A History of Technology

SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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John Ridley was a preacher in his youth, and then became a mill owner before migrating to Australia with his wife and daughters in 1839. Intending to continue his business in the new colony, he took with him a "Grasshopper" overbeam steam-engine made by James Watt, together with milling equipment. Cereal acreages were insufficient for the steam power he had available, and he expanded into saw milling as well as farming 300 acres. Aware of the Adelaide trials of reaping machines, he eventually built a prototype using the same principles as those developed by Wrathall Bull. After a successful trial in 1843 Ridley began the patent procedure in England, although he never completed the project. The agricultural press was highly enthusiastic about his machine, but when trials took place in 1855 the award went to a rival. The development of the stripper enabled a spectacular increase in the cereal acreage planted over the next decade. Ridley left Australia in 1853 and returned to England. He built a number of machines to his design in Leeds; however, these failed to perform in the much damper English climate. All of the machines were exported to South America, anticipating a substantial market to be exploited by Australian manufacturers.

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SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

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In 1869 Stumpf was commissioned by the Pope Manufacturing Company of Hertford, Connecticut, to set up two triple-expansion, vertical, Corliss pumping engines. He tried to simplify this complicated system and started research with the internal combustion engine and the steam turbine particularly as his models. The construction of steam turbines in several stages where the steam passed through in a unidirectional flow was being pursued at that time, and Stumpf wondered whether it would be possible to raise the efficiency of a reciprocating steam engine to the same thermal level as the turbine by the use of the uniflow principle.

Stumpf began to investigate these principles without studying the work of earlier pioneers like L.J. Todd, which he later thought would have led him astray. It was not until 1908, when he was Professor at the Institute of Technology in Berlin- Charlottenburg, that he patented his successful "una-flow" steam engine. In that year he took out six British patents for improvements in details on his original one Stumpf fully realized the thermal advantages of compressing the residual steam and was able to evolve systems of coping with excessive compression when starting. He also placed steam-jackets around the ends of the cylinder. Stumpf's first engine was built in 1908 by the Erste B runner Maschinenfabrik-Gesellschaft, and licences were taken out by many other manufacturers, including those in Britain and the USA. His engine was developed into the most economical type of reciprocating steam engine.

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SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors, Textiles

