it's his greatest work

majeur, e [maʒœʀ]

1. adjective

   a. ( = important) major

• ils ont rencontré une difficulté majeure they came up against a major difficulty

• c'est son œuvre majeure it's his greatest work

• en majeure partie for the most part

• la majeure partie des gens sont restés the majority have stayed on

   b. (Law) of age attrib

• il sera majeur en l'an 2005 he will come of age in the year 2005

• il n'est pas encore majeur he's not yet of age

   c. (Music) major

• en sol majeur in G major

2. masculine noun

( = doigt) middle finger

3. feminine noun

majeure ( = matière) main subject (Brit), major (US)

* * *

* * *

1. adj

1) (plus important) major

2) DROIT of age

2. nm/f

DROIT adult, person of majority age

3. nm

(= doigt) middle finger

* * *

majeur, majeure

A adj

1 Jur of age ( jamais épith) spéc; être majeur to be over 18 ou of age spéc; elle sera majeure en mai she will be 18 in May ou come of age in May spéc; les étudiants majeurs students (who are) over 18;

2 ( le plus important) [cause, défi] main, major; ( en logique) [terme, prémisse] major; c'est un problème majeur it's a major problem; c'est le problème majeur it's the main problem; la majeure partie de ma carrière most of ou the major part of my career; en majeure partie for the most part;

3 Mus major; en ré majeur in D major;

4 Jeux tierce/quinte majeure tierce/ quint major;

5 Relig ordres majeurs major orders.

B nm,f ( en âge) person over 18, major spéc.

C nm ( doigt) middle finger.

( féminin majeure) [maʒɶr] adjectif

1. [le plus important] major, greatest

2. [grave] major

3. [adulte]

4. MUSIQUE major

5. RELIGION

causes majeures causae majores

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nom masculin

1. [doigt] middle finger

2. LOGIQUE major term

3. MUSIQUE major key ou mode

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majeure nom féminin

en majeure partie locution adverbiale

son œuvre est en majeure partie hermétique the major part ou the bulk of his work is abstruse

majeur, e [maʒœʀ]

1. adjective

   a. ( = important) major

• ils ont rencontré une difficulté majeure they came up against a major difficulty

• c'est son œuvre majeure it's his greatest work

• en majeure partie for the most part

• la majeure partie des gens sont restés the majority have stayed on

   b. (Law) of age attrib

• il sera majeur en l'an 2005 he will come of age in the year 2005

• il n'est pas encore majeur he's not yet of age

   c. (Music) major

• en sol majeur in G major

2. masculine noun

( = doigt) middle finger

3. feminine noun

majeure ( = matière) main subject (Brit), major (US)

* * *

* * *

1. adj

1) (plus important) major

2) DROIT of age

2. nm/f

DROIT adult, person of majority age

3. nm

(= doigt) middle finger

* * *

majeur, majeure

A adj

1 Jur of age ( jamais épith) spéc; être majeur to be over 18 ou of age spéc; elle sera majeure en mai she will be 18 in May ou come of age in May spéc; les étudiants majeurs students (who are) over 18;

2 ( le plus important) [cause, défi] main, major; ( en logique) [terme, prémisse] major; c'est un problème majeur it's a major problem; c'est le problème majeur it's the main problem; la majeure partie de ma carrière most of ou the major part of my career; en majeure partie for the most part;

3 Mus major; en ré majeur in D major;

4 Jeux tierce/quinte majeure tierce/ quint major;

5 Relig ordres majeurs major orders.

B nm,f ( en âge) person over 18, major spéc.

C nm ( doigt) middle finger.

[maʒɶr] nom propre

le lac Majeur Lake Maggiore

1. occupy, interest

въпросът, който ни занимава the question that interests/concerns us, the point at issue, the matter in hand

този въпрос не бива да ни занимава сега that question need not occupy us now

няма да ви занимавам повече с това I won't take up any more of your time with this

занимава ме мисълта за be thinking of, be contemplating (c ger.)

занимава ме мисълта за be interested in

това, което най-много ме занимава, е my greatest preoccupation is

занимавам хората само със себе си talk about nothing but o.s.; monopolize people's attention; intrude o.'s problems on other people

2. (обучавам) teach, instruct, tutor

3. (забавлявам) entertain, attend to, mind

занимавам децата keep the children amused

занимавам се l. ( заемам се) see to, attend, take care of

(проучвам въпрос и пр.) take up, go/look into, study, examine

занимай се с гостите attend to/entertain/take care of the guests

никой не се занимава с него nobody busies himself about/bothers about/attends to him

занимай се с този въпрос take up/go into/look into this subject/question/matter; take care of/attend to this case/problem

занимаваме се с този въпрос the question is under consideration/is being studied

ще ви занимая с един важен въпрос I'll draw your attention to an important question

граматиката не се занимава с този въпрос this question is not the concern of grammar, grammar does not deal with this type of question, this question is outside the scope of grammar

преставам да се занимавам (с проблем и пр.) give up; relegate to the past

4. (работя) be engaged (in), be concerned (with), have to do (with)

(върша нещо) be occupied/busy with, be at, do

(посвещавам се) devote oneself (to), take up, ( с увлечение) indulge in, go in for

с какво се занимава баща му? what is his father? what is his father's trade/profession? what does his father do?

с какво се занимаваш сега? what are you working on? what are yon doing now?

занимава се с нещо в другата стая he doing s.th./working on s.th. in the other room

занимава се с опаковането на багажа he is busy (with the) packing, he is doing the packing

точно с това се занимавам сега that's just what I am doing now, I am on the job now

занимавам се с домакинство be a housewife, keep house

занимавам се с политика be engaged in politics, go in for politics

занимавам се с търговия run a business, be in business

занимавам се с изкуство be an artist

занимавам се със спорт go in for sports

трябва да се занимаваш със спорт you ought to take up sports

занимавам се с овощарство grow fruit

не се занимавам с такива работи I do not concern myself with such matters; I have nothing to do with such matters

занимавам се с глупости waste o.'s time

5. (уча) study

(преподавам) teach, coach, give lessons (to)

остави го да се занимава let him get on with his lessons/work

* * *

занима̀вам,

1. occupy, interest; въпросът, който ни занимава the question that interests/concerns us, the point at issue, the matter in hand; занимава ме мисълта да be thinking of, be contemplating (с ger.); be flirting with the idea of; няма да ви \занимавам повече с това I won’t take up any more of your time with this; това, което най-много ме занимава, е my greatest preoccupation is;

2. ( обучавам) teach, instruct, tutor;

3. ( забавлявам) entertain, attend to, mind; \занимавам децата keep the children amused;

