a+further+50+men

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

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Noyce was the son of a Congregational minister whose family, after a number of moves, finally settled in Grinnell, some 50 miles (80 km) east of Des Moines, Iowa. Encouraged to follow his interest in science, in his teens he worked as a baby-sitter and mower of lawns to earn money for his hobby. One of his clients was Professor of Physics at Grinnell College, where Noyce enrolled to study mathematics and physics and eventually gained a top-grade BA. It was while there that he learned of the invention of the transistor by the team at Bell Laboratories, which included John Bardeen, a former fellow student of his professor. After taking a PhD in physical electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953, he joined the Philco Corporation in Philadelphia to work on the development of transistors. Then in January 1956 he accepted an invitation from William Shockley, another of the Bell transistor team, to join the newly formed Shockley Transistor Company, the first electronic firm to set up shop in Palo Alto, California, in what later became known as "Silicon Valley".

From the start things at the company did not go well and eventually Noyce and Gordon Moore and six colleagues decided to offer themselves as a complete development team; with the aid of the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company, the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation was born. It was there that in 1958, contemporaneously with Jack K. Wilby at Texas Instruments, Noyce had the idea for monolithic integration of transistor circuits. Eventually, after extended patent litigation involving study of laboratory notebooks and careful examination of the original claims, priority was assigned to Noyce. The invention was most timely. The Apollo Moon-landing programme announced by President Kennedy in May 1961 called for lightweight sophisticated navigation and control computer systems, which could only be met by the rapid development of the new technology, and Fairchild was well placed to deliver the micrologic chips required by NASA.

In 1968 the founders sold Fairchild Semicon-ductors to the parent company. Noyce and Moore promptly found new backers and set up the Intel Corporation, primarily to make high-density memory chips. The first product was a 1,024-bit random access memory (1 K RAM) and by 1973 sales had reached $60 million. However, Noyce and Moore had already realized that it was possible to make a complete microcomputer by putting all the logic needed to go with the memory chip(s) on a single integrated circuit (1C) chip in the form of a general purpose central processing unit (CPU). By 1971 they had produced the Intel 4004 microprocessor, which sold for US$200, and within a year the 8008 followed. The personal computer (PC) revolution had begun! Noyce eventually left Intel, but he remained active in microchip technology and subsequently founded Sematech Inc.

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

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Palmer was an assistant to Thomas Telford for ten years from 1816. In 1818 he arranged a meeting of young engineers from which the Institution of Civil Engineers originated. In the early 1820s he invented a monorail system, the first of its kind, in which a single rail of wood, with an iron strip spiked on top to form a running surface, was supported on posts. Wagon bodies were supported pannier fashion from a frame attached to grooved wheels and were propelled by men or horses. An important object was to minimize friction, and short lines were built on this principle at Deptford and Cheshunt. In 1826 Palmer was appointed Resident Engineer to the London Docks and was responsible for the construction of many of them. He was subsequently consulted about many important engineering works.

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See also: Lartigue, Charles François Marie-Thérèse

SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Telecommunications

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He was the son of a brewer and maltster and part-owner of a theatre in Bath. In his early 20s his father sent him to London to organize the petition for a licence for the Orchard Street theatre, which was granted in 1768. He then organized a series of post-chaises to transport ac-tors between this and another theatre in Bristol in which his father also had an interest. By 1782 he had ready a plan for a countrywide service of mail coaches to replace the existing arrangements of conveying the mail by post-boys and -girls mounted on horseback who were by law compelled to carry the mail "at a Rate of Six Miles in the Hour at least" on penalty of one month's hard labour if found loitering. Lord Camden, Member of Parliament for Bath, put Palmer's plan before Prime Minister Pitt, who approved of it. An experimental run was tried on 2 August 1782, a coach leaving Bristol at 4 pm and arriving in London at 8 am the next morning, to return the following night from London at 8 pm and reaching Bristol at 10 am. In March 1785 the Norwich Mail Coach was started and during that year services were started to Portsmouth, Dover, Exeter, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Shrewsbury, Chester, Holyhead, Worcester, South Wales and Milford Haven. A feature of importance was that each mail coach was accompanied by an armed guard. In August 1786 Palmer was appointed Surveyor and Comptroller-General of the Post Office at a salary of £1,500 per annum and a bonus depending on all revenue over £300,000 each year. The popularity of the new service is shown by the feet that by 1813 his 2 1/2 per cent bonus came to £50,000. Due to the intrigues of his deputy, he was removed from office, but he was given a pension of £3,000 a year. He received the freedom of some eighteen towns, was made Mayor of Bath and represented that constituency in Parliament four times.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Weapons and armour

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Francis A.Pratt served an apprenticeship as a machinist with Warren Aldrich, and on completing it in 1848 he entered the Gloucester Machine Works as a journeyman machinist. From 1852 to 1854 he worked at the Colt Armory in Hartford, Connecticut, where he met his future partner, Amos Whitney. He then became Superintendent of the Phoenix Iron Works, also at Hartford and run by George S.Lincoln \& Company. While there he designed the well-known "Lincoln" miller, which was first produced in 1855. This was a development of the milling machine built by Robbins \& Lawrence and designed by F.W. Howe, and incorporated a screw drive for the table instead of the rack and pinion used in the earlier machine.

