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1 Bramah, Joseph
SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Domestic appliances and interiors, Land transport, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Public utilities[br]b. 2 April 1749 Stainborough, Yorkshire, Englandd. 9 December 1814 Pimlico, London, England[br]English inventor of the second patented water-closet, the beer-engine, the Bramah lock and, most important, the hydraulic press.[br]Bramah was the son of a tenant farmer and was educated at the village school before being apprenticed to a local carpenter, Thomas Allot. He walked to London c.1773 and found work with a Mr Allen that included the repair of some of the comparatively rare water-closets of the period. He invented and patented one of his own, which was followed by a water cock in 1783. His next invention, a greatly improved lock, involved the devising of a number of special machine tools, for it was one of the first devices involving interchangeable components in its manufacture. In this he had the help of Henry Maudslay, then a young and unknown engineer, who became Bramah's foreman before setting up business on his own. In 1784 he moved his premises from Denmark Street, St Giles, to 124 Piccadilly, which was later used as a showroom when he set up a factory in Pimlico. He invented an engine for putting out fires in 1785 and 1793, in effect a reciprocating rotary-vane pump. He undertook the refurbishment and modernization of Norwich waterworks c.1793, but fell out with Robert Mylne, who was acting as Consultant to the Norwich Corporation and had produced a remarkably vague specification. This was Bramah's only venture into the field of civil engineering.In 1797 he acted as an expert witness for Hornblower \& Maberley in the patent infringement case brought against them by Boulton and Watt. Having been cut short by the judge, he published his proposed evidence in "Letter to the Rt Hon. Sir James Eyre, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas…etc". In 1795 he was granted his most important patent, based on Pascal's Hydrostatic Paradox, for the hydraulic press which also incorporated the concept of hydraulics for the transmission of both power and motion and was the foundation of the whole subsequent hydraulic industry. There is no truth in the oft-repeated assertion originating from Samuel Smiles's Industrial Biography (1863) that the hydraulic press could not be made to work until Henry Maudslay invented the self-sealing neck leather. Bramah used a single-acting upstroking ram, sealed only at its base with a U-leather. There was no need for a neck leather.He also used the concept of the weight-loaded, in this case as a public-house beer-engine. He devised machinery for carbonating soda water. The first banknote-numbering machine was of his design and was bought by the Bank of England. His development of a machine to cut twelve nibs from one goose quill started a patent specification which ended with the invention of the fountain pen, patented in 1809. His coach brakes were an innovation that was followed bv a form of hydropneumatic carriage suspension that was somewhat in advance of its time, as was his patent of 1812. This foresaw the introduction of hydraulic power mains in major cities and included the telescopic ram and the air-loaded accumulator.In all Joseph Bramah was granted eighteen patents. On 22 March 1813 he demonstrated a hydraulic machine for pulling up trees by the roots in Hyde Park before a large crowd headed by the Duke of York. Using the same machine in Alice Holt Forest in Hampshire to fell timber for ships for the Navy, he caught a chill and died soon after at his home in Pimlico.[br]Bibliography1778, British patent no. 1177 (water-closet). 1784, British patent no. 1430 (Bramah Lock). 1795, British patent no. 2045 (hydraulic press). 1809, British patent no. 3260 (fountain pen). 1812, British patent no. 3611.Further ReadingI.McNeil, 1968, Joseph Bramah, a Century of Invention.S.Smiles, 1863, Industrial Biography.H.W.Dickinson, 1942, "Joseph Bramah and his inventions", Transactions of the Newcomen Society 22:169–86.IMcN -
2 Clement (Clemmet), Joseph
SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering[br]bapt. 13 June 1779 Great Asby, Westmoreland, Englandd. 28 February 1844 London, England[br]English machine tool builder and inventor.[br]Although known as Clement in his professional life, his baptism at Asby and his death were registered under the name of Joseph Clemmet. He worked as a slater until the age of 23, but his interest in mechanics led him to spend much of his spare time in the local blacksmith's shop. By studying books on mechanics borrowed from his cousin, a watchmaker, he taught himself and with the aid of the village blacksmith made his own lathe. By 1805 he was able to give up the slating trade and find employment as a mechanic in a small factory at Kirkby Stephen. From there he moved to Carlisle for two years, and then to Glasgow where, while working as a turner, he took lessons in drawing; he had a natural talent and soon became an expert draughtsman. From about 1809 he was employed by Leys, Mason \& Co. of Aberdeen designing and making power looms. For this work he built a screw-cutting lathe and continued his self-education. At the end of 1813, having saved about £100, he made his way to London, where he soon found employment as a mechanic and draughtsman. Within a few months he was engaged by Joseph Bramah, and after a trial period a formal agreement dated 1 April 1814 was made by which Clement was to be Chief Draughtsman and Superintendent of Bramah's Pimlico works for five years. However, Bramah died in December 1814 and after his sons took over the business it was agreed that Clement should leave before the expiry of the five-year period. He soon found employment as Chief Draughtsman with Henry Maudslay \& Co. By 1817 Clement had saved about £500, which enabled him to establish his own business at Prospect Place, Newington Butts, as a mechanical draughtsman and manufacturer of high-class machinery. For this purpose he built lathes for his own use and invented various improvements in their detailed design. In 1827 he designed and built a facing lathe which incorporated an ingenious system of infinitely variable belt gearing. He had also built his own planing machine by 1820 and another, much larger one in 1825. In 1828 Clement began making fluted taps and dies and standardized the screw threads, thus anticipating on a small scale the national standards later established by Sir Joseph Whitworth. Because of his reputation for first-class workmanship, Clement was in the 1820s engaged by Charles Babbage to carry out the construction of his first Difference Engine.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsSociety of Arts Gold Medal 1818 (for straightline mechanism), 1827 (for facing lathe); Silver Medal 1828 (for lathe-driving device).BibliographyExamples of Clement's draughtsmanship can be found in the Transactions of the Society of Arts 33 (1817), 36 (1818), 43 (1925), 46 (1828) and 48 (1829).Further ReadingS.Smiles, 1863, Industrial Biography, London, reprinted 1967, Newton Abbot (virtually the only source of biographical information on Clement).L.T.C.Rolt, 1965, Tools for the Job, London (repub. 1986); W.Steeds, 1969, A History of Machine Tools 1700–1910, Oxford (both contain descriptions of his machine tools).RTSBiographical history of technology > Clement (Clemmet), Joseph
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3 Civil engineering
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4 Land transport
See also: INDEX BY SUBJECT AREA[br]Austin, HerbertHamilton, Harold LeeIssigonis, Sir Alexander Arnold ConstantineMa JunMorris, William RichardSauerbrun, Charles de -
5 Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering
See also: INDEX BY SUBJECT AREA[br]Clement, JosephDu ShiDu YuGongshu PanLi BingMa JunMurdock, WilliamSomerset, EdwardBiographical history of technology > Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering
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6 Domestic appliances and interiors
Biographical history of technology > Domestic appliances and interiors
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7 Public utilities
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8 Maudslay, Henry
SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering[br]b. 22 August 1771 Woolwich, Kent, Englandd. 15 February 1831 Lambeth, London, England[br]English precision toolmaker and engineer.[br]Henry Maudslay was the third son of an ex-soldier and storekeeper at Woolwich Arsenal. At the age of 12 he was employed at the Arsenal filling cartridges; two years later he was transferred to the woodworking department, adjacent to the smithy, to which he moved when 15 years old. He was a rapid learner, and three years later Joseph Bramah took him on for the construction of special tools required for the mass-production of his locks. Maudslay was thus employed for the next eight years. He became Bramah's foreman, married his housekeeper, Sarah Tindale, and, unable to better himself, decided to leave and set up on his own. He soon outgrew his first premises in Wells Street and moved to Margaret Street, off Oxford Street, where some examples of his workmanship were displayed in the window. These caught the attention of a visiting Frenchman, de Bacquancourt; he was a friend of Marc Isambard Brunel, who was then in the early stages of designing the block-making machinery later installed at Portsmouth dockyard.Brunel wanted first a set of working models, as he did not think that the Lords of the Admiralty would be capable of understanding engineering drawings; Maudslay