R for Richard

SUBJECT AREA: Horology

[br]

[br]

[br]

Richard, the son of a blacksmith, was adopted by the Prior of Wallingford when his father died and educated at Oxford. He then joined the monastery at St Albans and was ordained as a priest in 1317. After a further period at Oxford studying mathematics and astronomy he returned to St Albans as Abbot in 1327. Shortly after he had been elected Abbot he started work on a very elaborate astronomical clock. The escapement and the striking mechanism of this clock were unusual. The former was a variation on the verge escapement, and the hour striking (up to twenty-four) was controlled by a series of pins laid out in a helical pattern on a drum. However, timekeeping was of secondary importance as the main purpose of the clock was to show the motion of the Sun, Moon and planets (the details of the planet mechanism are lost) and to demonstrate eclipses. This was achieved in a very precise manner by a series of ingenious mechanisms, such as the elliptical wheel that was used to derive the variable motion of the sun.

Richard died of leprosy, which he had contracted during a visit to obtain papal confirmation of his appointment, and the clock was completed after his death. The last recorded reference to it was made by John Leyland, shortly before the dissolution of the monasteries. It is now known only from incomplete manuscript copies of Richard's treatise. A modern reconstruction has been made based upon J.D.North's interpretation of the manuscript.

[br]

разг.; шутл.

   paзг. шутл.

   этo мнe пocлaнo зa мoи гpexи

    'Do you love me still, Honor?' 'For my sins, Richard' (D. du Maurier)

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Textiles

[br]

[br]

[br]

Richard Roberts was the son of a shoemaker and tollkeeper and received only an elementary education at the village school. At the age of 10 his interest in mechanics was stimulated when he was allowed by the Curate, the Revd Griffith Howell, to use his lathe and other tools. As a young man Roberts acquired a considerable local reputation for his mechanical skills, but these were exercised only in his spare time. For many years he worked in the local limestone quarries, until at the age of 20 he obtained employment as a pattern-maker in Staffordshire. In the next few years he worked as a mechanic in Liverpool, Manchester and Salford before moving in 1814 to London, where he obtained employment with Henry Maudslay. In 1816 he set up on his own account in Manchester. He soon established a reputation there for gear-cutting and other general engineering work, especially for the textile industry, and by 1821 he was employing about twelve men. He built machine tools mainly for his own use, including, in 1817, one of the first planing machines.

One of his first inventions was a gas meter, but his first patent was obtained in 1822 for improvements in looms. His most important contribution to textile technology was his invention of the self-acting spinning mule, patented in 1825. The normal fourteen-year term of this patent was extended in 1839 by a further seven years. Between 1826 and 1828 Roberts paid several visits to Alsace, France, arranging cottonspinning machinery for a new factory at Mulhouse. By 1826 he had become a partner in the firm of Sharp Brothers, the company then becoming Sharp, Roberts \& Co. The firm continued to build textile machinery, and in the 1830s it built locomotive engines for the newly created railways and made one experimental steam-carriage for use on roads. The partnership was dissolved in 1843, the Sharps establishing a new works to continue locomotive building while Roberts retained the existing factory, known as the Globe Works, where he soon after took as partners R.G.Dobinson and Benjamin Fothergill (1802–79). This partnership was dissolved c. 1851, and Roberts continued in business on his own for a few years before moving to London as a consulting engineer.

During the 1840s and 1850s Roberts produced many new inventions in a variety of fields, including machine tools, clocks and watches, textile machinery, pumps and ships. One of these was a machine controlled by a punched-card system similar to the Jacquard loom for punching rivet holes in plates. This was used in the construction of the Conway and Menai Straits tubular bridges. Roberts was granted twenty-six patents, many of which, before the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852, covered more than one invention; there were still other inventions he did not patent. He made his contribution to the discussion which led up to the 1852 Act by publishing, in 1830 and 1833, pamphlets suggesting reform of the Patent Law.