\занимавам се 1. ( заемам се) see to, attend, take care of; ( проучвам въпрос и пр.) take up, go/look into, study, examine; граматиката не се занимава с този въпрос this question is not the concern of grammar, grammar does not deal with this type of question, this question is outside the scope of grammar; занимаваме се с този въпрос the question is under consideration/is being studied; никой не се занимава с него nobody busies himself about/bothers about/attends to him; преставам да се \занимавам (с проблем и пр.) give up; relegate to the past; ще ви занимая с един важен въпрос I’ll draw your attention to an important question;

2. ( работя) be engaged (in), be concerned (with), have to do (with); ( върша нещо) be occupied/busy with, be at, do; ( посвещавам се) devote oneself (to), take up, engage in; (с увеличение) indulge in, go in for; \занимавам се с глупости waste o.’s time; \занимавам се с домакинство be a housewife, keep house; \занимавам се с изкуство be an artist; \занимавам се с овощарство grow fruit; \занимавам се с политика be engaged in politics, go in for politics; \занимавам се с търговия run a business, be in business; с какво се занимава баща му? what is his father’s trade/profession? what does his father do? точно с това се \занимавам сега that’s just what I am doing now, I am on the job now; трябва да се занимаваш със спорт you ought to take up sports;

3. ( уча) study; ( преподавам) teach, coach, give lessons (to); остави го да се занимава let him get on with his lessons/work.

* * *

amuse; entertain; interest{`intirist}: the question that занимавамs us - въпросът, който ни занимава; preoccupy

* * *

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace, Architecture and building, Horology, Weapons and armour

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Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a Florentine lawyer. His first sixteen years were spent with the lawyer's family in the rural surroundings of Vinci, which aroused in him a lifelong love of nature and an insatiable curiosity in it. He received little formal education but extended his knowledge through private reading. That gave him only a smattering of Latin, a deficiency that was to be a hindrance throughout his active life. At sixteen he was apprenticed in the studio of Andrea del Verrochio in Florence, where he received a training not only in art but in a wide variety of crafts and technical arts.

In 1482 Leonardo went to Milan, where he sought and obtained employment with Ludovico Sforza, later Duke of Milan, partly to sculpt a massive equestrian statue of Ludovico but the work never progressed beyond the full-scale model stage. He did, however, complete the painting which became known as the Virgin of the Rocks and in 1497 his greatest artistic achievement, The Last Supper, commissioned jointly by Ludovico and the friars of Santa Maria della Grazie and painted on the wall of the monastery's refectory. Leonardo was responsible for the court pageants and also devised a system of irrigation to supply water to the plains of Lombardy. In 1499 the French army entered Milan and deposed Leonardo's employer. Leonardo departed and, after a brief visit to Mantua, returned to Florence, where for a time he was employed as architect and engineer to Cesare Borgia, Duke of Romagna. Around 1504 he completed another celebrated work, the Mona Lisa.

In 1506 Leonardo began his second sojourn in Milan, this time in the service of King Louis XII of France, who appointed him "painter and engineer". In 1513 Leonardo left for Rome in the company of his pupil Francesco Melzi, but his time there was unproductive and he found himself out of touch with the younger artists active there, Michelangelo above all. In 1516 he accepted with relief an invitation from King François I of France to reside at the small château of St Cloux in the royal domain of Amboise. With the pension granted by François, Leonardo lived out his remaining years in tranquility at St Cloux.

Leonardo's career can hardly be regarded as a success or worthy of such a towering genius. For centuries he was known only for the handful of artistic works that he managed to complete and have survived more or less intact. His main activity remained hidden until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during which the contents of his notebooks were gradually revealed. It became evident that Leonardo was one of the greatest scientific investigators and inventors in the history of civilization. Throughout his working life he extended a searching curiosity over an extraordinarily wide range of subjects. The notes show careful investigation of questions of mechanical and civil engineering, such as power transmission by means of pulleys and also a form of chain belting. The notebooks record many devices, such as machines for grinding and polishing lenses, a lathe operated by treadle-crank, a rolling mill with conical rollers and a spinning machine with pinion and yard divider. Leonardo made an exhaustive study of the flight of birds, with a view to designing a flying machine, which obsessed him for many years.

Leonardo recorded his observations and conclusions, together with many ingenious inventions, on thousands of pages of manuscript notes, sketches and drawings. There are occasional indications that he had in mind the publication of portions of the notes in a coherent form, but he never diverted his energy into putting them in order; instead, he went on making notes. As a result, Leonardo's impact on the development of science and technology was virtually nil. Even if his notebooks had been copied and circulated, there were daunting impediments to their understanding. Leonardo was left-handed and wrote in mirror-writing: that is, in reverse from right to left. He also used his own abbreviations and no punctuation.

At his death Leonardo bequeathed his entire output of notes to his friend and companion Francesco Melzi, who kept them safe until his own death in 1570. Melzi left the collection in turn to his son Orazio, whose lack of interest in the arts and sciences resulted in a sad period of dispersal which endangered their survival, but in 1636 the bulk of them, in thirteen volumes, were assembled and donated to the Ambrosian Library in Milan. These include a large volume of notes and drawings compiled from the various portions of the notebooks and is now known as the Codex Atlanticus. There they stayed, forgotten and ignored, until 1796, when Napoleon's marauding army overran Italy and art and literary works, including the thirteen volumes of Leonardo's notebooks, were pillaged and taken to Paris. After the war in 1815, the French government agreed to return them but only the Codex Atlanticus found its way back to Milan; the rest remained in Paris. The appendix to one notebook, dealing with the flight of birds, was later regarded as of sufficient importance to stand on its own. Four small collections reached Britain at various times during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; of these, the volume in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle is notable for its magnificent series of anatomical drawings. Other collections include the Codex Leicester and Codex Arundel in the British Museum in London, and the Madrid Codices in Spain.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Leonardo's true stature as scientist, engineer and inventor began to emerge, particularly with the publication of transcriptions and translations of his notebooks. The volumes in Paris appeared in 1881–97 and the Codex Atlanticus was published in Milan between 1894 and 1904.

