day control of the company in 1925, and at last had time for recreation. On 14 March 1932, suffering from a painful terminal cancer and after tidying up his affairs, he shot himself through the heart, leaving a note: "To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?" Although Eastman's technical innovations were made mostly at the beginning of his career, the organization which he founded and guided in its formative years was responsible for many of the major advances in photography over the years.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Automotive engineering, Electricity, Electronics and information technology, Metallurgy, Photography, film and optics, Public utilities, Recording, Telecommunications

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He was the son of Samuel Edison, who was in the timber business. His schooling was delayed due to scarlet fever until 1855, when he was 8½ years old, but he was an avid reader. By the age of 14 he had a job as a newsboy on the railway from Port Huron to Detroit, a distance of sixty-three miles (101 km). He worked a fourteen-hour day with a stopover of five hours, which he spent in the Detroit Free Library. He also sold sweets on the train and, later, fruit and vegetables, and was soon making a profit of $20 a week. He then started two stores in Port Huron and used a spare freight car as a laboratory. He added a hand-printing press to produce 400 copies weekly of The Grand Trunk Herald, most of which he compiled and edited himself. He set himself to learn telegraphy from the station agent at Mount Clements, whose son he had saved from being run over by a freight car.

At the age of 16 he became a telegraphist at Port Huron. In 1863 he became railway telegraphist at the busy Stratford Junction of the Grand Trunk Railroad, arranging a clock with a notched wheel to give the hourly signal which was to prove that he was awake and at his post! He left hurriedly after failing to hold a train which was nearly involved in a head-on collision. He usually worked the night shift, allowing himself time for experiments during the day. His first invention was an arrangement of two Morse registers so that a high-speed input could be decoded at a slower speed. Moving from place to place he held many positions as a telegraphist. In Boston he invented an automatic vote recorder for Congress and patented it, but the idea was rejected. This was the first of a total of 1180 patents that he was to take out during his lifetime. After six years he resigned from the Western Union Company to devote all his time to invention, his next idea being an improved ticker-tape machine for stockbrokers. He developed a duplex telegraphy system, but this was turned down by the Western Union Company. He then moved to New York.

Edison found accommodation in the battery room of Law's Gold Reporting Company, sleeping in the cellar, and there his repair of a broken transmitter marked him as someone of special talents. His superior soon resigned, and he was promoted with a salary of $300 a month. Western Union paid him $40,000 for the sole rights on future improvements on the duplex telegraph, and he moved to Ward Street, Newark, New Jersey, where he employed a gathering of specialist engineers. Within a year, he married one of his employees, Mary Stilwell, when she was only 16: a daughter, Marion, was born in 1872, and two sons, Thomas and William, in 1876 and 1879, respectively.

He continued to work on the automatic telegraph, a device to send out messages faster than they could be tapped out by hand: that is, over fifty words per minute or so. An earlier machine by Alexander Bain worked at up to 400 words per minute, but was not good over long distances. Edison agreed to work on improving this feature of Bain's machine for the Automatic Telegraph Company (ATC) for $40,000. He improved it to a working speed of 500 words per minute and ran a test between Washington and New York. Hoping to sell their equipment to the Post Office in Britain, ATC sent Edison to England in 1873 to negotiate. A 500-word message was to be sent from Liverpool to London every half-hour for six hours, followed by tests on 2,200 miles (3,540 km) of cable at Greenwich. Only confused results were obtained due to induction in the cable, which lay coiled in a water tank. Edison returned to New York, where he worked on his quadruplex telegraph system, tests of which proved a success between New York and Albany in December 1874. Unfortunately, simultaneous negotiation with Western Union and ATC resulted in a lawsuit.

Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for a telephone in March 1876 while Edison was still working on the same idea. His improvements allowed the device to operate over a distance of hundreds of miles instead of only a few miles. Tests were carried out over the 106 miles (170 km) between New York and Philadelphia. Edison applied for a patent on the carbon-button transmitter in April 1877, Western Union agreeing to pay him $6,000 a year for the seventeen-year duration of the patent. In these years he was also working on the development of the electric lamp and on a duplicating machine which would make up to 3,000 copies from a stencil. In 1876–7 he moved from Newark to Menlo Park, twenty-four miles (39 km) from New York on the Pennsylvania Railway, near Elizabeth. He had bought a house there around which he built the premises that would become his "inventions factory". It was there that he began the use of his 200- page pocket notebooks, each of which lasted him about two weeks, so prolific were his ideas. When he died he left 3,400 of them filled with notes and sketches.

