Brunel's

druž. ime

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Land transport, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Ports and shipping, Public utilities, Railways and locomotives

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The son of Marc Isambard Brunel and Sophia Kingdom, he was educated at a private boarding-school in Hove. At the age of 14 he went to the College of Caen and then to the Lycée Henri-Quatre in Paris, after which he was apprenticed to Louis Breguet. In 1822 he returned from France and started working in his father's office, while spending much of his time at the works of Maudslay, Sons \& Field.

From 1825 to 1828 he worked under his father on the construction of the latter's Thames Tunnel, occupying the position of Engineer-in-Charge, exhibiting great courage and presence of mind in the emergencies which occurred not infrequently. These culminated in January 1828 in the flooding of the tunnel and work was suspended for seven years. For the next five years the young engineer made abortive attempts to find a suitable outlet for his talents, but to little avail. Eventually, in 1831, his design for a suspension bridge over the River Avon at Clifton Gorge was accepted and he was appointed Engineer. (The bridge was eventually finished five years after Brunel's death, as a memorial to him, the delay being due to inadequate financing.) He next planned and supervised improvements to the Bristol docks. In March 1833 he was appointed Engineer of the Bristol Railway, later called the Great Western Railway. He immediately started to survey the route between London and Bristol that was completed by late August that year. On 5 July 1836 he married Mary Horsley and settled into 18 Duke Street, Westminster, London, where he also had his office. Work on the Bristol Railway started in 1836. The foundation stone of the Clifton Suspension Bridge was laid the same year. Whereas George Stephenson had based his standard railway gauge as 4 ft 8½ in (1.44 m), that or a similar gauge being usual for colliery wagonways in the Newcastle area, Brunel adopted the broader gauge of 7 ft (2.13 m). The first stretch of the line, from Paddington to Maidenhead, was opened to traffic on 4 June 1838, and the whole line from London to Bristol was opened in June 1841. The continuation of the line through to Exeter was completed and opened on 1 May 1844. The normal time for the 194-mile (312 km) run from Paddington to Exeter was 5 hours, at an average speed of 38.8 mph (62.4 km/h) including stops. The Great Western line included the Box Tunnel, the longest tunnel to that date at nearly two miles (3.2 km).

Brunel was the engineer of most of the railways in the West Country, in South Wales and much of Southern Ireland. As railway networks developed, the frequent break of gauge became more of a problem and on 9 July 1845 a Royal Commission was appointed to look into it. In spite of comparative tests, run between Paddington-Didcot and Darlington-York, which showed in favour of Brunel's arrangement, the enquiry ruled in favour of the narrow gauge, 274 miles (441 km) of the former having been built against 1,901 miles (3,059 km) of the latter to that date. The Gauge Act of 1846 forbade the building of any further railways in Britain to any gauge other than 4 ft 8 1/2 in (1.44 m).

The existence of long and severe gradients on the South Devon Railway led to Brunel's adoption of the atmospheric railway developed by Samuel Clegg and later by the Samuda brothers. In this a pipe of 9 in. (23 cm) or more in diameter was laid between the rails, along the top of which ran a continuous hinged flap of leather backed with iron. At intervals of about 3 miles (4.8 km) were pumping stations to exhaust the pipe. Much trouble was experienced with the flap valve and its lubrication—freezing of the leather in winter, the lubricant being sucked into the pipe or eaten by rats at other times—and the experiment was abandoned at considerable cost.

Brunel is to be remembered for his two great West Country tubular bridges, the Chepstow and the Tamar Bridge at Saltash, with the latter opened in May 1859, having two main spans of 465 ft (142 m) and a central pier extending 80 ft (24 m) below high water mark and allowing 100 ft (30 m) of headroom above the same. His timber viaducts throughout Devon and Cornwall became a feature of the landscape. The line was extended ultimately to Penzance.

As early as 1835 Brunel had the idea of extending the line westwards across the Atlantic from Bristol to New York by means of a steamship. In 1836 building commenced and the hull left Bristol in July 1837 for fitting out at Wapping. On 31 March 1838 the ship left again for Bristol but the boiler lagging caught fire and Brunel was injured in the subsequent confusion. On 8 April the ship set sail for New York (under steam), its rival, the 703-ton Sirius, having left four days earlier. The 1,340-ton Great Western arrived only a few hours after the Sirius. The hull was of wood, and was copper-sheathed. In 1838 Brunel planned a larger ship, some 3,000 tons, the Great Britain, which was to have an iron hull.

