an+expert+on+the+subject

(только sg) информация, сведения, сообщения, данные

- useful information

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2) (assume as hypothesis) supporre + sub, mettere + sub

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5) (presuppose) presupporre

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Lobnitz was the son of Henry Christian Lobnitz. His father was born in Denmark in 1831, and had worked for some years in both England and Scotland before becoming a naturalized British subject. Ultimately Henry joined the Clyde shipyard of James Henderson \& Son and worked there until his death, by which time he was sole proprietor and the yard was called Lobnitz \& Co. By this time the shipyard was the acknowledged world leader in rock-cutting machinery.

Frederick was given the opportunity to travel in Europe during the late 1870s and early 1880s. He studied at Bonn, Heidelberg and at the Zurich Polytechnic, and also served an apprenticeship at the Fairfield Shipyard of John Elder \& Co. of Glasgow. One of his first tasks was to supervise the construction and commissioning of a subaqueous rock excavator, and then he was asked to direct rock excavations at the Suez Canal.

In 1888 Frederick Lobnitz was made a partner of the company by his father and was to remain with them until his death, at which time he was Chairman. By this time the shipyard was a private limited company and had continued to enhance its name in the specialized field of dredging. At that time the two greatest dredge builders in the world (and deadly rivals) were situated next to each other on the banks of the Clyde at Renfrew; in 1957 they merged as Simons-Lobnitz Ltd. In 1915 Lobnitz was appointed Deputy Director for Munitions in Scotland and one year later he became Director, a post he held until 1919. Having investigated the running of munitions factories in France, he released scarce labour for the war effort by staffing the plants under his control with female and unskilled labour.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Domestic appliances and interiors, Land transport, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Public utilities

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Bramah was the son of a tenant farmer and was educated at the village school before being apprenticed to a local carpenter, Thomas Allot. He walked to London c.1773 and found work with a Mr Allen that included the repair of some of the comparatively rare water-closets of the period. He invented and patented one of his own, which was followed by a water cock in 1783. His next invention, a greatly improved lock, involved the devising of a number of special machine tools, for it was one of the first devices involving interchangeable components in its manufacture. In this he had the help of Henry Maudslay, then a young and unknown engineer, who became Bramah's foreman before setting up business on his own. In 1784 he moved his premises from Denmark Street, St Giles, to 124 Piccadilly, which was later used as a showroom when he set up a factory in Pimlico. He invented an engine for putting out fires in 1785 and 1793, in effect a reciprocating rotary-vane pump. He undertook the refurbishment and modernization of Norwich waterworks c.1793, but fell out with Robert Mylne, who was acting as Consultant to the Norwich Corporation and had produced a remarkably vague specification. This was Bramah's only venture into the field of civil engineering.

In 1797 he acted as an expert witness for Hornblower \& Maberley in the patent infringement case brought against them by Boulton and Watt. Having been cut short by the judge, he published his proposed evidence in "Letter to the Rt Hon. Sir James Eyre, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas…etc". In 1795 he was granted his most important patent, based on Pascal's Hydrostatic Paradox, for the hydraulic press which also incorporated the concept of hydraulics for the transmission of both power and motion and was the foundation of the whole subsequent hydraulic industry. There is no truth in the oft-repeated assertion originating from Samuel Smiles's Industrial Biography (1863) that the hydraulic press could not be made to work until Henry Maudslay invented the self-sealing neck leather. Bramah used a single-acting upstroking ram, sealed only at its base with a U-leather. There was no need for a neck leather.

He also used the concept of the weight-loaded, in this case as a public-house beer-engine. He devised machinery for carbonating soda water. The first banknote-numbering machine was of his design and was bought by the Bank of England. His development of a machine to cut twelve nibs from one goose quill started a patent specification which ended with the invention of the fountain pen, patented in 1809. His coach brakes were an innovation that was followed bv a form of hydropneumatic carriage suspension that was somewhat in advance of its time, as was his patent of 1812. This foresaw the introduction of hydraulic power mains in major cities and included the telescopic ram and the air-loaded accumulator.