In the early 1820s Roberts helped to establish the Manchester Mechanics' Institute, and in 1823 he was elected a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. He frequently contributed to their proceedings and in 1861 he was made an Honorary Member. He was elected a Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1838. From 1838 to 1843 he served as a councillor of the then-new Municipal Borough of Manchester. In his final years, without the assistance of business partners, Roberts suffered financial difficulties, and at the time of his death a fund for his aid was being raised.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

[br]

[br]

[br]

Arkwright was the youngest of thirteen children and was apprenticed to a barber; when he was about 18, he followed this trade in Bol ton. In 1755 he married Patients Holt, who bore him a son before she died, and he remarried in 1761, to Margaret Biggins. He prospered until he took a public house as well as his barber shop and began to lose money. After this failure, he travelled around buying women's hair for wigs.

In the late 1760s he began spinning experiments at Preston. It is not clear how much Arkwright copied earlier inventions or was helped by Thomas Highs and John Kay but in 1768 he left Preston for Nottingham, where, with John Smalley and David Thornley as partners, he took out his first patent. They set up a mill worked by a horse where machine-spun yarn was produced successfully. The essential part of this process lay in drawing out the cotton by rollers before it was twisted by a flyer and wound onto the bobbin. The partners' resources were not sufficient for developing their patent so Arkwright found new partners in Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt, hosiers of Nottingham and Derby. Much experiment was necessary before they produced satisfactory yarn, and in 1771 a water-driven mill was built at Cromford, where the spinning process was perfected (hence the name "waterframe" was given to his spinning machine); some of this first yarn was used in the hosiery trade. Sales of all-cotton cloth were initially limited because of the high tax on calicoes, but the tax was lowered in 1774 by Act of Parliament, marking the beginning of the phenomenal growth of the cotton industry. In the evidence for this Act, Arkwright claimed that he had spent £12,000 on his machine. Once Arkwright had solved the problem of mechanical spinning, a bottleneck in the preliminary stages would have formed but for another patent taken out in 1775. This covered all preparatory processing, including some ideas not invented by Arkwright, with the result that it was disputed in 1783 and finally annulled in 1785. It contained the "crank and comb" for removing the cotton web off carding engines which was developed at Cromford and solved the difficulty in carding. By this patent, Arkwright had mechanized all the preparatory and spinning processes, and he began to establish water-powered cotton mills even as far away as Scotland. His success encouraged many others to copy him, so he had great difficulty in enforcing his patent Need died in 1781 and the partnership with Strutt ended soon after. Arkwright became very rich and financed other spinning ventures beyond his immediate control, such as that with Samuel Oldknow. It was estimated that 30,000 people were employed in 1785 in establishments using Arkwright's patents. In 1786 he received a knighthood for delivering an address of thanks when an attempt to assassinate George III failed, and the following year he became High Sheriff of Derbyshire. He purchased the manor of Cromford, where he died in 1792.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives, Steam and internal combustion engines

[br]

[br]

[br]

Trevithick's father was a tin-mine manager, and Trevithick himself, after limited formal education, developed his immense engineering talent among local mining machinery and steam-engines and found employment as a mining engineer. Tall, strong and high-spirited, he was the eternal optimist.

About 1797 it occurred to him that the separate condenser patent of James Watt could be avoided by employing "strong steam", that is steam at pressures substantially greater than atmospheric, to drive steam-engines: after use, steam could be exhausted to the atmosphere and the condenser eliminated. His first winding engine on this principle came into use in 1799, and subsequently such engines were widely used. To produce high-pressure steam, a stronger boiler was needed than the boilers then in use, in which the pressure vessel was mounted upon masonry above the fire: Trevithick designed the cylindrical boiler, with furnace tube within, from which the Cornish and later the Lancashire boilers evolved.

Simultaneously he realized that high-pressure steam enabled a compact steam-engine/boiler unit to be built: typically, the Trevithick engine comprised a cylindrical boiler with return firetube, and a cylinder recessed into the boiler. No beam intervened between connecting rod and crank. A master patent was taken out.

Such an engine was well suited to driving vehicles. Trevithick built his first steam-carriage in 1801, but after a few days' use it overturned on a rough Cornish road and was damaged beyond repair by fire. Nevertheless, it had been the first self-propelled vehicle successfully to carry passengers. His second steam-carriage was driven about the streets of London in 1803, even more successfully; however, it aroused no commercial interest. Meanwhile the Coalbrookdale Company had started to build a locomotive incorporating a Trevithick engine for its tramroads, though little is known of the outcome; however, Samuel Homfray's ironworks at Penydarren, South Wales, was already building engines to Trevithick's design, and in 1804 Trevithick built one there as a locomotive for the Penydarren Tramroad. In this, and in the London steam-carriage, exhaust steam was turned up the chimney to draw the fire. On 21 February the locomotive hauled five wagons with 10 tons of iron and seventy men for 9 miles (14 km): it was the first successful railway locomotive.

