iron and steel company

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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After working as a millwright in Halifax, Riley found employment at the Ormesby Ironworks in Middlesbrough until, in 1869, he became manager of the Askam Ironworks in Cumberland. Three years later, in 1872, he was appointed Blast-furnace Manager at the pioneering Siemens Steel Company's works at Landore, near Swansea in South Wales. Using Spanish ore, he produced the manganese-rich iron (spiegeleisen) required as an additive to make satisfactory steel. Riley was promoted in 1874 to be General Manager at Landore, and he worked with William Siemens to develop the use of the latter's regenerative furnace for the production of open-hearth steel. He persuaded Welsh makers of tin plate to use sheets rolled from lowcarbon (mild) steel instead of from charcoal iron and, partly by publishing some test results, he was instrumental in influencing the Admiralty to build two naval vessels of mild steel, the Mercury and the Iris.

In 1878 Riley moved north on his appointment as General Manager of the Steel Company of Scotland, a firm closely associated with Charles Tennant that was formed in 1872 to make steel by the Siemens process. Already by 1878, fourteen Siemens melting furnaces had been erected, and in that year 42,000 long tons of ingots were produced at the company's Hallside (Newton) Works, situated 8 km (5 miles) south-east of Glasgow. Under Riley's leadership, steelmaking in open-hearth furnaces was initiated at a second plant situated at Blochairn. Plates and sections for all aspects of shipbuilding, including boilers, formed the main products; the company also supplied the greater part of the steel for the Forth (Railway) Bridge. Riley was associated with technical modifications which improved the performance of steelmaking furnaces using Siemens's principles. He built a gasfired cupola for melting pig-iron, and constructed the first British "universal" plate mill using three-high rolls (Lauth mill).

At the request of French interests, Riley investigated the properties of steels containing various proportions of nickel; the report that he read before the Iron and Steel Institute in 1889 successfully brought to the notice of potential users the greatly enhanced strength that nickel could impart and its ability to yield alloys possessing substantially lower corrodibility.

The Steel Company of Scotland paid dividends in the years to 1890, but then came a lean period. In 1895, at the age of 54, Riley moved once more to another employer, becoming General Manager of the Glasgow Iron and Steel Company, which had just laid out a new steelmaking plant at Wishaw, 25 km (15 miles) south-east of Glasgow, where it already had blast furnaces. Still the technical innovator, in 1900 Riley presented an account of his experiences in introducing molten blast-furnace metal as feed for the open-hearth steel furnaces. In the early 1890s it was largely through Riley's efforts that a West of Scotland Board of Conciliation and Arbitration for the Manufactured Steel Trade came into being; he was its first Chairman and then its President.

In 1899 James Riley resigned from his Scottish employment to move back to his native Yorkshire, where he became his own master by acquiring the small Richmond Ironworks situated at Stockton-on-Tees. Although Riley's 1900 account to the Iron and Steel Institute was the last of the many of which he was author, he continued to contribute to the discussion of papers written by others.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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After spending some years at his father's Castle Ironworks and at Ebbw Vale Works, Talbot travelled to the USA in 1890 to become Superintendent of the Southern Iron and Steel Company of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he initiated basic open-hearth steelmaking and a preliminary slag washing to remove silicon. In 1893 he moved to Pennsylvania as Steel Superintendent at the Pencoyd works; there, six years later, he began his "continuous" steelmaking process. Returning to Britain in 1900, Talbot marketed the technique: after ten years it was in successful use in Britain, continental Europe and the USA; it promoted the growth of steel production.

