-
41 Bedson, George
SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy[br]b. 3 November 1820 Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, Englandd. 12 December 1884 Manchester (?), England[br]English metallurgist, inventor of the continuous rolling mill.[br]He acquired a considerable knowledge of wire-making in his father's works before he took a position in 1839 at the works of James Edleston at Warrington. From there, in 1851, he went to Manchester as Manager of Richard Johnson \& Sons' wire mill, where he remained for the rest of his life. It was there that he initiated several important improvements in the manufacture of wire. These included a system of circulating puddling furnace water bottoms and sides, and a galvanizing process. His most important innovation, however, was the continuous mill for producing iron rod for wiredrawing. Previously the red-hot iron billets had to be handled repeatedly through a stand or set of rolls to reduce the billet to the required shape, with time and heat being lost at each handling. In Bedson's continuous mill, the billet entered the first of a succession of stands placed as closely to each other as possible and emerged from the final one as rod suitable for wiredrawing, without any intermediate handling. A second novel feature was that alternate rolls were arranged vertically to save turning the piece manually through a right angle. That improved the quality as well as the speed of production. Bedson's first continuous mill was erected in Manchester in 1862 and had sixteen stands in tandem. A mill on this principle had been patented the previous year by Charles While of Pontypridd, South Wales, but it was Bedson who made it work and brought it into use commercially. A difficult problem to overcome was that as the piece being rolled lengthened, its speed increased, so that each pair of rolls had to increase correspondingly. The only source of power was a steam engine working a single drive shaft, but Bedson achieved the greater speeds by using successively larger gear-wheels at each stand.Bedson's first mill was highly successful, and a second one was erected at the Manchester works; however, its application was limited to the production of small bars, rods and sections. Nevertheless, Bedson's mill established an important principle of rolling-mill design that was to have wider applications in later years.[br]Further ReadingObituary, 1884, Journal of the Iron and Steel Institute 27:539–40. W.K.V.Gale, 1969, Iron and Steel, London: Longmans, pp. 81–2.LRD -
42 Fairbairn, William
SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping[br]b. 19 February 1789 Kelso, Roxburghshire, Scotlandd. 18 August 1874 Farnham, Surrey, England[br]Scottish engineer and shipbuilder, pioneer in the use of iron in structures.[br]Born in modest circumstances, Fairbairn nevertheless enjoyed a broad and liberal education until around the age of 14. Thereafter he served an apprenticeship as a millwright in a Northumberland colliery. This seven-year period marked him out as a man of determination and intellectual ability; he planned his life around the practical work of pit-machinery maintenance and devoted his limited free time to the study of mathematics, science and history as well as "Church, Milton and Recreation". Like many before and countless thousands after, he worked in London for some difficult and profitless years, and then moved to Manchester, the city he was to regard as home for the rest of his life. In 1816 he was married. Along with a workmate, James Lillie, he set up a general engineering business, which steadily enlarged and ultimately involved both shipbuilding and boiler-making. The partnership was dissolved in 1832 and Fairbairn continued on his own. Consultancy work commissioned by the Forth and Clyde Canal led to the construction of iron steamships by Fairbairn for the canal; one of these, the PS Manchester was lost in the Irish Sea (through the little-understood phenomenon of compass deviation) on her delivery voyage from Manchester to the Clyde. This brought Fairbairn to the forefront of research in this field and confirmed him as a shipbuilder in the novel construction of iron vessels. In 1835 he operated the Millwall Shipyard on the Isle of Dogs on the Thames; this is regarded as one of the first two shipyards dedicated to iron production from the outset (the other being Tod and MacGregor of Glasgow). Losses at the London yard forced Fairbairn to sell off, and the yard passed into the hands of John Scott Russell, who built the I.K. Brunel -designed Great Eastern on the site. However, his business in Manchester went from strength to strength: he produced an improved Cornish boiler with two firetubes, known as the Lancashire boiler; he invented a riveting machine; and designed the beautiful swan-necked box-structured crane that is known as the Fairbairn crane to this day.Throughout his life he advocated the widest use of iron; he served on the Admiralty Committee of 1861 investigating the use of this material in the Royal Navy. In his later years he travelled widely in Europe as an engineering consultant and published many papers on engineering. His contribution to worldwide engineering was recognized during his lifetime by the conferment of a baronetcy by Queen Victoria.