engine+builder

engine builder s Maschinenbauer(in)

konstruktor

['end9in bild2] n construtor de máquinas.

n. motor montörü

n. motor montörü

graditelj strojev

MECH ENG constructor de motores m, fabricante de motores mf, fabricante de máquinas mf

1

2 n

AIR TRANSP, AUTO, MECH, MECH ENG, VEH motor m

WATER TRANSP motor m, máquina f

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

[br]

[br]

[br]

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.

[br]

WK / PJGR

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

[br]

[br]

[br]

Symington was the son of the Superintendent of the Mines Company in Lanarkshire, and attended the local school. When he was 22 years old he was sent by Gilbert Meason, Manager of the Wanlockhead mines, to Edinburgh University. In 1779 he was working on the assembly of a Watt engine as an apprentice to his brother, George, and in 1786 he started experiments to modify a Watt engine in order to avoid infringing the separate condenser patent. He sought a patent for his alternative, which was paid for by Meason. He constructed a model steam road carriage which was completed in 1786; it was shown in Edinburgh by Meason, attracting interest but inadequate financial support. It had a horizontal cylinder and was non-condensing. No full-sized engine was ever built but the model secured the interest of Patrick Miller, an Edinburgh banker, who ordered an engine from Symington to drive an experimental boat, 25 ft (7.6 m) long with a dual hull, which performed satisfactorily on Dalswinton Loch in 1788. In the following year Miller ordered a larger engine for a bigger boat which was tried on the Forth \& Clyde Canal in December 1789, the component parts having been made by the Carron Company. The engine worked perfectly but had the effect of breaking the paddle wheels. These were repaired and further trials were successful but Miller lost interest and his experiments lapsed. Symington devoted himself thereafter to building stationary engines. He built other engines for mine pumping at Sanquhar and Leadhills before going further afield. In all, he built over thirty engines, about half of them being rotary. In 1800–1 he designed the engine for a boat for Lord Dundas, the Charlotte Dundas; this was apparently the first boat of that name and sailed on both the Forth and Clyde rivers. A second Charlotte Dundas with a horizontal cylinder was to follow and first sailed in January 1803 for the Forth \& Clyde Canal Company. The speed of the boat was only 2 mph (3 km/h) and much was made by its detractors of the damage said to be caused to the canal banks by its wash. Lord Dundas declined to authorize payment of outstanding accounts; Symington received little reward for his efforts. He died in the house of his son-in-law, Dr Robert Bowie, in Wapping, amidst heated controversy about the true inventor of steam navigation.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

[br]

[br]

[br]

At the conclusion of his schooling in the South of England, Yarrow became an indentured apprentice to the Thames engine-builder Ravenhill. During this five-year period various incidents and meetings sharpened his interest in scientific matters and he showed the skills that in later years were to be so beneficial to shipbuilding. For two years he acted as London representative for Ravenhill before joining up with a Mr Hedley to form a shipyard on the Isle of Dogs. The company lasted from 1868 until 1875 and in that period produced 350 small launches and other craft. This massive output enabled Yarrow to gain confidence in many aspects of ship design. Within two years of setting out on his own he built his first ship for the Royal Navy: a torpedo boat, then at the cutting edge of technology.

In the early 1890s the company was building watertube boilers and producing destroyers with speeds in excess of 27 knots (50 km/h); it built the Russian destroyer Sokol, did pioneering work with aluminium and with high-tensile steels and worked on shipboard equipment to nullify vibrational effects. With the closure of most of the Thames shipyards and the run-down in skilled labour, Yarrow decided that the shipyard must move to some other part of the United Kingdom. After careful deliberation a green field site to the west of Glasgow was chosen, and in 1908 their first Clyde-built destroyer was launched. The company expanded, more building berths were arranged, boiler construction was developed and over the years they became recognized as specialists in smaller highspeed craft and in "knock down" ships for other parts of the world.