made these for him within the next two years. Sir Samuel Bentham, Inspector-General of Naval Works, agreed that Brunel's system was superior to the one that he had gone some way in developing; the Admiralty approved, and an order was placed for the complete plant. The manufacture of the machinery occupied Maudslay for the next six years; he was assisted by a draughtsman whom he took on from Portsmouth dockyard, Joshua Field (1786–1863), who became his partner in Maudslay, Son and Field. There were as many as eighty employees at Margaret Street until, in 1810, larger premises became necessary and a new works was built at Lambeth Marsh where, eventually, there were up to two hundred workers. The new factory was flanked by two houses, one of which was occupied by Maudslay, the other by Field. The firm became noted for its production of marine steam-engines, notably Maudslay's table engine which was first introduced in 1807.Maudslay was a consummate craftsman who was never happier than when working at his bench or at a machine tool; he was also one of the first engineers to appreciate the virtues of standardization. Evidence of this appreciation is to be found in his work in the development of the Bramah lock and then on the machine tools for the manufacture of ship's blocks to Marc Brunel's designs; possibly his most important contribution was the invention in 1797 of the metal lathe. He made a number of surface plates of the finest quality. The most celebrated of his numerous measuring devices was a micrometer-based machine which he termed his "Lord Chancellor" because, in the machine shop, it represented the "final court of appeal", measuring to one-thousandth of an inch.[br]Further Reading1934–5, "Maudslay, Sons \& Field as general engineers", Transactions of the Newcomen Society 15, London.1963, Engineering Heritage, Vol. 1, London: Institution of Mechanical Engineers. L.T.C.Rolt, 1965, Tools for the Job, London: Batsford.W.Steeds, 1969, A History of Machine Tools 1700–1910, Oxford: Oxford University Press.IMcN -
9 Mylne, Robert
[br]b. 1733 Edinburgh, Scotland d. 1811[br]Scottish engineer, architect and bridge-builder.[br]Mylne was the eldest son of Thomas Mylne, Surveyor to the City of Edinburgh. Little is known of his early education. In 1754, at the age of 21, he left Edinburgh by sea and journeyed to Rome, where he attended the Academy of St Luke. There he received the first prize for architecture. In 1759 he left Rome to travel back to England, where he arrived in time for the competition then going ahead for the design and building of a new bridge across the Thames at Blackfriars. Against 68 other competitors, Mylne won the competition; the work took some ten years to complete.In 1760 he was appointed Engineer and Architect to the City of London, and in 1767 Joint Engineer to the New River Company together with Henry Mill, who died within a few years to leave Mylne to become Chief Engineer in 1770. Thus for the next forty years he was in charge of all the works for the New River Company between Clerkenwell and Ware, the opposite ends of London's main water supply. By 1767 he had also been appointed to a number of other important posts, which included Surveyor to Canterbury Cathedral and St Paul's Cathedral. In addition to undertaking his responsibilities for these great public buildings, he designed many private houses and villas all over the country, including several buildings for the Duke of Argyll on the Inverary Castle estate.Mylne was also responsible for the design of a great number of bridges, waterworks and other civil engineering works throughout Britain. Called in to advise on the Norwich city waterworks, he fell out with Joseph Bramah in a somewhat spectacular dispute.For much of his life Mylne lived at the Water House at the New River Head at Islington, from which he could direct much of the work on that waterway that came under his supervision. He also had residences in New Bridge Street and, as Clerk of Works, at Greenwich Hospital. Towards the end of his life he built himself a small house at Amwell, a country retreat at the outer end of the New River. He kept a diary from 1762 to 1810 which includes only brief memoranda but which shows a remarkable diligence in travelling all over the country by stagecoach and by postchaise. He was a freemason, as were many of his family; he married Mary Home on 10 September 1770, with whom he had ten children, four of whom survived into adulthood.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsFellow of the Royal Society 1767.Further ReadingDictionary of National Biography, London.A.E.Richardson, 1955, Robert Mylne, 1733–1811, Engineer and Architect, London: Batsford. -
10 Pascal, Blaise
SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology[br]b. 19 June 1623 Clermont Ferrand, Franced. 19 August 1662 Paris, France[br]French mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher.[br]Pascal was the son of Etienne Pascal, President of the Court of Aids. His mother died when he was 3 years old and he was brought up largely by his two sisters, one of whom was a nun at Port Royal. They moved to Paris in 1631 and again to Rouen ten years later. He received no formal education. In 1654 he was involved in a carriage accident in which he saw a mystical vision of God and from then on confined himself to philosophical rather than scientific matters. In the field of mathematics he is best known for his work on conic sections and on the laws of probability. As a youth he designed a calculating machine of which, it is said, some seventy were made. His main contribution to technology was his elucidation of the laws of hydrostatics which formed the basis of all hydrostatic machines in subsequent years. Pascal, however, did not put these laws to any practical use: that was left to the English cabinet-maker and engineer Joseph Bramah more than a century later. Suffering from indifferent health, Pascal persuaded his brother-in-law Périer to repeat the experiments of Evangelista Torricelli on the pressure of the atmosphere. This involved climbing the 4,000 ft (1,220 m) of the Puy de Dôme, a mountain close to Clermont, with a heavy mercury-in-glass barometer. The experiment was reported in the 1647 pamphlet "Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide". The Hydrostatic Law was laid down by Pascal in Traité de l'équilibre des liqueurs, published a year after his death. In this he established the fact that in a fluid at rest the pressure is transmitted equally in all directions.[br]Bibliography1647, "Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide". 1663, Traité de l'équilibre des liqueurs.Further ReadingJ.Mesnard, 1951, Pascal, His Life and Works.I.McNeil, 1972, Hydraulic Power, London: Longmans.IMcN
См. также в других словарях:
Bramah, Joseph — born April 13, 1748, Stainborough, Yorkshire, Eng. died Dec. 9, 1814, London British engineer and inventor. Originally a cabinetmaker, Bramah in 1784 devised a pick proof lock, which defied all efforts for 67 years. Since the success of his locks … Universalium
Bramah, Joseph — (13 abr. 1748, Stainborough, Yorkshire, Inglaterra–9 dic. 1814, Londres). Ingeniero e inventor británico. Originalmente un ebanista, ideó en 1784 una cerradura a prueba de ganzúa, que desafió todos los esfuerzos por violarla durante 67 años. Como … Enciclopedia Universal
BRAMAH, JOSEPH — an engineer, born in Barnsley, Yorkshire; author of many mechanical inventions, 18 of which were patented, among others the hydraulic press, named after him (1748 1814) … The Nuttall Encyclopaedia
Bramah, Joseph — the Englishman who had the world s first patent of a locking mechanism in 1784. It was the first lock incorporating a cylinder whose key did not contact the lock bolt directly … Locksmith dictionary
Joseph Bramah — est un mécanicien et inventeur anglais né à Stainborough dans le Yorkshire le 13 avril 1748[1] et décédé de pneumonie à Holt Forest dans le Hampshire le 9 décembre 1814. On lui doit notamment la serrure à pompe ou serrure de… … Wikipédia en Français
Bramah — Bramah, Joseph, Mechaniker, geb. 13. April 1749 zu Stainborough in der engl. Grafschaft York, gest. 9. Dez. 1814 in London, erfand 1793 die Waterclosets, 1784 ein Kombinationsschloß und 1796 die hydraulische Presse, ferner auch eine Presse zum… … Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon
Bramah — Bramah, Joseph, engl. Mechaniker, geb. 13. April 1749 zu Stainborough (Yorkshire), gest. 9. Dez. 1814 zu London; erfand 1783 die Waterklosetts, 1784 das nach ihm benannte Kombinationsschloß (s. Bramahschloß), 1796 die hydraulische Presse, ferner… … Kleines Konversations-Lexikon
Joseph Bramah — Infobox Scientist name = Joseph Bramah box width = image width =150px caption = Joseph Bramah birth date = 13 April 1748 birth place = Wentworth, Yorkshire death date = 9 December 1814 death place = Pimlico residence = citizenship = nationality … Wikipedia
BRAMAH — UNITED KINGDOM (see also List of Individuals) 13.4.1748 Stainborough/UK 9.12.1814 Pimlico, London/UK Joseph Bramah was born in Yorkshire. Prevented by an accident from following his father as a farmer Bramah was apprenticed as a carpenter and… … Hydraulicians in Europe 1800-2000
Joseph — /joh zeuhf, seuhf/, n. 1. Jacob s eleventh son, the first of Jacob and his second wife, Rachel: sold into slavery by his brothers. Gen. 30:22 24; 37. 2. the husband of Mary who was the mother of Jesus. Matt. 1:16 25. 3. (Hinmaton yalaktit), c1840 … Universalium
Joseph — (as used in expressions) Abbot, Sir John (Joseph Caldwell) Addison, Joseph Akiba ben Joseph Jacques Joseph Ahearn Arrow, Kenneth J(oseph) Abba Mari ben Moses ben Joseph Banks, Sir Joseph Belloc, (Joseph Pierre) Hilaire Berrigan, Daniel (Joseph) y … Enciclopedia Universal