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsCreated Baronet 1869. FRS 1850. Elected to the Academy of Science of France 1852. President, Institution of Mechnical Engineers 1854. Royal Society Gold Medal 1860. President, British Association 1861.BibliographyFairbairn wrote many papers on a wide range of engineering subjects from water-wheels to iron metallurgy and from railway brakes to the strength of iron ships. In 1856 he contributed the article on iron to the 8th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.Further ReadingW.Pole (ed.), 1877, The Life of Sir William Fairbairn Bart, London: Longmans Green; reprinted 1970, David and Charles Reprints (written in part by Fairbairn, but completed and edited by Pole).FMW -
43 Moulton, Alexander
[br]b. 9 April 1920 Stratford-on-Avon[br]English inventor of vehicle suspension systems and the Moulton bicycle.[br]He spent his childhood at The Hall in Bradfordon-Avon. He was educated at Marlborough College, and in 1937 was apprenticed to the Sentinel Steam Wagon Company of Shrewsbury. About that same time he went to King's College, Cambridge, where he took the Mechanical Sciences Tripos. It was then wartime, and he did research on aero-engines at the Bristol Aeroplane Company, where he became Personal Assistant to Sir Roy Fedden. He left Bristol's in 1945 to join his family firm, Spencer \& Moulton, of which he eventually became Technical Director and built up the Research Department. In 1948 he invented his first suspension unit, the "Flexitor", in which an inner shaft and an outer shell were separated by an annular rubber body which was bonded to both.In 1848 his great-grandfather had founded the family firm in an old woollen mill, to manufacture vulcanized rubber products under Charles Goodyear's patent. The firm remained a family business with Spencer's, consultants in railway engineering, until 1956 when it was sold to the Avon Rubber Company. He then formed Moulton Developments to continue his work on vehicle suspensions in the stables attached to The Hall. Sponsored by the British Motor Corporation (BMC) and the Dunlop Rubber Company, he invented a rubber cone spring in 1951 which was later used in the BMC Mini (see Issigonis, Sir Alexander Arnold Constantine): by 1994 over 4 million Minis had been fitted with these springs, made by Dunlop. In 1954 he patented the Hydrolastic suspension system, in which all four wheels were independently sprung with combined rubber springs and damper assembly, the weight being supported by fluid under pressure, and the wheels on each side being interconnected, front to rear. In 1962 he formed Moulton Bicycles Ltd, having designed an improved bicycle system for adult use. The conventional bicycle frame was replaced by a flat-sided oval steel tube F-frame on a novel rubber front and rear suspension, with the wheel size reduced to 41 cm (16 in.) with high-pressure tyres. Raleigh Industries Ltd having refused his offer to produce the Moulton Bicycle under licence, he set up his own factory on his estate, producing 25,000 bicycles between 1963 and 1966. In 1967 he sold out to Raleigh and set up as Bicycle Consultants Ltd while continuing the suspension development of Moulton Developments Ltd. In the 1970s the combined firms employed some forty staff, nearly 50 per cent of whom were graduates.He won the Queen's Award for Industry in 1967 for technical innovation in Hydrolastic car suspension and the Moulton Bicycle. Since that time he has continued his innovative work on suspensions and the bicycle. In 1983 he introduced the AM bicycle series of very sophisticated space-frame design with suspension and 43 cm (17 in.) wheels; this machine holds the world speed record fully formed at 82 km/h (51 mph). The current Rover 100 and MGF use his Hydragas interconnected suspension. By 1994 over 7 million cars had been fitted with Moulton suspensions. He has won many design awards and prizes, and has been awarded three honorary doctorates of engineering. He is active in engineering and design education.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsQueen's Award for Industry 1967; CBE; RDI. Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.Further ReadingP.R.Whitfield, 1975, Creativity in Industry, London: Penguin Books.IMcN -
44 Smith, Charles Shaler
SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering[br]b. 1836 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USAd. 1886 St Louis, Missouri, USA[br]American bridge engineer.[br]Smith's early career started as an assistant to Albert Fink; he later became a divisional engineer for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. During the Civil War, he served as a Captain of Engineers in the Confederate Army. In 1886 he went into partnership with Benjamin H. and Charles H.Latrobe in the Baltimore Bridge Company; his greatest achievement was the Kentucky Railroad Bridge built for the Cincinnati Southern Railroad in 1876–7. The cantilever that he used for this bridge was entirely novel, and soon became the standard type of construction for long spans. He is also well known for the Lachine bridge across the St Lawrence River near Montreal, Quebec, which was started in 1880 and was, for many years, the only continuous-span bridge of any importance in North America.[br]Further Reading1964, Concise Dictionary of American Biography, New York: Charles Scribner.IMcN -
45 Zeppelin, Count Ferdinand von
SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace[br]b. 8 July 1838 Konstanz, Germanyd. 8 March 1917 Berlin, Germany[br]German designer of rigid airships, which became known as Zeppelins.[br]Zeppelin served in the German Army and retired with the rank of General in 1890. While in the army, he was impressed by the use of balloons in the American Civil War and during the Siege of Paris. By the time he retired, non-rigid airships were just beginning to make their mark. Zeppelin decided to build an airship with a rigid framework to support the gas bags. Plans were drawn up in 1893 with the assistance of Theodore Kober, an engineer, but the idea was rejected by the authorities. A company was founded in 1898 and construction began. The Luftschiff Zeppelin No. 1 (LZ1) made its first flight on 2 July 1900. Modifications were needed and the second flight took place in October. A reporter called Hugo Eckener covered this and later flights: his comments and suggestions so impressed Zeppelin that Eckener eventually became his partner, publicist, fund-raiser and pilot.The performance of the subsequent Zeppelins gradually improved, but there was limited military interest. In November 1909 a company with the abbreviated name DELAG was founded to operate passenger-carrying Zeppelins. The service was opened by LZ 7 Deutschland in mid-June 1910, and the initial network of Frankfurt, Baden- Baden and Düsseldorf was expanded. Eckener became a very efficient Director of Flight Operations, and by the outbreak of war in 1914 some 35,000 passengers had been carried without any fatalities. During the First World War many Zeppelins were built and they carried out air-raids on Britain. Despite their menacing reputation, they were very vulnerable to attack by fighters. Zeppelin, now in his seventies, turned his attention to large bombers, following the success of Sikorsky's Grand, but he died in 1917. Eckener continued to instruct crews and improve the Zeppelin designs. When the war ended Eckener arranged to supply the Americans with an airship as part of German reparations: this became the Los Angeles. In 1928 a huge new airship, the Graf Zeppelin, was completed and Eckener took command. He took the Graf Zeppelin on many successful flights, including a voyage around the world in 1929.[br]Bibliography1908, Erfahrungen beim Bau von Luftschiffen, Berlin. 1908, Die Eroberung der Luft, Stuttgart.Further ReadingThere are many books on the history of airships, and on Graf von Zeppelin in particular. Of note are: H.Eckener, 1938, Count Zeppelin: The Man and His Work, London.——1958, My Zeppelins, London.P.W.Brooks, 1992, Zeppelin: Rigid Airships 1893–1940, London.T.Nielson, 1955, The Zeppelin Story: The Life of Hugo Eckener, English edn, London (written as a novel in direct speech).M.Goldsmith, 1931, Zeppelin: A Biography, New York.W.R.Nitshe, 1977, The Zeppelin Story, New York.F.Gütschow, 1985, Das Luftschiff, Stuttgart (a record of all the airships).JDSBiographical history of technology > Zeppelin, Count Ferdinand von
-
46 Insight
In October 1838 that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement "Malthus on Population," and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. (Darwin, 1911, p. 68)The insight of the chimpanzee shows itself to be principally determined by his optical apprehension of the situation. (KoЁhler, 1925, p. 267)Then I turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions apparently without much success and without a suspicion of any connection with my preceding researches. Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. (Poincareґ, 1929, p. 388)The direct awareness of determination... may also be called insight. When I once used this expression in a description of the intelligent behavior of apes, an unfortunate misunderstanding was, it seems, not entirely prevented.... Apparently, some readers interpreted this formulation as though it referred to a mysterious mental agent or faculty which was made responsible for the apes' behavior. Actually, nothing of this sort was intended... the concept is used in a strictly descriptive fashion. (KoЁhler, 1947, pp. 341-342)The task must be neither so easy that the animal solves the problem at once, thus not allowing one to analyze the solution; nor so hard that the animal fails to solve it except by rote learning in a long series of trials. With a problem of such borderline difficulty, the solution may appear out of a blue sky. There is a period first of fruitless effort in one direction, or perhaps a series of attempted solutions. Then suddenly there is a complete change in the direction of effort, and a cleancut solution of the task. This then is the first criterion of the occurrence of insight. The behavior cannot be described as a gradual accretion of learning; it is evident that something has happened in the animal at the moment of solution. (What happens is another matter.) (Hebb, 1949, p. 160)If the subject had not spontaneously solved the problem [of how to catch hold at the same time of two strings hung from the ceiling so wide apart that he or she could only get hold of one at a time, when the only available tool was a pair of pliers, by tying the pliers to one string and setting it into pendular motion] within ten minutes, Maier supplied him with a hint; he would "accidentally" brush against one of the strings, causing it to swing gently. Of those who solved the problem after this hint, the average interval between hint and solution was only forty-two seconds.... Most of those subjects who solved the problem immediately after the hint did so without any realization that they had been given one. The "idea" of making a pendulum with pliers seemed to arise spontaneously. (Osgood, 1960, p. 633)There seems to be very little reason to believe that solutions to novel problems come about in flashes of insight, independently of past experience.... People create solutions to new problems by starting with what they know and later modifying it to meet the specific problem at hand. (Weisberg, 1986, p. 50)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Insight
Страницы
См. также в других словарях:
novel — novel1 novellike, adj. /nov euhl/, n. 1. a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes. 2. (formerly) novella (def. 1). [1560 70; … Universalium
Novel — For other uses, see Novel (disambiguation). Not to be confused with Novell. New novels in a Oldenburg bookshop, February 2009 … Wikipedia
Novel sequence — A novel sequence is a set or series of novels which share common themes, characters, or settings, but where each novel has its own title and free standing storyline, and can thus be read independently or out of sequence. Contents 1 Definitions 2… … Wikipedia
novel — {{11}}novel (adj.) new, strange, unusual, early 15c., but little used before 1600, from O.Fr. novel, nouvel new, young, fresh, recent; additional; early, soon (Mod.Fr. nouveau, fem. nouvelle), from L. novellus new, young, recent, dim. of novus… … Etymology dictionary
novel — I. /ˈnɒvəl / (say novuhl) noun 1. a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length, usually having a plot that is developed by the actions, thoughts, speech, etc., of the characters. 2. Obsolete a short story or a novella. {Italian novella,… …
Wieland (novel) — Infobox Book | name = Wieland title orig = translator = image caption = author = Charles Brockden Brown illustrator = cover artist = country = United States language = English series = genre = Gothic novel publisher = H. Caritat release date =… … Wikipedia
Space Opera (novel) — Infobox Book | name = Space Opera title orig = translator = image caption = first edition of the Space Opera author = Jack Vance illustrator = cover artist = country = United States language = English series = genre = Science fiction novel… … Wikipedia
The Waterworks (novel) — infobox Book | name = The Waterworks title orig = translator = author = E. L. Doctorow cover artist = country = United States language = English series = genre = Postmodern Historical novel publisher = Random House release date = 1994 media type … Wikipedia
Germinal (novel) — infobox Book | name = Germinal title orig = translator = image caption = First edition, 1885 author = Émile Zola illustrator = cover artist = country = France language = French series = Les Rougon Macquart genre = Novel publisher = G. Charpentier … Wikipedia
Troubles (novel) — Infobox Book name = Troubles title orig = translator = image caption = author = J. G. Farrell illustrator = cover artist = country = England language = English series = subject = genre = publisher = Jonathan Cape release date = 1970 english… … Wikipedia
Conan the Barbarian (novel) — This article is about the 1982 novel. For other uses, see Conan the Barbarian (disambiguation). Conan the Barbarian … Wikipedia