The Great Britain was screwdriven and was launched on 19 July 1843,289 ft (88 m) long by 51 ft (15.5 m) at its widest. The ship's first voyage, from Liverpool to New York, began on 26 August 1845. In 1846 it ran aground in Dundrum Bay, County Down, and was later sold for use on the Australian run, on which it sailed no fewer than thirty-two times in twenty-three years, also serving as a troop-ship in the Crimean War. During this war, Brunel designed a 1,000-bed hospital which was shipped out to Renkioi ready for assembly and complete with shower-baths and vapour-baths with printed instructions on how to use them, beds and bedding and water closets with a supply of toilet paper! Brunel's last, largest and most extravagantly conceived ship was the Great Leviathan, eventually named The Great Eastern, which had a double-skinned iron hull, together with both paddles and screw propeller. Brunel designed the ship to carry sufficient coal for the round trip to Australia without refuelling, thus saving the need for and the cost of bunkering, as there were then few bunkering ports throughout the world. The ship's construction was started by John Scott Russell in his yard at Millwall on the Thames, but the building was completed by Brunel due to Russell's bankruptcy in 1856. The hull of the huge vessel was laid down so as to be launched sideways into the river and then to be floated on the tide. Brunel's plan for hydraulic launching gear had been turned down by the directors on the grounds of cost, an economy that proved false in the event. The sideways launch with over 4,000 tons of hydraulic power together with steam winches and floating tugs on the river took over two months, from 3 November 1857 until 13 January 1858. The ship was 680 ft (207 m) long, 83 ft (25 m) beam and 58 ft (18 m) deep; the screw was 24 ft (7.3 m) in diameter and paddles 60 ft (18.3 m) in diameter. Its displacement was 32,000 tons (32,500 tonnes).

The strain of overwork and the huge responsibilities that lay on Brunel began to tell. He was diagnosed as suffering from Bright's disease, or nephritis, and spent the winter travelling in the Mediterranean and Egypt, returning to England in May 1859. On 5 September he suffered a stroke which left him partially paralysed, and he died ten days later at his Duke Street home.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Mining and extraction technology, Ports and shipping

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His mother died when he was 7 years old, a year later he went to college in Gisors and later to the Seminary of Sainte-Nicaise at Rouen. From 1786 to 1792 he followed a career in the French navy as a junior officer. In Rouen he met Sophie Kingdom, daughter of a British Navy contractor, whom he was later to marry. In July 1793 Marc sailed for America from Le Havre. He was to remain there for six years, and became an American citizen, occupying himself as a land surveyor and as an architect. He became Chief Engineer to the City of New York. At General Hamilton's dinner table he learned that the British Navy used over 100,000 ship's blocks every year; this started him thinking how the manufacture of blocks could be mechanized. He roughed out a set of machines to do the job, resigned his post as Chief Engineer and sailed for England in February 1799.

In London he was shortly introduced to Henry Maudslay, to whom he showed the drawings of his proposed machines and with whom he placed an order for their manufacture. The first machines were completed by mid-1803. Altogether Maudslay produced twenty-one machines for preparing the shells, sixteen for preparing the sheaves and eight other machines.

In February 1809 he saw troops at Portsmouth returning from Corunna, the victors, with their lacerated feet bound in rags. He resolved to mechanize the production of boots for the Army and, within a few months, had twenty-four disabled soldiers working the machinery he had invented and installed near his Battersea sawmill. The plant could produce 400 pairs of boots and shoes a day, selling at between 9s. 6d. and 20s. a pair. One day in 1817 at Chatham dockyard he observed a piece of scrap keel timber, showing the ravages wrought by the shipworm, Teredo navalis, which, with its proboscis protected by two jagged concave triangular shells, consumes, digests and finally excretes the ship's timbers as it gnaws its way through them. The excreted material provided material for lining the walls of the tunnel the worm had drilled. Brunel decided to imitate the action of the shipworm on a large scale: the Thames Tunnel was to occupy Marc Brunel for most of the remainder of his life. Boring started in March 1825 and was completed by March 1843. The project lay dormant for long periods, but eventually the 1,200 ft (366 m)-long tunnel was completed. Marc Isambard Brunel died at the age of 80 and was buried at Kensal Green cemetery.

