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SUBJECT AREA: Weapons and armour

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The son of a textile manufacturer, as a youth Colt displayed an interest in chemistry, largely through bleaching and dyeing processes used in his father's business, and lectured to lay audiences on it. In 1832 he took ship as a deckhand on a voyage to India; the concept of the revolver is supposed to have come to him from watching the ship's wheel.

Upon his return to the USA he described the idea to the US Patent Office, but did not register it until four years later, having taken out patents in Britain and France during a visit to Europe in 1835. He formed a company to manufacture his invention, but it failed in 1842. Even so, note had been taken of his weapon, and in 1846, upon the outbreak of the war with Mexico, the US Government placed an order for his revolver that was executed by the Eli Whitney arms factory in his native Hartford. Thereafter Colt set up another company, this time successfully. He also took an interest in other fields, experimenting with a submarine battery and electrically detonated mines, and opened a submarine telegraph between New York and Coney Island in 1843.

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

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Geoffrey de Havilland started experimenting with aircraft and engines of his own design in 1908. In the following year, with the help of his friend Frank Hearle, he built and flew his first aircraft; it crashed on its first flight. The second aircraft used the same engine and made its first flight on 10 September 1910, and enabled de Havilland to teach himself to fly. From 1910 to 1914 he was employed at Farnborough, where in 1912 the Royal Aircraft Factory was established. As Chief Designer and Chief Test Pilot he was responsible for the BE 2, which was the first British military aircraft to land in France in 1914.

In May 1914 de Havilland went to work for George Holt Thomas, whose Aircraft Manufacturing Company Ltd (Airco) of Hendon was expanding to design and build aircraft of its own design. However, because de Havilland was a member of the Royal Flying Corps Reserve, he had to report for duty when war broke out in August. His value as a designer was recognized and he was transferred back to Airco, where he designed eight aircraft in four years. Of these, the DH 2, DH 4, DH 5, DH 6 and DH 9 were produced in large numbers, and a modified DH 4A operated the first British cross- Channel air service in 1919.

On 25 September 1920 de Havilland founded his own company, the De Havilland Aircraft Company Ltd, at Stag Lane near Edgware, London. During the 1920s and 1930s de Havilland concentrated on civil aircraft and produced the very successful Moth series of small biplanes and monoplanes, as well as the Dragon, Dragon Rapide, Albatross and Flamingo airliners. In 1930 a new site was acquired at Hatfield, Hertfordshire, and by 1934 a modern factory with a large airfield had been established. His Comet racer won the England-Australia air race in 1934 using de Havilland engines. By this time the company had established very successful engine and propeller divisions. The Comet used a wooden stressed-skin construction which de Havilland developed and used for one of the outstanding aircraft of the Second World War: the Mosquito. The de Havilland Engine Company started work on jet engines in 1941 and their Goblin engine powered the Vampire jet fighter first flown by Geoffrey de Havilland Jr in 1943. Unfortunately, Geoffrey Jr and his brother John were both killed in flying accidents. The Comet jet airliner first flew in 1949 and the Trident in 1962, although by 1959 the De Havilland Company had been absorbed into Hawker Siddeley Aviation.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Synthetic materials, Textiles