Again, there was no commercial interest, although Trevithick now had nearly fifty stationary engines completed or being built to his design under licence. He experimented with one to power a barge on the Severn and used one to power a dredger on the Thames. He became Engineer to a project to drive a tunnel beneath the Thames at Rotherhithe and was only narrowly defeated, by quicksands. Trevithick then set up, in 1808, a circular tramroad track in London and upon it demonstrated to the admission-fee-paying public the locomotive Catch me who can, built to his design by John Hazledine and J.U. Rastrick.

In 1809, by which date Trevithick had sold all his interest in the steam-engine patent, he and Robert Dickinson, in partnership, obtained a patent for iron tanks to hold liquid cargo in ships, replacing the wooden casks then used, and started to manufacture them. In 1810, however, he was taken seriously ill with typhus for six months and had to return to Cornwall, and early in 1811 the partners were bankrupt; Trevithick was discharged from bankruptcy only in 1814.

In the meantime he continued as a steam engineer and produced a single-acting steam engine in which the cut-off could be varied to work the engine expansively by way of a three-way cock actuated by a cam. Then, in 1813, Trevithick was approached by a representative of a company set up to drain the rich but flooded silver-mines at Cerro de Pasco, Peru, at an altitude of 14,000 ft (4,300 m). Low-pressure steam engines, dependent largely upon atmospheric pressure, would not work at such an altitude, but Trevithick's high-pressure engines would. Nine engines and much other mining plant were built by Hazledine and Rastrick and despatched to Peru in 1814, and Trevithick himself followed two years later. However, the war of independence was taking place in Peru, then a Spanish colony, and no sooner had Trevithick, after immense difficulties, put everything in order at the mines then rebels arrived and broke up the machinery, for they saw the mines as a source of supply for the Spanish forces. It was only after innumerable further adventures, during which he encountered and was assisted financially by Robert Stephenson, that Trevithick eventually arrived home in Cornwall in 1827, penniless.

He petitioned Parliament for a grant in recognition of his improvements to steam-engines and boilers, without success. He was as inventive as ever though: he proposed a hydraulic power transmission system; he was consulted over steam engines for land drainage in Holland; and he suggested a 1,000 ft (305 m) high tower of gilded cast iron to commemorate the Reform Act of 1832. While working on steam propulsion of ships in 1833, he caught pneumonia, from which he died.

[br]

See also: Blenkinsop, John

SUBJECT AREA: Weapons and armour

[br]

[br]

[br]

Richard S.Lawrence received only an elementary education and as a young man worked on local farms and later in a woodworking shop. His work there included making carpenters' and joiners' tools and he spent some of his spare time in a local gunsmith's shop. After a brief period of service in the Army, he obtained employment in 1838 with N.Kendall \& Co. of Windsor, Vermont, making guns at the Windsor prison. Within six months he was put in charge of the work, continuing in this position until 1842 when the gun-making ceased; he remained at the prison for a time in charge of the carriage shop. In 1843 he opened a gun shop in Windsor in partnership with Kendall, and the next year S.E. Robbins, a businessman, helped them obtain a contract from the Federal Government for 10,000 rifles. A new company, Robbins, Kendall \& Lawrence, was formed and a factory was built at Windsor. Three years later Kendall's share of the business was purchased by his partners and the firm became Robbins \& Lawrence. Lawrence supervised the design and production and, to improve methods of manufacture, developed new machine tools with the aid of F.W. Howe. In 1850 Lawrence introduced the lubrication of bullets, which practice ensured the success of the breech-loading rifle. Also in 1850, the company undertook to manufacture railway cars, but this involved them in a considerable financial loss. The company took to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, England, a set of rifles built on the interchangeable system. The interest this created resulted in a visit of some members of the British Royal Small Arms Commission to America and subsequently an order for 150 machine tools, jigs and fixtures from Robbins \& Lawrence, to be installed at the small-arms factory at Enfield. In 1852 the company contracted to manufacture Sharps rifles and carbines at a new factory to be built at Hartford, Connecticut. Lawrence moved to Hartford in 1853 to superintend the building and equipment of the plant. Shortly afterwards, however, a promised order for a large number of rifles failed to materialize and, following its earlier financial difficulties, Robbins \& Lawrence was forced into bankruptcy. The Hartford plant was acquired by the Sharps Rifle Company in 1856 and Lawrence remained there as Superintendent until 1872. From then he was for many years Superintendent of Streets in the city of Hartford and he also served on the Water Board, the Board of Aldermen and as Chairman of the Fire Board.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