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Universidad Brunel.

plural de BRUNEL UNIVERSITY, UXBRIDGE AND LONDON

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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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.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Land transport, Railways and locomotives, Telecommunications

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Gooch gained experience as a pupil with several successive engineering firms, including Vulcan Foundry and Robert Stephenson \& Co. In 1837 he was engaged by I.K. Brunel, who was then building the Great Western Railway (GWR) to the broad gauge of 7 ft 1/4 in. (2.14 m), to take charge of the railway's locomotive department. He was just 21 years old. The initial locomotive stock comprised several locomotives built to such extreme specifications laid down by Brunel that they were virtually unworkable, and two 2–2–2 locomotives, North Star and Morning Star, which had been built by Robert Stephenson \& Co. but left on the builder's hands. These latter were reliable and were perpetuated. An enlarged version, the "Fire Fly" class, was designed by Gooch and built in quantity: Gooch was an early proponent of standardization. His highly successful 4–2–2 Iron Duke of 1847 became the prototype of GWR express locomotives for the next forty-five years, until the railway's last broad-gauge sections were narrowed. Meanwhile Gooch had been largely responsible for establishing Swindon Works, opened in 1843. In 1862 he designed 2–4–0 condensing tank locomotives to work the first urban underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway in London. Gooch retired in 1864 but was then instrumental in arranging for Brunel's immense steamship Great Eastern to be used to lay the first transatlantic electric telegraph cable: he was on board when the cable was successfully laid in 1866. He had been elected Member of Parliament for Cricklade (which constituency included Swindon) in 1865, and the same year he had accepted an invitation to become Chairman of the Great Western Railway Company, which was in financial difficulties; he rescued it from near bankruptcy and remained Chairman until shortly before his death. The greatest engineering work undertaken during his chairmanship was the boring of the Severn Tunnel.

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See also: INDEX BY SUBJECT AREA

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Albert, Prince Consort

Aubert, Jean

Bailey, Sir Donald Coleman

Bateman, John Frederick La Trobe

Bell, Imrie

Booth, Hubert Cecil

Bouch, Sir Thomas

Bramah, Joseph

Brunel, Isambard Kingdom

Brunel, Sir Marc Isambard

Clark, Edwin

Cubitt, William

Deas, James

Doane, Thomas

Downing, Samuel

Du Yu

Dyer, Henry

Eads, James Buchanan

Eiffel, Alexandre Gustave

Ellet, Charles

Field, Joshua

Fowler, John

Fox, Sir Charles

Freyssinet, Eugène

Frost, James

Gamond, Aimé Thomé de

Giles, Francis

Gooch, Sir Daniel

Gordon, Lewis Dunbar Brodie

Greathead, James Henry

Guo Shoujing

Hennébique, François

Hodgkinson, Eaton

Holabird, William

Hosking, William

Howe, William

Jenney, William Le Baron

Jervis, John Bloomfield

Jessop, William

Johnson, Isaac Charles

Johnston, William J.

Lascelles, William

Li Chun

Locke, Joseph

McAdam, John Loudon

Merritt, William Hamilton

Metcalf, John

Monier, Joseph

Mylne, Robert

Nervi, Pier Luigi

Palmer, Henry Robinson

Parker, James

Pasley, General Sir Charles William

Paxton, Sir Joseph

Perret, Auguste

Pole, William

Pratt, Thomas Willis

Pritchard, Thomas Farnolls

Ransome, Frederick

Rennie, John

Riquet, Pierre Paul

Roebling, John Augustus

Roebling, Washington Augustus

Rondelet, Jean-Baptiste

Shaw, Percy

Shi Lu

Smeaton, John

Smith, Charles Shaler

Sommeiller, Germain

Steers, Thomas

Telford, Thomas

Town, Ithiel

Trésaguet, Pierre Marie Jerome

Turner, Richard

Türr, Istvan

Twiss, William

Unwin, William Cawthorne

Vauban, Sébastien de

Vermuyden, Sir Cornelius

Villard de Honnecourt

Whipple, Squire

White, Canvass

Williams, Sir Edward Leader

Yeoman, Thomas

See also: INDEX BY SUBJECT AREA

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Archimedes of Syracuse

Armstrong, Sir William George

Atwood, George

Ayre, Sir Amos Lowrey

Barlow, Peter

Barnaby, Kenneth C.

Barnett, James Rennie

Bell, Henry

Bell, Imrie

Bentham, Sir Samuel

Berry, Henry

Biles, Sir John Harvard

Booth, Hubert Cecil

Brown, Andrew

Brunel, Isambard Kingdom

Brunel, Sir Marc Isambard

Burrell, William

Caird, Sir James

Chapman, Frederik Henrik af

Cockerell, Christopher Sydney

Cousteau, Jacques-Yves

Cubitt, William

Dalen, Nils Gustav

Davis, Robert Henry

Deane, Sir Anthony

Deas, James

Denny, William

Du Cane, Peter

Egerton, Francis

Elder, John

Elgar, Francis

Ericsson, John

Fairbairn, William

Ferguson, Peter Jack

Fife, William

Fox, Uffa

Foyn, Svend

Froude, William

Fulton, Robert

Giles, Francis

Harrison, John

Henry, James J.