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The introduction of one type of artificial fibre encouraged chemists to look for more. J.T.Dickson and J.R. Whinfield discovered one such fibre in 1941 when they derived polyester from terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol. Dickson, a 21-year-old Edinburgh graduate, was working under Whinfield at the Calico Printers' Association research laboratory at Broad Oak Print Works in Accrington. He was put onto fibre research: probably in April, but certainly by 5 July 1941, a murky-looking resin had been synthesized, out of which Dickson successfully drew a filament, which was named "Terylene" by its discoverers. Owing to restrictions imposed in Britain during the Second World War, this fibre was developed initially by the DuPont Company in the USA, where it was marketed under the name "Dacron". When Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) were able to manufacture it in Britain, it acquired the brand name "Terylene" and became very popular. Under the microscope, Terylene appears identical to nylon: longitudinally, it is completely devoid of any structure and the filaments appear as glass rods with a perfectly circular cross-section. The uses of Terylene are similar to those of nylon, but it has two advantages. First, it can be heat-set by exposing the fabric to a temperature about 30°C higher than is likely to be encountered in everyday use, and therefore can be the basis for "easy-care" clothing such as drip-dry shirts. It can be blended with other fibres such as wool, and when pressed at a high temperature the creases are remarkably durable. It is also remarkably resistant to chemicals, which makes it particularly suitable for industrial purposes under conditions where other textile materials would be degraded rapidly. Dickson later worked for ICI.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Dickson was born in France of English and Scottish parents. As a young man of almost 19 years, he wrote in 1879 to Thomas Edison in America, asking for a job. Edison replied that he was not taking on new staff at that time, but Dickson, with his mother and sisters, decided to emigrate anyway. In 1883 he contacted Edison again, and was given a job at the Goerk Street laboratory of the Edison Electric Works in New York. He soon assumed a position of responsibility as Superintendent, working on the development of electric light and power systems, and also carried out most of the photography Edison required. In 1888 he moved to the Edison West Orange laboratory, becoming Head of the ore-milling department. When Edison, inspired by Muybridge's sequence photographs of humans and animals in motion, decided to develop a motion picture apparatus, he gave the task to Dickson, whose considerable skills in mechanics, photography and electrical work made him the obvious choice. The first experiments, in 1888, were on a cylinder machine like the phonograph, in which the sequence pictures were to be taken in a spiral. This soon proved to be impractical, and work was delayed for a time while Dickson developed a new ore-milling machine. Little progress with the movie project was made until George Eastman's introduction in July 1889 of celluloid roll film, which was thin, tough, transparent and very flexible. Dickson returned to his experiments in the spring of 1891 and soon had working models of a film camera and viewer, the latter being demonstrated at the West Orange laboratory on 20 May 1891. By the early summer of 1892 the project had advanced sufficiently for commercial exploitation to begin. The Kinetograph camera used perforated 35 mm film (essentially the same as that still in use in the late twentieth century), and the kinetoscope, a peep-show viewer, took fifty feet of film running in an endless loop. Full-scale manufacture of the viewers started in 1893, and they were demonstrated on a number of occasions during that year. On 14 April 1894 the first kinetoscope parlour, with ten viewers, was opened to the public in New York. By the end of that year, the kinetoscope was seen by the public all over America and in Europe. Dickson had created the first commercially successful cinematograph system. Dickson left Edison's employment on 2 April 1895, and for a time worked with Woodville Latham on the development of his Panoptikon projector, a projection version of the kinetoscope. In December 1895 he joined with Herman Casier, Henry N.Marvin and Elias Koopman to form the American Mutoscope Company. Casier had designed the Mutoscope, an animated-picture viewer in which the sequences of pictures were printed on cards fixed radially to a drum and were flipped past the eye as the drum rotated. Dickson designed the Biograph wide-film camera to produce the picture sequences, and also a projector to show the films directly onto a screen. The large-format images gave pictures of high quality for the period; the Biograph went on public show in America in September 1896, and subsequently throughout the world, operating until around 1905. In May 1897 Dickson returned to England and set up as a producer of Biograph films, recording, among other subjects, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897, Pope Leo XIII in 1898, and scenes of the Boer War in 1899 and 1900. Many of the Biograph subjects were printed as reels for the Mutoscope to produce the "what the butler saw" machines which were a feature of fairgrounds and seaside arcades until modern times. Dickson's contact with the Biograph Company, and with it his involvement in cinematography, ceased in 1911.