Richard Edmund Reason was educated at Tonbridge School and the Royal College of Science (Imperial College), where he studied under Professor A.F.C.Pollard, Professor of Technical Optics. After graduating in 1925 he joined Taylor, Taylor and Hobson Ltd, Leicester, manufacturers of optical, electrical and scientific instruments, and remained with that firm throughout his career. One of his first contributions was in the development, with E.F.Fincham, of the Fincham Coincidence Optometer. At this time the firm, under William Taylor, was mainly concerned with optical instruments and lens manufacture, but in the 1930s Reason was also engaged in developing means for measuring the roughness of machined surfaces. The need for establishing standards and methods of measurement of surface finish was called for when the subcontracting of aero-engine components became necessary during the Second World War. This led to the development by Reason of an instrument in which a stylus was moved across the surface and the profile recorded electronically. This was called the Talysurf and was first produced in 1941. Further development followed, and from 1947 Reason tackled the problem of measuring roundness, producing the first Talyrond machine in 1949. The technology developed for these instruments was used in the production of others such as the Talymin Comparator and the Talyvel electronic level. Reason was also associated with the development of optical projection systems to measure the profile of parts such as gear teeth, screw threads and turbine blades. He retired in 1968 but continued as a consultant to the company. He served for many years on committees of the British Standards Institution on surface metrology and was a representative of Britain at the International Standards Organization.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

[br]

[br]

[br]

In May 1791, Richard Gorton took out a patent for a new type of power-driven loom for narrow fabrics to "work one or several pieces at the same time, either by hand, lath, steam engine, or by water-machinery". The sley with the reed was worked by a crank, and the picker by a lever and cam. The shuttle-box had springs to retain the shuttle, and the warp was kept tight by weights. A stop, which was usually pushed out of the way by the shuttle entering the box, prevented the sley or lath "driving the shuttle against the piece" when the shuttle stuck in the middle. One particularly interesting feature was the sizing of the warp threads by means of brushes and a roller that turned in a square trough filled with size. This pre-dates Radcliffe's sizing machine, which is always considered the first, by a number of years. The mill in which these machines worked was at Cuckney, near Mansfield, England. In 1788 Thomas Gorton had installed one of the earliest Boulton \& Watt rotative steam engines there.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Railways and locomotives

[br]

[br]

[br]

Reynolds was born into a Quaker family, his father being an iron merchant and a considerable customer for the products of the Darbys (see Abraham Darby) of Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. After education at a Quaker boarding school in Pickwick, Wiltshire, Reynolds was apprenticed to William Fry, a grocer of Bristol, from whom he would have learned business methods. The year before the expiry of his apprenticeship in 1757, Reynolds was being sent on business errands to Coalbrookdale. In that year he met and married Hannah Darby, the daughter of Abraham Darby II. At the same time, he acquired a half-share in the Ketley ironworks, established not long before, in 1755. There he supervised not only the furnaces at Ketley and Horsehay and the foundry, but also the extension of the railway, linking this site to Coalbrookdale itself.