Yarrow retired in 1913, but at the commencement of the First World War he returned to help the yard produce, in four years, twenty-nine destroyers with speeds of up to 40 knots (74 km/h). At the end of hostilities he gave of his time and money to many charities, including those for ex-servicemen. He left a remarkable industrial organization which remains to this day the most prolific builder of surface craft for the Royal Navy.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Public utilities

[br]

[br]

[br]

Bateman's maternal grandfather was a Moravian missionary, and from the age of 7 he was educated at the Moravian schools at Fairfield and Ockbrook. At the age of 15 he was apprenticed to a "civil engineer, land surveyor and agent" in Oldham. After this apprenticeship, Bateman commenced his own practice in 1833. One of his early schemes and reports was in regard to the flooding of the river Medlock in the Manchester area. He came to the attention of William Fairbairn, the engine builder and millwright of Canal Street, Ancoats, Manchester. Fairbairn used Bateman as his site surveyor and as such he prepared much of the groundwork for the Bann reservoirs in Northern Ireland. Whilst the reports on the proposals were in the name of Fairbairn, Bateman was, in fact, appointed by the company as their engineer for the execution of the works. One scheme of Bateman's which was carried forward was the Kendal Reservoirs. The Act for these was signed in 1845 and was implemented not for the purpose of water supply but for the conservation of water to supply power to the many mills which stood on the river Kent between Kentmere and Morecambe Bay. The Kentmere Head dam is the only one of the five proposed for the scheme to survive, although not all the others were built as they would have retained only small volumes of water.

Perhaps the greatest monument to the work of J.F.La Trobe Bateman is Manchester's water supply; he was consulted about this in 1844, and construction began four years later. He first built reservoirs in the Longdendale valley, which has a very complicated geological stratification. Bateman favoured earth embankment dams and gravity feed rather than pumping; the five reservoirs in the valley that impound the river Etherow were complex, cored earth dams. However, when completed they were greatly at risk from landslips and ground movement. Later dams were inserted by Bateman to prevent water loss should the older dams fail. The scheme was not completed until 1877, by which time Manchester's population had exceeded the capacity of the original scheme; Thirlmere in Cumbria was chosen by Manchester Corporation as the site of the first of the Lake District water-supply schemes. Bateman, as Consulting Engineer, designed the great stone-faced dam at the west end of the lake, the "gothic" straining well in the middle of the east shore of the lake, and the 100-mile (160 km) pipeline to Manchester. The Act for the Thirlmere reservoir was signed in 1879 and, whilst Bateman continued as Consulting Engineer, the work was supervised by G.H. Hill and was completed in 1894.

Bateman was also consulted by the authorities in Glasgow, with the result that he constructed an impressive water-supply scheme derived from Loch Katrine during the years 1856–60. It was claimed that the scheme bore comparison with "the most extensive aqueducts in the world, not excluding those of ancient Rome". Bateman went on to superintend the waterworks of many cities, mainly in the north of England but also in Dublin and Belfast. In 1865 he published a pamphlet, On the Supply of Water to London from the Sources of the River Severn, based on a survey funded from his own pocket; a Royal Commission examined various schemes but favoured Bateman's.

Bateman was also responsible for harbour and dock works, notably on the rivers Clyde and Shannon, and also for a number of important water-supply works on the Continent of Europe and beyond. Dams and the associated reservoirs were the principal work of J.F.La Trobe Bateman; he completed forty-three such schemes during his professional career. He also prepared many studies of water-supply schemes, and appeared as professional witness before the appropriate Parliamentary Committees.

[br]

KM / LRD

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

[br]

[br]

[br]

In his own words, Patrick Miller was "without a sixpence" in his early youth; this is difficult to prove one way or another as he ended his life as Director and Deputy Governor of the Bank of Scotland. One thing is clear however, that from his earliest days, in common with most of his counterparts of the late eighteenth century, he was interested in experimental and applied science. Having acquired a substantial income from other sources, Miller was able to indulge his interest in ships and engineering. His first important vessel was the trimaran Edinburgh, designed by him and launched at Leith in 1786. Propulsion was man-powered using paddle wheels positioned in the spaces between the outer and central hulls. This led to several trials of similar craft on the Forth in the 1780s, and ultimately to the celebrated Dalswinton Loch trials. In 1785 Miller had purchased the Dumfriesshire estate of Dalswinton and commenced a series of experiments on agricultural development and other matters. With the help of William Symington he built a double-hull steamship with internal paddle wheels which was tested on the Loch in 1788. The 7.6 m (25 ft) long ship travelled at 5 mph (8 km/h) on her trials, and according to unsubstantiated tradition carried a group of well-known people including the poet Robert Burns (1759–1796).

