john's+english

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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John Lombe's father, Henry Lombe, was a worsted weaver who married twice. John was the second son of the second marriage and was still a baby when his father died in 1695. John, a native of the Eastern Counties, was apprenticed to a trade and employed by Thomas Cotchett in the erection of Cotchett's silk mill at Derby, which soon failed however. Lombe went to Italy, or was sent there by his elder half-brother, Thomas, to discover the secrets of their throwing machinery while employed in a silk mill in Piedmont. He returned to England in 1716 or 1717, bringing with him two expert Italian workmen.

Thomas Lombe was a prosperous London merchant who financed the construction of a new water-powered silk mill at Derby which is said to have cost over £30,000. John arranged with the town Corporation for the lease of the island in the River Derwent, where Cotchett had erected his mill. During the four years of its construction, John first set up the throwing machines in other parts of the town. The machines were driven manually there, and their product helped to defray the costs of the mill. The silk-throwing machine was very complex. The water wheel powered a horizontal shaft that was under the floor and on which were placed gearwheels to drive vertical shafts upwards through the different floors. The throwing machines were circular, with the vertical shafts running through the middle. The doubled silk threads had previously been wound on bobbins which were placed on spindles with wire flyers at intervals around the outer circumference of the machine. The bobbins were free to rotate on the spindles while the spindles and flyers were driven by the periphery of a horizontal wheel fixed to the vertical shaft. Another horizontal wheel set a little above the first turned the starwheels, to which were attached reels for winding the silk off the bobbins below. Three or four sets of these spindles and reels were placed above each other on the same driving shaft. The machine was very complicated for the time and must have been expensive to build and maintain.

John lived just long enough to see the mill in operation, for he died in 1722 after a painful illness said to have been the result of poison administered by an Italian woman in revenge for his having stolen the invention and for the injury he was causing the Italian trade. The funeral was said to have been the most superb ever known in Derby.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Mining and extraction technology, Railways and locomotives

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The son of a "coal viewer", Curr was brought up in the West Durham colliery district. In 1777 he went to the Duke of Norfolk's collieries at Sheffield, where in 1880 he was appointed Superintendent. There coal was conveyed underground in baskets on sledges: Curr replaced the wicker sledges with wheeled corves, i.e. small four-wheeled wooden wagons, running on "rail-roads" with cast-iron rails and hauled from the coal-face to the shaft bottom by horses. The rails employed hitherto had usually consisted of plates of iron, the flange being on the wheels of the wagon. Curr's new design involved flanges on the rails which guided the vehicles, the wheels of which were unflanged and could run on any hard surface. He appears to have left no precise record of the date that he did this, and surviving records have been interpreted as implying various dates between 1776 and 1787. In 1787 John Buddle paid tribute to the efficiency of the rails of Curr's type, which were first used for surface transport by Joseph Butler in 1788 at his iron furnace at Wingerworth near Chesterfield: their use was then promoted widely by Benjamin Outram, and they were adopted in many other English mines. They proved serviceable until the advent of locomotives demanded different rails.

In 1788 Curr also developed a system for drawing a full corve up a mine shaft while lowering an empty one, with guides to separate them. At the surface the corves were automatically emptied by tipplers. Four years later he was awarded a patent for using double ropes for lifting heavier loads. As the weight of the rope itself became a considerable problem with the increasing depth of the shafts, Curr invented the flat hemp rope, patented in 1798, which consisted of several small round ropes stitched together and lapped upon itself in winding. It acted as a counterbalance and led to a reduction in the time and cost of hoisting: at the beginning of a run the loaded rope began to coil upon a small diameter, gradually increasing, while the unloaded rope began to coil off a large diameter, gradually decreasing.

Curr's book The Coal Viewer (1797) is the earliest-known engineering work on railway track and it also contains the most elaborate description of a Newcomen pumping engine, at the highest state of its development. He became an acknowledged expert on construction of Newcomen-type atmospheric engines, and in 1792 he established a foundry to make parts for railways and engines.

Because of the poor financial results of the Duke of Norfolk's collieries at the end of the century, Curr was dismissed in 1801 despite numerous inventions and improvements which he had introduced. After his dismissal, six more of his patents were concerned with rope-making: the one he gained in 1813 referred to the application of flat ropes to horse-gins and perpendicular drum-shafts of steam engines. Curr also introduced the use of inclined planes, where a descending train of full corves pulled up an empty one, and he was one of the pioneers employing fixed steam engines for hauling. He may have resided in France for some time before his death.