Whitney also moved to the Phoenix Iron Works, and in 1860 the two men started in a small way doing machine work on their own account. In 1862 they took a third partner, Monroe Stannard, and enlarged their workshop. The business continued to expand, but Pratt and Whitney remained at the Phoenix Iron Works until 1864 and in the following year they built their first new factory. The Pratt \& Whitney Company was incorporated in 1869 with a capital of $350,000, F.A.Pratt being elected President. The firm specialized in making machine tools and tools particularly for the armament industry. In the 1870s Pratt made no less than ten trips to Europe gaining orders for equipping armouries in many different countries. Pratt \& Whitney was one of the leading firms developing the system of interchangeable manufacture which led to the need to establish national standards of measurement. The Rogers-Bond Comparator, developed with the backing of Pratt \& Whitney, played an important part in the establishment of these standards, which formed the basis of the gauges of many various types made by the firm. Pratt remained President of the company until 1898, after which he served as their Consulting Engineer for a short time before retiring from professional life. He was granted a number of patents relating to machine tools. He was a founder member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1880 and was elected a vice-president in 1881. He was an alderman of the city of Hartford.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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After working as a millwright in Halifax, Riley found employment at the Ormesby Ironworks in Middlesbrough until, in 1869, he became manager of the Askam Ironworks in Cumberland. Three years later, in 1872, he was appointed Blast-furnace Manager at the pioneering Siemens Steel Company's works at Landore, near Swansea in South Wales. Using Spanish ore, he produced the manganese-rich iron (spiegeleisen) required as an additive to make satisfactory steel. Riley was promoted in 1874 to be General Manager at Landore, and he worked with William Siemens to develop the use of the latter's regenerative furnace for the production of open-hearth steel. He persuaded Welsh makers of tin plate to use sheets rolled from lowcarbon (mild) steel instead of from charcoal iron and, partly by publishing some test results, he was instrumental in influencing the Admiralty to build two naval vessels of mild steel, the Mercury and the Iris.

In 1878 Riley moved north on his appointment as General Manager of the Steel Company of Scotland, a firm closely associated with Charles Tennant that was formed in 1872 to make steel by the Siemens process. Already by 1878, fourteen Siemens melting furnaces had been erected, and in that year 42,000 long tons of ingots were produced at the company's Hallside (Newton) Works, situated 8 km (5 miles) south-east of Glasgow. Under Riley's leadership, steelmaking in open-hearth furnaces was initiated at a second plant situated at Blochairn. Plates and sections for all aspects of shipbuilding, including boilers, formed the main products; the company also supplied the greater part of the steel for the Forth (Railway) Bridge. Riley was associated with technical modifications which improved the performance of steelmaking furnaces using Siemens's principles. He built a gasfired cupola for melting pig-iron, and constructed the first British "universal" plate mill using three-high rolls (Lauth mill).

At the request of French interests, Riley investigated the properties of steels containing various proportions of nickel; the report that he read before the Iron and Steel Institute in 1889 successfully brought to the notice of potential users the greatly enhanced strength that nickel could impart and its ability to yield alloys possessing substantially lower corrodibility.

The Steel Company of Scotland paid dividends in the years to 1890, but then came a lean period. In 1895, at the age of 54, Riley moved once more to another employer, becoming General Manager of the Glasgow Iron and Steel Company, which had just laid out a new steelmaking plant at Wishaw, 25 km (15 miles) south-east of Glasgow, where it already had blast furnaces. Still the technical innovator, in 1900 Riley presented an account of his experiences in introducing molten blast-furnace metal as feed for the open-hearth steel furnaces. In the early 1890s it was largely through Riley's efforts that a West of Scotland Board of Conciliation and Arbitration for the Manufactured Steel Trade came into being; he was its first Chairman and then its President.