Meanwhile its originator had joined the Cargo Fleet Iron Company Limited on Teesside, where he was made Managing Director in 1907. Twelve years later he assumed, in addition, the same position in the allied South Durham Steel and Iron Company Limited. While remaining Managing Director, he was appointed Deputy Chairman of both companies in 1925, and Chairman in 1940. The companies he controlled survived the depressed 1920s and 1930s and were significant contributors to British steel output, with a capacity of more than half a million tonnes per year.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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After graduating from Columbia University in 1896. Monell became a metallurgical engineer to the Carnegie Steel Company, rising in six years to be Assistant to the President. In 1900, while Manager of the company's open-hearth steelworks at Pittsburg, he patented a procedure for making high-carbon steel in basic conditions on the hearth of a fixed/stationary furnace; the method was intended to refine pig-iron containing substantial proportions of phosphorus and to do so relatively quickly. The process was introduced at the Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company in February 1900, where it continued in use for some years. In April 1902 Monell was among those who launched the International Nickel Company of New Jersey in order to bring together a number of existing nickel interests; he became the new company's President. In 1904–5, members of the company's metallurgical staff produced an alloy of about 70 parts nickel and 30 copper which seemed to show great commercial promise on account of its high resistance to corrosion and its good appearance. Monell agreed to the suggestion that the new alloy should be given his name; for commercial reasons it was marketed as "Monel metal". In 1917, following the entry of the USA into the First World War, Monell was commissioned Colonel in the US Army (Aviation) for overseas service, relinquishing his presidency of the International Nickel Company but remaining as a director. At the time of his death he was also a director in several other companies in the USA.

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See also: Stanley, Robert Crooks; Talbot, Benjamin

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Alleyne was the heir to a baronetcy created in 1769, which he succeeded to on the death of his father in 1870. He was educated at Harrow and at Bonn University, and from 1843 to 1851 he was Warden at Dulwich College, to the founder of which the family claimed to be related.

Alleyne's business career began with a short spell in the sugar industry at Barbados, but he returned to England to enter Butterley Iron Works Company, where he remained for many years. He was at first concerned with the production of rolled-iron girders for floors, especially for fireproof flooring, and deck beams for iron ships. The demand for large sections exceeded the capacity of the small mills then in use at Butterley, so Alleyne introduced the welding of T-sections to form the required H-sections.

In 1861 Alleyne patented a mechanical traverser for moving ingots in front of and behind a rolling mill, enabling one person to manipulate large pieces. In 1870 he introduced his major innovation, the two-high reversing mill, which enabled the metal to be passed back and forth between the rolls until it assumed the required size and shape. The mill had two steam engines, which supplied the motion in opposite directions. These two inventions produced considerable economies in time and effort in handling the metal and enabled much heavier pieces to be processed.

During Alleyne's regime, the Butterley Company secured some notable contracts, such as the roof of St Paneras Station, London, in 1868, with the then-unparalleled span of 240 ft (73 m). The manufacture and erection of this awe-inspiring structure was a tribute to Alleyne's abilities. In 1872 he masterminded the design and construction of the large railway bridge over the Old Maas at Dordrecht, Holland. Alleyne also devised a method of determining small quantities of phosphorus in iron and steel by means of the spectroscope. In his spare time he was a skilled astronomical observer and metalworker in his private workshop.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Saniter spent three years as a pupil in J.E.Stead's chemical laboratory in Middlesbrough, and then from 1883 was employed in the same town as Assistant Chemist at the new North-Eastern Steelworks. In 1890 he became Chief Chemist to the Wigan Coal and Iron Company in Lancashire. There he devised a desulphurizing treatment for molten iron and steel, based upon the presence of abundant lime together with calcium chloride. Between 1898 and 1904 he was in the Middlesbrough district once more, employed by Dorman Long \& Co. and Bell Brothers in experiments which led to the establishment of Teesside's first large-scale basic open-hearth steel plant. Calcium fluoride (fluorspar), mentioned in Saniter's 1892 patent, soon came to replace the calcium chloride; with this modification, his method retained wide applicability throughout the era of open-hearth steel. In 1904 Saniter became chief metallurgist to Steel, Peech \& Tozer Limited of Sheffield, and he remained in this post until 1928. Throughout the last forty years of his life he participated in the discussion of steelmaking developments and practices.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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William Sellers was educated at a private school that had been established by his father and other relatives for their children, and at the age of 14 he was apprenticed for seven years to the machinist's trade with his uncle. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1845 he took charge of the machine shop of Fairbanks, Bancroft \& Co. in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1848 he established his own factory manufacturing machine tools and mill gearing in Philadelphia, where he was soon joined by Edward Bancroft, the firm becoming Bancroft \& Sellers. After Bancroft's death the name was changed in 1856 to William Sellers \& Co. and Sellers served as President until the end of his life. His machine tools were characterized by their robust construction and absence of decorative embellishments. In 1868 he formed the Edgemoor Iron Company, of which he was President. This company supplied the structural ironwork for the Centennial Exhibition buildings and much of the material for the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1873 he reorganized the William Butcher Steel Works, renaming it the Midvale Steel Company, and under his presidency it became a leader in the production of heavy ordnance. It was at the Midvale Steel Company that Frederick W. Taylor began, with the encouragement of Sellers, his experiments on cutting tools.

