engineering+progress

SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Metallurgy, Public utilities, Telecommunications

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Born Carl Wilhelm, he attended craft schools in Lübeck and Magdeburg, followed by an intensive course in natural science at Göttingen as a pupil of Weber. At the age of 19 Siemens travelled to England and sold an electroplating process developed by his brother Werner Siemens to Richard Elkington, who was already established in the plating business. From 1843 to 1844 he obtained practical experience in the Magdeburg works of Count Stolburg. He settled in England in 1844 and later assumed British nationality, but maintained close contact with his brother Werner, who in 1847 had co-founded the firm Siemens \& Halske in Berlin to manufacture telegraphic equipment. William began to develop his regenerative principle of waste-heat recovery and in 1856 his brother Frederick (1826–1904) took out a British patent for heat regeneration, by which hot waste gases were passed through a honeycomb of fire-bricks. When they became hot, the gases were switched to a second mass of fire-bricks and incoming air and fuel gas were led through the hot bricks. By alternating the two gas flows, high temperatures could be reached and considerable fuel economies achieved. By 1861 the two brothers had incorporated producer gas fuel, made by gasifying low-grade coal.

Heat regeneration was first applied in ironmaking by Cowper in 1857 for heating the air blast in blast furnaces. The first regenerative furnace was set up in Birmingham in 1860 for glassmaking. The first such furnace for making steel was developed in France by Pierre Martin and his father, Emile, in 1863. Siemens found British steelmakers reluctant to adopt the principle so in 1866 he rented a small works in Birmingham to develop his open-hearth steelmaking furnace, which he patented the following year. The process gradually made headway; as well as achieving high temperatures and saving fuel, it was slower than Bessemer's process, permitting greater control over the content of the steel. By 1900 the tonnage of open-hearth steel exceeded that produced by the Bessemer process.

In 1872 Siemens played a major part in founding the Society of Telegraph Engineers (from which the Institution of Electrical Engineers evolved), serving as its first President. He became President for the second time in 1878. He built a cable works at Charlton, London, where the cable could be loaded directly into the holds of ships moored on the Thames. In 1873, together with William Froude, a British shipbuilder, he designed the Faraday, the first specialized vessel for Atlantic cable laying. The successful laying of a cable from Europe to the United States was completed in 1875, and a further five transatlantic cables were laid by the Faraday over the following decade.

The Siemens factory in Charlton also supplied equipment for some of the earliest electric-lighting installations in London, including the British Museum in 1879 and the Savoy Theatre in 1882, the first theatre in Britain to be fully illuminated by electricity. The pioneer electric-tramway system of 1883 at Portrush, Northern Ireland, was an opportunity for the Siemens company to demonstrate its equipment.

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SUBJECT AREA: Weapons and armour

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The son of an engineer, Szilard, after service in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, studied electrical engineering at the University of Berlin. Obtaining his doctorate there in 1922, he joined the faculty and concentrated his studies on thermodynamics. He later began to develop an interest in nuclear physics, and in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, Szilard emigrated to Britain because of his Jewish heritage.

In 1934 he conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction through the breakdown of beryllium into helium and took out a British patent on it, but later realized that this process would not work. In 1937 he moved to the USA and continued his research at the University of Columbia, and the following year Hahn and Meitner discovered nuclear fission with uranium; this gave Szilard the breakthrough he needed. In 1939 he realized that a nuclear chain reaction could be produced through nuclear fission and that a weapon with many times the destructive power of the conventional high-explosive bomb could be produced. Only too aware of the progress being made by German nuclear scientists, he believed that it was essential that the USA should create an atomic bomb before Hitler. Consequently he drafted a letter to President Roosevelt that summer and, with two fellow Hungarian émigrés, persuaded Albert Einstein to sign it. The result was the setting up of the Uranium Committee.