In 1899 James Riley resigned from his Scottish employment to move back to his native Yorkshire, where he became his own master by acquiring the small Richmond Ironworks situated at Stockton-on-Tees. Although Riley's 1900 account to the Iron and Steel Institute was the last of the many of which he was author, he continued to contribute to the discussion of papers written by others.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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The son of John Augustus Roebling, he graduated in 1857 from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a civil engineer, and joined his father in his suspension bridge construction work. He served in the Civil War as a colonel of engineers in the Union Army, and in 1867, two years after the end of the war, he went to Europe to study new methods of sinking underwater foundations by means of compressed air. These new methods were employed in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, of which he took charge on his father's death in 1869. Timber pneumatic caissons were used, with a maximum pressure of 34 psi (2.4 kg/cm²) above atmospheric pressure. Two years after work on the piers had started in the caissons, Roebling, who had been working constantly with the men on the foundations of the piers, was carried unconscious out of the caisson, a victim of decompression sickness, then known as “caisson disease”. He was paralysed and lost the use of his voice. From then on he directed the rest of the work from the sickroom of his nearby house, his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, helping with his instructions and notes and carrying them out to the workforce; she even read a statement from him to the American Society of Civil Engineers. The erection of the cables, which were of steel, began in August 1876 and took twenty-six months to complete. In 1881 eleven trustees and Emily Warren Roebling walked across temporary planking, but the decking of the total span was not completed until 1885, fourteen years after construction of the bridge had started. The Brooklyn Bridge was Roebling's last major work, although following the death of his nephew in 1921 he was forced to head again the management of Roebling \& Company, though aged 84 and an invalid.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport

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An engineer and agriculturalist who had to travel long distances over rough country, he evolved an improved design of velocipede. The original device appears to have been first shown in the gardens of the Palais Royal by the comte de Sivrac in 1791, a small wooden "horse" fitted with two wheels and propelled by the rider's legs thrusting alternately against the ground. It was not possible to turn the front wheel to steer the machine, a small variation from the straight being obtained by the rider leaning sideways. It is not known if de Sivrac was the inventor of the machine: it is likely that it had been in existence, probably as a child's toy, for a number of years. Its original name was the celerifière, but it was renamed the velocifère in 1793. The Baron's Draisienne was an improvement on this primitive machine; it had a triangulated wooden frame, an upholstered seat, a rear luggage seat and an armrest which took the thrust of the rider as he or she pushed against the ground. Furthermore, it was steerable. In some models there was a cordoperated brake and a prop stand, and the seat height could be adjusted. At least one machine was fitted with a milometer. Drais began limited manufacture and launched a long marketing and patenting campaign, part of which involved sending advertising letters to leading figures, including a number of kings.

The Draisienne was first shown in public in April 1817: a ladies' version became available in 1819. Von Drais took out a patent in Baden on 12 January 1818 and followed with a French patent on 17 February. Three-and four-wheeled versions became available so the two men could take the ladies for a jaunt.

Drais left his agricultural and forestry work and devoted his full time to the "Running Machine" business. Soon copies were being made and sold in Italy, Germany and Austria. In London, a Denis Johnson took out a patent in December 1818 for a "pedestrian curricle" which was soon nicknamed the dandy horse.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Electricity, Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Graduating from the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, in 1878, Sprague served at sea and with various shore establishments. In 1883 he resigned from the Navy and obtained employment with the Edison Company; but being convinced that the use of electricity for motive power was as important as that for illumination, in 1884 he founded the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company. Sprague began to develop reliable and efficient motors in large sizes, marketing 15 hp (11 kW) examples by 1885. He devised the method of collecting current by using a wooden, spring-loaded rod to press a roller against the underside of an overhead wire. The installation by Sprague in 1888 of a street tramway on a large scale in Richmond, Virginia, was to become the prototype of the universally adopted trolley system with overhead conductor and the beginning of commercial electric traction. Following the success of the Richmond tramway the company equipped sixty-seven other railways before its merger with Edison General Electric in 1890. The Sprague traction motor supported on the axle of electric streetcars and flexibly mounted to the bogie set a pattern that was widely adopted for many years.

Encouraged by successful experiments with multiple-sheave electric elevators, the Sprague Elevator Company was formed and installed the first set of high-speed passenger cars in 1893–4. These effectively displaced hydraulic elevators in larger buildings. From experience with control systems for these, he developed his system of multiple-unit control for electric trains, which other engineers had considered impracticable. In Sprague's system, a master controller situated in the driver's cab operated electrically at a distance the contactors and reversers which controlled the motors distributed down the train. After years of experiment, Sprague's multiple-unit control was put into use for the first time in 1898 by the Chicago South Side Elevated Railway: within fifteen years multiple-unit operation was used worldwide.

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