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Son of Elias Howe, a farmer, he acquired his mechanical knowledge in his father's mill. He left school at 12 years of age and was apprenticed for two years in a machine shop in Lowell, Massachusetts, and later to an instrument maker, Ari Davis in Boston, Massachusetts, where his master's services were much in demand by Harvard University. Fired by a desire to invent a sewing machine, he utilized the experience gained in Lowell to devise a shuttle carrying a lower thread and a needle carrying an upper thread to make lock-stitch in straight lines. His attempts were so rewarding that he left his job and was sustained first by his father and then by a partner. By 1845 he had built a machine that worked at 250 stitches per minute, and the following year he patented an improved machine. The invention of the sewing machine had an enormous impact on the textile industry, stimulating demand for cloth because making up garments became so much quicker. The sewing machine was one of the first mass-produced consumer durables and was essentially an American invention. William Thomas, a London manufacturer of shoes, umbrellas and corsets, secured the British rights and persuaded Howe to come to England to apply it to the making of shoes. This Howe did, but he quarrelled with Thomas after less than one year. He returned to America to face with his partner, G.W.Bliss, a bigger fight over his patent (see I.M. Singer), which was being widely infringed. Not until 1854 was the case settled in his favour. This litigation threatened the very existence of the new industry, but the Great Sewing Machine Combination, the first important patent-pooling arrangement in American history, changed all this. For a fee of $5 on every domestically-sold machine and $1 on every exported one, Howe contributed to the pool his patent of 1846 for a grooved eye-pointed needle used in conjunction with a lock-stitch-forming shuttle. Howe's patent was renewed in 1861; he organized and equipped a regiment during the Civil War with the royalties. When the war ended he founded the Howe Machine Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Cotton was originally employed in Loughborough and became one of the first specialized hosiery-machine builders. After the introduction of the latch needle by Matthew Townsend in 1856, knitting frames developed rapidly. The circular frame was easier to work automatically, but attempts to apply power to the flat frame, which could produce fully fashioned work, culminated in 1863 with William Cotton's machine. In that year he invented a machine that could make a dozen or more stockings or hose simultaneously and knit fashioned garments of all kinds. The difficulty was to reduce automatically the number of stitches in the courses where the hose or garment narrowed to give it shape. Cotton had early opportunities to apply himself to the improvement of hosiery machines while employed in the patent shop of Cartwright \& Warner of Loughborough, where some of the first rotaries were made. He remained with the firm for twenty years, during which time sixty or seventy of these machines were turned out. Cotton then established a factory for the manufacture of warp fabrics, and it was here that he began to work on his ideas. He had no knowledge of the principles of engineering or drawing, so his method of making sketches and then getting his ideas roughed out involved much useless labour. After twelve years, in 1863, a patent was issued for the machine that became the basis of the Cotton's Patent type. This was a flat frame driven by rotary mechanism and remarkable for its adaptability. At first he built his machine upright, like a cottage piano, but after much thought and experimentation he conceived the idea of turning the upper part down flat so that the needles were in a vertical position instead of being horizontal, and the work was carried off horizontally instead of vertically. His first machine produced four identical pieces simultaneously, but this number was soon increased. Cotton was induced by the success of his invention to begin machine building as a separate business and thus established one of the first of a class of engineering firms that sprung up as an adjunct to the new hosiery manufacture. He employed only a dozen men and turned out six machines in the first year, entering into an agreement with Hine \& Mundella for their exclusive use. This was later extended to the firm of I. \& R.Morley. In 1878, Cotton began to build on his own account, and the business steadily increased until it employed some 200 workers and had an output of 100 machines a year.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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After John Levers had brought out his lacemaking machine in 1813, other lacemakers proceeded to elaborate their machinery so as to imitate the more complicated forms of handwork. One of these was Samuel Draper of Nottingham, who took out one patent in 1835 for the use of a Jacquard mechanism on a lace making machine, followed by another in 1837. However, material made on his machine cost more than the handmade article, so the experiment was abandoned after three years. Then, in Nottingham in 1841, Hooton Deverill patented the first truly successful application of the Jacquard to lacemaking. The Jacquard needles caused the warp threads to be pushed sideways to form the holes in the lace while the bobbins were moved around them to bind them together. This made it possible to reproduce most of the traditional patterns of handmade lace in both narrow and wide pieces. Lace made on these machines became cheap enough for most people to be able to hang it in their windows as curtains, or to use it for trimming clothing. However, it raised in a most serious form the problem of patent rights between the two patentees, Deverill and Draper, threatening much litigation. Deverill's patent was bought by Richard Birkin, who with his partner Biddle relinquished the patent rights. The lacemaking trade on these machines was thus thrown open to the public and a new development of the trade took place. Levers lace is still made in the way described here.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Around 1586, Anton Möller related that he saw in Danzig a loom on which four to six pieces of ribbon could be woven at once. Some accounts say he may have invented this loom, which required no skill to use beyond the working of a bar. The city council was afraid that a great many workers might be reduced to begging because of this invention, so they had it suppressed and the inventor strangled or drowned. It seems to have been in use in London c. 1616 and at Leiden in Holland by 1620, but its spread was handicapped both by popular rioting and by restrictive legislation. By 1621 the capacity of the loom had been increased to twenty-four ribbons, and it was later increased to fifty. It made its appearance in Lancashire around 1680 and the way the shuttles were operated could have given John Kay the inspiration for his flying shuttle.

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SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

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Giambattista della Porta spent most of his life in Naples, where some time before 1580 he established the Accademia dei Segreti, which met at his house. In 1611 he was enrolled among the Oziosi in Naples, then the most renowned literary academy. He was examined by the Inquisition, which, although he had become a lay brother of the Jesuits by 1585, banned all further publication of his books between 1592 and 1598.