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SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

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After he received his initial education in Scotland, Donald's family moved to South Africa, where he obtained a BA degree in Cape Town in 1930. After the death of his parents he returned to England, graduating in medicine in 1937. He served in the RAF from 1942 to 1946 and was awarded the MBE for bravery in rescuing air-crews. In 1954, following a fruitful period as Reader and Lecturer at St Thomas's Hospital and the Hammersmith Hospital, he was appointed Regius Professor of Midwifery in Glasgow. It was while at St Thomas's and Hammersmith that he evolved a demand-response respirator for infants. With the assistance of Tom Brown, an engineer, and the company Kelvin Hughes—which had earlier produced ultrasound equipment for detecting flaws in metal castings—he was able to originate, develop and improve the diagnostic use of ultra-sound in obstetrics and gynaecology. The use of this technique rapidly spread into other disciplines. Donald was fortunate in that the procedure proved to have no untoward influence on pregnancy; at the time, little was known of possible side effects.

He was the proponent of other advances in the speciality, including laparoscopy, breast-feeding and the preservation of the membranes during labour. An ardent anti-abortionist, his authoritarian Scottish approach made Glasgow a world centre, with himself as a renowned and loved teacher. Despite undergoing three major cardiac interventions, his longevity did not surprise those who knew of his immense vitality.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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As a youth, Dyer constructed an unsinkable life-boat but did not immediately pursue his mechanical bent, for at 16 he entered the counting-house of a French refugee named Nancrède and succeeded to part of the business. He first went to England in 1801 and finally settled in 1811 when he married Ellen Jones (d. 1842) of Gower Street, London. Dyer was already linked with American inventors and brought to England Perkins's plan for steel engraving in 1809, shearing and nail-making machines in 1811, and also received plans and specifications for Fulton's steamboats. He seems to have acted as a sort of British patent agent for American inventors, and in 1811 took out a patent for carding engines and a card clothing machine. In 1813 there was a patent for spinning long-fibred substances such as hemp, flax or grasses, and in 1825 there was a further patent for card making machinery. Joshua Field, on his tour through Britain in 1821, saw a wire drawing machine and a leather splitting machine at Dyer's works as well as the card-making machines. At first Dyer lived in Camden Town, London, but he had a card clothing business in Birmingham. He moved to Manchester c.1816, where he developed an extensive engineering works under the name "Joseph C.Dyer, patent card manufacturers, 8 Stanley Street, Dale Street". In 1832 he founded another works at Gamaches, Somme, France, but this enterprise was closed in 1848 with heavy losses through the mismanagement of an agent. In 1825 Dyer improved on Danforth's roving frame and started to manufacture it. While it was still a comparatively crude machine when com-pared with later versions, it had the merit of turning out a large quantity of work and was very popular, realizing a large sum of money. He patented the machine that year and must have continued his interest in these machines as further patents followed in 1830 and 1835. In 1821 Dyer had been involved in the foundation of the Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) and he was linked with the construction of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway. He was not so successful with the ill-fated Bank of Manchester, of which he was a director and in which he lost £98,000. Dyer played an active role in the community and presented many papers to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. He helped to establish the Royal Institution in London and the Mechanics Institution in Manchester. In 1830 he was a member of the delegation to Paris to take contributions from the town of Manchester for the relief of those wounded in the July revolution and to congratulate Louis-Philippe on his accession. He called for the reform of Parliament and helped to form the Anti-Corn Law League. He hated slavery and wrote several articles on the subject, both prior to and during the American Civil War.

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See also: Arnold, Aza

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping, Railways and locomotives

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The son of a mine owner and inspector, Ericsson's first education was private and haphazard. War with Russia disrupted the mines and the father secured a position on the Gotha Canal, then under construction. He enrolled John, then aged 13, and another son as cadets in a corps of military engineers engaged on the canal. There John was given a sound education and training in the physical sciences and engineering. At the age of 17 he decided to enlist in the Army, and on receiving a commission he was drafted to cartographic survey duties. After some years he decided that a career outside the Army offered him the best opportunities, and in 1826 he moved to London to pursue a career of mechanical invention.