In 1860 Sellers obtained the American rights of the patent for the Giffard injector for feeding steam boilers. He later invented his own improvements to the injector, which numbered among his many other patents, most of which related to machine tools. Probably Sellers's most important contribution to the engineering industry was his proposal for a system of screw threads made in 1864 and later adopted as the American national standard.

Sellers was a founder member in 1880 of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and was also a member of many other learned societies in America and other countries, including, in Britain, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Iron and Steel Institute.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Ports and shipping

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The son of a merchant of Dundee, Kirkaldy was educated there, then at Merchiston Castle School, Edinburgh, and at Edinburgh University. For a while he worked in his father's office, but with a preference for engineering, in 1843 he commenced an apprenticeship at the Glasgow works of Robert Napier. After four years in the shops he was transferred to the drawing office and in a very few years rose to become Chief. Here Kirkaldy demonstrated a remarkable talent both for the meticulous recording of observations and data and for technical drawing. His work also had an aesthetic appeal and four of his drawings of Napier steamships were shown at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, earning both Napier and Kirkaldy a medal. His "as fitted" set of drawings of the Cunard Liner Persia, which had been built in 1855, is now in the possession of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, London; it is regarded as one of the finest examples of its kind in the world, and has even been exhibited at the Royal Academy in London.

With the impending order for the Royal Naval Ironclad Black Prince (sister ship to HMS Warrior, now preserved at Portsmouth) and for some high-pressure marine boilers and engines, there was need for a close scientific analysis of the physical properties of iron and steel. Kirkaldy, now designated Chief Draughtsman and Calculator, was placed in charge of this work, which included comparisons of puddled steel and wrought iron, using a simple lever-arm testing machine. The tests lasted some three years and resulted in Kirkaldy's most important publication, Experiments on Wrought Iron and Steel (1862, London), which gained him wide recognition for his careful and thorough work. Napier's did not encourage him to continue testing; but realizing the growing importance of materials testing, Kirkaldy resigned from the shipyard in 1861. For the next two and a half years Kirkaldy worked on the design of a massive testing machine that was manufactured in Leeds and installed in premises in London, at The Grove, Southwark.

The works was open for trade in January 1866 and engineers soon began to bring him specimens for testing on the great machine: Joseph Cubitt (son of William Cubitt) brought him samples of the materials for the new Blackfriars Bridge, which was then under construction. Soon The Grove became too cramped and Kirkaldy moved to 99 Southwark Street, reopening in January 1874. In the years that followed, Kirkaldy gained a worldwide reputation for rigorous and meticulous testing and recording of results, coupled with the highest integrity. He numbered the most distinguished engineers of the time among his clients.

After Kirkaldy's death, his son William George, whom he had taken into partnership, carried on the business. When the son died in 1914, his widow took charge until her death in 1938, when the grandson David became proprietor. He sold out to Treharne \& Davies, chemical consultants, in 1965, but the works finally closed in 1974. The future of the premises and the testing machine at first seemed threatened, but that has now been secured and the machine is once more in working order. Over almost one hundred years of trading in South London, the company was involved in many famous enquiries, including the analysis of the iron from the ill-fated Tay Bridge (see Bouch, Sir Thomas).

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LRD / FMW

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Darby's father, John, was a farmer who also worked a small forge to produce nails and other ironware needed on the farm. He was brought up in the Society of Friends, or Quakers, and this community remained important throughout his personal and working life. Darby was apprenticed to Jonathan Freeth, a malt-mill maker in Birmingham, and on completion of his apprenticeship in 1699 he took up the trade himself in Bristol. Probably in 1704, he visited Holland to study the casting of brass pots and returned to Bristol with some Dutch workers, setting up a brassworks at Baptist Mills in partnership with others. He tried substituting cast iron for brass in his castings, without success at first, but in 1707 he was granted a patent, "A new way of casting iron pots and other pot-bellied ware in sand without loam or clay". However, his business associates were unwilling to risk further funds in the experiments, so he withdrew his share of the capital and moved to Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. There, iron ore, coal, water-power and transport lay close at hand. He took a lease on an old furnace and began experimenting. The shortage and expense of charcoal, and his knowledge of the use of coke in malting, may well have led him to try using coke to smelt iron ore. The furnace was brought into blast in 1709 and records show that in the same year it was regularly producing iron, using coke instead of charcoal. The process seems to have been operating successfully by 1711 in the production of cast-iron pots and kettles, with some pig-iron destined for Bristol. Darby prospered at Coalbrookdale, employing coke smelting with consistent success, and he sought to extend his activities in the neighbourhood and in other parts of the country. However, ill health prevented him from pursuing these ventures with his previous energy. Coke smelting spread slowly in England and the continent of Europe, but without Darby's technological breakthrough the ever-increasing demand for iron for structures and machines during the Industrial Revolution simply could not have been met; it was thus an essential component of the technological progress that was to come.