His first book, the Magiae Naturalis, which covered the secrets of nature, was published in 1558. He had been collecting material for it since the age of 15 and he saw that science should not merely represent theory and contemplation but must arrive at practical and experimental expression. In this work he described the hardening of files and pieces of armour on quite a large scale, and it included the best sixteenth-century description of heat treatment for hardening steel. In the 1589 edition of this work he covered ways of improving vision at a distance with concave and convex lenses; although he may have constructed a compound microscope, the history of this instrument effectively begins with Galileo. His theoretical and practical work on lenses paved the way for the telescope and he also explored the properties of parabolic mirrors.

In 1563 he published a treatise on cryptography, De Furtivis Liter arum Notis, which he followed in 1566 with another on memory and mnemonic devices, Arte del Ricordare. In 1584 and 1585 he published treatises on horticulture and agriculture based on careful study and practice; in 1586 he published De Humana Physiognomonia, on human physiognomy, and in 1588 a treatise on the physiognomy of plants. In 1593 he published his De Refractione but, probably because of the ban by the Inquisition, no more were produced until the Spiritali in 1601 and his translation of Ptolemy's Almagest in 1605. In 1608 two new works appeared: a short treatise on military fortifications; and the De Distillatione. There was an important work on meteorology in 1610. In 1601 he described a device similar to Hero's mechanisms which opened temple doors, only Porta used steam pressure instead of air to force the water out of its box or container, up a pipe to where it emptied out into a higher container. Under the lower box there was a small steam boiler heated by a fire. He may also have been the first person to realize that condensed steam would form a vacuum, for there is a description of another piece of apparatus where water is drawn up into a container at the top of a long pipe. The container was first filled with steam so that, when cooled, a vacuum would be formed and water drawn up into it. These are the principles on which Thomas Savery's later steam-engine worked.

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RLH / IMcN

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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In mass production of garments, layers of cloth are laid out on top of each other and multiples of each different part are cut out at the same time. The first portable cutting machine was invented by Joseph Bloch in 1888. It was operated from a DC electricity supply and had a circular knife, which was difficult to use when cutting round curves. Therefore the cloth had to be raised on curves so that it would reach the furthest part of the circular blade. In the same year in the USA, G.P.Eastman produced a vertically reciprocating cutting machine with a straight blade.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Early drawing and spinning processes failed to give linen yarn the requisite fineness and homogeneity. In 1810 Napoleon offered a prize of a million francs for a successful flax-spinning machine as part of his policy of stimulating the French textile industries. Spurred on by this offer, Girard suggested three improvements. He was too late to win the prize, but his ideas were patented in England in 1814, although not under his own name. He proposed that the fibres should be soaked in a very hot alkaline solution both before drawing and immediately before they went to the spindles. The actual drawing was to be done by passing the dried material through combs or gills that moved alternately; gill drawing was taken up in England in 1816. His method of wet spinning was never a commercial success, but his processes were adopted in part and developed in Britain and spread to Austria, Poland and France, for his ideas were essentially good and produced a superior product. The successful power-spinning of linen thread from flax depended primarily upon the initial processes of heckling and drawing. The heckling of the bundles or stricks of flax, so as to separate the long fibres of "line" from the shorter ones of "tow", was extremely difficult to mechanize, for each strick had to be combed on both sides in turn and then in the reverse direction. It was to this problem that Girard next turned his attention, inventing a successful machine in 1832 that subsequently was improved in England. The strick was placed between two vertical sheets of combs that moved opposite to each other, depositing the tow upon a revolving cylinder covered with a brush at the bottom of the machine, while the holder from which the strick was suspended moved up and down so as to help the teeth to penetrate deeper into the flax. The tow was removed from the cylinder at the bottom of the machine and taken away to be spun like cotton. The long line fibres were removed from the top of the machine and required further processing if the yarn was to be uniform.

When N.L.Sadi Carnot's book Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu, was published in 1824, Girard made a favourable report on it.