In all Joseph Bramah was granted eighteen patents. On 22 March 1813 he demonstrated a hydraulic machine for pulling up trees by the roots in Hyde Park before a large crowd headed by the Duke of York. Using the same machine in Alice Holt Forest in Hampshire to fell timber for ships for the Navy, he caught a chill and died soon after at his home in Pimlico.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Mining and extraction technology, Railways and locomotives

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The son of a "coal viewer", Curr was brought up in the West Durham colliery district. In 1777 he went to the Duke of Norfolk's collieries at Sheffield, where in 1880 he was appointed Superintendent. There coal was conveyed underground in baskets on sledges: Curr replaced the wicker sledges with wheeled corves, i.e. small four-wheeled wooden wagons, running on "rail-roads" with cast-iron rails and hauled from the coal-face to the shaft bottom by horses. The rails employed hitherto had usually consisted of plates of iron, the flange being on the wheels of the wagon. Curr's new design involved flanges on the rails which guided the vehicles, the wheels of which were unflanged and could run on any hard surface. He appears to have left no precise record of the date that he did this, and surviving records have been interpreted as implying various dates between 1776 and 1787. In 1787 John Buddle paid tribute to the efficiency of the rails of Curr's type, which were first used for surface transport by Joseph Butler in 1788 at his iron furnace at Wingerworth near Chesterfield: their use was then promoted widely by Benjamin Outram, and they were adopted in many other English mines. They proved serviceable until the advent of locomotives demanded different rails.

In 1788 Curr also developed a system for drawing a full corve up a mine shaft while lowering an empty one, with guides to separate them. At the surface the corves were automatically emptied by tipplers. Four years later he was awarded a patent for using double ropes for lifting heavier loads. As the weight of the rope itself became a considerable problem with the increasing depth of the shafts, Curr invented the flat hemp rope, patented in 1798, which consisted of several small round ropes stitched together and lapped upon itself in winding. It acted as a counterbalance and led to a reduction in the time and cost of hoisting: at the beginning of a run the loaded rope began to coil upon a small diameter, gradually increasing, while the unloaded rope began to coil off a large diameter, gradually decreasing.

Curr's book The Coal Viewer (1797) is the earliest-known engineering work on railway track and it also contains the most elaborate description of a Newcomen pumping engine, at the highest state of its development. He became an acknowledged expert on construction of Newcomen-type atmospheric engines, and in 1792 he established a foundry to make parts for railways and engines.

Because of the poor financial results of the Duke of Norfolk's collieries at the end of the century, Curr was dismissed in 1801 despite numerous inventions and improvements which he had introduced. After his dismissal, six more of his patents were concerned with rope-making: the one he gained in 1813 referred to the application of flat ropes to horse-gins and perpendicular drum-shafts of steam engines. Curr also introduced the use of inclined planes, where a descending train of full corves pulled up an empty one, and he was one of the pioneers employing fixed steam engines for hauling. He may have resided in France for some time before his death.

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WK / PJGR

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Davis was the son of a detective with the City of London police. At the age of 11 he entered the employment of Siebe, Gorman \& Co., manufacturers of diving and other safety equipment since 1819, at their Lambeth works. By good fortune, his neat handwriting attracted the notice of Mr Gorman and he was transferred to work in the office. He studied hard after working hours and rose steadily in the firm. In his twenties he was promoted to Assistant Manager, then General Manager, Managing Director and finally Governing Director. He retired in 1960, having been made Life President the previous year, and continued to attend the office regularly until May 1964.

Davis's entire career was devoted to research and development in the firm's special field. In 1906 he perfected the first practicable oxygen-breathing apparatus for use in mine rescue; it was widely adopted and with modifications was still in use in the 1990s. With Professor Leonard Hill he designed a deep-sea diving-bell incorporating a decompression chamber. He also invented an oxygen-breathing apparatus and heated apparel for airmen flying at high altitudes.