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LRD / IMcN

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Froude was educated at a preparatory school at Buckfastleigh, and then at Westminster School, London, before entering Oriel College, Oxford, to read mathematics and classics. Between 1836 and 1838 he served as a pupil civil engineer, and then he joined the staff of Isambard Kingdom Brunel on various railway engineering projects in southern England, including the South Devon Atmospheric Railway. He retired from professional work in 1846 and lived with his invalid father at Dartington Parsonage. The next twenty years, while apparently unproductive, were important to Froude as he concentrated his mind on difficult mathematical and scientific problems. Froude married in 1839 and had five children, one of whom, Robert Edmund Froude (1846–1924), was to succeed him in later years in his research work for the Admiralty. Following the death of his father, Froude moved to Paignton, and there commenced his studies on the resistance of solid bodies moving through fluids. Initially these were with hulls towed through a house roof storage tank by wires taken over a pulley and attached to falling weights, but the work became more sophisticated and was conducted on ponds and the open water of a creek near Dartmouth. Froude published work on the rolling of ships in the second volume of the Transactions of the then new Institution of Naval Architects and through this became acquainted with Sir Edward Reed. This led in 1870 to the Admiralty's offer of £2,000 towards the cost of an experimental tank for ship models at Torquay. The tank was completed in 1872 and tests were carried out on the model of HMS Greyhound following full-scale towing trials which had commenced on the actual ship the previous year. From this Froude enunciated his Law of Comparisons, which defines the rules concerning the relationship of the power required to move geometrically similar floating bodies across fluids. It enabled naval architects to predict, from a study of a much less expensive and smaller model, the resistance to motion and the power required to move a full-size ship. The work in the tank led Froude to design a model-cutting machine, dynamometers and machinery for the accurate ruling of graph paper. Froude's work, and later that of his son, was prodigious and covered many fields of ship design, including powering, propulsion, rolling, steering and stability. In only six years he had stamped his academic authority on the new science of hydrodynamics, served on many national committees and corresponded with fellow researchers throughout the world. His health suffered and he sailed for South Africa to recuperate, but he contracted dysentery and died at Simonstown. He will be remembered for all time as one of the greatest "fathers" of naval architecture.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Weapons and armour

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Fermi was one of the most versatile of twentieth-century physicists, one of the few to excel in both theory and experiment. His greatest theoretical achievements lay in the field of statistics and his theory of beta decay. His statistics, parallel to but independent of Dirac, were the key to the modern theory of metals and the statistical modds of the atomic nucleus. On the experimental side, his most notable discoveries were artificial radioactivity produced by neutron bombardment and the realization of a controlled nuclear chain reaction, in the world's first nuclear reactor.

Fermi received a conventional education with a chemical bias, but reached proficiency in mathematics and physics largely through his own reading. He studied at Pisa University, where he taught himself modern physics and then travelled to extend his knowledge, spending time with Max Born at Göttingen. On his return to Italy, he secured posts in Florence and, in 1927, in Rome, where he obtained the first Italian Chair in Theoretical Physics, a subject in which Italy had so far lagged behind. He helped to bring about a rebirth of physics in Italy and devoted himself to the application of statistics to his model of the atom. For this work, Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938, but in December of that year, finding the Fascist regime uncongenial, he transferred to the USA and Columbia University. The news that nuclear fission had been achieved broke shortly before the Second World War erupted and it stimulated Fermi to consider this a way of generating secondary nuclear emission and the initiation of chain reactions. His experiments in this direction led first to the discovery of slow neutrons.

Fermi's work assumed a more practical aspect when he was invited to join the Manhattan Project for the construction of the first atomic bomb. His small-scale work at Columbia became large-scale at Chicago University. This culminated on 2 December 1942 when the first controlled nuclear reaction took place at Stagg Field, Chicago, an historic event indeed. Later, Fermi spent most of the period from September 1944 to early 1945 at Los Alamos, New Mexico, taking part in the preparations for the first test explosion of the atomic bomb on 16 July 1945. President Truman invited Fermi to serve on his Committee to advise him on the use of the bomb. Then Chicago University established an Institute for Nuclear Studies and offered Fermi a professorship, which he took up early in 1946, spending the rest of his relatively short life there.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

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Born into a family of Scottish landowners, at the early age of 13 years Napier went to the University of St Andrews in Fife, but he apparently left before taking his degree. An extreme Protestant, he was active in the struggles with the Roman Catholic Church and in 1594 he dedicated to James VI of Scotland his Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St John, an attempt to promote the Protestant case in the guise of a learned study. About this time, as well as being involved in the development of military equipment, he devoted much of his time to finding methods of simplifying the tedious calculations involved in astronomy. Eventually he realized that by representing numbers in terms of the power to which a "base" number needed to be raised to produce them, it was possible to perform multiplication and division and to find roots, by the simpler processes of addition, substraction and integer division, respectively.

A description of the principle of his "logarithms" (from the Gk. logos, reckoning, and arithmos, number), how he arrived at the idea and how they could be used was published in 1614 under the title Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio. Two years after his death his Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Constructio appeared, in which he explained how to calculate the logarithms of numbers and gave tables of them to eight significant figures, a novel feature being the use of the decimal point to distinguish the integral and fractional parts of the logarithm. As originally conceived, Napier's tables of logarithms were calculated using the natural number e(=2.71828…) as the base, not directly, but in effect according to the formula: Naperian logx= 107(log e 107-log e x) so that the original Naperian logarithm of a number decreased as the number increased. However, prior to his death he had readily acceded to a suggestion by Henry Briggs that it would greatly facilitate their use if logarithms were simply defined as the value to which the decimal base 10 needed to be raised to realize the number in question. He was almost certainly also aware of the work of Joost Burgi.

No doubt as an extension of his ideas of logarithms, Napier also devised a means of manually performing multiplication and division by means of a system of rods known as Napier's Bones, a forerunner of the modern slide-rule, which evolved as a result of successive developments by Edmund Gunther, William Oughtred and others. Other contributions to mathematics by Napier include important simplifying discoveries in spherical trigonometry. However, his discovery of logarithms was undoubtedly his greatest achievement.

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to place, to put.

situó la acción de la novela en la Edad Media he set the novel in the Middle Ages

me suena pero no lo sitúo he sounds familiar, but I can't place him

* * *

Conjugation model [ ACTUAR], like link=actuar actuar

► verbo transitivo

1 to place, locate, situate, put

■ no puedo situarlo en el mapa I can't locate it on the map

► verbo pronominal situarse

1 (colocarse) to be placed, be located, be situated

2 (lograr una posición) to get on, do well, be successful

* * *

* * *

1. VT

1) (=colocar) to place, put; (Mil) to post

2) (=señalar) to find, locate

3) † [+ dinero] (=invertir) to place, invest; (=depositar en banco) to bank

situarse

* * *

verbo transitivo

1)

a) (colocar, ubicar) <fábrica/aeropuerto> to site, to locate (frml)

b) (Lit) <obra/acción> to set

c) < soldados> to post, station

2) (Fin) to invest, place

situarse v pron

1)

a) (colocarse, ubicarse)

b) ( socialmente)

2) (frml) ( cifrarse)

* * *

= place, sit, site, situate, locate, station, posit, post.

