civil+engineers

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Elgar enjoyed a fascinating professional life, during which he achieved distinction in the military, merchant, academic and political aspects of his profession. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed as a shipwright to the Royal Dockyard at Portsmouth but when he was in his late teens he was selected as one of the Admiralty students to further his education at the Royal School of Naval Architecture at South Kensington, London. On completion of the course he was appointed to Birkenhead, where the ill-fated HMS Captain was being built, and then to Portsmouth Dockyard. In 1870 the Captain was lost at sea and Francis Elgar was called on to prepare much of the evidence for the Court Martial. This began his life-long interest in ship stability and in ways of presenting this information in an easily understood form to ship operators.

In 1883 he accepted the John Elder Chair of Naval Architecture at Glasgow University, an appointment which formalized the already well-established teaching of this branch of engineering at Glasgow. However, after only three years he returned to public service in the newly created post of Director of Royal Dockyards, a post that he held for a mere six years but which brought about great advances in the speed of warship construction, with associated reductions in cost. In 1892 he was made Naval Architect and Director of the Fairfield Shipbuilding Company in Glasgow, remaining there until he retired in 1907. The following year he accepted the post of Chairman of the Birkenhead shipyard of Cammell Laird \& Co.; this was a recent amalgamation of two companies, and he retained this position until his death. Throughout his life, Elgar acted on many consultative bodies and committees, including the 1884 Ship Load Line Enquiry. His work enabled him to keep abreast of all current thinking in ship design and construction.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Metallurgy, Steam and internal combustion engines

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He was the son of a cloth mill worker in Leeds and at the age of 10 he joined his father at the mill. Showing a mechanical inclination, he was apprenticed to a firm of machine-tool makers, Smith, Beacock and Tannett. There he rose to become Foreman and Traveller, and designed and patented tools for cutting bevelled gears. With his brother and one Refitt, he set up the Silver Cross engineering works for making special machine tools. In 1874 he founded the Leeds Forge Company, acting as Managing Director until 1896 and then as Chairman until shortly before his death.

It was in 1877 that he patented his most important invention, the corrugated furnace for steam-boilers. These furnaces could withstand much higher pressures than the conventional form, and higher working pressures in marine boilers enabled triple-expansion engines to be installed, greatly improving the performance of steamships, and the outcome was the great ocean-going liners of the twentieth century. The first vessel to be equipped with the corrugated furnace was the Pretoria of 1878. At first the furnaces were made by hammering iron plates using swage blocks under a steam hammer. A plant for rolling corrugated plates was set up at Essen in Germany, and Fox installed a similar mill at his works in Leeds in 1882.

In 1886 Fox installed a Siemens steelmaking plant and he was notable in the movement for replacing wrought iron with steel. He took out several patents for making pressed-steel underframes for railway wagons. The business prospered and Fox opened a works near Chicago in the USA, where in addition to wagon underframes he manufactured the first American pressed-steel carriages. He later added a works at Pittsburgh.

Fox was the first in England to use water gas for his metallurgical operations and for lighting, with a saving in cost as it was cheaper than coal gas. He was also a pioneer in the acetylene industry, producing in 1894 the first calcium carbide, from which the gas is made.

Fox took an active part in public life in and around Leeds, being thrice elected Mayor of Harrogate. As a music lover, he was a benefactor of musicians, contributing no less than £45,000 towards the cost of building the Royal College of Music in London, opened in 1894. In 1897 he sued for libel the author Jerome K.Jerome and the publishers of the Today magazine for accusing him of misusing his great generosity to the College to give a misleading impression of his commercial methods and prosperity. He won the case but was not awarded costs.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering, Railways and locomotives

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Fox was a pupil of John Ericsson, helped to build the locomotive Novelty, and drove it at the Rainhill Trials in 1829. He became a driver on the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway and then a pupil of Robert Stephenson, who appointed him an assistant engineer for construction of the southern part of the London \& Birmingham Railway, opened in 1837. He was probably responsible for the design of the early bow-string girder bridge which carried the railway over the Regent's Canal. He also invented turnouts with switch blades, i.e. "points". With Robert Stephenson he designed the light iron train sheds at Euston Station, a type of roof that was subsequently much used elsewhere. He then became a partner in Fox, Henderson \& Co., railway contractors and manufacturers of railway equipment and bridges. The firm built the Crystal Palace in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851: Fox did much of the detail design work personally and was subsequently knighted. It also built many station roofs, including that at Paddington. From 1857 Fox was in practice in London as a consulting engineer in partnership with his sons, Charles Douglas Fox and Francis Fox. Sir Charles Fox became an advocate of light and narrow-gauge railways, although he was opposed to break-of-gauge unless it was unavoidable. He was joint Engineer for the Indian Tramway Company, building the first narrow-gauge (3 ft 6 in. or 107 cm) railway in India, opened in 1865, and his firm was Consulting Engineer for the first railways in Queensland, Australia, built to the same gauge at the same period on recommendation of Government Engineer A.C.Fitzgibbon.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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Auguste Perret belonged to the family contracting firm of A. \& G.Perret, which early specialized in the use of reinforced concrete. His eight-storey building at 25 bis Rue Franklin in Paris, built in 1902–3, was the first example of frame construction in this material and established its viability for structural design. Both ground plan and façade are uncompromisingly modern, the simplicity of the latter being relieved by unobtrusive faience decoration. The two upper floors, which are set back, and the open terrace roof garden set a pattern for future schemes. All of Perret's buildings had reinforced-concrete structures and this was clearly delineated on the façade designs. The concept was uncommon in Europe at the time, when eclecticism still largely ruled, but was derived from the late nineteenth-century skyscraper façades built by Louis Sullivan in America. In 1905–6 came Perret's Garage Ponthieu in Paris; a striking example of exposed concrete, it had a central façade window glazed in modern design in rich colours. By the 1920s ferroconcrete was in more common use, but Perret still led the field in France with his imaginative, bold use of the material. His most original structure is the Church of Notre Dame at Le Raincy on the outskirts of Paris (1922–3). The imposing exterior with its tall tower in diminishing stages is finely designed, but the interior has magnificence. It is a wide, light church, the segmented vaulted roof supported on slender columns. The whole structure is in concrete apart from the glass window panels, which extend the full height of the walls all around the church. They provide a symphony of colour culminating in deep blue behind the altar. Because of the slenderness of the columns and the richness of the glass, this church possesses a spiritual atmosphere and unimpeded sight and sound of and from the altar for everyone. It became the prototype for churches all over Europe for decades, from Moser in prewar Switzerland to Spence's postwar Coventry Cathedral.

In a long working life Perret designed buildings for a wide range of purposes, adhering to his preference for ferroconcrete and adapting its use according to each building's needs. In the 1940s he was responsible for the railway station at Amiens, the Atomic Centre at Saclay and, one of his last important works, the redevelopment after wartime damage of the town centre of Le Havre. For the latter, he laid out large open squares enclosed by prefabricated units, which display a certain monotony, despite the imposing town hall and Church of St Joseph in the Place de L'Hôtel de Ville.

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1) General subject: American Society of Civil Engineers

2) Oil: ASCE

genio civile

civil engineers

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American Society of Civil Engineers — Американское общество гражданских инженеров

Committee on Environmental Quality Management — Комитет по управлению качеством окружающей среди ( при Обществе гражданских инженеров США)

Committee on Environmental Quality Management of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Sanitary Engineering Division — Комитет по управлению качеством окружающей среды при Американском обществе гражданских инженеров, отделе санитарной техники

surveying and mapping division of the american society of civil engineers — Отделение геодезии и картографии при Американском обществе гражданских инженеров