Late in 1877 he applied for a patent for a phonograph which was granted on 19 February 1878, and by the end of the year he had formed a company to manufacture this totally new product. At the time, Edison saw the device primarily as a business aid rather than for entertainment, rather as a dictating machine. In August 1878 he was granted a British patent. In July 1878 he tried to measure the heat from the solar corona at a solar eclipse viewed from Rawlins, Wyoming, but his "tasimeter" was too sensitive.

Probably his greatest achievement was "The Subdivision of the Electric Light" or the "glow bulb". He tried many materials for the filament before settling on carbon. He gave a demonstration of electric light by lighting up Menlo Park and inviting the public. Edison was, of course, faced with the problem of inventing and producing all the ancillaries which go to make up the electrical system of generation and distribution-meters, fuses, insulation, switches, cabling—even generators had to be designed and built; everything was new. He started a number of manufacturing companies to produce the various components needed.

In 1881 he built the world's largest generator, which weighed 27 tons, to light 1,200 lamps at the Paris Exhibition. It was later moved to England to be used in the world's first central power station with steam engine drive at Holborn Viaduct, London. In September 1882 he started up his Pearl Street Generating Station in New York, which led to a worldwide increase in the application of electric power, particularly for lighting. At the same time as these developments, he built a 1,300yd (1,190m) electric railway at Menlo Park.

On 9 August 1884 his wife died of typhoid. Using his telegraphic skills, he proposed to 19-year-old Mina Miller in Morse code while in the company of others on a train. He married her in February 1885 before buying a new house and estate at West Orange, New Jersey, building a new laboratory not far away in the Orange Valley.

Edison used direct current which was limited to around 250 volts. Alternating current was largely developed by George Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla, using transformers to step up the current to a higher voltage for long-distance transmission. The use of AC gradually overtook the Edison DC system.

In autumn 1888 he patented a form of cinephotography, the kinetoscope, obtaining film-stock from George Eastman. In 1893 he set up the first film studio, which was pivoted so as to catch the sun, with a hinged roof which could be raised. In 1894 kinetoscope parlours with "peep shows" were starting up in cities all over America. Competition came from the Latham Brothers with a screen-projection machine, which Edison answered with his "Vitascope", shown in New York in 1896. This showed pictures with accompanying sound, but there was some difficulty with synchronization. Edison also experimented with captions at this early date.

In 1880 he filed a patent for a magnetic ore separator, the first of nearly sixty. He bought up deposits of low-grade iron ore which had been developed in the north of New Jersey. The process was a commercial success until the discovery of iron-rich ore in Minnesota rendered it uneconomic and uncompetitive. In 1898 cement rock was discovered in New Village, west of West Orange. Edison bought the land and started cement manufacture, using kilns twice the normal length and using half as much fuel to heat them as the normal type of kiln. In 1893 he met Henry Ford, who was building his second car, at an Edison convention. This started him on the development of a battery for an electric car on which he made over 9,000 experiments. In 1903 he sold his patent for wireless telegraphy "for a song" to Guglielmo Marconi.

In 1910 Edison designed a prefabricated concrete house. In December 1914 fire destroyed three-quarters of the West Orange plant, but it was at once rebuilt, and with the threat of war Edison started to set up his own plants for making all the chemicals that he had previously been buying from Europe, such as carbolic acid, phenol, benzol, aniline dyes, etc. He was appointed President of the Navy Consulting Board, for whom, he said, he made some forty-five inventions, "but they were pigeonholed, every one of them". Thus did Edison find that the Navy did not take kindly to civilian interference.

In 1927 he started the Edison Botanic Research Company, founded with similar investment from Ford and Firestone with the object of finding a substitute for overseas-produced rubber. In the first year he tested no fewer than 3,327 possible plants, in the second year, over 1,400, eventually developing a variety of Golden Rod which grew to 14 ft (4.3 m) in height. However, all this effort and money was wasted, due to the discovery of synthetic rubber.