Herreshoff, Nathaniel Greene

Holland, John Philip

Hulls, Jonathan

Jessop, William

Kennedy, Sir Alexander Blackie William

King, James Foster

Kirk, Alexander Carnegie

Kirkaldy, David

Krylov, Alexei Nicolaevitch

Laird, John

Li Gao

Linton, Hercules

Lithgow, James

Lobnitz, Frederick

MacGregor, Robert

McKay, Donald

McNeill, Sir James McFadyen

Mavor, Henry Alexander

Meek, Marshall

Miller, Patrick

Mitchell, Charles

Murray, John Mackay

Napier, Robert

Parsons, Sir Charles Algernon

Peter the Great

Plimsoll, Samuel

Popoff, Andrei Alexandrovitch

Pounder, Cuthbert Coulson

Purvis, Frank Prior

Railton, Reid Anthony

Ramus, Revd C.M.

Rickover, Admiral Hyman George

Russell, John Scott

Samuda, Joseph d'Aguilar

Schanck, John

Seppings, Robert

Shen Gua

Sickels, Frederick Ellsworth

Simpson, Thomas

Smith, Sir Francis Pettit

Sperry, Elmer Ambrose

Stalkartt, Marmaduke

Stanhope, Charles

Steers, Thomas

Stevens, John

Stevens, Robert Livingston

Stevenson, Robert

Symington, William

Taylor, David Watson

Temple, Lewis

Tideman, Bruno Joannes

Wallace, Sir William

Watson, George Lennox

Watts, Philip

Waymouth, Bernard

White, Sir William Henry

Williams, Thomas

Wilson, Thomas

Yarrow, Sir Alfred Fernandez

Yourkevitch, Vladimir Ivanovitch

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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A son of the manse, Russell was originally destined for the Church and commenced studies at the University of St Andrews, but shortly afterwards he transferred to Glasgow, graduating MA in 1825 when only 17 years old. He began work as a teacher in Edinburgh, working up from a school to the Mechanics Institute and then in 1832 to the University, where he took over the classes in natural philosophy following the death of the professor. During this period he designed and advised on the application of steam power to road transport and to the Forth and Clyde Canal, thereby awakening his interest in ships and naval architecture.

Russell presented papers to the British Association over several years, and one of them, The Wave Line Theory of Ship Form (although now superseded), had great influence on ship designers of the time and helped to establish the formal study of hydromechanics. With a name that was becoming well known, Russell looked around for better opportunities, and on narrowly missing appointment to the Chair of Mathematics at Edinburgh University he joined the upand-coming Clyde shipyard of Caird \& Co., Greenock, as Manager in 1838.

Around 1844 Russell and his family moved to London; following some business problems he was in straitened circumstances. However, appointment as Secretary to the Committee setting up the Great Exhibition of 1851 eased his path into London's intellectual society and allowed him to take on tasks such as, in 1847, the purchase of Fairbairn's shipyard on the Isle of Dogs and the subsequent building there of I.K. Brunel's Great Eastern steamship. This unhappy undertaking was a millstone around the necks of Brunel and Russell and broke the health of the former. With the yard failing to secure the order for HMS Warrior, the Royal Navy's first ironclad, Russell pulled out of shipbuilding and for the remainder of his life was a designer, consultant and at times controversial, but at all times polished and urbane, member of many important committees and societies. He is remembered as one of the founders of the Institution of Naval Architects in 1860. His last task was to design a Swiss Lake steamer for Messrs Escher Wyss, a company that coincidentally had previously retained Sir William Fairbairn.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Smith was the only son of Charles Smith, Postmaster at Hythe, and his wife Sarah (née Pettit). After education at a private school in Ashford, Kent, he took to farming, first on Romney Marsh, then at Hendon, Middlesex. As a boy, he showed much skill in the construction of model boats, especially in devising their means of propulsion. He maintained this interest into adult life and in 1835 he made a model propelled by a screw driven by a spring. This worked so well that he became convinced that the screw propeller offered a better method of propulsion than the paddle wheels that were then in general use. This notion so fired his enthusiasm that he virtually gave up farming to devote himself to perfecting his invention. The following year he produced a better model, which he successfully demonstrated to friends on his farm at Hendon and afterwards to the public at the Adelaide Gallery in London. On 31 May 1836 Smith was granted a patent for the propulsion of vessels by means of a screw.

The idea of screw propulsion was not new, however, for it had been mooted as early as the seventeenth century and since then several proposals had been advanced, but without successful practical application. Indeed, simultaneously but quite independently of Smith, the Swedish engineer John Ericsson had invented the ship's propeller and obtained a patent on 13 July 1836, just weeks after Smith. But Smith was completely unaware of this and pursued his own device in the belief that he was the sole inventor.