On the death of Abraham Darby II in 1763, Reynolds took charge of the whole works during the minority of Abraham Darby III. During this period, the most notable development was the introduction by the Cranage brothers of a new way of converting pig-iron to wrought iron, a process patented in 1766 that used coal in a reverberatory furnace. This, with other processes for the same purpose, remained in use until superseded by the puddling process patented by Henry Cort in 1783 and 1784. Reynolds's most important innovation was the introduction of cast-iron rails in 1767 on the railway around Coalbrookdale. A useful network had been in operation for some time with wooden rails, but these wore out quickly and were expensive to maintain. Reynolds's iron rails were an immediate improvement, and some 20 miles (32 km) were laid within a short time. In 1768 Abraham Darby III was able to assume control of the Coalbrookdale works, but Reynolds had been extending his own interest in other ironworks and various other concerns, earning himself considerable wealth. When Darby was oppressed with loan repayments, Reynolds bought the Manor of Madely, which made him Landlord of the Coalbrookdale Company; by 1780 he was virtually banker to the company.

[br]

1920-1989

   Nacido en Detroit, Richard Quine fue actor infantil en Broadway y, mas tarde, en 1938, guionista, mas concretamente en el mundo del musical de Broad way. Con poste rioridad, es contratado por Columbia como director de cine. Gran amigo de Blake Ed wards, escribe siete guiones con el. Vive una etapa brillante como rea lizador entre 1954 y 1965, etapa en la que dirige comedias, melodramas, un estu pendo filme negro, La calle 99 (Pushover, 1954), que supone su primera colaboracion con la actriz Kim Novak, y un magnifico musical, Mi hermana Elena (My Sister Eileen, 1955). Es conocido el apasionado amor, no correspondido, que sintio hacia Kim Novak, a la que dirigio en cuatro peliculas. A partir del ano 1965, se inicia una rapida y lamentable decadencia que termina con el suicidio del director en 1989.

   FILMOGRAFIA

    A Talent for Loving. 1969. 110 minutos. Color. Paramount. Richard Wid mark, Caroline Munro, Cesar Romero, Topol, Fran Jeffries.

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

[br]

[br]

[br]

After naval service during the First World War, Fuller worked for some time in the building industry with his father, who was an architect. In 1927 he became interested in trying to solve social problems by providing good, low-cost housing for an expanding population. Utilizing modern techniques applicable in other industries, such as the design of aircraft and ships, he produced his "Dymaxion House", which was transportable and cheap. This was followed in 1946 by his aluminium, stressed-skin, prefabricated house. The geodesic dome is the structural concept for which Fuller is particularly known. It was patented in 1954 and 300,000 were built over a thirty-year period. He had envisaged the dome being utilized on smaller or larger, simple or complex patterns for a wide variety of needs such as enclosing a covered area for a house, a botanical garden, an exhibition pavilion, a factory, a weather station or, indeed, an entire city. A famous example that he designed was that for the US pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal. A geodesic dome is generally spherical in form, the chief structural elements of which are interconnected in a geodesic pattern, i.e. one in which the lines connecting two points are the shortest possible. The structure is composed of slender, lightweight struts (usually of aluminium) arranged in geometrical patterns, with the metal skeleton covered by a light, plastic material. Inside the dome, all the space is usable and the climate is controllable. Fuller wrote and lectured widely on his patented invention, explaining the importance of structural research particularly in relation to world needs.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

[br]

[br]

[br]

He was apprenticed to his uncles, makers of metalware, in 1815 and showed such aptitude for business that he was taken into partnership. On their deaths, Elkington assumed sole ownership of the business. In conjunction with his cousin Henry (1810–52), by unrelenting enterprise, he established an industry for electroplating and electrogilding. Up until c.1840, silver-plated goods were produced by rolling or soldering thin sheets of silver to a base metal, such as copper. Back in 1801, the English chemist William Wollaston had deposited one metal upon another by means of an electric current generated from a voltaic pile or battery. In the 1830s, certain inventors, such as Bessemer used this result to produce plated articles and these efforts in turn induced the Elkingtons to apply the method in their trade. In 1836 and 1837 they took out patents for "mercurial gilding", and one patent of 1838 refers to a separate electric current. In 1840 they bought from John Wright, a Birmingham surgeon, his discovery of what proved to be the best electroplating solution: namely, solutions of cyanides of gold and silver in potassium cyanide. They also purchased rights to use the electric machine invented by J.S. Woolrich. Armed with these techniques, the Elkingtons produced in their large new works in Newhall Street a wide range of gold-and silver-plated decorative and artistic ware. Henry was particularly active on the artistic side of the business, as was their employee Alexander Parkes. For some twenty-five years, Britain enjoyed a virtual monopoly of this kind of ware, due largely to the enterprise of the Elkingtons, although by the end of the century rising tariffs had closed many foreign markets and the lead had passed to Germany. George spent all his working life in Birmingham, taking some part in the public life of the city. He was a governor of King Edward's Grammar School and a borough magistrate. He was also a caring employer, setting up houses and schools for his workers.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