In October 1929 he was present at Henry Ford's opening of his Dearborn Museum to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the incandescent lamp, including a replica of the Menlo Park laboratory. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and was elected to the American Academy of Sciences. He died in 1931 at his home, Glenmont; throughout the USA, lights were dimmed temporarily on the day of his funeral.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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Joseph Gilbert was the son of a congregational minister. His schooling was interrupted by the loss of an eye as the result of a shooting accident, but despite this setback he entered Glasgow University to study analytical chemistry, and then went to University College, London, where he was a fellow student of John Bennet Lawes. During his studies he visited Giessen, Germany, and worked in the laboratory of Justus von Liebig. In 1843, at the age of 26, he was hired as an assistant by Lawes, who was 29 at that time; an unbroken friendship and collaboration existed between the two until Lawes died in 1900. They began a series of experiments on grain production and grew plots under different applications of nitrogen, with control plots that received none at all. Much of the work at Rothampsted was on the nitrogen requirements of plants and how this element became available to them. The grain grown in these experiments was analyzed to determine whether nitrogen input affected grain quality. Gilbert was a methodical worker who by the time of his death had collected together some 50,000 carefully stored and recorded samples.

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SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

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After education at Yale University, he studied at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York, qualifying in 1877. Following internships in New York, he spent two postgraduate years in Germany and Austria, where he became acquainted with the German methods of surgical education. He returned to New York in 1880 to practise privately and also demonstrate anatomy at the College.

In 1884, when experimenting with cocaine as an anaesthetic, he became addicted; he underwent treatment for his addiction in 1886–7 and there is also some evidence of treatment for morphine addiction in 1892. As a consequence of these problems he moved to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he was appointed Surgeon-in-Chief in 1890 and Professor of Surgery in 1892. In this role he devoted considerable time to laboratory study and made important contributions in the treatment of breast carcinoma, thyroid disease and aneurism. A perfectionist, his technical advances were an outcome of his approach to surgery, which was methodical and painstaking in comparison with the cavalier methods of some contemporaries.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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He was born Edward Muggeridge, but later changed his name, taking the Saxon spelling of his first name and altering his surname, first to Muygridge and then to Muybridge. He emigrated to America in 1851, working in New York in bookbinding and selling as a commission agent for the London Printing and Publishing Company. Through contact with a New York daguerreotypist, Silas T.Selleck, he acquired an interest in photography that developed after his move to California in 1855. On a visit to England in 1860 he learned the wet-collodion process from a friend, Arthur Brown, and acquired the best photographic equipment available in London before returning to America. In 1867, under his trade pseudonym "Helios", he set out to record the scenery of the Far West with his mobile dark-room, christened "The Flying Studio".

His reputation as a photographer of the first rank spread, and he was commissioned to record the survey visit of Major-General Henry W.Halleck to Alaska and also to record the territory through which the Central Pacific Railroad was being constructed. Perhaps because of this latter project, he was approached by the President of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford, to attempt to photograph a horse trotting at speed. There was a long-standing controversy among racing men as to whether a trotting horse had all four hooves off the ground at any point; Stanford felt that it did, and hoped than an "instantaneous" photograph would settle the matter once and for all. In May 1872 Muybridge photographed the horse "Occident", but without any great success because the current wet-collodion process normally required many seconds, even in a good light, for a good result. In April 1873 he managed to produce some better negatives, in which a recognizable silhouette of the horse showed all four feet above the ground at the same time.

Soon after, Muybridge left his young wife, Flora, in San Francisco to go with the army sent to put down the revolt of the Modoc Indians. While he was busy photographing the scenery and the combatants, his wife had an affair with a Major Harry Larkyns. On his return, finding his wife pregnant, he had several confrontations with Larkyns, which culminated in his shooting him dead. At his trial for murder, in February 1875, Muybridge was acquitted by the jury on the grounds of justifiable homicide; he left soon after on a long trip to South America.

He again took up his photographic work when he returned to North America and Stanford asked him to take up the action-photography project once more. Using a new shutter design he had developed while on his trip south, and which would operate in as little as 1/1,000 of a second, he obtained more detailed pictures of "Occident" in July 1877. He then devised a new scheme, which Stanford sponsored at his farm at Palo Alto. A 50 ft (15 m) long shed was constructed, containing twelve cameras side by side, and a white background marked off with vertical, numbered lines was set up. Each camera was fitted with Muybridge's highspeed shutter, which was released by an electromagnetic catch. Thin threads stretched across the track were broken by the horse as it moved along, closing spring electrical contacts which released each shutter in turn. Thus, in about half a second, twelve photographs were obtained that showed all the phases of the movement.