Miller carried out many more important experiments and in 1796 obtained a patent for the design of shallow-drafted ships able to carry substantial cargo on flat bottoms. His main achievement may have been to stimulate William Symington, who at the beginning of the nineteenth century went on to design and build two of the world's first important steamships, each named Charlotte Dundas, for service on the Forth and Clyde Canal.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

[br]

[br]

[br]

The son of Patrick Bell, a millwright, Henry had two sisters and an elder brother and was educated at the village school. When he was 9 years old Henry was sent to lodge in Falkirk with an uncle and aunt of his mother's so that he could attend the school there. At the age of 12 he left school and agreed to become a mason with a relative. In 1783, after only three years, he was bound apprentice to his Uncle Henry, a millwright at Jay Mill. He stayed there for a further three years and then, in 1786, joined the firm of Shaw \& Hart, shipbuilders of Borrowstoneness. These were to be the builders of William Symington's hull for the Charlotte Dundas. He also spent twelve months with Mr James Inglis, an engineer of Bellshill, Lanarkshire, and then went to London to gain experience, working for the famous John Rennie for some eighteen months. By 1790 he was back in Glasgow, and a year later he took a partner, James Paterson, into his new business of builder and contractor, based in the Trongate. He later referred to himself as "architect", and his partnership with Paterson lasted seven years. He is said to have invented a discharging machine for calico printing, as well as a steam dredger for clearing the River Clyde.

The Baths Hotel was opened in Helensburgh in 1808, with the hotel-keeper, who was also the first provost of the town, being none other than Henry Bell. It has been suggested that Bell was also the builder of the hotel and this seems very likely. Bell installed a steam engine for pumping sea water out of the Clyde and into the baths, and at first ran a coach service to bring customers from Glasgow three days a week. The driver was his brother Tom. The coach was replaced by the Comet steamboat in 1812.

While Henry was busy with his provost's duties and making arrangements for the building of his steamboat, his wife Margaret, née Young, whom he married in March 1794, occupied herself with the management of the Baths Hotel. Bell did not himself manufacture, but supervised the work of experts: John and Charles Wood of Port Glasgow, builders of the 43ft 6 in. (13.25 m)-long hull of the Comet; David Napier of Howard Street Foundry for the boiler and other castings; and John Robertson of Dempster Street, who had previously supplied a small engine for pumping water to the baths at the hotel in Helensburgh, for the 3 hp engine. The first trials of the finished ship were held on 24 July 1812, when she was launched from Wood's yard. A regular service was advertised in the Glasgow Chronicle on 5 August and was the first in Europe, preceded only by that of Robert Fulton in the USA. The Comet continued to run until 1820, when it was wrecked.

Bell received little reward for his promotion of steam navigation, merely small pensions from the Clyde trustees and others. He was buried at the parish church of Rhu.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Automotive engineering, Land transport

[br]

[br]

[br]

Marcus was apprenticed as a mechanic and was employed in the newly founded enterprise of Siemens \& Halske in Berlin. He then went to Vienna and, from 1853, was employed in the workshop of the Imperial Court Mechanic, Kraft, and in the same year he was a mechanic in the Royal and Imperial Institute of Physics of the University of Vienna. In 1860 he became independent of the Imperial Court, but he installed an electrical bell system for the Empress Elizabeth and instructed the Crown Prince Rudolf in natural science.

Marcus was granted thirty-eight patents in Austria, as well as many foreign patents. The magnetic electric ignition engine, for which he was granted a patent in 1864, brought him the biggest financial reward; it was introduced as the "Viennese Ignition" engine by the Austrian Navy and the pioneers of the Prussian and Russian armies. The engine was exhibited at the World Fair in Paris in 1867 together with the "Thermoscale" which was also constructed by Marcus; this was a magnetic/electric rotative engine for electric lighting and field telegraphy.

Marcus's reputation is due mainly to his attempts to build a new internal combustion engine. By 1870 he had assembled a simple, direct-working internal combustion engine on a primitive chassis. This was, in fact, the first petrol-engined vehicle with electric ignition, and tradition records that when Marcus drove the vehicle in the streets of Vienna it made so much noise that the police asked him to remove it; this he did and did not persist with his experiments. Thus ended the trials of the world's first petrol-engined vehicle; it was running in 1875, ten years before Daimler and Benz were carrying out their early trials in Stuttgart.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Automotive engineering, Land transport

[br]

[br]

[br]