Immediately after the first German gas attacks on the Western Front in April 1915, Davis devised a respirator, known as the stocking skene or veil mask. He quickly organized the mass manufacture of this device, roping in members of his family and placing the work in the homes of Lambeth: within 48 hours the first consignment was being sent off to France.

He was a member of the Admiralty Deep Sea Diving Committee, which in 1933 completed tables for the safe ascent of divers with oxygen from a depth of 300 ft (91 m). They were compiled by Davis in conjunction with Professors J.B.S.Haldane and Leonard Hill and Captain G.C.Damant, the Royal Navy's leading diving expert. With revisions these tables have been used by the Navy ever since. Davis's best-known invention was first used in 1929: the Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus. It became standard equipment on submarines until it was replaced by the Built-in Breathing System, which the firm began manufacturing in 1951.

The firm's works were bombed during the Second World War and were re-established at Chessington, Surrey. The extensive research facilities there were placed at the disposal of the Royal Navy and the Admiralty Experimental Diving Unit. Davis worked with Haldane and Hill on problems of the underwater physiology of working divers. A number of inventions issued from Chessington, such as the human torpedo, midget submarine and human minesweeper. In the early 1950s the firm helped to pioneer the use of underwater television to investigate the sinking of the submarine Affray and the crashed Comet jet airliners.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Electronics and information technology, Public utilities

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After attending Owens College, Manchester, Hopkinson was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1867 to read for the Mathematical Tripos. An appointment in 1872 with the lighthouse department of the Chance Optical Works in Birmingham directed his attention to electrical engineering. His most noteworthy contribution to lighthouse engineering was an optical system to produce flashing lights that distinguished between individual beacons. His extensive researches on the dielectric properties of glass were recognized when he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society at the age of 29. Moving to London in 1877 he became established as a consulting engineer at a time when electricity supply was about to begin on a commercial scale. During the remainder of his life, Hopkinson's researches resulted in fundamental contributions to electrical engineering practice, dynamo design and alternating current machine theory. In making a critical study of the Edison dynamo he developed the principle of the magnetic circuit, a concept also arrived at by Gisbert Kapp around the same time. Hopkinson's improvement of the Edison dynamo by reducing the length of the field magnets almost doubled its output. In 1890, in addition to-his consulting practice, Hopkinson accepted a post as the first Professor of Electrical Engineering and Head of the Siemens laboratory recently established at King's College, London. Although he was not involved in lecturing, the position gave him the necessary facilities and staff and student assistance to continue his researches. Hopkinson was consulted on many proposals for electric traction and electricity supply, including schemes in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. He also advised Mather and Platt when they were acting as contractors for the locomotives and generating plant for the City and South London tube railway. As early as 1882 he considered that an ideal method of charging for the supply of electricity should be based on a two-part tariff, with a charge related to maximum demand together with a charge for energy supplied. Hopkinson was one the foremost expert witnesses of his day in patent actions and was himself the patentee of over forty inventions, of which the three-wire system of distribution and the series-parallel connection of traction motors were his most successful. Jointly with his brother Edward, John Hopkinson communicated the outcome of his investigations to the Royal Society in a paper entitled "Dynamo Electric Machinery" in 1886. In this he also described the later widely used "back to back" test for determining the characteristics of two identical machines. His interest in electrical machines led him to more fundamental research on magnetic materials, including the phenomenon of recalescence and the disappearance of magnetism at a well-defined temperature. For his work on the magnetic properties of iron, in 1890 he was awarded the Royal Society Royal Medal. He was a member of the Alpine Club and a pioneer of rock climbing in Britain; he died, together with three of his children, in a climbing accident.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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John Lombe's father, Henry Lombe, was a worsted weaver who married twice. John was the second son of the second marriage and was still a baby when his father died in 1695. John, a native of the Eastern Counties, was apprenticed to a trade and employed by Thomas Cotchett in the erection of Cotchett's silk mill at Derby, which soon failed however. Lombe went to Italy, or was sent there by his elder half-brother, Thomas, to discover the secrets of their throwing machinery while employed in a silk mill in Piedmont. He returned to England in 1716 or 1717, bringing with him two expert Italian workmen.

