armaments laboratory

— advanced concepts laboratory

— Air Force Weapons laboratory

— armaments laboratory

— Army Aeromedical Research laboratory

— Army Aeronautical Research laboratory

— Army Air Mobility R&D laboratory

— Army Ballistics Research laboratory

— Army Biochemical laboratory

— Army Biological R&D laboratory

— Army Chemical Systems laboratory

— Army Construction Engineering Research laboratory

— Army Engineer Topographic laboratoryies

— Army Fuel and Lubricants Research laboratory

— Army Medical Research and Nutrition laboratory

— Army Night Vision laboratory

— Army Special Weapons laboratory

— Army Tropical Research laboratory

— Atmospheric Sciences laboratory

— Avionics Development laboratory

— Bacteriological Warfare laboratory

— Ballistic Wound laboratory

— Behavioral Scientific Research laboratory

— Chemical &Radiological R&D laboratory

— chemical field laboratory

— Cold Regions Research and Engineering laboratory

— Combat Surveillance and Target Acquisition laboratory

— Concepts laboratory

— Criminal Investigation laboratory

— Electronics R&D laboratory

— Engineer R&D laboratory

— EW laboratory

— field laboratory

— Fire Control and Small Caliber Weapons Systems laboratory

— general medical service laboratory

— Geophysical laboratory

— Human Engineering laboratory

— Human Factors Operation Research laboratory

— Jungle laboratory

— Land Warfare laboratory

— Large Caliber Weapon Systems laboratory

— Limited War laboratory

— major thrust lead laboratory

— Medical Bioengineering R&D laboratory

— medical general laboratory

— military orbital laboratory

— mobile fuel testing laboratory

— Naval Weapons laboratory

— Nuclear Defense laboratory

— Ordnance Investigation laboratory

— ordnance laboratory

— Organizations and Systems Research laboratory

— Personnel and Training Research laboratory

— Radiological Defense laboratory

— Rocket Propulsion laboratory

— Signal Corps Engineering laboratory

— Signals Warfare laboratory

— Tactical Imagery Processing laboratory

— Tank Automotive Systems laboratory

— USAF Epidemiological laboratory

— USN Mine Defense laboratory

— weapons effects laboratory

— weapons laboratory

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Hadfield's father, Robert, set up a steelworks in Sheffield in 1872, one of the earliest to specialize in steel castings. After his education in Sheffield, during which he showed an interest in chemistry, Hadfield entered his father's works. His first act was to set up a laboratory, where he began systematically experimenting with alloy steels in order to improve the quality of the products of the family firm. In 1883 Hadfield found that by increasing the manganese content to 12.5 per cent, with a carbon content of 1.4 per cent, the resulting alloy showed extraordinary resistance to abrasive wear even though it was quite soft. It was soon applied in railway points and crossings, crushing and grinding machinery, and wherever great resistance to wear is required. Its lack of brittleness led to its use in steel helmets during the First World War. Hadfield's manganese steel was also non-magnetic, which was later of importance in the electrical industry. Hadfield's other great invention was that of silicon steel. Again after careful and systematic laboratory work, Hadfield found that a steel containing 3–4 per cent silicon and as little as possible of other elements was highly magnetic, which was to prove important in the electrical industry (e.g. reducing the weight and bulk of electrical transformers). Hadfield took over the firm on the death of his father in 1888, but he continued to lay great stress on the need for laboratory research to improve the quality and range of products. The steel-casting side of the business led to a flourishing armaments industry, and this, together with their expertise in alloy steels, made Hadfield's one of the great names in Sheffield and British steel until, sadly, it succumbed along with so many other illustrious names during the British economic recession of 1983. Hadfield had a keen interest in metallurgical history, particularly in his characteristically thorough examination of the alloys of iron prepared by Faraday at the Royal Institution. Hadfield was an enlightened employer and was one of the first to introduce the eight-hour day.