With some financial and technical backing, Smith was able to construct a 10 ton boat driven by a screw and powered by a steam engine of about 6 hp (4.5 kW). After showing it off to the public, Smith tried it out at sea, from Ramsgate round to Dover and Hythe, returning in stormy weather. The screw performed well in both calm and rough water. The engineering world seemed opposed to the new method of propulsion, but the Admiralty gave cautious encouragement in 1839 by ordering that the 237 ton Archimedes be equipped with a screw. It showed itself superior to the Vulcan, one of the fastest paddle-driven ships in the Navy. The ship was put through its paces in several ports, including Bristol, where Isambard Kingdom Brunel was constructing his Great Britain, the first large iron ocean-going vessel. Brunel was so impressed that he adapted his ship for screw propulsion.

Meanwhile, in spite of favourable reports, the Admiralty were dragging their feet and ordered further trials, fitting Smith's four-bladed propeller to the Rattler, then under construction and completed in 1844. The trials were a complete success and propelled their lordships of the Admiralty to a decision to equip twenty ships with screw propulsion, under Smith's supervision.

At last the superiority of screw propulsion was generally accepted and virtually universally adopted. Yet Smith gained little financial reward for his invention and in 1850 he retired to Guernsey to resume his farming life. In 1860 financial pressures compelled him to accept the position of Curator of Patent Models at the Patent Museum in South Kensington, London, a post he held until his death. Belated recognition by the Government, then headed by Lord Palmerston, came in 1855 with the grant of an annual pension of £200. Two years later Smith received unofficial recognition when he was presented with a national testimonial, consisting of a service of plate and nearly £3,000 in cash subscribed largely by the shipbuilding and engineering community. Finally, in 1871 Smith was honoured with a knighthood.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Robert Stephenson's father was George Stephenson, who ensured that his son was educated to obtain the theoretical knowledge he lacked himself. In 1821 Robert Stephenson assisted his father in his survey of the Stockton \& Darlington Railway and in 1822 he assisted William James in the first survey of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway. He then went to Edinburgh University for six months, and the following year Robert Stephenson \& Co. was named after him as Managing Partner when it was formed by himself, his father and others. The firm was to build stationary engines, locomotives and railway rolling stock; in its early years it also built paper-making machinery and did general engineering.

In 1824, however, Robert Stephenson accepted, perhaps in reaction to an excess of parental control, an invitation by a group of London speculators called the Colombian Mining Association to lead an expedition to South America to use steam power to reopen gold and silver mines. He subsequently visited North America before returning to England in 1827 to rejoin his father as an equal and again take charge of Robert Stephenson \& Co. There he set about altering the design of steam locomotives to improve both their riding and their steam-generating capacity. Lancashire Witch, completed in July 1828, was the first locomotive mounted on steel springs and had twin furnace tubes through the boiler to produce a large heating surface. Later that year Robert Stephenson \& Co. supplied the Stockton \& Darlington Railway with a wagon, mounted for the first time on springs and with outside bearings. It was to be the prototype of the standard British railway wagon. Between April and September 1829 Robert Stephenson built, not without difficulty, a multi-tubular boiler, as suggested by Henry Booth to George Stephenson, and incorporated it into the locomotive Rocket which the three men entered in the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway's Rainhill Trials in October. Rocket, was outstandingly successful and demonstrated that the long-distance steam railway was practicable.

Robert Stephenson continued to develop the locomotive. Northumbrian, built in 1830, had for the first time, a smokebox at the front of the boiler and also the firebox built integrally with the rear of the boiler. Then in Planet, built later the same year, he adopted a layout for the working parts used earlier by steam road-coach pioneer Goldsworthy Gurney, placing the cylinders, for the first time, in a nearly horizontal position beneath the smokebox, with the connecting rods driving a cranked axle. He had evolved the definitive form for the steam locomotive.

Also in 1830, Robert Stephenson surveyed the London \& Birmingham Railway, which was authorized by Act of Parliament in 1833. Stephenson became Engineer for construction of the 112-mile (180 km) railway, probably at that date the greatest task ever undertaken in of civil engineering. In this he was greatly assisted by G.P.Bidder, who as a child prodigy had been known as "The Calculating Boy", and the two men were to be associated in many subsequent projects. On the London \& Birmingham Railway there were long and deep cuttings to be excavated and difficult tunnels to be bored, notoriously at Kilsby. The line was opened in 1838.