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SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors

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Few biographical details are known of Hans Haupt, other than that he invented the telescopic umbrella in Berlin in 1930. His device gave protection from rain and sun similar to that provided by Samuel Fox's lightweight steel-framed device of 1874, but it was much more compact when folded.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Josué Heilmann, of Mulhouse, was awarded 5,000 francs offered by the cotton spinners of Alsace for a machine that would comb cotton. It was a process not hitherto applied to this fibre and, when perfected, enabled finer, smoother and more lustrous yarns to be spun. The important feature of Heilmann's method was to use a grip or nip to hold the end of the sliver that was being combed. Two or more combs passed through the protruding fibres to comb them thoroughly, and a brush cylinder and knife cleared away the noils. The combed section was passed forward so that the part held in the nip could then be combed. The combed fibres were joined up with the length already finished. Heilmann obtained a British patent in 1846, but no machines were put to work until 1851. Six firms of cotton spinners in Lancashire paid £30,000 for the cotton-combing rights and Marshall's of Leeds paid £20,000 for the rights to comb flax. Heilmann's machine was used on the European continent for combing silk as well as flax, wool and cotton, so it proved to be very versatile. Priority of his patent was challenged in England because Lister had patented a combing machine with a gripper or nip in 1843; in 1852 the parties went to litigation and cross-suits were instituted. While Heilmann obtained a verdict of infringement against Lister for certain things, Lister also obtained one against Heilmann for other matters. After this outcome, Heilmann's patent was bought on speculation by Messrs Akroyd and Titus Salt for £30,000, but was afterwards resold to Lister for the same amount. In this way Lister was able to exploit his own patent through suppressing Heilmann's.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Synthetic materials, Textiles

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Cross was educated at the universities of London, Zurich and Manchester. It was at Owens College, Manchester, that Cross first met E.J. Bevan and where these two first worked together on the nature of cellulose. After gaining some industrial experience, Cross joined Bevan to set up a partnership in London as analytical and consulting chemists, specializing in the chemistry and technology of cellulose and lignin. They were at the Jodrell laboratory, Kew Gardens, for a time and then set up their own laboratory at Station Avenue, Kew Gardens. In 1888, the first edition of their joint publication A Textbook of Paper-making, appeared. It went into several editions and became the standard reference and textbook on the subject. The long introductory chapter is a discourse on cellulose.

In 1892, Cross, Bevan and Clayton Beadle took out their historic patent on the solution and regeneration of cellulose. The modern artificial-fibre industry stems from this patent. They made their discovery at New Court, Carey Street, London: wood-pulp (or another cheap form of cellulose) was dissolved in a mixture of carbon disulphide and aqueous alkali to produce sodium xanthate. After maturing, it was squirted through fine holes into dilute acid, which set the liquid to give spinnable fibres of "viscose". However, it was many years before the process became a commercial operation, partly because the use of a natural raw material such as wood involved variations in chemical content and each batch might react differently. At first it was thought that viscose might be suitable for incandescent lamp filaments, and C.H.Stearn, a collaborator with Cross, continued to investigate this possibility, but the sheen on the fibres suggested that viscose might be made into artificial silk. The original Viscose Spinning Syndicate was formed in 1894 and a place was rented at Erith in Kent. However, it was not until some skeins of artificial silk (a term to which Cross himself objected) were displayed in Paris that textile manufacturers began to take an interest in it. It was then that Courtaulds decided to investigate this new fibre, although it was not until 1904 that they bought the English patents and developed the first artificial silk that was later called "rayon". Cross was also concerned with the development of viscose films and of cellulose acetate, which became a rival to rayon in the form of "Celanese". He retained his interest in the paper industry and in publishing, in 1895 again collaborating with Bevan and publishing a book on Cellulose and other technical articles. He was a cultured man and a good musician. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1917.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology

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Ward is perhaps better described as a "quack" than a medical doctor. His remedies, one containing a dangerous quantity of antimony, were dubious to say the least. A fraudulent attempt to enter Parliament in 1717 forced him to leave the country quickly. After his pardon in 1733, he returned to London and established a successful practice. His medical prowess is immortalized in Hogarth's picture The Harlot's Progress.