Thomas Lombe was a prosperous London merchant who financed the construction of a new water-powered silk mill at Derby which is said to have cost over £30,000. John arranged with the town Corporation for the lease of the island in the River Derwent, where Cotchett had erected his mill. During the four years of its construction, John first set up the throwing machines in other parts of the town. The machines were driven manually there, and their product helped to defray the costs of the mill. The silk-throwing machine was very complex. The water wheel powered a horizontal shaft that was under the floor and on which were placed gearwheels to drive vertical shafts upwards through the different floors. The throwing machines were circular, with the vertical shafts running through the middle. The doubled silk threads had previously been wound on bobbins which were placed on spindles with wire flyers at intervals around the outer circumference of the machine. The bobbins were free to rotate on the spindles while the spindles and flyers were driven by the periphery of a horizontal wheel fixed to the vertical shaft. Another horizontal wheel set a little above the first turned the starwheels, to which were attached reels for winding the silk off the bobbins below. Three or four sets of these spindles and reels were placed above each other on the same driving shaft. The machine was very complicated for the time and must have been expensive to build and maintain.

John lived just long enough to see the mill in operation, for he died in 1722 after a painful illness said to have been the result of poison administered by an Italian woman in revenge for his having stolen the invention and for the injury he was causing the Italian trade. The funeral was said to have been the most superb ever known in Derby.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Telecommunications

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

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

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Mining and extraction technology

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At the University of Prague he studied law, but thereafter turned to mineralogy, physics and different aspects of mining. In 1769–70 he worked with the mining administration in Schemnitz (now Banská Stiavnica, Slovakia) and Prague and later continued travelling to many parts of Europe, with special interests in the mining districts. In 1776, he was charged to enlarge and systematically to reshape the natural-history collection in Vienna. Three years later he was appointed Wirklicher Hofrat at the mining and monetary administration of the Austrian court.

Born, who had been at a Jesuit college in his youth, was an active freemason in Vienna and exercised remarkable social communication. The intensity of his academic exchange was outstanding, and he was a member of more than a dozen learned societies throughout Europe. When with the construction of a new metallurgic plant at Joachimsthal (now Jáchymov, Czech Republic) the methods of extracting silver and gold from ores by the means of quicksilver demanded acute consideration, it was this form of scientific intercourse that induced him in 1786 to invite many of his colleagues from several countries to meet in Schemnitz in order to discuss his ideas. Since the beginnings of the 1780s Born had developed the amalgamation process as had first been applied in Mexico in 1557, by mixing the roasted and chlorinated ores with water, ingredients of iron and quicksilver in drums and having the quicksilver refined from the amalgam in the next step. The meeting led to the founding of the Societät der Bergbaukunde, the first internationally structured society of scientists in the world. He died as the result of severe injuries suffered in an accident while he was studying fire-setting in a Slovakian mine in 1770.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Born into comfortable circumstances, Burrell chose ship construction as his career. Ability aided by financial influence helped professional advancement, and by his early thirties he possessed a shipyard at Ratcliffe on the River Thames. Ship design was then unscientific, shrouded in mystique, and it required patience and perseverance to penetrate the conventions of the craft.