Ex. In each class the most significant facet is placed first, the next most significant next, and so on.

Ex. It would be highly desirable to have a phone sitting on top of the library catalogue (if your are still in the dark ages with a card catalogue that is).

Ex. The library's data bases are available at a number of locations via appropriately sited terminals.

Ex. NACs ideally prefer to be situated in ground-floor shop-front premises in a shopping area and on a route that people follow in the normal course of their lives.

Ex. One of the greatest appeals to travelers to Santiago, located in the central coastal region of Chile, is its Mediterranean climate.

Ex. Acquisition of material is through an office of the Library of Congress stationed in Jakarta as well as direct purchasing from vendors.

Ex. We can choose to turn our backs on these principles with fatuous arguments which posit their anachronism and the nonexistent intelligence of computing machinery.

Ex. The agents then posted themselves strategically around the restaurant.

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* situar en contexto = place + in context.

* situar en un contexto = bring into + context.

* * *

verbo transitivo

1)

a) (colocar, ubicar) <fábrica/aeropuerto> to site, to locate (frml)

b) (Lit) <obra/acción> to set

c) < soldados> to post, station

2) (Fin) to invest, place

situarse v pron

1)

a) (colocarse, ubicarse)

b) ( socialmente)

2) (frml) ( cifrarse)

* * *

* * *

situar [ A18 ]

1 (colocar, ubicar) ‹fábrica/aeropuerto› to site, to locate ( frml), to situate ( frml)

esta novela la sitúa entre los grandes de la literatura this novel places her among the greatest writers

2 ( Lit) ‹obra/acción› to set

3 ‹soldados› to post, station

B ( Fin) to invest, place

(colocarse, ubicarse): con esta victoria Chicago se sitúa en primer lugar with this victory Chicago moves into first place, this victory puts Chicago in first place

ha logrado situarse entre los cinco mejores del mundo she has succeeded in establishing a position for herself among the world's top five

(socialmente): se ha situado muy bien he has done very well for himself

B ( frml)

(cifrarse): la tasa de desempleo se sitúa en un 22% unemployment stands at 22%

el precio podría llegar a situarse en 20 dólares the price could reach 20 dollars

* * *

a) (colocar, ubicar) ‹fábrica/aeropuerto› to site, to locate (frml)

b) (Lit) ‹obra/acción› to set

c) ‹ soldados› to post, station

a) (colocarse, ubicarse):

◊ con esta victoria se sitúan en primer lugar this victory puts them in first place;

b) ( socialmente):

◊ se ha situado muy bien he has done very well for himself

* * *

♦ vt

1. [colocar] to place, to put;

los arqueólogos sitúan el antiguo teatro en el centro de la ciudad archaeologists place the ancient theatre in the centre of the town;

situó la acción de la novela en la Edad Media he set the novel in the Middle Ages;

me suena pero no lo sitúo he sounds familiar, but I can't place him

2. [en clasificación]

la nueva obra lo sitúa entre los artistas más importantes de su generación his latest work places him among the most important artists of his generation

♦ See also the pronominal verb situarse

* * *

v/t place, put

* * *

situar {3} vt

ubicar: to situate, to place, to locate

♦ See also the reflexive verb situarse

* * *

situar vb

1. (colocar) to put [pt. & pp. put] / to place

2. (localizar) to find [pt. & pp. found]

SUBJECT AREA: Canals, Civil engineering

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Pierre Paul Riquet was the son of a wealthy lawyer whose ancestors came from Italy. In his education at the Jesuit College in Béziers he showed obvious natural ability in science and mathematics, but he received no formal engineering training. With his own and his wife's fortunes he was able to purchase a château at Verfeil, near Toulouse. In 1630 he was appointed a collector of the salt tax in Languedoc and in a short time became Lessee General (Fermier Général) of this tax for the whole province. This entailed constant travel through the district, with the result that he became very familiar with this part of the country. He also became involved in military contracting. He acquired a vast fortune out of both activities. At this time he pondered the possibility of building a canal from Toulouse to the Mediterranean beyond Béziers and, after further investigation as to possible water supplies, he wrote to Colbert in Paris on 16 November 1662 advocating the construction of the canal. Although the idea proved acceptable it was not until 27 May 1665 that Riquet was authorized to direct operations, and on 14 October 1666 he was given authority to construct the first part of the canal, from Toulouse to Trebes. Work started on 1 January 1667. By 1669 he had between 7,000 and 8,000 men employed on the work. Unhappily, Riquet died just over six months before the canal was completed, the official opening beingon 15 May 1681.

Although Riquet's fame rightly rests on the Canal du Midi, probably the greatest work of its time in Europe, he was also consulted about and was responsible for other projects. He built an aqueduct on more than 100 arches to lead water into the grounds of the château of his friend the marquis de Castres. The plans for this work, which involved considerable practical difficulties, were finalized in 1670, and water flowed into the château grounds in 1676. Also in 1676, Riquet was commissioned to lead the waters of the river Ourcq into Paris; he drew up plans, but he was too busy to undertake the construction and on his death the work was shelved until Napoleon's time. He was responsible for the creation of the port of Sète on the Mediterranean at the end of the Canal du Midi. He was also consulted on the supply of water to the Palace of Versailles and on a proposed route which later became the Canal de Bourgogne. Riquet was a very remarkable man: when he started the construction of the canal he was well over 60 years old, an age at which most people are retiring, and lived almost to its completion.

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(ca. 1510-1583)

   Soldier and adventurer in Asia and one of Portugal's greatest prose writers of the 16th century. He was the author of a classic, largely true adventure story and history of Portugal in Asia, the Peregrinação, which in popularity among 17th-century readers in Iberia and Europe rivaled Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote. Even less is known about Mendes Pinto's life than that of Luís de Camões. He left as a soldier on a fleet for India in 1537, and lived in Asia for about 17 years. In addition to Portuguese India, he saw many places in Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. His service for Portugal involved great personal suffering including wounds in battle, captivities, and near-starvation. In later years, he retired as a lay brother of the Jesuit Order in Goa and went to Japan in 1556.

   In 1558, he retired to Portugal, where he wrote his great work, the Peregrinação, which can be translated as 'Travels." The work was not published in his lifetime, but only in 1614, and it was long considered a work mainly of fiction, an apocryphal composition. It was apparently more popular in Spain, France, and England than in his homeland. Later critics and translators have concluded that much of the work is a partly true description of the Portuguese in Asia and of Asian events, coupled with a wry but honest look at the foibles of the Catholic Church of his day.

SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

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Marconi was educated in physics at Leghorn and at Bologna University. An avid experimenter, he worked in his parents' attic and, almost certainly aware of the recent work of Hertz and others, soon improved the performance of coherers and spark-gap transmitters. He also discovered for himself the use of earthing and of elevated metal plates as aerials. In 1895 he succeeded in transmitting telegraphy over a distance of 2 km (1¼ miles), but the Italian Telegraph authority rejected his invention, so in 1896 he moved to England, where he filed the first of many patents. There he gained the support of the Chief Engineer of the Post Office, and by the following year he had achieved communication across the Bristol Channel.

The British Post Office was also slow to take up his work, so in 1897 he formed the Wireless Telegraph \& Signal Company to work independently. In 1898 he sold some equipment to the British Army for use in the Boer War and established the first permanent radio link from the Isle of Wight to the mainland. In 1899 he achieved communication across the English Channel (a distance of more than 31 miles or 50 km), the construction of a wireless station at Spezia, Italy, and the equipping of two US ships to report progress in the America's Cup yacht race, a venture that led to the formation of the American Marconi Company. In 1900 he won a contract from the British Admiralty to sell equipment and to train operators. Realizing that his business would be much more successful if he could offer his customers a complete radio-communication service (known today as a "turnkey" deal), he floated a new company, the Marconi International Marine Communications Company, while the old company became the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company.

His greatest achievement occurred on 12 December 1901, when Morse telegraph signals from a transmitter at Poldhu in Cornwall were received at St John's, Newfoundland, a distance of some 2,100 miles (3,400 km), with the use of an aerial flown by a kite. As a result of this, Marconi's business prospered and he became internationally famous, receiving many honours for his endeavours, including the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909. In 1904, radio was first used to provide a daily bulletin at sea, and in 1907 a transatlantic wireless telegraphy service was inaugurated. The rescue of 1,650 passengers from the shipwreck of SS Republic in 1909 was the first of many occasions when wireless was instrumental in saving lives at sea, most notable being those from the Titanic on its maiden voyage in April 1912; more lives would have been saved had there been sufficient lifeboats. Marconi was one of those who subsequently pressed for greater safety at sea. In 1910 he demonstrated the reception of long (8 km or 5 miles) waves from Ireland in Buenos Aires, but after the First World War he began to develop the use of short waves, which were more effectively reflected by the ionosphere. By 1918 the first link between England and Australia had been established, and in 1924 he was awarded a Post Office contract for short-wave communication between England and the various parts of the British Empire.

With his achievements by then recognized by the Italian Government, in 1915 he was appointed Radio-Communications Adviser to the Italian armed forces, and in 1919 he was an Italian delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. From 1921 he lived on his yacht, the Elettra, and although he joined the Fascist Party in 1923, he later had reservations about Mussolini.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Automotive engineering, Electricity, Electronics and information technology, Metallurgy, Photography, film and optics, Public utilities, Recording, Telecommunications

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He was the son of Samuel Edison, who was in the timber business. His schooling was delayed due to scarlet fever until 1855, when he was 8½ years old, but he was an avid reader. By the age of 14 he had a job as a newsboy on the railway from Port Huron to Detroit, a distance of sixty-three miles (101 km). He worked a fourteen-hour day with a stopover of five hours, which he spent in the Detroit Free Library. He also sold sweets on the train and, later, fruit and vegetables, and was soon making a profit of $20 a week. He then started two stores in Port Huron and used a spare freight car as a laboratory. He added a hand-printing press to produce 400 copies weekly of The Grand Trunk Herald, most of which he compiled and edited himself. He set himself to learn telegraphy from the station agent at Mount Clements, whose son he had saved from being run over by a freight car.

At the age of 16 he became a telegraphist at Port Huron. In 1863 he became railway telegraphist at the busy Stratford Junction of the Grand Trunk Railroad, arranging a clock with a notched wheel to give the hourly signal which was to prove that he was awake and at his post! He left hurriedly after failing to hold a train which was nearly involved in a head-on collision. He usually worked the night shift, allowing himself time for experiments during the day. His first invention was an arrangement of two Morse registers so that a high-speed input could be decoded at a slower speed. Moving from place to place he held many positions as a telegraphist. In Boston he invented an automatic vote recorder for Congress and patented it, but the idea was rejected. This was the first of a total of 1180 patents that he was to take out during his lifetime. After six years he resigned from the Western Union Company to devote all his time to invention, his next idea being an improved ticker-tape machine for stockbrokers. He developed a duplex telegraphy system, but this was turned down by the Western Union Company. He then moved to New York.

Edison found accommodation in the battery room of Law's Gold Reporting Company, sleeping in the cellar, and there his repair of a broken transmitter marked him as someone of special talents. His superior soon resigned, and he was promoted with a salary of $300 a month. Western Union paid him $40,000 for the sole rights on future improvements on the duplex telegraph, and he moved to Ward Street, Newark, New Jersey, where he employed a gathering of specialist engineers. Within a year, he married one of his employees, Mary Stilwell, when she was only 16: a daughter, Marion, was born in 1872, and two sons, Thomas and William, in 1876 and 1879, respectively.

He continued to work on the automatic telegraph, a device to send out messages faster than they could be tapped out by hand: that is, over fifty words per minute or so. An earlier machine by Alexander Bain worked at up to 400 words per minute, but was not good over long distances. Edison agreed to work on improving this feature of Bain's machine for the Automatic Telegraph Company (ATC) for $40,000. He improved it to a working speed of 500 words per minute and ran a test between Washington and New York. Hoping to sell their equipment to the Post Office in Britain, ATC sent Edison to England in 1873 to negotiate. A 500-word message was to be sent from Liverpool to London every half-hour for six hours, followed by tests on 2,200 miles (3,540 km) of cable at Greenwich. Only confused results were obtained due to induction in the cable, which lay coiled in a water tank. Edison returned to New York, where he worked on his quadruplex telegraph system, tests of which proved a success between New York and Albany in December 1874. Unfortunately, simultaneous negotiation with Western Union and ATC resulted in a lawsuit.

Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for a telephone in March 1876 while Edison was still working on the same idea. His improvements allowed the device to operate over a distance of hundreds of miles instead of only a few miles. Tests were carried out over the 106 miles (170 km) between New York and Philadelphia. Edison applied for a patent on the carbon-button transmitter in April 1877, Western Union agreeing to pay him $6,000 a year for the seventeen-year duration of the patent. In these years he was also working on the development of the electric lamp and on a duplicating machine which would make up to 3,000 copies from a stencil. In 1876–7 he moved from Newark to Menlo Park, twenty-four miles (39 km) from New York on the Pennsylvania Railway, near Elizabeth. He had bought a house there around which he built the premises that would become his "inventions factory". It was there that he began the use of his 200- page pocket notebooks, each of which lasted him about two weeks, so prolific were his ideas. When he died he left 3,400 of them filled with notes and sketches.