Although the pictures were still little more than silhouettes, they were very sharp, and sequences published in scientific and photographic journals throughout the world excited considerable attention. By replacing the threads with an electrical commutator device, which allowed the release of the shutters at precise intervals, Muybridge was able to take series of actions by other animals and humans. From 1880 he lectured in America and Europe, projecting his results in motion on the screen with his Zoopraxiscope projector. In August 1883 he received a grant of $40,000 from the University of Pennsylvania to carry on his work there. Using the vastly improved gelatine dry-plate process and new, improved multiple-camera apparatus, during 1884 and 1885 he produced over 100,000 photographs, of which 20,000 were reproduced in Animal Locomotion in 1887. The subjects were animals of all kinds, and human figures, mostly nude, in a wide range of activities. The quality of the photographs was extremely good, and the publication attracted considerable attention and praise.

Muybridge returned to England in 1894; his last publications were Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901). His influence on the world of art was enormous, over-turning the conventional representations of action hitherto used by artists. His work in pioneering the use of sequence photography led to the science of chronophotography developed by Marey and others, and stimulated many inventors, notably Thomas Edison to work which led to the introduction of cinematography in the 1890s.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Volk was the son of a German immigrant clockmaker and continued the business with his mother after his father died in 1869, although when he married in 1879 his profession was described as "electrician". He installed Brighton's first telephone the same year and in 1880 he installed electric lighting in his own house, using a Siemens Brothers dynamo (see Siemens, Dr Ernst Werner von) driven by a Crossley gas engine. This was probably one of the first half-dozen such installations in Britain. Magnus Volk \& Co. became noted electrical manufacturers and contractors, and, inter alia, installed electric light in Brighton Pavilion in place of gas.

By 1883 Volk had moved house. He had kept the dynamo and gas engine used to light his previous house, and he also had available an electric motor from a cancelled order. After approaching the town clerk of Brighton, he was given permission for a limited period to build and operate a 2 ft (61 cm) gauge electric railway along the foreshore. Using the electrical equipment he already had, Volk built the line, a quarter of a mile (400 m) long, in eight weeks. The car was built by a local coachbuilder, with the motor under the seat; electric current at 50 volts was drawn from one running rail and returned through the other.

The railway was opened on 4 August 1883. It operated regularly for several months and then, permission to run it having been renewed, it was rebuilt for the 1884 season to 2 ft 9 in. (84 cm) gauge, with improved equipment. Despite storm damage from time to time, Volk's Electric Railway, extended in length, has become an enduring feature of Brighton's sea front. In 1887 Volk made an electric dogcart, and an electric van which he built for the Sultan of Turkey was probably the first motor vehicle built in Britain for export. In 1896 he opened the Brighton \& Rottingdean Seashore Electric Tramroad, with very wide-gauge track laid between the high-and low-tide lines, and a long-legged, multi-wheel car to run upon it, through the water if necessary. This lasted only until 1901, however. Volk subsequently became an early enthusiast for aircraft.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Land transport, Public utilities, Railways and locomotives

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George Westinghouse's father was an ingenious manufacturer of agricultural implements; the son, after a spell in the Union Army during the Civil War, and subsequently in the Navy as an engineer, went to work for his father. He invented a rotary steam engine, which proved impracticable; a rerailing device for railway rolling stock in 1865; and a cast-steel frog for railway points, with longer life than the cast-iron frogs then used, in 1868–9. During the same period Westinghouse, like many other inventors, was considering how best to meet the evident need for a continuous brake for trains, i.e. one by which the driver could apply the brakes on all vehicles in a train simultaneously instead of relying on brakesmen on individual vehicles. By chance he encountered a magazine article about the construction of the Mont Cenis Tunnel, with a description of the pneumatic tools invented for it, and from this it occurred to him that compressed air might be used to operate the brakes along a train.

