inventive development

1) вариант; развитие ( изобретения); разработка

2) событие; явление

3) процесс

4) проявление (напр. фотоматериалов)

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- development of invention

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives, Weapons and armour

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The Brennan family, including Louis, emigrated to Australia in 1861. He was an inventive genius from childhood, and while at Melbourne invented his torpedo. Within it were two drums, each with several miles of steel wire coiled upon it and mounted on one of two concentric propeller shafts. The propellers revolved in opposite directions. Wires were led out of the torpedo to winding drums on land, driven by high-speed steam engines: the faster the drums on shore were driven, the quicker the wires were withdrawn from the drums within the torpedo and the quicker the propellers turned. A steering device was operated by altering the speeds of the wires relative to one another. As finally developed, Brennan torpedoes were accurate over a range of 1 1/2 miles (2.4 km), in contrast to contemporary self-propelled torpedoes, which were unreliable at ranges over 400 yards (366 in).

Brennan moved to England in 1880 and sold the rights to his torpedo to the British Government for a total of £110,000, probably the highest payment ever made by it to an individual inventor. Brennan torpedoes became part of the defences of many vital naval ports, but never saw active service: improvement of other means of defence meant they were withdrawn in 1906. By then Brennan was deeply involved in the development of his monorail. The need for a simple and cheap form of railway had been apparent to him when in Australia and he considered it could be met by a ground-level monorail upon which vehicles would be balanced by gyroscopes. After overcoming many manufacturing difficulties, he demonstrated first a one-eighth scale version and then a full-size, electrically driven vehicle, which ran on its single rail throughout the summer of 1910 in London, carrying up to fifty passengers at a time. Development had been supported financially by, successively, the War Office, the India Office and the Government of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, which had no rail access; despite all this, however, no further financial support, government or commercial, was forthcoming.

Brennan made many other inventions, worked on the early development of helicopters and in 1929 built a gyroscopically balanced, two-wheeled motor car which, however, never went into production.

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See also: Behr, Fritz Bernhard; Lartigue, Charles François Marie-Thérèse; Palmer, Henry Robinson( monorails); Whitehead, Robert( torpedoes).

SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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The son of a Forfarshire tenant farmer, Patrick Bell obtained an MA from the University of St Andrews. His early association with farming kindled an interest in engineering and mechanics and he was to maintain a workshop not only on his father's farm, but also, in later life, at the parsonage at Carmyllie.

He was still studying divinity when he invented his reaping machine. Using garden shears as the basis of his design, he built a model in 1827 and a full-scale prototype the following year. Not wishing the machine to be seen during his early experiments, he and his brother planted a sheaf of oats in soil laid out in a shed, and first tried the machine on this. It cut well enough but left the straw in a mess behind it. A canvas belt system was devised and another secret trial in the barn was followed by a night excursion into a field, where corn was successfully harvested.

Two machines were at work during 1828, apparently achieving a harvest rate of one acre per hour. In 1832 there were ten machines at work, and at least another four had been sent to the United States by this time. Despite their success Bell did not patent his design, feeling that the idea should be given free to the world. In later years he was to regret the decision, feeling that the many badly-made imitations resulted in its poor reputation and prevented its adoption.