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SUBJECT AREA: Automotive engineering, Land transport

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He was the son of an Irish immigrant farmer, William Ford, and the oldest son to survive of Mary Litogot; his mother died in 1876 with the birth of her sixth child. He went to the village school, and at the age of 16 he was apprenticed to Flower brothers' machine shop and then at the Drydock \& Engineering Works in Detroit. In 1882 he left to return to the family farm and spent some time working with a 1 1/2 hp steam engine doing odd jobs for the farming community at $3 per day. He was then employed as a demonstrator for Westinghouse steam engines. He met Clara Jane Bryant at New Year 1885 and they were married on 11 April 1888. Their only child, Edsel Bryant Ford, was born on 6 November 1893.

At that time Henry worked on steam engine repairs for the Edison Illuminating Company, where he became Chief Engineer. He became one of a group working to develop a "horseless carriage" in 1896 and in June completed his first vehicle, a "quadri cycle" with a two-cylinder engine. It was built in a brick shed, which had to be partially demolished to get the carriage out.

Ford became involved in motor racing, at which he was more successful than he was in starting a car-manufacturing company. Several early ventures failed, until the Ford Motor Company of 1903. By October 1908 they had started with production of the Model T. The first, of which over 15 million were built up to the end of its production in May 1927, came out with bought-out steel stampings and a planetary gearbox, and had a one-piece four-cylinder block with a bolt-on head. This was one of the most successful models built by Ford or any other motor manufacturer in the life of the motor car.

Interchangeability of components was an important element in Ford's philosophy. Ford was a pioneer in the use of vanadium steel for engine components. He adopted the principles of Frederick Taylor, the pioneer of time-and-motion study, and installed the world's first moving assembly line for the production of magnetos, started in 1913. He installed blast furnaces at the factory to make his own steel, and he also promoted research and the cultivation of the soya bean, from which a plastic was derived.

In October 1913 he introduced the "Five Dollar Day", almost doubling the normal rate of pay. This was a profit-sharing scheme for his employees and contained an element of a reward for good behaviour. About this time he initiated work on an agricultural tractor, the "Fordson" made by a separate company, the directors of which were Henry and his son Edsel.

In 1915 he chartered the Oscar II, a "peace ship", and with fifty-five delegates sailed for Europe a week before Christmas, docking at Oslo. Their objective was to appeal to all European Heads of State to stop the war. He had hoped to persuade manufacturers to replace armaments with tractors in their production programmes. In the event, Ford took to his bed in the hotel with a chill, stayed there for five days and then sailed for New York and home. He did, however, continue to finance the peace activists who remained in Europe. Back in America, he stood for election to the US Senate but was defeated. He was probably the father of John Dahlinger, illegitimate son of Evangeline Dahlinger, a stenographer employed by the firm and on whom he lavished gifts of cars, clothes and properties. He became the owner of a weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which became the medium for the expression of many of his more unorthodox ideas. He was involved in a lawsuit with the Chicago Tribune in 1919, during which he was cross-examined on his knowledge of American history: he is reputed to have said "History is bunk". What he actually said was, "History is bunk as it is taught in schools", a very different comment. The lawyers who thus made a fool of him would have been surprised if they could have foreseen the force and energy that their actions were to release. For years Ford employed a team of specialists to scour America and Europe for furniture, artefacts and relics of all kinds, illustrating various aspects of history. Starting with the Wayside Inn from South Sudbury, Massachusetts, buildings were bought, dismantled and moved, to be reconstructed in Greenfield Village, near Dearborn. The courthouse where Abraham Lincoln had practised law and the Ohio bicycle shop where the Wright brothers built their first primitive aeroplane were added to the farmhouse where the proprietor, Henry Ford, had been born. Replicas were made of Independence Hall, Congress Hall and the old City Hall in Philadelphia, and even a reconstruction of Edison's Menlo Park laboratory was installed. The Henry Ford museum was officially opened on 21 October 1929, on the fiftieth anniversary of Edison's invention of the incandescent bulb, but it continued to be a primary preoccupation of the great American car maker until his death.

Henry Ford was also responsible for a number of aeronautical developments at the Ford Airport at Dearborn. He introduced the first use of radio to guide a commercial aircraft, the first regular airmail service in the United States. He also manufactured the country's first all-metal multi-engined plane, the Ford Tri-Motor.