Darby's eldest son, Abraham II (1711–63), entered the Coalbrookdale Company partnership in 1734 and largely assumed control of the technical side of managing the furnaces and foundry. He made a number of improvements, notably the installation of a steam engine in 1742 to pump water to an upper level in order to achieve a steady source of water-power to operate the bellows supplying the blast furnaces. When he built the Ketley and Horsehay furnaces in 1755 and 1756, these too were provided with steam engines. Abraham II's son, Abraham III (1750–89), in turn, took over the management of the Coalbrookdale works in 1768 and devoted himself to improving and extending the business. His most notable achievement was the design and construction of the famous Iron Bridge over the river Severn, the world's first iron bridge. The bridge members were cast at Coalbrookdale and the structure was erected during 1779, with a span of 100 ft (30 m) and height above the river of 40 ft (12 m). The bridge still stands, and remains a tribute to the skill and judgement of Darby and his workers.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Andrew Carnegie was a highly successful entrepreneur and steel industrialist rather than an engineer, but he made a significant contribution to engineering both through his work in industry and through his philanthropic and educational activities. His parents emigrated to the United States in 1848 and the family settled in Pennsylvania. Beginning as a telegraph boy in Pittsburgh in 1850, the young Carnegie rose through successful enterprises in railways, bridges, locomotives and rolling stock, pursuing a process of "Vertical integration" in the iron and steel industry which led to him becoming the leading American ironmaster by 1881. His interests in the Carnegie Steel Company were incorporated in the United States Steel Corporation in 1901, when Carnegie retired from business and devoted himself to philanthropy. He was particularly involved in benefactions to provide public libraries in the United States, Great Britain and other English-speaking countries. Remembering his ancestry, he was especially generous toward Scottish universities, as a result of which he was elected Rector of the University of St Andrews, Scotland's oldest university, by its students. Other large endowments were made for funds in recognition of heroic deeds, and he financed the building of the Temple of Peace at The Hague.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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Hennébique was an important leader in experimenting with various ways of reinforcing concrete with iron and steel. He set up his own firm in 1867, so acquiring valuable experience in the number of commissions that he carried out when using this material. He patented his own invention in 1892; this was for a method of using hooked connections for reinforcing-bars of iron and steel. England lagged behind France in developing the use of reinforced concrete as a structural material: it was Hennébique who was most influential in changing this situation. He had used his new method of reinforcement in the construction of the Spinning Mills at Tourcoing in France in 1895, and he was commissioned by Weaver \& Co., who wished to build a new flour mill in Swansea: the mill was completed in 1898. Soon after, both Hennébique and Coignet established London offices for developing their constructional techniques in England.

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SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

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Hugo Junkers trained as an engineer and in 1895 founded the Junkers Company, which manufactured metal products including gas-powered hot-water heaters. He was also Professor of Thermodynamics at the high school in Aachen. The visits to Europe by the Wright brothers in 1908 and 1909 aroused his interest in flight, and in 1910 he was granted a patent for a flying wing, i.e. no fuselage and a thick wing which did not require external bracing wires. Using his sheet-metal experience he built the more conventional Junkers J 1 entirely of iron and steel. It made its first flight in December 1915 but was rather heavy and slow, so Junkers turned to the newly available aluminium alloys and built the J 4 bi-plane, which entered service in 1917. To stiffen the thin aluminium-alloy skins, Junkers used corrugations running fore and aft, a feature of his aircraft for the next twenty years. Incidentally, in 1917 the German authorities persuaded Junkers and Fokker to merge, but the Junkers-Fokker Company was short-lived.