Bell's calling took precedence over his inventive interests and after qualifying he went to Canada in 1833, spending four years in Fergus, Ontario. He later returned to Scotland and be-came the minister at Carmyllie, with a living of £150 per annum.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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For the first twenty-five years of his life, Gestetner was a rolling stone and accordingly gathered no moss. Leaving school in 1867, he began working for an uncle in Sopron, making sausages. Four years later he apprenticed himself to another uncle, a stockbroker, in Vienna. The financial crisis of 1873 prompted a move to a restaurant, also in the family, but tiring of a menial existence, he emigrated to the USA, travelling steerage. He began to earn a living by selling Japanese kites: these were made of strong Japanese paper coated with lacquer, and he noted their long fibres and great strength, an observation that was later to prove useful when he was searching for a suitable medium for stencil duplicating. However, he did not prosper in the USA and he returned to Europe, first to Vienna and finally to London in 1879. He took a job with Fairholme \& Co., stationers in Shoe Lane, off Holborn; at last Gestetner found an outlet for his inventive genius and he began his life's work in developing stencil duplicating. His first patent was in 1879 for an application of the hectograph, an early method of duplicating documents. In 1881, he patented the toothed-wheel pen, or Cyclostyle, which made good ink-passing perforations in the stencil paper, with which he was able to pioneer the first practicable form of stencil duplicating. He then adopted a better stencil tissue of Japanese paper coated with wax, and later an improved form of pen. This assured the success of Gestetner's form of stencil duplicating and it became established practice in offices in the late 1880s. Gestetner began to manufacture the apparatus in premises in Sun Street, at first under the name of Fairholme, since they had defrayed the patent expenses and otherwise supported him financially, in return for which Gestetner assigned them his patent rights. In 1882 he patented the wheel pen in the USA and appointed an agent to sell the equipment there. In 1884 he moved to larger premises, and three years later to still larger premises. The introduction of the typewriter prompted modifications that enabled stencil duplicating to become both the standard means of printing short runs of copy and an essential piece of equipment in offices. Before the First World War, Gestetner's products were being sold around the world; in fact he created one of the first truly international distribution networks. He finally moved to a large factory to the north-east of London: when his company went public in 1929, it had a share capital of nearly £750,000. It was only with the development of electrostatic photocopying and small office offset litho machines that stencil duplicating began to decline in the 1960s. The firm David Gestetner had founded adapted to the new conditions and prospers still, under the direction of his grandson and namesake.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology, Electricity, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Steam and internal combustion engines

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Gustaf de Laval was educated at the Stockholm Technical Institute and Uppsala University. He proved to have an unfailing vigour and variety in his inventive talent, for his interests ranged from electric lighting and electrometallurgy to aerodynamics. In the 1890s he employed over one hundred engineers to develop his inventions, but he was best known for two: the cream separator and a steam turbine. In 1877 he invented the high-speed centrifugal cream separator, which was probably the greatest advance in butter-making up to that time. By 1880 the separators were being successfully marketed all over the world, for they were quickly adopted in larger dairies where they effected enormous savings in labour and space. He followed this with various devices for the dairy industry, including a vacuum milking machine perfected in 1913. In c. 1882, de Laval invented a turbine on the principle of Hero's engine, but he quickly turned his attention to the impulse type, which was like Branca's, with a jet of steam impinging on a set of blades around the periphery of a wheel. He applied for a British patent in 1889. The steam was expanded in a single stage from the initial to the final pressure: to secure economy with the steam issuing at high velocity, the blades also had to rotate at high velocity. An early 5 hp (3.7 kW) turbine rotated at 30,000 rpm, so reduction gearing had to be introduced. Production started in Sweden in 1893 and in other countries at about the same time. In 1892 de Laval proposed employing one of his turbines of 15 hp (11 kW) in an experimental launch, but there is no evidence that it was ever actually installed in a vessel. However, his turbines were popular for powering electric generating sets for lighting textile mills and ships, and by 1900 were available in sizes up to 300 bhp (224 kW).

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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The son of the millwright James Meikle, who is credited with the introduction of the winnowing machine into Britain, Andrew Meikle followed in his father's footsteps. His inventive inclinations were first turned to developing his father's idea, and together with his own son George he built and patented a double-fan winnowing machine.

However, in the history of agricultural development Andrew Meikle is most famous for his invention of the threshing machine, patented in 1784. He had been presented with a model of a threshing mill designed by a Mr Ilderton of Northumberland, but after failing to make a full-scale machine work, he developed the concept further. He eventually built the first working threshing machine for a farmer called Stein at Kilbagio. The patent revolutionized farming practice because it displaced the back-breaking and soul-destroying labour of flailing the grain from the straw. The invention was of great value in Scotland and in northern England when the land was becoming underpopulated as a result of heavy industrialization, but it was bitterly opposed in the south of England until well into the nineteenth century. Although the introduction of the threshing machine led to the "Captain Swing" riots of the 1830s, in opposition to it, it shortly became universal.