Ericsson first developed a heat (external combustion) engine, which proved unsuccessful. Three years later he designed and constructed the steam locomotive Novelty, which he entered in the Rainhill locomotive trials on the new Liverpool \& Manchester Railway. The engine began by performing promisingly, but it later broke down and failed to complete the test runs. Later he devised a self-regulating lead (1835) and then, more important and successful, he invented the screw propeller, patented in 1835 and installed in his first screw-propelled ship of 1839. This work was carried out independently of Sir Francis Pettit Smith, who contemporaneously developed a four-bladed propeller that was adopted by the British Admiralty. Ericsson saw that with screw propulsion the engine could be below the waterline, a distinct advantage in warships. He crossed the Atlantic to interest the American government in his ideas and became a naturalized citizen in 1848. He pioneered the gun turret for mounting heavy guns on board ship. Ericsson came into his own during the American Civil War, with the construction of the epoch-making warship Monitor, a screw-propelled ironclad with gun turret. This vessel demonstrated its powers in a signal victory at Hampton Roads on 9 March 1862.

Ericsson continued to design warships and torpedoes, pointing out to President Lincoln that success in war would now depend on technological rather than numerical superiority. Meanwhile he continued to pursue his interest in heat engines, and from 1870 to 1888 he spent much of his time and resources in pursuing research into alternative energy sources, such as solar power, gravitation and tidal forces.

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SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

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The parents of Henri and Maurice Farman were British subjects living in Paris, but their sons lived all their lives in France and became French citizens. As young men, both became involved in cycle and automobile racing. Henri (or Henry—he used both versions) turned his attention to aviation in 1907 when he bought a biplane from Gabriel Voisin. Within a short time he had established himself as one of the leading pilots in Europe, with many record-breaking flights to his credit. Farman modified the Voisin with his own improvements, including ailerons, and then in 1909 he designed the first Farman biplane. This became the most popular biplane in Europe from the autumn of 1909 until well into 1911 and is one of the classic aeroplanes of history. Meanwhile, Maurice Farman had also begun to design and build biplanes; his first design of 1909 was not a great success but from it evolved two robust biplanes nicknamed the "Longhorn" and the "Shorthorn", so called because of their undercarriage skids. In 1912 the brothers joined forces and set up a very large factory at Billancourt. The "Longhorn" and "Shorthorn" became the standard training aircraft in France and Britain during the early years of the First World War. The Farman brothers went on to produce a number of other wartime designs, including a large bomber. After the war the Farmans produced a series of large airliners which played a key role in establishing France as a major airline operator. Most famous of these was the Goliath, a twin-engined biplane capable of carrying up to twelve passengers. This was produced from 1918 to 1929 and was used by many airlines, including the Farman Line. The brothers retired when their company was nationalized in 1937.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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Eugène Freyssinet was an army engineer during the First World War who pioneered pre-stressed reinforced concrete and experimented with building concrete bridges. After 1918 he formed his own company to develop his ideas. He investigated the possibilities of very high-strength concrete, and in so doing studied shrinkage and creep. He combined high-quality concrete with highly stressed, stretched steel to give top quality results. His work in 1926 on Plougastel Bridge, at that time the longest reinforced concrete bridge, is a notable example of his use of this technique. In 1916 Freyssinet had built his famous airship hangars at Orly, which were destroyed in the Second World War; the hangars were roofed in parabolic sections to a height of about 200 ft. In 1934 he succeeded in saving the Ocean Terminal at Le Havre from sinking into the mud and being covered by the sea by using his pre-stressing techniques. By 1938 he had developed a superior method of pre-stressing with steel which led to widespread adoption of his methods.

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SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

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Of immigrant stock, Goldberger entered the College of New York in 1890 as an engineering student. In 1892 he transferred to medicine, and in 1895 he qualified at Bellevue Hospital. Following an internship and unhappy experience of private medical practice in Pennsylvania, he qualified for the US Public Health Service in 1899, remaining there until his death.