Late in 1877 he applied for a patent for a phonograph which was granted on 19 February 1878, and by the end of the year he had formed a company to manufacture this totally new product. At the time, Edison saw the device primarily as a business aid rather than for entertainment, rather as a dictating machine. In August 1878 he was granted a British patent. In July 1878 he tried to measure the heat from the solar corona at a solar eclipse viewed from Rawlins, Wyoming, but his "tasimeter" was too sensitive.

Probably his greatest achievement was "The Subdivision of the Electric Light" or the "glow bulb". He tried many materials for the filament before settling on carbon. He gave a demonstration of electric light by lighting up Menlo Park and inviting the public. Edison was, of course, faced with the problem of inventing and producing all the ancillaries which go to make up the electrical system of generation and distribution-meters, fuses, insulation, switches, cabling—even generators had to be designed and built; everything was new. He started a number of manufacturing companies to produce the various components needed.

In 1881 he built the world's largest generator, which weighed 27 tons, to light 1,200 lamps at the Paris Exhibition. It was later moved to England to be used in the world's first central power station with steam engine drive at Holborn Viaduct, London. In September 1882 he started up his Pearl Street Generating Station in New York, which led to a worldwide increase in the application of electric power, particularly for lighting. At the same time as these developments, he built a 1,300yd (1,190m) electric railway at Menlo Park.

On 9 August 1884 his wife died of typhoid. Using his telegraphic skills, he proposed to 19-year-old Mina Miller in Morse code while in the company of others on a train. He married her in February 1885 before buying a new house and estate at West Orange, New Jersey, building a new laboratory not far away in the Orange Valley.

Edison used direct current which was limited to around 250 volts. Alternating current was largely developed by George Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla, using transformers to step up the current to a higher voltage for long-distance transmission. The use of AC gradually overtook the Edison DC system.

In autumn 1888 he patented a form of cinephotography, the kinetoscope, obtaining film-stock from George Eastman. In 1893 he set up the first film studio, which was pivoted so as to catch the sun, with a hinged roof which could be raised. In 1894 kinetoscope parlours with "peep shows" were starting up in cities all over America. Competition came from the Latham Brothers with a screen-projection machine, which Edison answered with his "Vitascope", shown in New York in 1896. This showed pictures with accompanying sound, but there was some difficulty with synchronization. Edison also experimented with captions at this early date.

In 1880 he filed a patent for a magnetic ore separator, the first of nearly sixty. He bought up deposits of low-grade iron ore which had been developed in the north of New Jersey. The process was a commercial success until the discovery of iron-rich ore in Minnesota rendered it uneconomic and uncompetitive. In 1898 cement rock was discovered in New Village, west of West Orange. Edison bought the land and started cement manufacture, using kilns twice the normal length and using half as much fuel to heat them as the normal type of kiln. In 1893 he met Henry Ford, who was building his second car, at an Edison convention. This started him on the development of a battery for an electric car on which he made over 9,000 experiments. In 1903 he sold his patent for wireless telegraphy "for a song" to Guglielmo Marconi.

In 1910 Edison designed a prefabricated concrete house. In December 1914 fire destroyed three-quarters of the West Orange plant, but it was at once rebuilt, and with the threat of war Edison started to set up his own plants for making all the chemicals that he had previously been buying from Europe, such as carbolic acid, phenol, benzol, aniline dyes, etc. He was appointed President of the Navy Consulting Board, for whom, he said, he made some forty-five inventions, "but they were pigeonholed, every one of them". Thus did Edison find that the Navy did not take kindly to civilian interference.

In 1927 he started the Edison Botanic Research Company, founded with similar investment from Ford and Firestone with the object of finding a substitute for overseas-produced rubber. In the first year he tested no fewer than 3,327 possible plants, in the second year, over 1,400, eventually developing a variety of Golden Rod which grew to 14 ft (4.3 m) in height. However, all this effort and money was wasted, due to the discovery of synthetic rubber.

In October 1929 he was present at Henry Ford's opening of his Dearborn Museum to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the incandescent lamp, including a replica of the Menlo Park laboratory. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and was elected to the American Academy of Sciences. He died in 1931 at his home, Glenmont; throughout the USA, lights were dimmed temporarily on the day of his funeral.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity

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While at the technical institute in Graz, Austria, Tesla's attention was drawn to the desirability of constructing a motor without a commutator. He considered the sparking between the commutator and brushes of the Gramme machine when run as a motor a serious defect. In 1881 he went to Budapest to work on the telegraph system and while there conceived the principle of the rotating magnetic field, upon which all polyphase induction motors are based. In 1882 Tesla moved to Paris and joined the Continental Edison Company. After building a prototype of his motor he emigrated to the United States in 1884, becoming an American citizen in 1889. He left Edison and founded an independent concern, the Tesla Electric Company, to develop his inventions.

The importance of Tesla's first patents, granted in 1888 for alternating-current machines, cannot be over-emphasized. They covered a complete polyphase system including an alternator and induction motor. Other patents included the polyphase transformer, synchronous motor and the star connection of three-phase machines. These were to become the basis of the whole of the modern electric power industry. The Westinghouse company purchased the patents and marketed Tesla motors, obtaining in 1893 the contract for the Niagara Falls two-phase alternators driven by 5,000 hp (3,700 kW) water turbines.

After a short period with Westinghouse, Tesla resigned to continue his research into high-frequency and high-voltage phenomena using the Tesla coil, an air-cored transformer. He lectured in America and Europe on his high-frequency devices, enjoying a considerable international reputation. The name "tesla" has been given to the SI unit of magnetic-flux density. The induction motor became one of the greatest advances in the industrial application of electricity. A claim for priority of invention of the induction motor was made by protagonists of Galileo Ferraris (1847–1897), whose discovery of rotating magnetic fields produced by alternating currents was made independently of Tesla's. Ferraris demonstrated the phenomenon but neglected its exploitation to produce a practical motor. Tesla himself failed to reap more than a small return on his work and later became more interested in scientific achievement than commercial success, with his patents being infringed on a wide scale.

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1 effort, pledge, commitment, endeavor.

2 determination, insistence, persistence, resolute determination.

3 pawn, pawned article.

4 pawn, pawnage, vadium.

1^st person singular (yo) present indicative of spanish verb: empeñar.