The first prototype was ready in 1869 and the Westinghouse Air Brake Company was set up to manufacture it. However, despite impressive demonstration of the brake's powers when it saved the test train from otherwise certain collision with a horse-drawn dray on a level crossing, railways were at first slow to adopt it. Then in 1872 Westinghouse added to it the triple valve, which enabled the train pipe to charge reservoirs beneath each vehicle, from which the compressed air would apply the brakes when pressure in the train pipe was reduced. This meant that the brake was now automatic: if a train became divided, the brakes on both parts would be applied. From then on, more and more American railways adopted the Westinghouse brake and the Railroad Safety Appliance Act of 1893 made air brakes compulsory in the USA. Air brakes were also adopted in most other parts of the world, although only a minority of British railway companies took them up, the remainder, with insular reluctance, preferring the less effective vacuum brake.

From 1880 Westinghouse was purchasing patents relating to means of interlocking railway signals and points; he combined them with his own inventions to produce a complete signalling system. The first really practical power signalling scheme, installed in the USA by Westinghouse in 1884, was operated pneumatically, but the development of railway signalling required an awareness of the powers of electricity, and it was probably this that first led Westinghouse to become interested in electrical processes and inventions. The Westinghouse Electric Company was formed in 1886: it pioneered the use of electricity distribution systems using high-voltage single-phase alternating current, which it developed from European practice. Initially this was violently opposed by established operators of direct-current distribution systems, but eventually the use of alternating current became widespread.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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T.W.Worsdell was the son of Nathaniel Worsdell. After varied training, which included some time in the drawing office of the London \& North Western Railway's Crewe Works, he moved to the Pennsylvania Railroad, USA, in 1865 and shortly became Master Mechanic in charge of its locomotive workshops in Altoona. In 1871, however, he accepted an invitation from F.W. Webb to return to Crewe as Works Manager: it was while he was there that Webb produced his first compound locomotive by rebuilding an earlier simple.

In 1881 T.W.Worsdell was appointed Locomotive Superintendent of the Great Eastern Railway. Working with August von Borries, who was Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Hannover Division of the Prussian State Railways, he developed a two-cylinder compound derived from the work of J.T.A. Mallet. Von Borries produced his compound 2–4–0 in 1880, Worsdell followed with a 4–4–0 in 1884; the restricted British loading gauge necessitated substitution of inside cylinders for the outside cylinders used by von Borries, particularly the large low-pressure one. T.W.Worsdell's compounds were on the whole successful and many were built, particularly on the North Eastern Railway, to which he moved as Locomotive Superintendent in 1885. There, in 1888, he started to build, uniquely, two-cylinder compound "single driver" 4–2–2s: one of them was recorded as reaching 86 mph (138 km/h). He also equipped his locomotives with a large side-window cab, which gave enginemen more protection from the elements than was usual in Britain at that time and was no doubt appreciated in the harsh winter climate of northeast England. The idea for the cab probably originated from his American experience. When T.W.Worsdell retired from the North Eastern Railway in 1890 he was succeeded by his younger brother, Wilson Worsdell, who in 1899 introduced the first 4– 6–0s intended for passenger trains in England.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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After completing his early education in Weimar, Zeiss became an apprentice to the engineer Dr Frederick Koerner. As part of his training, Zeiss was required to travel widely and he visited Vienna, Berlin, Stuttgart and Darmstadt to study his trade. In 1846 he set up a business of his own, an optical workshop in Jena, where he began manufacturing magnifying glasses and microscopes. Much of his work was naturally for the university there and he had the co-operation of some of the University staff in the development of precision instruments. By 1858 he was seeking to make more expensive compound microscopes, but he found the current techniques primitive and laborious. He decided that it was necessary to introduce scientific method to the design of the optics, and in 1866 he sought the advice of a professor of physics at the University of Jena, Ernst Abbe (1840–1905). It took Zeiss until 1869 to persuade Abbe to join his company, and two difficult years were spent working on the calculations before success was achieved. Within a few more years the Zeiss microscope had earned a worldwide reputation for quality. Abbe became a full partner in the Zeiss business in 1875. In 1880 Abbe began an association with Friedrich Otte Schott that was to lead to the establishment of the famous Jena glass works in 1884. With the support of the German government, Jena was to become the centre of world production of new optical glasses for photographic objectives.

In 1886 the distinguished mathematician and optician Paul Rudolph joined Zeiss at Jena. After Zeiss's death, Rudolph went on to use the characteristics of the new glass to calculate the first anastigmatic lenses. Immediately successful and widely imitated, the anastigmats were also the first of a long series of Zeiss photographic objectives that were to be at the forefront of lens design for years to come. Abbe took over the management of the company and developed it into an internationally famous organization.

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