By 1910 he had been involved in field investigations of yellow fever, dengue and typhus. It was during this time that, with J.F.Anderson, he developed the egg culture techniques which enabled the demonstration of the filter-passing measles virus. The work with which he was most identified, however, was in connection with pellagra, at that time thought to be of microbial or protozoal origin. Using epidemiological techniques, he was able to demonstrate that it was in fact a nutritional deficiency disease, inducing the disease in prison volunteers on an abundant but protein-deficient diet.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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James John Guest was educated at Marlborough in 1880–4 and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating as fifth wrangler in 1888. He received practical training in several workshops and spent two years in postgraduate work at the Engineering Department of Cambridge University. After working as a draughtsman in the machine-tool, hydraulic and crane departments of Tangyes Ltd at Birmingham, he was appointed in 1896 Assistant Professor of Engineering at McGill University in Canada. After a short time he moved to the Polytechnic Institute at Worcester, Massachusetts, where he was for three years Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Head of the Engineering Department. In 1899 he returned to Britain and set up as a consulting engineer in Birmingham, being a partner in James J.Guest \& Co. For the next fifteen years he combined this work with research on grinding phenomena. He also developed a theory of grinding which he first published in a paper at the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1914 and elaborated in a paper to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and in his book Grinding Machinery (1915). During the First World War, in 1916–17, he was in charge of inspection in the Staffordshire and Shropshire Area, Ministry of Munitions. In 1917 he returned to teaching as Reader in Graphics and Structural Engineering at University College London. His final appointment was about 1923 as Professor of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Artillery College, Woolwich, which later became the Military College of Science.

He carried out research on the strength of materials and contributed many articles on the subject to the technical press. He originated Guest's Law for a criterion of failure of materials under combined stresses, first published in 1900. He was a Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1900–6 and from 1919 and contributed to their proceedings in many discussions and two major papers.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Hackworth trained under his father, who was Foreman Blacksmith at Wylam colliery, and succeeded him upon his death in 1807. Between 1812 and 1816 he helped to build and maintain the Wylam locomotives under William Hedley. He then moved to Walbottle colliery, but during 1824 he took temporary charge of Robert Stephenson \& Co.'s works while George Stephenson was surveying the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway and Robert Stephenson was away in South America. In May 1825 Hackworth was appointed to the Stockton \& Darlington Railway (S \& DR) "to have superintendence of the permanent (i.e. stationary) and locomotive engines". He established the workshops at Shildon, and when the railway opened in September he became in effect the first locomotive superintendent of a railway company. From experience of operating Robert Stephenson \& Co.'s locomotives he was able to make many detail improvements, notably spring safety valves. In 1827 he designed and built the locomotive Royal George, with six wheels coupled and inverted vertical cylinders driving the rear pair. From the pistons, drive was direct by way of piston rods and connecting rods to crankpins on the wheels, the first instance of the use of this layout on a locomotive. Royal George was the most powerful and satisfactory locomotive on the S \& DR to date and was the forerunner of Hackworth's type of heavy-goods locomotive, which was built until the mid-1840s.

For the Rainhill Trials in 1829 Hackworth built and entered the locomotive Sans Pareil, which was subsequently used on the Bol ton \& Leigh Railway and is now in the Science Museum, London. A working replica was built for the 150th anniversary of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway in 1980. In 1833 a further agreement with the S \& DR enabled Hackworth, while remaining in charge of their locomotives, to set up a locomotive and engineering works on his own account. Its products eventually included locomotives for the London, Brighton \& South Coast and York, Newcastle \& Berwick Railways, as well as some of the earliest locomotives exported to Russia and Canada. Hackworth's son, John Wesley Hackworth, was also an engineer and invented the radial valve gear for steam engines that bears his name.