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► nombre masculino

1 (insistencia) determination

2 (deuda) pawn

\

con empeño eagerly

poner empeño en to take pains to

tener empeño en to be eager to

papeleta de empeño pawn ticket

* * *

1) pledge

2) pawning

3) insistence

* * *

1) (=resolución) determination; (=insistencia) insistence

2) (=tienda) pawnshop

3) (=objeto) pledge

4) (=empresa) undertaking

* * *

1)

a) ( afán) determination; ( esfuerzo) effort

b) ( obstinación)

c) (intento, empresa) undertaking, endeavor*

2) ( de valores) pawning, hocking (colloq)

* * *

1)

a) ( afán) determination; ( esfuerzo) effort

b) ( obstinación)

c) (intento, empresa) undertaking, endeavor*

2) ( de valores) pawning, hocking (colloq)

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empeño¹

¹ = enterprise, persistence, tenacity, determination.

empeño²

* casa de empeño = pawnshop, hock shop [hockshop].

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1 (afán) determination; (esfuerzo) effort

trabajar/estudiar con empeño to work/study hard

pondré todo mi empeño en conseguirlo I will do my best to achieve it

prometió poner empeño en la tarea he promised to put every effort into the task o to apply himself to the task

nunca ceja en su empeño ( frml); he never wavers in his endeavor ( frml)

2 (obstinación) empeño EN algo insistence ON sth

no comprendo su empeño en invitarla I don't understand his insistence on inviting her

3 (intento, empresa) undertaking, endeavor*

B (de valores) pawning, hocking ( colloq)

sacar algo del empeño ( fam); to get sth out of hock ( colloq), to redeem sth (from pawn)

* * *

1ª persona singular (yo) presente indicativo

3ª persona singular (él/ella/usted) pretérito indicativo

a) ‹joyas/pertenencias› to pawn, hock (colloq)

b) ‹ palabra› to give

a) ( afán) determination;

◊ estudiar con empeño to study hard;

b) ( obstinación) empeño en algo insistence on sth

c) (intento, empresa) undertaking, endeavor^{( conjugate endeavor)}

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empeño nm

1. [de joyas, bienes] pawning;

casa de empeño(s) pawnshop

2. [obstinación] determination;

no entiendo ese empeño tuyo por justificarlo todo I don't understand this insistence of yours on justifying everything;

con empeño persistently, tenaciously;

todo su empeño es poder viajar the one thing she wants is to be able to travel;

tener empeño en hacer algo to be determined to do sth

3. [afán, esfuerzo] effort(s);

en su empeño por ayudar, lo que hacía era estorbar in his efforts to help, all he did was get in the way;

no cejaremos en nuestro empeño (de…) we will not flag in our efforts (to…);

puso gran empeño en sus estudios she put a lot of effort into her studies;

poner empeño en hacer algo to make a great effort to do sth, to take pains to do sth;

debes poner más empeño en aprobar you should make more of an effort to pass

4. [intento]

* * *

1 ( obstinación) determination;

con empeño insistently

2 ( esfuerzo) effort

3 Méx

pawn shop

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empeño nm

1) : pledge, commitment

2) : insistence

3) esfuerzo: effort, determination

4) : pawning

casa de empeños: pawnshop

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empeño n

1. (deseo) wish [pl. wishes]

2. (esfuerzo) effort

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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James Caird was educated at Glasgow Academy. While the connections are difficult to unravel, it is clear he was related to the Cairds of Greenock, whose shipyard on the Clyde built countless liners for the P \& O Company, and to the Caird family who were munificent benefactors of Dundee and the Church of Scotland.

In 1878 Caird joined a firm of East India Merchants in Glasgow, but later went to London. In 1890 he entered the service of Turnbull, Martin \& Co., managers of the Scottish Shire Line of Steamers; he quickly rose to become Manager, and by 1903 he was the sole partner and owner. In this role his business skill became apparent, as he pioneered (along with the Houlder and Federal Lines) refrigerated shipping connections between the United Kingdom and Australia and New Zealand. In 1917 he sold his shipping interests to Messrs Cayzer Irvine, managers of the Clan Line.

During the First World War, Caird set up a new shipyard on the River Wye at Chepstow in Wales. Registered in April 1916, the Standard Shipbuilding and Engineering Company took over an existing shipbuilder in an area not threatened by enemy attacks. The purpose of the yard was rapid building of standardized merchant ships during a period when heavy losses were being sustained because of German U-boat attacks. Caird was appointed Chairman, a post he held until the yard came under full government control later in the war. The shipyard did not meet the high expectations of the time, but it did pioneer standard shipbuilding which was later successful in the USA, the UK and Japan.

Caird's greatest work may have been the service he gave to the councils which helped form the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. He used all his endeavours to ensure the successful launch of the world's greatest maritime museum; he persuaded friends to donate, the Government to transfer artefacts and records, and he gave of his wealth to purchase works of art for the nation. Prior to his death he endowed the Museum with £1.25 million, a massive sum for the 1930s, and this (the Caird Fund) is administered to this day by the Trustees of Greenwich.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Photography, film and optics, Steam and internal combustion engines

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Nothing is known of Hero, or Heron, apart from what can be gleaned from the books he wrote. Their scope and style suggest that he was a teacher at the museum or the university of Alexandria, writing textbooks for his students. The longest book, and the one with the greatest technological interest, is Pneumatics. Some of its material is derived from the works of the earlier writers Ctesibius of Alexandria and Philo of Byzantium, but many of the devices described were invented by Hero himself. The introduction recognizes that the air is a body and demonstrates the effects of air pressure, as when air must be allowed to escape from a closed vessel before water can enter. There follow clear descriptions of a variety of mechanical contrivances depending on the effects of either air pressure or heated gases. Most of the devices seem trivial, but such toys or gadgets were popular at the time and Hero is concerned to show how they work. Inventions with a more serious purpose are a fire pump and a water organ. One celebrated gadget is a sphere that is set spinning by jets of steam—an early illustration of the reaction principle on which modern jet propulsion depends.

M echanics, known only in an Arabic version, is a textbook expounding the theory and practical skills required by the architect. It deals with a variety of questions of mechanics, such as the statics of a horizontal beam resting on vertical posts, the theory of the centre of gravity and equilibrium, largely derived from Archimedes, and the five ways of applying a relatively small force to exert a much larger one: the lever, winch, pulley, wedge and screw. Practical devices described include sledges for transporting heavy loads, cranes and a screw cutter.

Hero's Dioptra describes instruments used in surveying, together with an odometer or device to indicate the distance travelled by a wheeled vehicle. Catoptrics, known only in Latin, deals with the principles of mirrors, plane and curved, enunciating that the angle of incidence is equal to that of reflection. Automata describes two forms of puppet theatre, operated by strings and drums driven by a falling lead weight attached to a rope wound round an axle. Hero's mathematical work lies in the tradition of practical mathematics stretching from the Babylonians through Islam to Renaissance Europe. It is seen most clearly in his Metrica, a treatise on mensuration.