From the 1600s Burrell had been investing in the East India Company. In 1607 the Company decided to build ships in their own right, and Burrell was appointed as the first Master Shipwright, a post he held for nearly twenty years. The first ship, Trade's Increase, of 1,000-tons burthen, was the largest ship built in England until the eighteenth century, but following a mishap at launch and the ship's subsequent loss on its maiden voyage, the Company reassessed its policy and built smaller ships. Burrell's foresight can be gauged by his involvement in two private commercial undertakings in Ireland; one to create oak forests for shipbuilding, and the other to set up a small ironworks. In 1618 a Royal Commission was appointed to enquire into the poor condition of the Navy, and with the help of Burrell it was ruled that the main problems were neglect and corruption. With his name being known and his good record of production, the Royal Navy ordered no fewer than ten warships from Burrell in the four-year period from 1619 to 1623. With experience in the military and commercial sectors, Burrell can be regarded as an all-round and expert shipbuilder of the Stuart period. He used intuition at a time when there were no scientific rules and little reliable empiric guidance on ship design.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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Although known as Clement in his professional life, his baptism at Asby and his death were registered under the name of Joseph Clemmet. He worked as a slater until the age of 23, but his interest in mechanics led him to spend much of his spare time in the local blacksmith's shop. By studying books on mechanics borrowed from his cousin, a watchmaker, he taught himself and with the aid of the village blacksmith made his own lathe. By 1805 he was able to give up the slating trade and find employment as a mechanic in a small factory at Kirkby Stephen. From there he moved to Carlisle for two years, and then to Glasgow where, while working as a turner, he took lessons in drawing; he had a natural talent and soon became an expert draughtsman. From about 1809 he was employed by Leys, Mason \& Co. of Aberdeen designing and making power looms. For this work he built a screw-cutting lathe and continued his self-education. At the end of 1813, having saved about £100, he made his way to London, where he soon found employment as a mechanic and draughtsman. Within a few months he was engaged by Joseph Bramah, and after a trial period a formal agreement dated 1 April 1814 was made by which Clement was to be Chief Draughtsman and Superintendent of Bramah's Pimlico works for five years. However, Bramah died in December 1814 and after his sons took over the business it was agreed that Clement should leave before the expiry of the five-year period. He soon found employment as Chief Draughtsman with Henry Maudslay \& Co. By 1817 Clement had saved about £500, which enabled him to establish his own business at Prospect Place, Newington Butts, as a mechanical draughtsman and manufacturer of high-class machinery. For this purpose he built lathes for his own use and invented various improvements in their detailed design. In 1827 he designed and built a facing lathe which incorporated an ingenious system of infinitely variable belt gearing. He had also built his own planing machine by 1820 and another, much larger one in 1825. In 1828 Clement began making fluted taps and dies and standardized the screw threads, thus anticipating on a small scale the national standards later established by Sir Joseph Whitworth. Because of his reputation for first-class workmanship, Clement was in the 1820s engaged by Charles Babbage to carry out the construction of his first Difference Engine.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

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Born on a cattle ranch, Forrester obtained a BSc in electrical engineering at the University of Nebraska in 1939 and his MSc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he remained to teach and carry out research. Becoming interested in computing, he established the Digital Computer Laboratory at MIT in 1945 and became involved in the construction of Whirlwind I, an early general-purpose computer completed in March 1951 and used for flight-simulation by the US Army Air Force. Finding the linear memories then available for storing data a major limiting factor in the speed at which computers were able to operate, he developed a three-dimensional store based on the binary switching of the state of small magnetic cores that could be addressed and switched by a matrix of wires carrying pulses of current. The machine used parallel synchronous fixed-point computing, with fifteen binary digits and a plus sign, i.e. 16 bits in all, and contained 5,000 vacuum tubes, eleven semiconductors and a 2 MHz clock for the arithmetic logic unit. It occupied a two-storey building and consumed 150kW of electricity. From his experience with the development and use of computers, he came to realize their great potential for the simulation and modelling of real situations and hence for the solution of a variety of management problems, using data communications and the technique now known as interactive graphics. His later career was therefore in this field, first at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts (1951) and subsequently (from 1956) as Professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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See also: Burks, Arthur Walter; Goldstine, Herman H.; Wilkes, Maurice Vincent; Williams, Sir Frederic Calland

SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors, Metallurgy

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Gillette's formal education in Chicago was brought to an end when a disastrous fire destroyed all his father's possessions. Forced to fend for himself, he worked first in the hardware trade in Chicago and New York, then as a travelling salesman. Gillette inherited the family talent for invention, but found that his successful inventions barely paid for those that failed. He was advised by a previous employer, William Painter (inventor of the Crown Cork), to look around for something that could be used widely and then thrown away. In 1895 he succeeded in following that advice of inventing something which people could use and then throw away, so that they would keep coming back for more. An idea came to him while he was honing an old-fashioned razor one morning; he was struck by the fact that only a short piece of the whole length of a cutthroat razor is actually used for shaving, as well as by the potentially dangerous nature of the implement. He "rushed out to purchase some pieces of brass, some steel ribbon used for clock springs, a small hand vise and some files". He thought of using a thin steel blade sharpened on each side, placed between two plates and held firmly together by a handle. Though coming from a family of inventors, Gillette had no formal technical education and was entirely ignorant of metallurgy. For six years he sought a way of making a cheap blade from sheet steel that could be hardened, tempered and sharpened to a keen edge.