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SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

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Frederick Handley Page trained as an electrical engineer but soon turned his attention to the more exciting world of aeronautics. He started by manufacturing propellers for aeroplanes and airships, and then in 1909 he founded a public company. His first aeroplane, the Bluebird, was not a success, but an improved version flew well. It was known as the "Yellow Peril" because of its yellow doped finish and made a notable flight across London from Barking to Brooklands. In 1910 Handley Page became one of the first college lecturers in aeronautical engineering. During the First World War Handley Page concentrated on the production of large bombers. The 0/100 was a biplane with a wing span of 100 ft (30 m) and powered by two engines: it entered service in 1916. In 1918 an improved version, the 0/400, entered service and a larger four-engined bomber made its first flight. This was the V/1500, which was designed to bomb Berlin, but the war ended before this raid took place. After the war, Handley Page turned his attention to airline operations with the great advantage of having at his disposal large bombers which could be adapted to carry passengers. Handley Page Air Transport Ltd was formed in 1919 and provided services to several European cities. Eventually this company became part of Imperial Airways, but Handley Page continued to supply them with large airliners. Probably the most famous was the majestic HP 42 four-engined biplane, which set very high standards of comfort and safety. Safety was always important to Handley Page and in 1920 he developed a wing with a slot along the leading edge: this made slow flying safer by delaying the stall. Later versions used separate aerofoil-shaped slats on the leading edge that were sometimes fixed, sometimes retractable. The HP 42 was fitted with these slats. From the 1930s Handley Page produced a series of bombers, such as the Heyford, Hampden, Harrow and, most famous of all, the Halifax, which played a major role in the Second World War. Then followed the Victor V-bomber of 1952 with its distinctive "crescent" wing and high tailplane. Sir Frederick's last venture was the Herald short-haul airliner of 1955; designed to replace the ubiquitous Douglas DC-3, it was only a limited success.

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SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

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Hartley obtained his BA in 1909 from the University of Utah, then gained a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, England. After obtaining a further BA and a BSc in 1912 and 1913, respectively, he returned to the USA and took a job with the Western Electric Laboratories of the Bell Telephone Company, where he was in charge of radio-receiver development. In 1915 he invented the Hartley oscillator, analogous to that invented by Colpitts. Subsequently he worked on carrier telephony at Western Electric and then at Bell Laboratories. There he concen-trated on information theory, building on the pioneering work of Nyquist, in 1926 publishing his law that related information capacity, frequency bandwidth and time. Forced to give up work in 1929 due to ill health, he returned to Bell in 1939 as a consultant on transmission problems. During the Second World War he worked on various projects, including the use of servo-mechanisms for radar and fire control, and finally retired in 1950.

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SUBJECT AREA: Horology, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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Son of Revd John Hooke, minister of the parish, he was a sickly child who was subject to headaches which prevented protracted study. He devoted his time while alone to making mechanical models including a wooden clock. On the death of his father in October 1648 he was left £100 and went to London, where he became a pupil of Sir Peter Lely and then went to Westminster School under Dr Busby. There he learned the classical languages, some Hebrew and oriental languages while mastering six books of Euclid in one week. In 1653 he entered Christ Church College, Oxford, where he graduated MA in 1663, after studying chemistry and astronomy. In 1662 he was appointed Curator of Experiments to the Royal Society and was elected a Fellow in 1663. In 1665 his appointment was made permanent and he was given apartments in Gresham College, where he lived until his death in 1703. He was an indefatigable experimenter, perhaps best known for the invention of the universal joint named after him. The properties of the atmosphere greatly engaged him and he devised many forms of the barometer. He was the first to apply the spiral spring to the regulation of the balance wheel of the watch in an attempt to measure longitude at sea, but he did not publish his results until after Huygens's reinvention of the device in 1675. Several of his "new watches" were made by Thomas Tompion, one of which was presented to King Charles II. He is said to have invented, among other devices, thirty different ways of flying, the first practical system of telegraphy, an odometer, a hearing aid, an arithmetical machine and a marine barometer. Hooke was a small man, somewhat deformed, with long, lank hair, who went about stooped and moved very quickly. He was of a melancholy and mistrustful disposition, ill-tempered and sharp-tongued. He slept little, often working all night and taking a nap during the day. John Aubrey, his near-contemporary, wrote of Hooke, "He is certainly the greatest Mechanick this day in the World." He is said to have been the first to establish the true principle of the arch. His eyesight failed and he was blind for the last year of his life. He is best known for his Micrographia, or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, first published in 1665. After the Great Fire of London, he exhibited a model for the rebuilding of the City. This was not accepted, but it did result in Hooke's appointment as one of two City Surveyors. This proved a lucrative post and through it Hooke amassed a fortune of some thousands of pounds, which was found intact after his death some thirty years later. It had never been opened in the interim period. Among the buildings he designed were the new Bethlehem (Bedlam) Hospital, the College of Physicians and Montague House.