It was not, however, until December 1941 that active steps began to be taken to produce such a weapon and it was a further nine months before the project was properly co-ordinated under the umbrella of the Manhattan Project. In the meantime, Szilard moved to join Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago and it was here, at the end of 1942, in a squash court under the football stadium, that they successfully developed the world's first self-sustaining nuclear reactor. Szilard, who became an American citizen in 1943, continued to work on the Manhattan Project. In 1945, however, when the Western Allies began to believe that only the atomic bomb could bring the war against Japan to an end, Szilard and a number of other Manhattan Project scientists objected that it would be immoral to use it against populated targets.

Although he would continue to campaign against nuclear warfare for the rest of his life, Szilard now abandoned nuclear research. In 1946 he became Professor of Biophysics at the University of Chicago and devoted himself to experimental work on bacterial mutations and biochemical mechanisms, as well as theoretical research on ageing and memory.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Telecommunications

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After education at Glasgow University and Peterhouse, Cambridge, a period of study in France gave Thomson an interest in experimental work and instrumentation. He became Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow in 1846 and retained the position for the rest of his career, establishing the first teaching laboratory in Britain.

Among his many contributions to science and engineering was his concept, introduced in 1848, of an "absolute" zero of temperature. Following on from the work of Joule, his investigations into the nature of heat led to the first successful liquefaction of gases such as hydrogen and helium, and later to the science of low-temperature physics.

Cable telegraphy gave an impetus to the scientific measurement of electrical quantities, and for many years Thomson was a member of the British Association Committee formed in 1861 to consider electrical standards and to develop units; these are still in use. Thomson first became Scientific Adviser to the Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1857, sailing on the Agamemnon and Great Eastern during the cable-laying expeditions. He invented a mirror galvanometer and more importantly the siphon recorder, which, used as a very sensitive telegraph receiver, provided a permanent record of signals. He also laid down the design parameters of long submarine cables and discovered that the conductivity of copper was greatly affected by its purity. A major part of the success of the Atlantic cable in 1866 was due to Thomson, who received a knighthood for his contribution.

Other instruments he designed included a quadrant electrostatic voltmeter to measure high voltages, and his "multi-cellular" instrument for low voltages. They could be used on alternating or direct current and were free from temperature errors. His balances for precision current measurement were widely used in standardizing laboratories.

Thomson was a prolific writer of scientific papers on subjects across the whole spectrum of physics; between 1855 and 1866 he published some 110 papers, with a total during his life of over 600. In 1892 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Kelvin of Largs. By the time of his death he was looked upon as the "father" of British physics, but despite his outstanding achievements his later years were spent resisting change and progress.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Nothing is known of Vitruvius apart from what can be gleaned from his only known work, the treatise De architectura. He seems to have been employed in some capacity by Julius Caesar and continued to serve under his heir, Octavianus, later Emperor Augustus, to whom he dedicated his book. It was written towards the end of his life, after Octavianus became undisputed ruler of the Empire by his victory at Actium in 31 BC, and was based partly on his own experience and partly on earlier, Hellenistic, writers.

The De architectura is divided into ten books. The first seven books expound the general principles of architecture and the planning, design and construction of various types of building, public and domestic, including a consideration of techniques and materials. Book 7 deals with interior decoration, including stucco work and painting, while Book 8 treats water supply, from the location of sources to the transport of water by aqueducts, tunnels and pipes. Book 9, after a long and somewhat confused account of the astronomical theories of the day, describes various forms of clock and sundial. Finally, Book 10 deals with mechanical devices for handling building materials and raising and pumping water, for which Vitruvius draws on the earlier Greek authors Ctesibius and Hero.