In 1837 Stephenson provided facilities for W.F. Cooke to make an experimental electrictelegraph installation at London Euston. The directors of the London \& Birmingham Railway company, however, did not accept his recommendation that they should adopt the electric telegraph and it was left to I.K. Brunel to instigate the first permanent installation, alongside the Great Western Railway. After Cooke formed the Electric Telegraph Company, Stephenson became a shareholder and was Chairman during 1857–8.

Earlier, in the 1830s, Robert Stephenson assisted his father in advising on railways in Belgium and came to be increasingly in demand as a consultant. In 1840, however, he was almost ruined financially as a result of the collapse of the Stanhope \& Tyne Rail Road; in return for acting as Engineer-in-Chief he had unwisely accepted shares, with unlimited liability, instead of a fee.

During the late 1840s Stephenson's greatest achievements were the design and construction of four great bridges, as part of railways for which he was responsible. The High Level Bridge over the Tyne at Newcastle and the Royal Border Bridge over the Tweed at Berwick were the links needed to complete the East Coast Route from London to Scotland. For the Chester \& Holyhead Railway to cross the Menai Strait, a bridge with spans as long-as 460 ft (140 m) was needed: Stephenson designed them as wrought-iron tubes of rectangular cross-section, through which the trains would pass, and eventually joined the spans together into a tube 1,511 ft (460 m) long from shore to shore. Extensive testing was done beforehand by shipbuilder William Fairbairn to prove the method, and as a preliminary it was first used for a 400 ft (122 m) span bridge at Conway.

In 1847 Robert Stephenson was elected MP for Whitby, a position he held until his death, and he was one of the exhibition commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the early 1850s he was Engineer-in-Chief for the Norwegian Trunk Railway, the first railway in Norway, and he also built the Alexandria \& Cairo Railway, the first railway in Africa. This included two tubular bridges with the railway running on top of the tubes. The railway was extended to Suez in 1858 and for several years provided a link in the route from Britain to India, until superseded by the Suez Canal, which Stephenson had opposed in Parliament. The greatest of all his tubular bridges was the Victoria Bridge across the River St Lawrence at Montreal: after inspecting the site in 1852 he was appointed Engineer-in-Chief for the bridge, which was 1 1/2 miles (2 km) long and was designed in his London offices. Sadly he, like Brunel, died young from self-imposed overwork, before the bridge was completed in 1859.

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See also: Pihl, Carl Abraham; Seguin, Marc

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Joseph Aspdin was the eldest of the six children of Thomas Aspdin, a bricklayer. He became interested in making advanced cements for rendering brickwork and, on 21 October 1824, patented a calcined mixture of limestone, clay and water that he called Portland Cement because he thought it resembled Portland Stone in colour.

Aspdin established his first cement works at Kirkgate in Wakefield in 1825: this was demolished in 1838 due to railway development, and a new works was established in the town in 1843. A year later Joseph Aspdin retired and handed the business over to his elder son James. Meanwhile, William, a younger son of Joseph, had also entered the business of manufacturing cement. Born in Leeds on 23 September 1815, he joined his father's firm at the age of 14, but left in 1841 to set up his own firm at Rotherhithe, London. There he manufactured an improved cement that was better and stronger than Parker's Roman Cement, probably because it contained a higher proportion of clinkered material. Further improvements were made during the following years and new factories were established, first at Northfleet in Kent and later at Gateshead on the south bank of the River Tyne (1853). It is interesting that Sir Marc Brunel later preferred to use William Aspdin's cement in the Thames railway tunnel construction because of its greater strength (see Frost). William Aspdin died at Itzehoe in Germany in 1864.

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SUBJECT AREA: Telecommunications

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At the age of 15 years Bright left the London Merchant Taylors' School to join the two-year-old Electric Telegraph Company. By 1851 he was in charge of the Birmingham telegraph station. After a short time as Assistant Engineer with the newly formed British Telegraph Company, he joined his brother (who was Manager) as Engineer-in-Chief of the English and Irish Magnetic Telegraph Company in Liverpool, for which he laid thousands of miles of underground cable and developed a number of innovations in telegraphy including a resistance box for locating cable faults and a two-tone bell system for signalling. In 1853 he was responsible for the first successful underwater cable between Scotland and Ireland. Three years later, with the American financier Cyrus Field and John Brett, he founded and was Engineer-in-chief of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, which aimed at laying a cable between Ireland and Newfoundland. After several unsuccessful attempts this was finally completed on 5 August 1858, Bright was knighted a month later, but the cable then failed! In 1860 Bright resigned from the Magnetic Telegraph Company to set up an independent consultancy with another engineer, Joseph Latimer Clark, with whom he invented an improved bituminous cable insulation. Two years later he supervised construction of a telegraph cable to India, and in 1865 a further attempt to lay an Atlantic cable using Brunel's new ship, the Great Eastern. This cable broke during laying, but in 1866 a new cable was at last successfully laid and the 1865 cable recovered and repaired. The year 1878 saw extension of the Atlantic cable system to the West Indies and the invention with his brother of a system of neighbourhood fire alarms and even an automatic fire alarm.