Gillette eventually found financial supporters: Henry Sachs, a Boston lamp manufacturer; his brother-in-law Jacob Heilbron; and William Nickerson, who had a considerable talent for invention. By skilled trial and error rather than expert metallurgical knowledge, Nickerson devised ways of forming and sharpening the blades, and it was these that brought commercial success. In 1901, the American Safety Razor Company, later to be renamed the Gillette Safety Razor Company, was set up. When it started production in 1903 the company was badly in debt, and managed to sell only fifty-one razors and 168 blades; but by the end of the following year, 90,000 razors and 12.4 million blades had been sold. A sound invention coupled with shrewd promotion ensured further success, and eight plants manufacturing safety razors were established in various parts of the world. Gillette's business experiences led him into the realms of social theory about the way society should be organized. He formulated his views in a series of books published over the years 1894 to 1910. He believed that competition led to a waste of up to 90 per cent of human effort and that want and crime would be eliminated by substituting a giant trust to plan production centrally. Unfortunately, the public in America, or anywhere else for that matter, were not ready for this form of Utopia; no omniscient planners were available, and human wants and needs were too various to be supplied by a single agency. Even so, some of his ideas have found favour: air conditioning and government provision of work for the unemployed. Gillette made a fortune from his invention and retired from active participation in the business in 1913, although he remained President until 1931 and Director until his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Telecommunications