[br]

[br]

[br]

He was the son of Robert Hoe, a printer who improved the cylinder press invented by David Napier. At the age of 15 he entered his father's business, taking full control of it three years later. Newspaper publishers demanded ever-increasing speeds of output from the printing press, and Hoe was one of those who realized that the speed was limited by the reciprocating action of the flat-bed machine. In 1846 he constructed a rotary press in which a central cylinder carried the type and flat sheets of paper were fed to smaller impression cylinders ranged around it. This kind of press, with four impression cylinders, was first used to print the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1847, and was able to print 8,000 papers per hour. Such presses reigned supreme for newspaper printing in many countries for twenty-five years: in 1857, for example, The Times had a ten-feeder machine making 20,000 impressions per hour. Even so, the quest for speed, now limited by the single-sheet feed, continued. William Bullock (1813–67) introduced continuous roll or web feed for the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1865, and the next year The Times followed suit with the web-fed Walter press. In 1871 Hoe devised a machine that combined all the advantages of the existing machines, producing a rotary, web, perfecting (printing on both sides of the paper at once) machine, first used in the office of the New York Tribune. Ten years later the Hoe Company devised a folding machine to fold the copies as they came off the press: the modern newspaper printing press had arrived. In addition to his contributions to the printing industry, Hoe was a good employer, arranging free evening classes and other welfare services for his apprentices.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Automotive engineering, Land transport

[br]

[br]

[br]

Morris was the son of Frederick Morris, then a draper. He was the eldest of a family of seven, all of whom, except for one sister, died in childhood. When he was 3 years old, his father moved to Cowley, near Oxford, where he attended the village school. After a short time with a local bicycle firm he set up on his own at the age of 16 with a capital of £4. He manufactured pedal cycles and by 1902 he had designed a motor cycle and was doing car-repair work. By 1912, at the Motor Show, he was able to announce his first car, the 8.9 hp, two-seater Morris Oxford with its characteristic "bull-nose". It could perform at up to 50 mph (80 km/h) and 50 mpg (5.65 1/100 km). It cost £165.

Though untrained, Morris was a born engineer as well as a natural judge of character. This enabled him to build up a reliable team of assistants in his growing business, with an order for four hundred cars at the Motor Show in 1912. Much of his business was built up in the assembly of components manufactured by outside suppliers. In he moved out of his initial premises by New College in Longwall and bought land at Cowley, where he brought out his second model, the 11.9hp Morris Oxford. This was after the First World War, during which car production was reduced to allow the manufacture of tanks and munitions. He was awarded the OBE in 1917 for his war work. Morris Motors Ltd was incorporated in 1919, and within fifteen months sales of cars had reached over 3,000 a year. By 1923 he was producing 20,000 cars a year, and in 1926 50,000, equivalent to about one-third of Britain's output. With the slump, a substantial overdraft, and a large stock of unsold cars, Morris took the bold decision to cut the prices of cars in stock, which then sold out within three weeks. Other makers followed suit, but Morris was ahead of them.

Morris was part-founder of the Pressed Steel Company, set up to produce car bodies at Cowley. A clever operation with the shareholding of the Morris Motors Company allowed Morris a substantial overall profit to provide expansion capital. By 1931 his "empire" comprised, in addition to Morris Motors, the MG Car Company, the Wolseley Company, the SU Carburettor Company and Morris Commercial Cars. In 1936, the value of Morris's financial interest in the business was put at some £16 million.