Of all his works, Pneumatics was the best known and most influential. It was one of the works of Greek science and technology assimilated by the Arabs, notably Banu Musa ibn Shakir, and was transmitted to medieval Western Europe.

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(1810-1877)

   One of Portugal's greatest historians and one of its giants in 19th-century writing and literature. Born in Lisbon to a middle-class family, Herculano studied commerce and diplomacy. At age 21, he enlisted in the liberal armed forces of King Pedro IV but was forced to flee to exile in Great Britain and then France. Later, he was part of the victorious liberal expeditionary force that landed near Oporto. He began his serious studies in Oporto, but soon relocated to Lisbon, where he worked as a journalist. In 1839, he was named to the post of director of the Royal Library at Ajudá Palace and at Necessidades Palace, and thus began to prepare to write his classic work, História de Portugal, a major study that when completed took the history of the country only up to the end of the 13th century. The first volume of this work, with which his fame as a historian is most closely associated, was published in 1846, but Herculano was a versatile writer who wrote novels, essays, and poetry as well as history.

   In addition to being a man of words, he was a man of action who was active in exchanges with other literati and who did government service. Herculano, for example, was on the commission that revised the civil code of Portugal. His histori cal writings influenced future generations of writers because of his literary style, because he broke through the legend and myth that had surrounded ancient and medieval Portuguese history, and above all because of his objective, scientific approach to research and conclusions. Dissatisfied with politics and public life, Herculano retired to a farm in the country (at Vale de Lobos) in 1859 and worked as a farmer until 1866.

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Despite domestic difficulties, Simpson managed to study and teach mathematics and allied subjects throughout his life. His interest in celestial phenomena was aroused by the solar eclipse of 1724. Around 1736 he started to work in London as a weaver, teaching mathematics in his spare time. The genius of his prolific work was recognized and various honours came his way, culminating in his appointment in 1743 to the Chair of Mathematics at the Royal Academy, Woolwich. In that same year he published a paper relating to "the means of approximating the areas of curves, by means of equidistant ordinates". This method, now known as Simpson's first and second rules, enabled engineers to calculate areas under curves and volumes bounded by shapes made up of a regular envelope of curves. Shipbuilders and naval architects were to find this one of the greatest developments in the history of ship design.

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SUBJECT AREA: Canals, Civil engineering, Ports and shipping, Railways and locomotives

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William Jessop inherited from his father a natural ability in engineering, and because of his father's association with John Smeaton in the construction of Eddystone Lighthouse he was accepted by Smeaton as a pupil in 1759 at the age of 14. Smeaton was so impressed with his ability that Jessop was retained as an assistant after completion of his pupilage in 1767. As such he carried out field-work, making surveys on his own, but in 1772 he was recommended to the Aire and Calder Committee as an independent engineer and his first personally prepared report was made on the Haddlesey Cut, Selby Canal. It was in this report that he gave his first evidence before a Parliamentary Committee. He later became Resident Engineer on the Selby Canal, and soon after he was elected to the Smeatonian Society of Engineers, of which he later became Secretary for twenty years. Meanwhile he accompanied Smeaton to Ireland to advise on the Grand Canal, ultimately becoming Consulting Engineer until 1802, and was responsible for Ringsend Docks, which connected the canal to the Liffey and were opened in 1796. From 1783 to 1787 he advised on improvements to the River Trent, and his ability was so recognized that it made his reputation. From then on he was consulted on the Cromford Canal (1789–93), the Leicester Navigation (1791–4) and the Grantham Canal (1793–7); at the same time he was Chief Engineer of the Grand Junction Canal from 1793 to 1797 and then Consulting Engineer until 1805. He also engineered the Barnsley and Rochdale Canals. In fact, there were few canals during this period on which he was not consulted. It has now been established that Jessop carried the responsibility for the Pont-Cysyllte Aqueduct in Wales and also prepared the estimates for the Caledonian Canal in 1804. In 1792 he became a partner in the Butterley ironworks and thus became interested in railways. He proposed the Surrey Iron Railway in 1799 and prepared for the estimates; the line was built and opened in 1805. He was also the Engineer for the 10 mile (16 km) long Kilmarnock \& Troon Railway, the Act for which was obtained in 1808 and was the first Act for a public railway in Scotland. Jessop's advice was sought on drainage works between 1785 and 1802 in the lowlands of the Isle of Axholme, Holderness, the Norfolk Marshlands, and the Axe and Brue area of the Somerset Levels. He was also consulted on harbour and dock improvements. These included Hull (1793), Portsmouth (1796), Folkestone (1806) and Sunderland (1807), but his greatest dock works were the West India Docks in London and the Floating Harbour at Bristol. He was Consulting Engineer to the City of London Corporation from 1796to 1799, drawing up plans for docks on the Isle of Dogs in 1796; in February 1800 he was appointed Engineer, and three years later, in September 1803, he was appointed Engineer to the Bristol Floating Harbour. Jessop was regarded as the leading civil engineer in the country from 1785 until 1806. He died following a stroke in 1814.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity

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Although he developed dynamos for electroplating and lighting, Weston's major contribution to technology was his invention of a moving-coil voltmeter and the standard cell which bears his name. After some years as a medical student, during which he gained a knowledge of chemistry, he abandoned his studies. Emigrating to New York in 1870, he was employed by a manufacturer of photographic chemicals. There followed a period with an electroplating company during which he built his first dynamo. In 1877 some business associates financed a company to build these machines and, later, arc-lighting equipment. By 1882 the Weston Company had been absorbed into the United States Electric Lighting Company, which had a counterpart in Britain, the Maxim Weston Company. By the time Weston resigned from the company, in 1886, he had been granted 186 patents. He then began the work in which he made his greatest contribution, the science of electrical measurement.

The Weston meter, the first successful portable measuring instrument with a pivoted coil, was made in 1886. By careful arrangement of the magnet, coil and control springs, he achieved a design with a well-damped movement, which retained its calibration. These instruments were produced commercially on a large scale and the moving-coil principle was soon adopted by many manufacturers. In 1892 he invented manganin, an alloy with a small negative temperature coefficient, for use as resistances in his voltmeters.

The Weston standard cell was invented in 1892. Using his chemical knowledge he produced a cell, based on mercury and cadmium, which replaced the Clark cell as a voltage reference source. The Weston cell became the recognized standard at the International Conference on Electrical Units and Standards held in London in 1908.

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