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SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors, Textiles

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Son of Elias Howe, a farmer, he acquired his mechanical knowledge in his father's mill. He left school at 12 years of age and was apprenticed for two years in a machine shop in Lowell, Massachusetts, and later to an instrument maker, Ari Davis in Boston, Massachusetts, where his master's services were much in demand by Harvard University. Fired by a desire to invent a sewing machine, he utilized the experience gained in Lowell to devise a shuttle carrying a lower thread and a needle carrying an upper thread to make lock-stitch in straight lines. His attempts were so rewarding that he left his job and was sustained first by his father and then by a partner. By 1845 he had built a machine that worked at 250 stitches per minute, and the following year he patented an improved machine. The invention of the sewing machine had an enormous impact on the textile industry, stimulating demand for cloth because making up garments became so much quicker. The sewing machine was one of the first mass-produced consumer durables and was essentially an American invention. William Thomas, a London manufacturer of shoes, umbrellas and corsets, secured the British rights and persuaded Howe to come to England to apply it to the making of shoes. This Howe did, but he quarrelled with Thomas after less than one year. He returned to America to face with his partner, G.W.Bliss, a bigger fight over his patent (see I.M. Singer), which was being widely infringed. Not until 1854 was the case settled in his favour. This litigation threatened the very existence of the new industry, but the Great Sewing Machine Combination, the first important patent-pooling arrangement in American history, changed all this. For a fee of $5 on every domestically-sold machine and $1 on every exported one, Howe contributed to the pool his patent of 1846 for a grooved eye-pointed needle used in conjunction with a lock-stitch-forming shuttle. Howe's patent was renewed in 1861; he organized and equipped a regiment during the Civil War with the royalties. When the war ended he founded the Howe Machine Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

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SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

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Born of Quaker stock, he was educated at home and apprenticed in 1845 to Caleb Williams, apothecary and surgeon of York. It was during this period that he developed and described his spirometer, which he had used in testing 121 sailors, 24 pugilists and wrestlers and 4 giants and dwarfs.

In 1850 he left York to complete his medical training at St Bartholomew's Hospital. By 1859 he was on the staff of the London Hospital as well as the many other specialist hospitals, including the Royal London Ophthalmic, the Blackfriars Hospital for Skin Diseases and the Royal Lock, the multiplicity of which reflected the very wide variety of his interests and expertise.

By 1863, having obtained the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, he had been appointed full Surgeon to London Hospital and was also responsible for medical ophthalmology. In 1883 he was appointed Emeritus Professor, and for many years after was deeply involved in a wide variety of medical interests. A vivid and memorable teacher, his name has been given to a large number of conditions, particularly in the fields of syphilis and ophthalmology. His special gift was an acuity of observation coupled with the accumulation and collation of clinical facts.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Kennedy was the third son of his father, Robert, and went to the village school in Dalry. On his father's death, he was sent at the age of 14 to Chowbent, Lancashire, where he was apprenticed to William Cannan, a maker of textile machines such as carding frames, Hargreaves's jennies and Arkwright's waterframes. On completion of his apprenticeship in 1791, he moved to Manchester and entered into partnership with Benjamin and William Sandford and James M'Connel, textile machine makers and mule spinners. In 1795 this partnership was terminated and one was made with James M'Connel to form the firm M'Connel \& Kennedy, cotton spinners.