After the First World War Junkers very rapidly converted to commercial aviation, and in 1919 he produced a single-engined low-wing monoplane capable of carrying four passengers in an enclosed cabin. The robust all-metal F 13 is generally accepted as being the world's first airliner and over three hundred were built and used worldwide: some were still in service eighteen years later. A series of low-wing transport aircraft followed, of which the best known is the Ju 52. The original version had a single engine and first flew in 1930; a three-engined version flew in 1932 and was known as the Ju 52/3m. This was used by many airlines and served with the Luftwaffe throughout the Second World War, with almost five thousand being built.

Junkers was always ready to try new ideas, such as a flap set aft of the trailing edge of the wing that became known as the "Junkers flap". In 1923 he founded a company to design and manufacture stationary diesel engines and aircraft petrol engines. Work commenced on a diesel aero-engine: this flew in 1929 and a successful range of engines followed later. Probably the most spectacular of Junkers's designs was his G 38 airliner of 1929. This was the world's largest land-plane at the time, with a wing span of 44 m (144 ft). The wing was so thick that some of the thirty-four passengers could sit in the wing and look out through windows in the leading edge. Two were built and were frequently seen on European routes.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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After a general education at Vickery's School at Southsea, Izod (who pronounced his name Izzod, not Izod) started his career as a premium apprentice at the works of Maudslay, Sons and Field at Lambeth in January 1893. When in 1995 he was engaged in the installation of machinery in HMS Renown at Pembroke, he gained some notoriety for his temerity in ordering Rear Admiral J.A.Fisher, who had no pass, out of the main engine room. He subsequently worked at Portsmouth Dockyard where the battleships Caesar and Gladiator were being engined by Maudslay's. From 1898 to 1900 Izod worked as a Demonstrator in the laboratories of University College London, and he was then engaged by Captain H. Riall Sankey as his Personal Assistant at the Rugby works of Willans and Robinson. Soon after going to Rugby, Izod was asked by Sankey to examine a failed gun barrel and try to ascertain why it burst in testing. Conventional mechanical testing did not reveal any significant differences in the properties of good and bad material. Izod found, however, that, when specimens from the burst barrel were notched, gripped in a vice, and then struck with a hammer they broke in a brittle manner, whereas sounder material merely bent plastically. From these findings his well-known notched-bar impact test emerged. His address to the British Association in September 1903 described the test and his testing machine, and was subsequently published in Engineering. Izod never claimed any priority for this method of test, and generously acknowledged his predecessors in this field, Swedenborg, Fremont, Arnold and Bent Russell. The Izod Test was rapidly adopted by the English-speaking world, although Izod himself, being a busy man, did little to publicize his work, which was introduced to the engineering world largely through the efforts of Captain Sankey. Izod became Assistant Managing Director at Willans, and in 1910 was appointed Chief Consulting Mechanical and Electrical Engineer to the Central Mining Corporation at Johannesburg. He became Managing Director of the Rand Mines in 1918, and returned to the UK in 1927 to become the Managing Director of Weymann Motor Bodies Ltd of Addlestone. As Chairman of this company he extended its activitiesconsiderably.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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Having completed his studies at the Technological Institute in Stockholm and the Mining School at Falun, Crælius was awarded a grant by the Swedish Jernkontoret and in 1879 he travelled to Germany, France and Belgium in order to study technological aspects of the mining, iron and steel industries. In the same year he went to the United States, where he worked with an iron works in Colorado and a mining company in Nevada. In 1884, having returned to Sweden, he obtained an appointment in the Norberg mines; two years later, he took up employment at the Ängelsberg oilmill.

His mining experience had shown him the demand for a reliable, handy and cheap method of drilling, particularly for prospecting purposes. He had become acquainted with modern drilling methods in America, possibly including Albert Fauck's drilling jar. In 1886, Crælius designed his first small-diameter drill, which was assembled in one unit. Its rotating boring rod, smooth on the outside, was fixed inside a hollow mandrel which could be turned in any direction. This first drill was hand-driven, but the hydraulic version of it became the prototype for all near-surface prospecting drills in use worldwide in the late twentieth century.