Although this may seem a motley assembly of subjects, to the Roman architect and builder it was a logical compendium of the subjects he was expected to know about. At the time, Vitruvius' rigid rules for the design of buildings such as temples seem to have had little influence, but his accounts of more practical matters of building materials and techniques were widely used. His illustrations to the original work were lost in antiquity, for no later manuscript includes them. Through the Middle Ages, manuscript copies were made in monastic scriptoria, although the architectural style in vogue had little relevance to those in Vitruvius: these came into their own with the Italian Renaissance. Alberti, writing the first great Renaissance treatise on architecture from 1452 to 1467, drew heavily on De architectura; those who sought to revive the styles of antiquity were bound to regard the only surviving text on the subject as authoritative. The appearance of the first printed edition in 1486 only served to extend its influence.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Vitruvius was used as a handbook for constructing machines and instruments. For the modern historian of technology and architecture the work is a source of prime importance, although it must be remembered that the illustrations in the early printed editions are of contemporary reproductions of ancient devices using the techniques of the time, rather than authentic representations of ancient technology.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Almost all of Watson's life was spent in or around the City of Glasgow; his formal education was at the city's High School and at the age of 16 he entered the yard and drawing offices of Robert Napier's Govan Shipyard. Three years later he crossed the River Clyde and started work in the design office of the Pointhouse Shipyard of A. \& J.Inglis, and there received the necessary grounding of a naval architect. Dr John Inglis, the Principal of the firm, encouraged Watson, ensured that he was involved in advanced design work and allowed him to build a yacht in a corner of the shipyard in his spare time.

At the early age of 22 Watson set up as a naval architect with his own company, which is still in existence 120 years later. In 1875, assisted by two carpenters, Watson built the 5-ton yacht Vril to his own design. This vessel was the first with an integral heavy lead keel and its success ensured that design contracts flowed to him for new yachts for the Clyde and elsewhere. His enthusiasm and increasing skill were recognized and soon he was working on the ultimate: the America's Cup challengers Thistle, Valkyrie II, Valkyrie III and Shamrock II. The greatest accolade was the contract for the design of the J Class yacht Britannia, built by D. \& W.Henderson of Glasgow in 1893 for the Prince of Wales.

The company of G.L.Watson became the world's leading designer of steam yachts, and it was usual for it to offer a full design service as well as supervise construction in any part of the world. Watson took a deep interest in the work of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and was its technical consultant for many years. One of his designs, the Watson Lifeboat, was a stalwart in its fleet for many years. In public life he lectured, took an active part in the debates on yacht racing and was recognized as Britain's leading designer.

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SUBJECT AREA: Public utilities

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He was born Frederic Albrecht Winzer but anglicized his name after settling in England. His interest in gas lighting was aroused by the experiments of Philippe Lebon in Paris in 1802. Winsor had little scientific knowledge or engineering ability, but was well endowed with confidence and enterprise. He alone among the early practitioners of gas-making envisaged a central plant supplying a number of users through gas mains. He managed to discover the essentials of Lebon's process and tried without success to exploit it on the European continent. So he moved to England in 1803 and settled first in Grosvenor Square and then in Pall Mall. He gave public demonstrations of gas lighting at the Lyceum Theatre in London and in 1804 took out his first patent. In December he lit Pall Mall, the first street to be illuminated by gas. Winsor then began to promote a grandiose scheme for the formation of a National Light and Heat Company. He struggled against bitter opposition both in and out of Parliament to obtain sanction for his company, and it was only after the third attempt that the Gas Light \& Coke Company received its charter in 1812. However, Winsor lacked the knowledge to devise successful gas-producing plant, even with the help of the German immigrant chemist F.C.Accum. Winsor was dismissed in 1812 and returned to Paris the following year, while the company recovered with the appointment of an able engineer, Samuel Clegg. Winsor formed a company in Paris to install gas lighting, but that failed in 1819.

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[tʃeɪndʒ]