William Morris was a frugal man and uncomplicated, having little use for all the money he made except to channel it to charitable purposes. It is said that in all he gave away some £30 million during his lifetime, much of it invested by the recipients to provide long-term benefits. He married Elizabeth Anstey in 1904 and lived for thirty years at Nuffield Place. He lived modestly, and even after retirement, when Honorary President of the British Motor Corporation, the result of a merger between Morris Motors and the Austin Motor Company, he drove himself to work in a modest 10 hp Wolseley. His generosity benefited many hospitals in London, Oxford, Birmingham and elsewhere. Oxford Colleges were another class of beneficiary from his largesse.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Railways and locomotives

[br]

[br]

[br]

Turner's first glasshouse commission was for the Palm House at the Botanic Gardens in Belfast, begun in 1839; this structure was designed by Charles Lanyon, Turner being responsible for the ironwork construction. The Belfast Palm House was followed in 1843 by the Palm House for the Royal Dublin Society, but the structure for which Turner is best known is the famous Palm House in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew Gardens in London. This was originally designed in 1844 by the architect Decimus Burton, but his concept was rejected and Turner was asked to design a new one. Burton tried again, basing his new design upon that of Turner but also incorporating features that made it more similar to the famous Great Conservatory by Paxton at Chatsworth. Finally, Turner was contracted to build the Palm Stove in collaboration with Burton. Completed in 1848, the Kew Palm House is the finest example of the glasshouses of that era. This remarkable structure is simple but impressive: it is 362 ft (110 m) long and is covered by 45,000 ft2 (4,180 m²) of greenish glass. Inside, in the central taller part, a decorative, cast-iron, spiral staircase gives access to an upper gallery, from where tall plants may be clearly viewed; the roof rises to 62 ft (19 m). The curving, glazed panels, set in ribs of wrought iron, rise from a low masonry wall. The ingenious method of construction of these ribs was patented by Turner in 1846. It consists of wrought-iron tie rods inserted into hollow cast-iron tubes; these can be tightened after the erection of the building is complete, so producing a stable, balanced structure not unlike the concept of a timber-trussed roof. The Palm Stove has only recently undergone extensive adaptation to modern needs.

[br]

упр. формула изменений (условная формула для оценки вероятности того, что проводимые организационные изменения будут успешны; первая версия формулы была предложена Р. Бекхардом в 1969 г. на основе идеи Д. Глейчера и выглядела как D * V * F > R, где D (dissatisfaction) — неудовлетворенность текущим положением, V (vision) — наличие четкого представления о возможностях, F (first) — эффективность первых шагов, R (resistance) — сопротивление изменениям со стороны коллектива; впоследствии некоторые исследователи предлагали другие модификации этой формулы)

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

[br]

[br]

[br]

Martyn became a leading shareholder in the Company of Mineral and Battery Works, the Elizabethan monopoly established in 1565 under the initiative William Humfrey. Its purpose was to mine lead and zinc ores and to introduce production of brass and manufacture of brass wire to England, activities in which he took an active interest. Appointed Warden of the Royal Mint in 1572, Martyn's responsibilities included the receipt of bullion and dispatch of freshly minted coins. He reported unfavourably on a new invention for producing "milled" coins by a screw press which embossed the two faces simultaneously. Considerable friction arose from his criticism of the then Master of the Mint. He was later subject to criticism himself on the irregularity of coin weights produced at the Mint. In 1580 Martyn leased Tintern wireworks, property of the Mineral and Battery Company, which was by then producing iron wire after earlier failing in the production of brass. Two years later he sought rights from the company to mine the zinc ore calamine and to make brass. When this was granted in 1587, he formed a partnership with others including William Brode, a London goldsmith who had been experimenting with the making of brass. Production started on a small scale using imported copper at Queen's Mill, Isleworth, largely financed by Martyn. Brode soon disagreed with his partners and with the Mineral and Battery Works Company and Martyn withdrew. After long and acrimonious disputes the works closed completely in 1605.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

[br]

[br]

[br]

Maddox studied medicine, but dogged by ill health he travelled widely, eventually settling in Constantinople (now Istanbul), where he married in 1849. After further migrations, Maddox returned to England in the 1870s. He had become interested in photography and was awarded medals for his photomicrographs. Searching for a substitute for collodion to hold the sensitive silver salts, Maddox devised a gelatine bromide emulsion that gave acceptable results, and he published details in 1871. Gelatine had been tried by earlier experimenters, but the results were poor; the plates made by Maddox were slow and lacked density, but they pointed the way to the modern gelatine halide emulsions which continued to form the basis of photographic emulsions in the 1990s.

[br]