In 1861 Bright presented a paper to the British Association for the Advancement of Science on the need for electrical standards, leading to the creation of an organization that still exists in the 1990s. From 1865 until 1868 he was Liberal MP for Greenwich, and he later assisted with preparations for the 1881 Paris Exhibition.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives, Telecommunications

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After private education and an engineering apprenticeship, Crampton worked under Marc Brunel, Daniel Gooch and the Rennie brothers before setting up as a civil engineer in 1848. His developing ideas on locomotive design were expressed through a series of five patents taken out between 1842 and 1849, each making a multiplicity of claims. The most typical feature of the Crampton locomotive, however, was a single pair of driving wheels set to the rear of the firebox. This meant they could be of large diameter, while the centre of gravity of the locomotive remained low, for the boiler barrel, though large, had only small carrying-wheels beneath it. The cylinders were approximately midway along the boiler and were outside the frames, as was the valve gear. The result was a steady-riding locomotive which neither pitched about a central driving axle nor hunted from side to side, as did other contemporary locomotives, and its working parts were unusually accessible for maintenance. However, adhesive weight was limited and the long wheelbase tended to damage track. Locomotives of this type were soon superseded on British railways, although they lasted much longer in Germany and France. Locomotives built to the later patents incorporated a long, coupled wheelbase with drive through an intermediate crankshaft, but they mostly had only short lives. In 1851 Crampton, with associates, laid the first successful submarine electric telegraph cable. The previous year the brothers Jacob and John Brett had laid a cable, comprising a copper wire insulated with gutta-percha, beneath the English Channel from Dover to Cap Gris Nez: signals were passed but within a few hours the cable failed. Crampton joined the Bretts' company, put up half the capital needed for another attempt, and designed a much stronger cable. Four gutta-percha-insulated copper wires were twisted together, surrounded by tarred hemp and armoured by galvanized iron wires; this cable was successful.

Crampton was also active in railway civil engineering and in water and gas engineering, and c. 1882 he invented a hydraulic tunnel-boring machine intended for a Channel tunnel.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Born in modest circumstances, Fairbairn nevertheless enjoyed a broad and liberal education until around the age of 14. Thereafter he served an apprenticeship as a millwright in a Northumberland colliery. This seven-year period marked him out as a man of determination and intellectual ability; he planned his life around the practical work of pit-machinery maintenance and devoted his limited free time to the study of mathematics, science and history as well as "Church, Milton and Recreation". Like many before and countless thousands after, he worked in London for some difficult and profitless years, and then moved to Manchester, the city he was to regard as home for the rest of his life. In 1816 he was married. Along with a workmate, James Lillie, he set up a general engineering business, which steadily enlarged and ultimately involved both shipbuilding and boiler-making. The partnership was dissolved in 1832 and Fairbairn continued on his own. Consultancy work commissioned by the Forth and Clyde Canal led to the construction of iron steamships by Fairbairn for the canal; one of these, the PS Manchester was lost in the Irish Sea (through the little-understood phenomenon of compass deviation) on her delivery voyage from Manchester to the Clyde. This brought Fairbairn to the forefront of research in this field and confirmed him as a shipbuilder in the novel construction of iron vessels. In 1835 he operated the Millwall Shipyard on the Isle of Dogs on the Thames; this is regarded as one of the first two shipyards dedicated to iron production from the outset (the other being Tod and MacGregor of Glasgow). Losses at the London yard forced Fairbairn to sell off, and the yard passed into the hands of John Scott Russell, who built the I.K. Brunel -designed Great Eastern on the site. However, his business in Manchester went from strength to strength: he produced an improved Cornish boiler with two firetubes, known as the Lancashire boiler; he invented a riveting machine; and designed the beautiful swan-necked box-structured crane that is known as the Fairbairn crane to this day.

Throughout his life he advocated the widest use of iron; he served on the Admiralty Committee of 1861 investigating the use of this material in the Royal Navy. In his later years he travelled widely in Europe as an engineering consultant and published many papers on engineering. His contribution to worldwide engineering was recognized during his lifetime by the conferment of a baronetcy by Queen Victoria.