Edsel became President of the Ford Motor Company on his father's resignation from that position on 30 December 1918. Following the end of production in May 1927 of the Model T, the replacement Model A was not in production for another six months. During this period Henry Ford, though officially retired from the presidency of the company, repeatedly interfered and countermanded the orders of his son, ostensibly the man in charge. Edsel, who died of stomach cancer at his home at Grosse Point, Detroit, on 26 May 1943, was the father of Henry Ford II. Henry Ford died at his home, "Fair Lane", four years after his son's death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace, Weapons and armour

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Maxim was born the son of a pioneer farmer who later became a wood turner. Young Maxim was first apprenticed to a carriage maker and then embarked on a succession of jobs before joining his uncle in his engineering firm in Massachusetts in 1864. As a young man he gained a reputation as a boxer, but it was his uncle who first identified and encouraged Hiram's latent talent for invention.

It was not, however, until 1878, when Maxim joined the first electric-light company to be established in the USA, as its Chief Engineer, that he began to make a name for himself. He developed an improved light filament and his electric pressure regulator not only won a prize at the first International Electrical Exhibition, held in Paris in 1881, but also resulted in his being made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur. While in Europe he was advised that weapons development was a more lucrative field than electricity; consequently, he moved to England and established a small laboratory at Hatton Garden, London. He began by investigating improvements to the Gatling gun in order to produce a weapon with a faster rate of fire and which was more accurate. In 1883, by adapting a Winchester carbine, he successfully produced a semi-automatic weapon, which used the recoil to cock the gun automatically after firing. The following year he took this concept a stage further and produced a fully automatic belt-fed weapon. The recoil drove barrel and breechblock to the vent. The barrel then halted, while the breechblock, now unlocked from the former, continued rearwards, extracting the spent case and recocking the firing mechanism. The return spring, which it had been compressing, then drove the breechblock forward again, chambering the next round, which had been fed from the belt, as it did so. Keeping the trigger pressed enabled the gun to continue firing until the belt was expended. The Maxim gun, as it became known, was adopted by almost every army within the decade, and was to remain in service for nearly fifty years. Maxim himself joined forces with the large British armaments firm of Vickers, and the Vickers machine gun, which served the British Army during two world wars, was merely a refined version of the Maxim gun.

Maxim's interests continued to occupy several fields of technology, including flight. In 1891 he took out a patent for a steam-powered aeroplane fitted with a pendulous gyroscopic stabilizer which would maintain the pitch of the aeroplane at any desired inclination (basically, a simple autopilot). Maxim decided to test the relationship between power, thrust and lift before moving on to stability and control. He designed a lightweight steam-engine which developed 180 hp (135 kW) and drove a propeller measuring 17 ft 10 in. (5.44 m) in diameter. He fitted two of these engines into his huge flying machine testrig, which needed a wing span of 104 ft (31.7 m) to generate enough lift to overcome a total weight of 4 tons. The machine was not designed for free flight, but ran on one set of rails with a second set to prevent it rising more than about 2 ft (61 cm). At Baldwyn's Park in Kent on 31 July 1894 the huge machine, carrying Maxim and his crew, reached a speed of 42 mph (67.6 km/h) and lifted off its rails. Unfortunately, one of the restraining axles broke and the machine was extensively damaged. Although it was subsequently repaired and further trials carried out, these experiments were very expensive. Maxim eventually abandoned the flying machine and did not develop his idea for a stabilizer, turning instead to other projects. At the age of almost 70 he returned to the problems of flight and designed a biplane with a petrol engine: it was built in 1910 but never left the ground.

In all, Maxim registered 122 US and 149 British patents on objects ranging from mousetraps to automatic spindles. Included among them was a 1901 patent for a foot-operated suction cleaner. In 1900 he became a British subject and he was knighted the following year. He remained a larger-than-life figure, both physically and in character, until the end of his life.

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See also: Pilcher, Percy Sinclair

CM / JDS