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Initially apprenticed to a carpenter, Gray soon showed an interest in chemistry, but he eventually studied electrical engineering at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, in the late 1850s. In 1869 he founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, where he devised an electric-needle annunciator for use in hotels and lifts and carried out experimental work aimed at the development of a means of distant-speech communication. After successful realization of a liquid-based microphone and public demonstrations of a receiver using a metal diaphragm, on 14 February 1876 he deposited a caveat of intention to file a patent claim within three months for the invention of the telephone, only to learn that Alexander Graham Bell had filed a full patent claim only three hours earlier on the same day. Following litigation, the patent was eventually awarded to Bell. In 1880 Gray was appointed Professor of Dynamic Electricity at Oberlin College, but he appears to have retained his business interests since in 1891 he was both a member of the firm of Gray and Barton and electrician to his old firm, Western Electric. Subsequently, in 1895, he invented the TelAutograph, a form of remote-writing telegraph, or facsimile, capable of operating over short distances. The system used a transmitter in which the x and y movements of a writing stylus were coupled to a pair of variable resistors. In turn, these were connected by two telegraph wires to a pair of receiving coils, which were used to control the position of a pen on a sheet of paper, thus replicating the movement of the original stylus.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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The son of a master weaver, he originally wished to become an engineer, but while remaining in the parental home he had to follow his father's trade in the textile industry, becoming a master weaver himself in 1839 at Hainichen. He was a good observer and a keen model maker. It was at this stage, in the early 1840s, that he began experimenting with a new material for papermaking. Until then the raw material had been waste rag from the textile industry, but the ever-increasing demands of the mechanical printing presses, especially those producing newspapers, were beginning to outstrip supply. Keller tried using pine wood ground with a wet grindstone. The mass of fibres that resulted was then heated with water to form a thick brew which he then strained through a cloth. By this means Keller obtained a pulp that could be used for papermaking. He constructed a simple grinding machine that could disintegrate the wood without splinters; this was used to make paper in the Altchemnitzer paper mill, and the newspaper Frankenberger Intelligenz-und Wochenblatt was the first to be printed on wood-pulp paper. Keller could not secure state funds to promote his invention, so he approached an expert in papermaking, Heinrich Voelter, Technical Director of the Vereinigten Bautzener Papierfabrik. Voelter put up 700 thaler, and in August 1845 the state of Saxony granted a patent in both their names. In 1848 the first practical machine for grinding wood was produced, but four years later the patent expired. Unfortunately Keller could not afford the renewal fee, and it was Voelter who developed the process of wood-pulp papermaking under his own name, leaving Keller behind. Without this invention, the output of paper from the mills could not have kept pace with the demands of the printing industry, and the mass readership that these technological developments made possible could not have been served. It is no fault of Keller's that wood-pulp paper contains within itself the seeds of its own deterioration and ultimate destruction, presenting librarians of today with an intractable problem of preservation. Keller's part in this technical breakthrough is established in his "ideas" notebook covering the years 1841 and 1842, preserved in the museum at Hainichen.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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Morland was one of several sons of the Revd Thomas Morland and was probably initially educated by his father. He went to Winchester School from 1639 to 1644 and then to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he graduated BA in 1648 and MA in 1652. He was appointed a tutor there in 1650. In 1653 he went to Sweden in the ambassadorial staff of Bulstrode Whitelocke and remained there until 1654. In that year he was appointed Clerk to Mr Secretary Thurloe, and in 1655 he was accredited by Oliver Cromwell to the Duke of Savoy to appeal for the Waldenses. In 1657 he married Susanne de Milleville of Boissy, France, with whom he had three children. In 1660 he went over to the Royalists, meeting King Charles at Breda, Holland. On 20 May, the King knighted him, creating him baron, for revealing a conspiracy against the king's life. He was also granted a pension of£500 per year. In 1661, at the age of 36, he decided to devote himself to mathematics and invention. He devised a mechanical calculator, probably based on the pattern of Blaise Pascal, for adding and subtracting: this was followed in 1666 by one for multiplying and other functions. A Perpetual Calendar or Almanack followed; he toyed with the idea of a "gunpowder engine" for raising water; he developed a range of speaking trum-pets, said to have a range of 1/2 to 1 mile (0.8–1.6 km) or more; also iron stoves for use on board ships, and improvements to barometers.

By 1675 he had started selling a range of pumps for private houses, for mines or deep wells, for ships, for emptying ponds or draining low ground as well as to quench fire or wet the sails of ships. The pumps cost from £5 to £63, and the great novelty was that he used, instead of packing around the cylinder sealing against the bore of the cylinder, a neck-gland or seal around the outside diameter of the piston or piston-rod. This revolutionary step avoided the necessity of accurately boring the cylinder, replacing it with the need to machine accurately the outside diameter of the piston or rod, a much easier operation. Twenty-seven variations of size and materials were included in his schedule of'Pumps or Water Engines of Isaac Thompson of Great Russel Street', the maker of Morland's design. In 1681 the King made him "Magister mechanicorum", or Master of Machines. In that year he sailed for France to advise Louis XIV on the waterworks being built at Marly to supply the Palace of Versailles. About this time he had shown King Charles plans for a pumping engine "worked by fire alone". He petitioned for a patent for this, but did not pursue the matter.

In 1692 he went blind. In all, he married five times. While working for Cromwell he became an expert in ciphers, in opening sealed letters and in their rapid copying.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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Although primarily an engineer, William Pole was a man of many and varied talents, being amongst other things an accomplished musician (his doctorate was in music) and an authority on whist. He served an apprenticeship at the Horsley Company in Birmingham, and moved to London in 1836, when he was employed first as Manager to a gasworks. In 1844 he published a study of the Cornish pumping engine, and he also accepted an appointment as the first Professor of Engineering in the Elphinstone College at Bombay. He spent three pioneering years in this post, and undertook the survey work for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway. Before returning to London in 1848 he married Matilda Gauntlett, the daughter of a clergyman.