Kennedy introduced improvements for spinning fine yarns and the firm of M'Connel \& Kennedy became famous for the quality of these products, which were in great demand. He made the spindles turn faster during the second part of the mule carriage's outward draw, and from 1793 onwards he experimented with driving mules by steam engines. Like William Kelly at New Lanark, he succeeded in making the spinning sequences power-operated by 1800, although the spinner had to take over the winding on. This made the mule into a factory machine, but it still required skilled operators. He was also involved with Henry Houldsworth, Junior, in the improvement of the roving frame. In 1803 Kennedy joined the Manchester Literary \& Philosophical Society, to which he presented several papers, including one in 1830 on "A memoir of Samuel Crompton". He retired from the spinning business in 1826, but continued his technical and mechanical pursuits. He was consulted about whether the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway should have moving or stationary steam engines and was an umpire at the Rainhill Trials in 1829.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Weapons and armour

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Krupp's father founded a small cast-steel works at Essen, but at his early death in 1826 the firm was left practically insolvent to his sons. Alfred's formal education ended at that point and he entered the ailing firm. The expansion of trade brought about by the Zollverein, or customs union, enabled him to increase output, and by 1843 he had 100 workers under him, making steel springs and machine parts. Five years later he was able to buy out his co-heirs, and in 1849 he secured his first major railway contract. The quality of his product was usefully advertised by displaying a flawless 2-ton steel ingot at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Krupp was then specializing in the manufacture of steel parts for railways and steamships, notably a weldless steel tire for locomotives, from which was derived the three-ring emblem of the Krupp concern. Krupp made a few cannon from 1847 but sold his first to the Khedive of Egypt in 1857. Two years later he won a major order of 312 cannon from the Prussian Government. With the development of this side of the business, he became the largest steel producer in Europe. In 1862 he adopted the Bessemer steelmaking process. The quality and design of his cannon were major factors in the victory of the Prussian artillery bombardment at Sedan in the Franco- Prussian War of 1870. Krupp expanded further during the boom years of the early 1870s and he was able to gain control of German coal and Spanish iron-ore supplies. He went on to manufacture heavy artillery, with a celebrated testing ground at Osnabrück. By this time he had a workforce of 21,000, whom he ruled with benevolent but strict control. His will instructed that the firm should not be divided.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Born of French parents, Lippman's work began with a distinguished career in classics, philosophy, mathematics and physics at the Ecole Normale in Luxembourg. After further studies in physics at Heidelberg University, he returned to France and the Sorbonne, where he was in 1886 appointed Director of Physics. He was a leading pioneer in France of research into electricity, optics, heat and other branches of physics.

In 1886 he conceived the idea of recording the existence of standing waves in light when it is reflected back on itself, by photographing the colours so produced. This required the production of a photographic emulsion that was effectively grainless: the individual silver halide crystals had to be smaller than the shortest wavelength of light to be recorded. Lippman succeeded in this and in 1891 demonstrated his process. A glass plate was coated with a grainless emulsion and held in a special plate-holder, glass towards the lens. The back of the holder was filled with mercury, which provided a perfect reflector when in contact with the emulsion. The standing waves produced during the exposure formed laminae in the emulsion, with the number of laminae being determined by the wavelength of the incoming light at each point on the image. When the processed plate was viewed under the correct lighting conditions, a theoretically exact reproduction of the colours of the original subject could be seen. However, the Lippman process remained a beautiful scientific demonstration only, since the ultra-fine-grain emulsion was very slow, requiring exposure times of over 10,000 times that of conventional negative material. Any method of increasing the speed of the emulsion also increased the grain size and destroyed the conditions required for the process to work.

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