Sulphuric acid had been an important chemical for centuries and Ward found that he needed large quantities of it to make his remedies. He set up works to manufacture it at Twickenham, near London, in 1736 and then at Richmond three years later. His process consisted of burning a mixture of saltpetre (nitre; potassium nitrate) and sulphur in the neck of a large glass globe containing a little water. Dilute sulphuric acid was thereby formed, which was concentrated by distillation. Although the method was not new, having been described in the seventeenth century by the German chemist Johann Glauber, Ward was granted a patent for his process in 1749. An important feature was the size of the globes, which had no less than fifty gallons' capacity, which must have entailed considerable skill on the part of the glassblowers. Through the adoption of Ward's process, the price of this essential commodity fell from £2 per pound to only 2 shillings. It provided the best method of manufacture until the advent of the lead-chamber process invented by John Roebuck.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Heathcote was the son of a small farmer who became blind, obliging the family to move to Long Whatton, near Loughborough, c.1790. He was apprenticed to W.Shepherd, a hosiery-machine maker, and became a frame-smith in the hosiery industry. He moved to Nottingham where he entered the employment of an excellent machine maker named Elliott. He later joined William Caldwell of Hathern, whose daughter he had married. The lace-making apparatus they patented jointly in 1804 had already been anticipated, so Heathcote turned to the problem of making pillow lace, a cottage industry in which women made lace by arranging pins stuck in a pillow in the correct pattern and winding around them thread contained on thin bobbins. He began by analysing the complicated hand-woven lace into simple warp and weft threads and found he could dispense with half the bobbins. The first machine he developed and patented, in 1808, made narrow lace an inch or so wide, but the following year he made much broader lace on an improved version. In his second patent, in 1809, he could make a type of net curtain, Brussels lace, without patterns. His machine made bobbin-net by the use of thin brass discs, between which the thread was wound. As they passed through the warp threads, which were arranged vertically, the warp threads were moved to each side in turn, so as to twist the bobbin threads round the warp threads. The bobbins were in two rows to save space, and jogged on carriages in grooves along a bar running the length of the machine. As the strength of this fabric depended upon bringing the bobbin threads diagonally across, in addition to the forward movement, the machine had to provide for a sideways movement of each bobbin every time the lengthwise course was completed. A high standard of accuracy in manufacture was essential for success. Called the "Old Loughborough", it was acknowledged to be the most complicated machine so far produced. In partnership with a man named Charles Lacy, who supplied the necessary capital, a factory was established at Loughborough that proved highly successful; however, their fifty-five frames were destroyed by Luddites in 1816. Heathcote was awarded damages of £10,000 by the county of Nottingham on the condition it was spent locally, but to avoid further interference he decided to transfer not only his machines but his entire workforce elsewhere and refused the money. In a disused woollen factory at Tiverton in Devonshire, powered by the waters of the river Exe, he built 300 frames of greater width and speed. By continually making inventions and improvements until he retired in 1843, his business flourished and he amassed a large fortune. He patented one machine for silk cocoon-reeling and another for plaiting or braiding. In 1825 he brought out two patents for the mechanical ornamentation or figuring of lace. He acquired a sound knowledge of French prior to opening a steam-powered lace factory in France. The factory proved to be a successful venture that lasted many years. In 1832 he patented a monstrous steam plough that is reputed to have cost him over £12,000 and was claimed to be the best in its day. One of its stated aims was "improved methods of draining land", which he hoped would develop agriculture in Ireland. A cable was used to haul the implement across the land. From 1832 to 1859, Heathcote represented Tiverton in Parliament and, among other benefactions, he built a school for his adopted town.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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Albert received a sound education in the arts and sciences, carefully designed to fit him for a role as consort to the future Queen Victoria. After their marriage in 1840, Albert threw himself into the task of establishing his position as, eventually, Prince Consort and uncrowned king of England. By his undoubted intellectual gifts, unrelenting hard work and moral rectitude, Albert moulded the British constitutional monarchy into the form it retains to this day. The purchase in 1845 of the Osborne estate in the Isle of Wight provided not only the growing royal family with a comfortable retreat from London and public life, but Albert with full scope for his abilities as architect and planner. With Thomas Cubitt, the eminent engineer and contractor, Albert erected at Osborne one of the most remarkable buildings of the nineteenth century. He went on to design the house and estate at Balmoral in Scotland, another notable creation.