Meikle's provisional patent in 1785 was a natural progression of earlier attempts by other millwrights to produce such a machine. The published patent is based on power provided by a horse engine, but these threshing machines were often driven by water-wheels or even by windmills. The corn stalks were introduced into the machine where they were fed between cast-iron rollers moving quite fast against each other to beat the grain out of the ears. The power source, whether animal, water or wind, had to cause the rollers to rotate at high speed to knock the grain out of the ears. While Meikle's machine was at first designed as a fixed barn machine powered by a water-wheel or by a horse wheel, later threshing machines became mobile and were part of the rig of an agricultural contractor.

In 1788 Meikle was awarded a patent for the invention of shuttered sails for windmills. This patent is part of the general description of the threshing machine, and whilst it was a practical application, it was superseded by the work of Thomas Cubitt.

At the turn of the century Meikle became a manufacturer of threshing machines, building appliances that combined the threshing and winnowing principles as well as the reciprocating "straw walkers" found in subsequent threshing machines and in conventional combine harvesters to the present day. However, he made little financial gain from his invention, and a public subscription organized by the President of the Board of Agriculture, Sir John Sinclair, raised £1,500 to support him towards the end of his life.

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KM / AP

1) General subject: contrivance

2) Engineering: development of inventions, invention

3) Patents: inventive act

1) деятельность; активность

2) организация, учреждение

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- business activity

1) беременная

2) чреватый; влекущий важные последствия; имеющий важное значение

3)

а) изобретательный, находчивый ( об уме); богатый ( о воображении)

б) полный смысла, значения; содержательный (о речи, высказывании)

SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology, Land transport

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The son of a market gardener, Albone's interest lay in mechanics, and by 1880 he had established his own business as a cycle maker and repairer. His inventive mind led to a number of patents relating to bicycle design, but his commercial success was particularly assisted by his achievements in cycle racing. From this early start he diversified his business, designing and supplying, amongst other things, axle bearings for the Great Northern Railway, and also building motor cycles and several cars. It is possible that he began working on tractors as early as 1896. Certainly by 1902 he had built his first prototype, to the three-wheeled design that was to remain in later production models. Weighing only 30 cwt, yet capable of pulling two binders or a two-furrow plough, Albone's Ivel tractor was ahead of anything in its time, and its power-to-weight ratio was to be unrivalled for almost a decade. Albone's commercial success was not entirely due to the mechanical tractor's superiority, but owed a considerable amount to his ability as a showman and demonstrator. He held two working demonstrations a month in the village of Biggleswade in Bedfordshire, where the tractors were made. The tractor was named after the river Ivel, which flowed through the village. The Ivel tractor gained twenty-six gold and silver medals at agricultural shows between 1902 and 1906, and was a significant contributor to Britain's position as the world's largest exporter of tractors between 1904 and 1914. Albone tried other forms of his tractor to increase its sales. He built a fire engine, and also an armoured vehicle, but failed to impress the War Office with its potential.

Albone died at the age of 46. His tractor continued in production but remained essentially unimproved, and the company finally lost its sales to other designs, particularly those of American origin.

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SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

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Constrained by poverty despite displaying considerable gifts, particularly in the realm of mathematics, he became a surgeon in the Prussian Army but was able to undertake research; in 1842 he wrote a thesis on the discovery of nerve cells in ganglia. He became Professor of Physiology in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1849. moving to a similar post in Bonn in 1855, to Heidelberg in 1858, and the Chair of Physic in Berlin in 1871. This latter included the directorship of the physicotechnical institute at Charlottenburg.

His investigations over the years encompassed almost the whole field of science, including physiology, physiological optics, physiological acoustics, chemistry, mathematics, electricity and magnetism, meteorology and theoretical mechanics. He also made important additions to the understanding of putrefaction and fermentation.

Helmholtz's contributions to the understanding of vision and optics ranged widely, but one of the most significant was the definitive development of the ophthalmoscope in 1851. Incorporating some of the aspects of Babbage's original suggestions (which were not brought to practical fruition), his instrument inaugurated a new diagnostic era in ophthalmology, particularly when his method of direct ophthalmoscopy was supplemented by the indirect method of Ruete. His personal life was uneventful, in contrast to his inventive achievements, which were perhaps unequalled in scope in his century. Michael Faraday's tribute, "the absolute simplicity, modesty and untroubled purity of his disposition had a charm such as I have never encountered in another man", is therefore all the more to be valued.

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