Between 1890 and 1900 Crælius was managing director of the Morgårdshammar mechanical workshops, where he was able to continue the development of his drilling apparatus. He successfully applied diesel engines in the 1890s, and in 1895 he added diamond crowns to the drill. The commercial exploitation of the invention was carried out by Svenska Diamantbergborrings AB, of which Crælius was a director from its establishment in 1886.

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See also: Fauvelle, Pierre-Pascal

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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He was the son of Captain Cowper- Coles, Royal Navy, the inventor of the swivelling turret for naval guns. He inherited his father's inventive talents and investigated a variety of inventions in his workshop at his home at Sunbury-on-Thames, assisted by a number of scientific workers. He had been educated by governesses, but he lacked a sound scientific background. His inventions, rarely systematically pursued, ranged from electrolytic processes for making copper sheets and parabolic reflectors to a process for inlaying and decorating metallic surfaces. Overall, however, he is best known for the invention of "sherardizing", the process for producing a rustproof coating of zinc on small metallic articles. The discovery came by chance, when he was annealing iron and steel packed in zinc dust to exclude air. The metal was found to be coated with a thin layer of zinc with some surface penetration. The first patent for the process was obtained in 1900, and later the American rights were sold, with a company being formed in 1908 to control them. A small plant was set up in Chelsea, London, to develop the process to the point where it could be carried out on a commercial scale in a plant in Willesden. Sherardizing has not been a general protective finish, but is restricted to articles such as nuts and bolts which are then painted or finished. The process was still in use in 1977, operated by the Zinc Alloy Company (London) Ltd.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity

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Ilgner graduated from the Gewerbeakademie (the forerunner of the Technical University) in Berlin. As the representative of an electric manufacturing company in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) from 1897, he was confronted with the fact that there were no appropriate drives for hoisting-engines or rolling-plants in steelworks. Two problems prevented the use of high-capacity electric motors in the mining as well as in the iron and steel industry: the reactions of the motors on the circuit at the peak point of stress concentration; and the complicated handling of the control system which raised the risks regarding safety. Having previously been head of the department of electrical power transmission in Hannover, he was concerned with the development of low-speed direct-current motors powered by gas engines.

It was Harry Ward Leonard's switchgear for direct-current motors (USA, 1891) that permitted sudden and exact changes in the speed and direction of rotation without causing power loss, as demonstrated in the driving of a rolling sidewalk at the Paris World Fair of 1900. Ilgner connected this switchgear to a large and heavy flywheel which accumulated the kinetic energy from the circuit in order to compensate shock loads. With this combination, electric motors did not need special circuits, which were still weak, because they were working continuously and were regulated individually, so that they could be used for driving hoisting-engines in mines, rolling-plants in steelworks or machinery for producing tools and paper. Ilgner thus made a notable advance in the general progress of electrification.

His transformer for hoisting-engines was patented in 1901 and was commercially used inter alia by Siemens \& Halske of Berlin. Their first electrical hoisting-engine for the Zollern II/IV mine in Dortmund gained international reputation at the Düsseldorf exhibition of 1902, and is still preserved in situ in the original machine hall of the mine, which is now a national monument in Germany. Ilgner thereafter worked with several companies to pursue his conception, became a consulting engineer in Vienna and Breslau and had a government post after the First World War in Brussels and Berlin until he retired for health reasons in 1919.

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SUBJECT AREA: Automotive engineering, Land transport, Metallurgy

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From his early years, Haynes was a practising Presbyterian and an active prohibitionist. He graduated in 1881 at Worcester, Massachusetts, and a spell of teaching in his home town was interrupted in 1884–5 while he attended the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1886 he became permanently diverted by the discovery of natural gas in Portland. He was soon appointed Superintendent of the local gas undertaking, and then in 1890 he was hired by the Indiana Natural Gas \& Oil Company. While continuing his gas-company employment until 1901, Haynes conducted numerous metallurgical experiments. He also designed an automobile: this led to the establishment of the Haynes- Apperson Company at Kokomo as one of the earliest motor-car makers in North America. From 1905 the firm traded as the Haynes Automobile Company, and before its bankruptcy in 1924 it produced more than 50,000 cars. After 1905, Haynes found the first "Stellite" alloys of cobalt and chromium, and in 1910 he was publicizing the patented material. He then discovered the valuable hardening effect of tungsten, and in 1912 began applying the "improved" Stellite to cutting tools. Three years later, the Haynes Stellite Company was incorporated, with Haynes as President, to work the patents. It was largely from this source that Haynes became a millionaire in 1920. In April 1912, Haynes's attempt to patent the use of chromium with iron to render the product rustless was unsuccessful. However, he re-applied for a US patent on 12 March 1915 and, although this was initially rejected, he persevered and finally obtained recognition of his modified claim. The American Stainless Steel Company licensed the patents of Brearley and Haynes jointly in the USA until the 1930s.