Back in Britain, Pole was employed by James Simpson, J.M.Rendel and Robert Stephenson, the latter engaging him to assist with calculations on the Britannia Bridge. In 1858 he set up his own practice. He kept a very small office, choosing not to delegate work to subordinates but taking on a bewildering variety of commissions for government and private companies. In the first category, he made calculations for government officials of the main drainage of the metropolis and for its water supply. He lectured on engineering to the Royal Engineers' institution at Chatham, and served on a Select Committee to enquire into the armour of warships and fortifications. He became a member of the Royal Commission on the Railways of Great Britain and Ireland (the Devonshire Commission, 1867) and reported to the War Office on the MartiniHenry rifle. He also advised the India Office about examinations for engineering students. The drafting and writing up of reports was frequently left to Pole, who also made distinguished contributions to the official Lives of Robert Stephenson (1864), I.K. Brunel (1870) and William Fairbairn (1877). For other bodies, he acted as Consulting Engineer in England to the Japanese government, and he assisted W.H.Barlow in calculations for a bridge at Queensferry on the Firth of Forth (1873). He was consulted about many urban water supplies.

Pole joined the Institution of Civil Engineers as an Associate in 1840 and became a Member in 1856. He became a Member of Council, Honorary Secretary (succeeding Manby in 1885–96) and Honorary Member of the Institution. He was interested in astronomy and photography, he was fluent in several languages, was an expert on music, and became the world authority on whist. In 1859 he was appointed Professor of Civil Engineering at University College London, serving in this office until 1867. Pole, whose dates coincided closely with those of Queen Victoria, was one of the great Victorian engineers: he was a polymath, able to apply his great abilities to an amazing range of different tasks. In engineering history, he deserves to be remembered as an outstanding communicator and popularizer.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Mining and extraction technology

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A scholar of the Mining Academy in Freiberg, who in his dissertation dealt with the fineness of coal dust, Rammler started experiments in 1925 relating to firing this material. In the USA this process, based on coal, had turned out to be very effective in large boiler furnaces. Rammler endeavoured to apply the process to lignite and pursued general research work on various thermochemical problems as well as methods of grinding and classifying. As producing power from lignite was of specific interest for the young Soviet Union, with its large demand from its new power stations and its as-yet unexploited lignite deposits, he soon came into contact with the Soviet authorities. In his laboratory in Dresden, which he had bought from the freelance metallurgist Paul Otto Rosin after his emigration and under whom he had been working since he left the Academy, he continued his studies in refining coal and soon gained an international reputation. He opened up means of producing coke from lignite for use in metallurgical processes.

His later work was of utmost importance after the Second World War when several countries in Eastern Europe, especially East Germany with its large lignite deposits, established their own iron and steel industries. Accordingly, the Soviet administration supported his experiments vigorously after he joined Karl Kegel's Institute for Briquetting in Freiberg in 1945. Through his numerous books and articles, he became the internationally leading expert on refining lignite and Kegel's successor as head of the Institute and Professor at the Bergakademie. Six years later, he produced for the first time high-temperature coke from lignite low in ash and sulphur for smelting in low-shaft furnaces. Rammler was widely honoured and contributed decisively to the industrial development of his country; he demonstrated new technological processes when, under austere conditions, economical and ecological considerations were neglected.

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SUBJECT AREA: Canals

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Between 1515 and 1522 Francis I of France became ruler of part of Italy, including Milan. He discussed with Leonardo da Vinci the possibility of providing canals in France similar to those constructed or under construction in Italy. One idea was to provide a link between the Garonne at Toulouse and the Aude at Carcassonne. In 1539 Bachelier and his colleague Arnaud Casanove, who described themselves as "expert levellers", proposed a survey of the Toulouse to Carcassonne route and also suggested that barges could either float down the Garonne to Bordeaux or could travel along a canal dug parallel to the river. Francis I authorized them to do the work and approved the plans, which comprised a lock-free canal of variable depth, when they had completed them. However, their plans were hopelessly inaccurate, and nothing was done. In 1598 Henri IV re-examined the plans, but it was left to Pierre Paul Riquet in 1662 to reassess the concept of a Biscay-to- Mediterranean waterway.

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