Albert applied his abilities as architect and planner in the promotion of such public works as the London sewer system and, in practical form, the design of cottages for workers, such as those in south London, as well as those on the royal estates. Albert's other main contribution to technology was as educationist in a broad sense. In 1847, he was elected Chancellor of Cambridge University. He was appalled at the low standards and narrow curriculum prevailing there and at Oxford. He was no mere figurehead, but took a close and active interest in the University's affairs. With his powerful influence behind them, the reforming fellows were able to force measures to raise standards and widen the curriculum to take account, in particular, of the rapid progress in the natural sciences. Albert was instrumental in ending the lethargy of centuries and laying the foundations of the modern British university system.

In 1847 the Prince became Secretary of the Royal Society of Arts. With Henry Cole, the noted administrator who shared Albert's concern for the arts, he promoted a series of exhibitions under the auspices of the Society. From these grew the idea of a great exhibition of the products of the decorative and industrial arts. It was Albert who decided that its scope should be international. As Chairman of the organizing committee, by sheer hard work he drove the project through to a triumphant conclusion. The success of the Exhibition earned it a handsome profit for which Albert had found a use even before it closed. The proceeds went towards the purchase of a site in South Kensington, for which he drew up a grand scheme for a complex of museums and colleges for the education of the people in the sciences and the arts. This largely came to fruition and South Kensington today is a fitting memorial to the Prince Consort's wisdom and concern for the public good.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Telecommunications

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After graduating from University College, London, Ayrton became for a short time a pupil of Sir William Thomson in Glasgow. For five years he was employed in the Indian Telegraph Service, eventually as Superintendent, where he assisted in revolutionizing the system, devising methods of fault detection and elimination. In 1873 he was invited by the Japanese Government to assist as Professor of Physics and Telegraphy in founding the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo. There he created a teaching laboratory that served as a model for those he was later to organize in England and which were copied elsewhere. It was in Tokyo that his joint researches with Professor John Perry began, an association that continued after their return to England. In 1879 he became Professor of Technical Physics at the City and Guilds Institute in Finsbury, London, and later was appointed Professor of Physics at the Central Institution in South Kensington.

The inventions of Avrton and Perrv included an electric tricycle in 1882, the first practicable portable ammeter and other electrical measuring instruments. By 1890, when the research partnership ended, they had published nearly seventy papers in their joint names, the emphasis being on a mathematical treatment of subjects including electric motor design, construction of electrical measuring instruments, thermodynamics and the economical use of electric conductors. Ayrton was then employed as a consulting engineer by government departments and acted as an expert witness in many important patent cases.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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The son of a Forfarshire tenant farmer, Patrick Bell obtained an MA from the University of St Andrews. His early association with farming kindled an interest in engineering and mechanics and he was to maintain a workshop not only on his father's farm, but also, in later life, at the parsonage at Carmyllie.

He was still studying divinity when he invented his reaping machine. Using garden shears as the basis of his design, he built a model in 1827 and a full-scale prototype the following year. Not wishing the machine to be seen during his early experiments, he and his brother planted a sheaf of oats in soil laid out in a shed, and first tried the machine on this. It cut well enough but left the straw in a mess behind it. A canvas belt system was devised and another secret trial in the barn was followed by a night excursion into a field, where corn was successfully harvested.

Two machines were at work during 1828, apparently achieving a harvest rate of one acre per hour. In 1832 there were ten machines at work, and at least another four had been sent to the United States by this time. Despite their success Bell did not patent his design, feeling that the idea should be given free to the world. In later years he was to regret the decision, feeling that the many badly-made imitations resulted in its poor reputation and prevented its adoption.

Bell's calling took precedence over his inventive interests and after qualifying he went to Canada in 1833, spending four years in Fergus, Ontario. He later returned to Scotland and be-came the minister at Carmyllie, with a living of £150 per annum.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Bigelow was born in West Boyleston, Massachusetts, where his father struggled as a farmer, wheelwright, and chairmaker. Before he was 20, Bigelow had many different jobs, among them farm labourer, clerk, violin player and cotton-mill employee. In 1830, he went to Leicester Academy, Massachusetts, but he could not afford to go on to Harvard. He sought work in Boston, New York and elsewhere, making various inventions.