address change вчт. изменение адреса address change вчт. переадресация administrative change административная реорганизация change делать пересадку, пересаживаться (to - на другой поезд, трамвай и т. п.); all change! пересадка! change биржа change делать пересадку, пересаживаться (to - на другой поезд, трамвай и т. п.); all change! пересадка! change делать пересадку change замена change изменение change изменять Change (сокр. от Exchange) лондонская биржа change мелкие деньги change мелочь change менять(-ся), изменять(ся); сменять, заменять; times change времена меняются change менять change менять деньги change новая фаза Луны, новолуние change обменивать(ся) change обменивать change переделывать change перемена; изменение; сдвиг; social change общественные (или социальные) сдвиги change перемена change переодеваться change пересадка (на железной дороге, трамвае); no change for Oxford в Оксфорд без пересадки change пересадка change to change up (down) авто переходить на большую (меньшую) скорость change подмена change размен (денег) change размен денег change разменная монета, сдача change разменная монета change разменять (деньги) change разнообразие; for a change для разнообразия change разнообразие change сдача; мелкие деньги, мелочь change сдача change скисать, прокисать; портиться change смена (белья, платья) change смена change (обыкн. pl) трезвон, перезвон колоколов to change colour покраснеть или побледнеть to change countenance измениться в лице change for reasons of consistency изменение из соображений совместимости change gear тех. механизм перемены направления движения to change hands переходить из рук в руки; переходить к другому владельцу hands: hands: change change переходить в другие руки to change horses in the midstream производить крупные перемены в критический или опасный момент change in behaviour изменение поведения change in cash value изменение стоимости в денежном выражении change in currency exchange rate изменение валютного курса change in currency exchange rate изменение обменного курса change in cyclical trend полит.эк. изменение периодического тренда change in definition изменение формулировки change in direction перемена курса change in exchange rates изменение валютных курсов change in foreign reserves изменение валютных запасов change in interest rates изменение процентных ставок change in inventories изменение уровней запасов change in net foreign reserves изменение чистой суммы валютных резервов change in net forward sales бирж. изменение объема нетто-продаж на срок change in order of priorities изменения порядка очередности change in practice изменение процедуры change in presentation of accounts изменение порядка представления отчетности change in price изменение цен change in statistical recording изменение статистической отчетности change in stock изменение уровня запасов change in stockbuilding изменение порядка создания запасов change in timing изменение чередования периодов change in work in progress изменение выполняемой работы change of address изменение адреса change of address модификация адреса change of address переадресование change of air тех. обмен воздуха change of air перемена обстановки change of attitude изменение отношения change of government смена правительства change of level изменение уровня change of life мед. климактерий change of managers смена руководителей change of name изменение названия change of ownership раздел собственности change of policy-orientation изменение политической ориентации change of profession смена профессии change of supplier смена поставщика change of system изменение системы change of trade смена профессии to change one's mind передумать, изменить решение mind: to be of the same change оставаться при своем мнении; to speak one's mind говорить откровенно; to change (или to alter) one's mind передумать; to my mind по моему мнению change over меняться местами change over вчт. переключать change over переходить (to - на что-л.) to change sides перейти на другую сторону (в политике, в споре и т. п.) sides: sides: change change изменять точку зрения control change вчт. смена режима управления de facto change фактическое изменение engineering change вчт. техническое изменение exact change точное изменение exchange rate change изменение валютного курса fee change изменение размера сбора change разнообразие; for a change для разнообразия generational change смена поколений to get no change out (of smb.) разг. ничего не добиться (от кого-л.) job change продвижение по службе minor change незначительное изменение change пересадка (на железной дороге, трамвае); no change for Oxford в Оксфорд без пересадки postproduction change вчт. доработка в процессе изготовления price change нетто-изменение курса ценной бумаги в течение рабочего дня price change переоценка public change вчт. общедоступное изменение random changes случайные изменения to ring the changes (on) повторять, твердить на все лады одно и то же runtime change вчт. изменение на период прогона small change мелкая разменная монета small change мелкие деньги, мелочь small change (что-л.) мелкое, незначительное small change небольшое изменение small change незначительное изменение small change несущественное изменение change перемена; изменение; сдвиг; social change общественные (или социальные) сдвиги social change изменения в обществе social change социальная перемена (перемены в жизни общества) step change вчт. ступенчатое изменение structural change структурное изменение to take the change (on smb.) разг. обмануть (кого-л.) to take the change out of a person разг. отомстить (кому-л.) change менять(-ся), изменять(ся); сменять, заменять; times change времена меняются