The fourth of eight children of an architect, he spent his childhood in Hove and attended a private preparatory school, from where, aged 14, he went to the Hartley Institution (the forerunner of Southampton University). He was then granted a scholarship to the Royal College of Science, South Kensington, and also studied practical engineering at Finsbury Technical College, London. He worked first for a draughtsman and pseudo-patent agent, and was then appointed Assistant Works Manager of the Forward Gas Engine Company of Birmingham, with sixty men and a salary of £1 per week. He was then aged 21. His younger brother, George, was apprenticed to the same company. In 1889 and 1890 he invented a pendulum governor and an engine starter which earned him royalties. He built a flat-bottomed river craft with a stern paddle-wheel and a vertical single-cylinder engine with a wick carburettor of his own design. From 1892 he performed a number of garden experiments on model gliders relating to problems of lift and drag, which led him to postulate vortices from the wingtips trailing behind, much of his work lying behind the theory of modern aerodynamics. The need to develop a light engine for aircraft led him to car design.

In February 1896 his first experimental car took the road. It had a torsionally rigid chassis, a perfectly balanced and almost noiseless engine, dynamically stable steering, epicyclic gear for low speed and reverse with direct drive for high speed. It turned out to be underpowered and was therefore redesigned. Two years later an 8 hp, two-cylinder flat twin appeared which retained the principle of balancing by reverse rotation, had new Lanchester valve-gear and a new method of ignition based on a magneto generator. For the first time a worm and wheel replaced chain-drive or bevel-gear transmission. Lanchester also designed the machinery to make it. The car was capable of about 18 mph (29 km/h): future cars of his travelled at twice that speed. From 1899 to 1904 cars were produced for sale by the Lanchester Engine Company, which was formed in 1898. The company had to make every component except the tyres. Lanchester gave up the managership but remained as Chief Designer, and he remained in this post until 1914.

In 1907–8 his two-volume treatise Aerial Flight was published; it included consideration of skin friction, boundary-layer theory and the theory of stability. In 1909 he was appointed to the Government's Committee for Aeronautics and also became a consultant to the Daimler Company. At the age of 51 he married Dorothea Cooper. He remained a consultant to Daimler and worked also for Wolseley and Beardmore until 1929 when he started Lanchester Laboratories, working on sound reproduction. He also wrote books on relativity and on the theory of dimensions.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

[br]

[br]

[br]

Newcomen was probably born at a house on the quay at Dartmouth, Devon, England, the son of Elias Newcomen and Sarah Trenhale. Nothing is known of his education, and there is only dubious evidence of his apprenticeship to an ironmonger in Exeter. He returned to Dartmouth and established himself there as an "ironmonger". The term "ironmonger" at that time meant more than a dealer in ironmongery: a skilled craftsman working in iron, nearer to today's "blacksmith". In this venture he had a partner, John Calley or Caley, who was a plumber and glazier. Besides running his business in Dartmouth, it is evident that Newcomen spent a good deal of time travelling round the mines of Devon and Cornwall in search of business.

Eighteenth-century writers and others found it impossible to believe that a provincial ironmonger could have invented the steam-engine, the concept of which had occupied the best scientific brains in Europe, and postulated a connection between Newcomen and Savery or Papin, but scholars in recent years have failed to find any evidence of this. Certainly Savery was in Dartmouth at the same time as Newcomen but there is nothing to indicate that they met, although it is possible. The most recent biographer of Thomas Newcomen is of the opinion that he was aware of Savery and his work, that the two men had met by 1705 and that, although Newcomen could have taken out his own patent, he could not have operated his own engines without infringing Savery's patent. In the event, they came to an agreement by which Newcomen was enabled to sell his engines under Savery's patent.

The first recorded Newcomen engine is dated 1712, although this may have been preceded by a good number of test engines built at Dartmouth, possibly following a number of models. Over one hundred engines were built to Newcomen's design during his lifetime, with the first engine being installed at the Griff Colliery near Dudley Castle in Staffordshire.

On the death of Thomas Savery, on 15 May 1715, a new company, the Proprietors of the Engine Patent, was formed to carry on the business. The Company was represented by Edward Elliot, "who attended the Sword Blade Coffee House in Birchin Lane, London, between 3 and 5 o'clock to receive enquiries and to act as a contact for the committee". Newcomen was, of course, a member of the Proprietors.

A staunch Baptist, Newcomen married Hannah Waymouth, who bore him two sons and a daughter. He died, it is said of a fever, in London on 5 August 1729 and was buried at Bunhill Fields.

[br]