The most important of his early inventions was the power loom of 1837 for making coach lace. This loom contained all the essential features of his carpet looms, which he developed and patented two years later. He formed the Clinton Company for manufacturing carpets at Leicester, Massachusetts, but the factory became so large that its name was adopted for the town. The next twenty years saw various mechanical discoveries, while his range of looms was extended to cover Brussels, Wilton, tapestry and velvet carpets. Bigelow has been justly described as the originator of every fundamental device in these machines, which were amongst the largest textile machines of their time. The automatic insertion and withdrawal of strong wires with looped ends was the means employed to raise the looped pile of the Brussels carpets, while thinner wires with a knife blade at the end raised and then severed the loops to create the rich Wilton pile. At the Great Exhibition in 1851, it was declared that his looms made better carpets than any from hand looms. He also developed other looms for special materials.

He became a noted American economist, writing two books about tariff problems, advocating that the United States should not abandon its protectionist policies. In 1860 he was narrowly defeated in a Congress election. The following year he was a member of the committee that established the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology

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Around 1850, the exciting new metal aluminium began to be produced by the process developed by Sainte-Claire Deville. However, it remained expensive on account of the high cost of one of the raw materials, sodium. It was another thirty years before Castner became the first to work successfully the process for producing sodium, which consisted of heating sodium hydroxide with charcoal at a high temperature. Unable to interest American backers in the process, Castner took it to England and set up a plant at Oldbury, near Birmingham. At the moment he achieved commercial success, however, the demand for cheap sodium plummeted as a result of the development of the electrolytic process for producing aluminium. He therefore sought other uses for cheap sodium, first converting it to sodium peroxide, a bleaching agent much used in the straw-hat industry. Much more importantly, Castner persuaded the gold industry to use sodium instead of potassium cyanide in the refining of gold. With the "gold rush", he established a large market in Australia, the USA, South Africa and elsewhere, but the problem was to meet the demand, so Castner turned to the electrolytic method. At first progress was slow because of the impure nature of the sodium hydroxide, so he used a mercury cathode, with which the released sodium formed an amalgam. It then reacted with water in a separate compartment in the cell to form sodium hydroxide of a purity hitherto unknown in the alkali industry; chlorine was a valuable by-product.

In 1894 Castner began to seek international patents for the cell, but found he had been anticipated in Germany by Kellner, an Austrian chemist. Preferring negotiation to legal confrontation, Castner exchanged patents and processes with Kellner, although the latter's had been less successful. The cell became known as the Castner-Kellner cell, but the process needed cheap electricity and salt, neither of which was available near Oldbury, so he set up the Castner-Kellner Alkali Company works at Runcorn in Cheshire; at the same time, a pilot plant was set up in the USA at Saltville, Virginia, with a larger plant being established at Niagara Falls.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

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After early education at the Jonkoping elementary school and the Weixo Gymnasium, George Scheutz entered the University of Lund, gaining a degree in law in 1805. Following five years' legal work, he moved to Stockholm in 1811 to work at the Supreme Court and, in 1814, as a military auditor. In 1816, he resigned, bought a printing business and became editor of a succession of industrial and technical journals, during which time he made inventions relating to the press. It was in 1830 that he learned from the Edinburgh Review of Babbage's ideas for a difference engine and started to make one from wood, pasteboard and wire. In 1837 his 15-yearold student son, Edvard Raphael Scheutz, offered to make it in metal, and by 1840 they had a working machine with two five-digit registers, which they increased the following year and then added a printer. Obtaining a government grant in 1851, by 1853 they had a fully working machine, now known as Swedish Difference Engine No. 1, which with an experienced operator could generate 120 lines of tables per hour and was used to calculate the logarithms of the numbers 1 to 10,000 in under eighty hours. This was exhibited in London and then at the Paris Great Exhibition, where it won the Gold Medal. It was subsequently sold to the Dudley Observatory in Albany, New York, for US$5,000 and is now in a Chicago museum.

In England, the British Registrar-General, wishing to produce new tables for insurance companies, and supported by the Astronomer Royal, arranged for government finance for construction of a second machine (Swedish Difference Engine No. 2). Comprising over 1,000 working parts and weighing 1,000 lb (450 kg), this machine was used to calculate over 600 tables. It is now in the Science Museum.

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