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SUBJECT AREA: Canals, Ports and shipping

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Wilson, the son of a sailor, spent his early years on the Forth. Later his father moved home to the west and Wilson served his apprenticeship as a shipwright on the Clyde at the small shipyards of Bowling, fifteen miles (24 km) west of Glasgow and on the river's north bank. In his late thirties Wilson was to take the leading role in what is arguably the most important development in Scotland's distinguished shipbuilding history: the building of the world's first properly constructed iron ship. This ship, the Vulcan, was the culmination of several years' effort by a group of people well connected within the academic establishment of Scotland. The Forth and Clyde Canal Company had passed instructions for investigations to be made into reducing running expenses and a distinguished committee looked into this matter. They included John Robison (Secretary of the Royal Society of Edinburgh), Professor Joseph Black of Glasgow University, James Watt and John Schanck. After a period of consideration it was decided to build a new, fastpassage barge of iron, and tenders were invited from several appropriate contractors. Wilson, with the assistance of two blacksmiths, John and Thomas Smellie, was awarded the work, and the Vulcan was constructed and ultimately launched at Faskine near Glasgow in 1819. The work involved was far beyond the comprehension of engineers of the twentieth century, as Wilson had to arrange puddled-iron plates for the shell and hand-crafted angle irons for the frames. His genius is now apparent as every steel ship worldwide uses a form of construction literally "hammered out on the anvil" between 1818 and 1819. The Vulcan was almost 64 ft (19.5 m) in length and 11 ft (3.4 m) broad. In 1822 Wilson was appointed an inspector of works for the Canal Company, and ultimately he superintended the building of the docks at Grangemouth, where he died in 1873, the same year that the Vulcan was broken up.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Metallurgy, Steam and internal combustion engines

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He was the son of a cloth mill worker in Leeds and at the age of 10 he joined his father at the mill. Showing a mechanical inclination, he was apprenticed to a firm of machine-tool makers, Smith, Beacock and Tannett. There he rose to become Foreman and Traveller, and designed and patented tools for cutting bevelled gears. With his brother and one Refitt, he set up the Silver Cross engineering works for making special machine tools. In 1874 he founded the Leeds Forge Company, acting as Managing Director until 1896 and then as Chairman until shortly before his death.

It was in 1877 that he patented his most important invention, the corrugated furnace for steam-boilers. These furnaces could withstand much higher pressures than the conventional form, and higher working pressures in marine boilers enabled triple-expansion engines to be installed, greatly improving the performance of steamships, and the outcome was the great ocean-going liners of the twentieth century. The first vessel to be equipped with the corrugated furnace was the Pretoria of 1878. At first the furnaces were made by hammering iron plates using swage blocks under a steam hammer. A plant for rolling corrugated plates was set up at Essen in Germany, and Fox installed a similar mill at his works in Leeds in 1882.

In 1886 Fox installed a Siemens steelmaking plant and he was notable in the movement for replacing wrought iron with steel. He took out several patents for making pressed-steel underframes for railway wagons. The business prospered and Fox opened a works near Chicago in the USA, where in addition to wagon underframes he manufactured the first American pressed-steel carriages. He later added a works at Pittsburgh.

Fox was the first in England to use water gas for his metallurgical operations and for lighting, with a saving in cost as it was cheaper than coal gas. He was also a pioneer in the acetylene industry, producing in 1894 the first calcium carbide, from which the gas is made.

Fox took an active part in public life in and around Leeds, being thrice elected Mayor of Harrogate. As a music lover, he was a benefactor of musicians, contributing no less than £45,000 towards the cost of building the Royal College of Music in London, opened in 1894. In 1897 he sued for libel the author Jerome K.Jerome and the publishers of the Today magazine for accusing him of misusing his great generosity to the College to give a misleading impression of his commercial methods and prosperity. He won the case but was not awarded costs.

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