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SUBJECT AREA: Telecommunications

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At the age of 15 Field left home to seek his fortune in New York, starting work on Broadway as an errand boy for $1 per week. Returning to Massachusetts, in 1838 he became an assistant to his brother Matthew, a paper-maker, leaving to set up his own business two years later. By the age of 21 he was also a partner in a New York firm of paper wholesalers, but this firm collapsed because of large debts. Out of the wreckage he set up Cyrus W.Field \& Co., and by 1852 he had paid off all the debts. With $250,000 in the bank he therefore retired and travelled in South America. Returning to the USA, he then became involved with the construction of a telegraph line in Newfoundland by an English engineer, F.N. Osborne. Although the company collapsed, he had been fired by the dream of a transatlantic cable and in 1854 was one of the founders of the New York, Newfoundland and London Telegraph Company. He began to promote surveys and hold discussions with British telegraph pioneers and with Isambard Brunel, who was then building the Great Eastern steamship. In 1856 he helped to set up the Atlantic Telegraph Company in Britain and, as a result of his efforts and those of the British physicist and inventor Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), work began in 1857 on the laying of the first transatlantic cable from Newfoundland to Ireland. After many tribulations the cable was completed on 5 August 1857, but it failed after barely a month. Following several unsuccessful attempts to repair and replace it, the cable was finally completed on 27 July 1866. Building upon his success, Field expanded his business interests. In 1877 he bought a controlling interest in and was President of the New York Elevated Railroad Company. He also helped develop the Wabash Railroad and became owner of the New York Mail and Express newspaper; however, he subsequently suffered large financial losses.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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As early as 1807 Frost, who was originally a builder and bricklayer in Finchley in north London, was manufacturing Roman Cement, patented by James Parker in 1796, in the Harwich area and a similar cement further south, at Sheerness. In the early 1820s Frost visited Louis J.Vicat (1796–1861) in France. Vicat was a French engineer who began in 1812 a detailed investigation into the properties of various limestones found in France. He later published his conclusions, which were that the best hydraulic lime was that produced from limestone containing clay incorporating silica and alumina. He experimented with adding different clays in varying proportions to slaked lime and calcined the mixture. Benefiting from Vicat's research, Frost obtained a patent in 1822 for what he called British Cement. This patent specified an artificial cement made from limestone and silica, and he calcined chalk with the clay to produce a quick-setting product. This was made at Swanscombe near Northfleet on the south bank of the River Thames. In 1833 the Swanscombe manufactory was purchased by Francis \& White for £3,500 and Frost emigrated to America, setting up practice as a civil engineer in New York. The cement was utilized by Sir Marc Brunel in 1835 in his construction of the Thames Tunnel, and at the same time it was used in building the first all-concrete house at Swanscombe for Mr White.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Froude was educated at a preparatory school at Buckfastleigh, and then at Westminster School, London, before entering Oriel College, Oxford, to read mathematics and classics. Between 1836 and 1838 he served as a pupil civil engineer, and then he joined the staff of Isambard Kingdom Brunel on various railway engineering projects in southern England, including the South Devon Atmospheric Railway. He retired from professional work in 1846 and lived with his invalid father at Dartington Parsonage. The next twenty years, while apparently unproductive, were important to Froude as he concentrated his mind on difficult mathematical and scientific problems. Froude married in 1839 and had five children, one of whom, Robert Edmund Froude (1846–1924), was to succeed him in later years in his research work for the Admiralty. Following the death of his father, Froude moved to Paignton, and there commenced his studies on the resistance of solid bodies moving through fluids. Initially these were with hulls towed through a house roof storage tank by wires taken over a pulley and attached to falling weights, but the work became more sophisticated and was conducted on ponds and the open water of a creek near Dartmouth. Froude published work on the rolling of ships in the second volume of the Transactions of the then new Institution of Naval Architects and through this became acquainted with Sir Edward Reed. This led in 1870 to the Admiralty's offer of £2,000 towards the cost of an experimental tank for ship models at Torquay. The tank was completed in 1872 and tests were carried out on the model of HMS Greyhound following full-scale towing trials which had commenced on the actual ship the previous year. From this Froude enunciated his Law of Comparisons, which defines the rules concerning the relationship of the power required to move geometrically similar floating bodies across fluids. It enabled naval architects to predict, from a study of a much less expensive and smaller model, the resistance to motion and the power required to move a full-size ship. The work in the tank led Froude to design a model-cutting machine, dynamometers and machinery for the accurate ruling of graph paper. Froude's work, and later that of his son, was prodigious and covered many fields of ship design, including powering, propulsion, rolling, steering and stability. In only six years he had stamped his academic authority on the new science of hydrodynamics, served on many national committees and corresponded with fellow researchers throughout the world. His health suffered and he sailed for South Africa to recuperate, but he contracted dysentery and died at Simonstown. He will be remembered for all time as one of the greatest "fathers" of naval architecture.

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