(in Russia before the revolution)

SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Fourdrinier's father was a paper manufacturer and stationer of London, from a family of French Protestant origin. Henry took up the same trade and, with his brother Sealy (d. 1847), devoted many years to developing the papermaking machine. Their first patent was taken out in 1801, but success was still far off. A machine for making paper had been invented a few years previously by Nicolas Robert at the Didot's mill at Essonnes, south of Paris. Robert quarrelled with the Didots, who then contacted their brother-in-law in England, John Gamble, in an attempt to raise capital for a larger machine. Gamble and the Fourdriniers called in the engineer Bryan Donkin, and between them they patented a much improved machine in 1807. In the new machine, the paper pulp flowed on to a moving continuous woven wire screen and was then squeezed between rollers to remove much of the water. The paper thus formed was transferred to a felt blanket and passed through a second press to remove more water, before being wound while still wet on to a drum. For the first time, a continuous sheet of paper could be made. Other inventors soon made further improvements: in 1817 John Dickinson obtained a patent for sizing baths to improve the surface of the paper; while in 1820 Thomas Crompton patented a steam-heated drum round which the paper was passed to speed up the drying process. The development cost of £60,000 bankrupted the brothers. Although Parliament extended the patent for fourteen years, and the machine was widely adopted, they never reaped much profit from it. Tsar Alexander of Russia became interested in the papermaking machine while on a visit to England in 1814 and promised Henry Fourdrinier £700 per year for ten years for super-intending the erection of two machines in Russia; Henry carried out the work, but he received no payment. At the age of 72 he travelled to St Petersburg to seek recompense from the Tsar's successor Nicholas I, but to no avail. Eventually, on a motion in the House of Commons, the British Government awarded Fourdrinier a payment of £7,000. The paper trade, sensing the inadequacy of this sum, augmented it with a further sum which they subscribed so that an annuity could be purchased for Henry, then the only surviving brother, and his two daughters, to enable them to live in modest comfort. From its invention in ancient China (see Cai Lun), its appearance in the Middle Ages in Europe and through the first three and a half centuries of printing, every sheet of paper had to made by hand. The daily output of a hand-made paper mill was only 60–100 lb (27–45 kg), whereas the new machine increased that tenfold. Even higher speeds were achieved, with corresponding reductions in cost; the old mills could not possibly have kept pace with the new mechanical printing presses. The Fourdrinier machine was thus an essential element in the technological developments that brought about the revolution in the production of reading matter of all kinds during the nineteenth century. The high-speed, giant paper-making machines of the late twentieth century work on the same principle as the Fourdrinier of 1807.

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SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology

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Zworykin studied engineering at the Institute of Technology in St Petersburg under Boris Rosing, assisting the latter with his early experiments with television. After graduating in 1912, he spent a time doing X-ray research at the Collège de France in Paris before returning to join the Russian Marconi Company, initially in St Petersburg and then in Moscow. On the outbreak of war in 1917, he joined the Russian Army Signal Corps, but when the war ended in the chaos of the Revolution he set off on his travels, ending up in the USA, where he joined the Westinghouse Corporation. There, in 1923, he filed the first of many patents for a complete system of electronic television, including one for an all-electronic scanning pick-up tube that he called the iconoscope. In 1924 he became a US citizen and invented the kinescope, a hard-vacuum cathode ray tube (CRT) for the display of television pictures, and the following year he patented a camera tube with a mosaic of photoelectric elements and gave a demonstration of still-picture TV. In 1926 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Pittsburgh and in 1928 he was granted a patent for a colour TV system.

In 1929 he embarked on a tour of Europe to study TV developments; on his return he joined the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as Director of the Electronics Research Group, first at Camden and then Princeton, New Jersey. Securing a budget to develop an improved CRT picture tube, he soon produced a kinescope with a hard vacuum, an indirectly heated cathode, a signal-modulation grid and electrostatic focusing. In 1933 an improved iconoscope camera tube was produced, and under his direction RCA went on to produce other improved types of camera tube, including the image iconoscope, the orthicon and image orthicon and the vidicon. The secondary-emission effect used in many of these tubes was also used in a scintillation radiation counter. In 1941 he was responsible for the development of the first industrial electron microscope, but for most of the Second World War he directed work concerned with radar, aircraft fire-control and TV-guided missiles.

After the war he worked for a time on high-speed memories and medical electronics, becoming Vice-President and Technical Consultant in 1947. He "retired" from RCA and was made an honorary vice-president in 1954, but he retained an office and continued to work there almost up until his death; he also served as Director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research from 1954 until 1962.

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See also: Baird, John Logie; Farnsworth, Philo Taylor; Jenkins, Charles Francis

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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William Cockerill began his career in Lancashire by making "roving billies" and flying shuttles. He was reputed to have an extraordinary mechanical genius and it is said that he could make models of almost any machine. He followed in the footsteps of many other enterprising British engineers when in 1794 he went to St Petersburg in Russia, having been recommended as a skilful artisan to the Empress Catherine II. After her death two years later, her successor Paul sent Cockerill to prison because he failed to finish a model within a certain time. Cockerill, however, escaped to Sweden where he was commissioned to construct the locks on a public canal. He attempted to introduce textile machinery of his own invention but was unsuccessful and so in 1799 he removed to Verviers, Belgium, where he established himself as a manufacturer of textile machinery. In 1802 he was joined by James Holden, who before long set up his own machine-building business. In 1807 Cockerill moved to Liège where, with his three sons (William Jnr, Charles James and John), he set up factories for the construction of carding machines, spinning frames and looms for the woollen industry. He secured for Verviers supremacy in the woollen trade and introduced at Liège an industry of which England had so far possessed the monopoly. His products were noted for their fine craftsmanship, and in the heyday of the Napoleonic regime about half of his output was sold in France. In 1813 he imported a model of a Watt steam-engine from England and so added another range of products to his firm. Cockerill became a naturalized Belgian subject c. 1810, and a few years later he retired from the business in favour of his two younger sons, Charles James and John (b. 30 April 1790 Haslingden, Lancashire, England; d. 19 June 1840 Warsaw, Poland), but in 1830 at Andenne he converted a vast factory formerly used for calico printing into a paper mill. Little is known of his eldest son William, but the other two sons expanded the enterprise, setting up a woollen factory at Berlin after 1815 and establishing at Seraing-on-the-Meuse in 1817 blast furnaces, an iron foundry and a machine workshop which became the largest on the European continent. William Cockerill senior died in 1832 at the Château du Behrensberg, the residence of his son Charles James, near Aix-la-Chapelle.

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