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WK / PJGR

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Textiles

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John Wyatt was the eldest son of John and Jane Wyatt, who lived in the small village of Thickbroom in the parish of Weeford, near Lichfield. John the younger was educated at Lichfield school and then worked as a carpenter at Thickbroom till 1730. In 1732 he was in Birmingham, engaged by a man named Heely, a gunbarrel forger, who became bankrupt in 1734. Wyatt had invented a machine for making files and sought the help of Lewis Paul to manufacture this commercially.

The surviving papers of Paul and Wyatt in Birmingham are mostly undated and show a variety of machines with which they were involved. There was a machine for "making lead hard" which had rollers, and "a Gymcrak of some consequence" probably refers to a machine for boring barrels or the file-making machine. Wyatt is said to have been one of the unsuccessful competitors for the erection of London Bridge in 1736. He invented and perfected the compound-lever weighing machine. He had more success with this: after 1744, machines for weighing up to five tons were set up at Birmingham, Chester, Gloucester, Hereford, Lichfield and Liverpool. Road construction, bridge building, hydrostatics, canals, water-powered engines and many other schemes received his attention and it is said that he was employed for a time after 1744 by Matthew Boulton.

It is certain that in April 1735 Paul and Wyatt were working on their spinning machine and Wyatt was making a model of it in London in 1736, giving up his work in Birmingham. The first patent, in 1738, was taken out in the name of Lewis Paul. It is impossible to know which of these two invented what. This first patent covers a wide variety of descriptions of the vital roller drafting to draw out the fibres, and it is unknown which system was actually used. Paul's carding patent of 1748 and his second spinning patent of 1758 show that he moved away from the system and principles upon which Arkwright built his success. Wyatt and Paul's spinning machines were sufficiently promising for a mill to be set up in 1741 at the Upper Priory, Birmingham, that was powered by two asses. Wyatt was the person responsible for constructing the machinery. Edward Cave established another at Northampton powered by water while later Daniel Bourn built yet another at Leominster. Many others were interested too. The Birmingham mill did not work for long and seems to have been given up in 1743. Wyatt was imprisoned for debt in The Fleet in 1742, and when released in 1743 he tried for a time to run the Birmingham mill and possibly the Northampton one. The one at Leominster burned down in 1754, while the Northampton mill was advertised for sale in 1756. This last mill may have been used again in conjunction with the 1758 patent. It was Wyatt whom Daniel Bourn contacted about a grant for spindles for his Leominster mill in 1748, but this seems to have been Wyatt's last association with the spinning venture.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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John Heathcote had shown that it was possible to make lace by machine with his patents of 1808 and 1809. His machines were developed and improved by John Levers. Levers was originally a hosiery frame-smith and setter-up at Sutton-in-Ashfield but moved to Nottingham, where he extended his operations to the construction of point-net and warp-lace machinery. In the years 1812 and 1813 he more or less isolated himself in the garret of a house in Derby Road, where he assembled his lacemaking machine by himself. He was helped by two brothers and a nephew who made parts, but they saw it only when it was completed. Financial help for making production machines came from the firm of John Stevenson \& Skipwith, lace manufacturers in Nottingham. Levers never sought a patent, as he was under the mistaken impression that additions or improvements to an existing patented machine could not be protected. An early example of the machine survives at the Castle Museum in Nottingham. Although his prospects must have seemed good, for some reason Levers dissolved his partnership with Stevenson \& Co. and continued to work on improving his machine. In 1817 he altered it from the horizontal to the upright position, building many of the machines each year. He was a friendly, kind-hearted man, but he seems to have been unable to apply himself to his business, preferring the company of musicians—he was a bandmaster of the local militia—and was soon frequently without money, even to buy food for his family. He emigrated in 1821 to Rouen, France, where he set up his lace machines and where he subsequently died; when or in what circumstances is unknown. His machine continued to be improved and was adapted to work with the Jacquard mechanism to select the pattern.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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To give a smooth surface to cloth such as the old English broadcloth, the nap was raised and then sheared off. Hand-operated shears of enormous size were used to cut the fibres that stuck up when the cloth was laid over a curved table top. Great skill was required to achieve a smooth finish. Various attempts, such as that in 1784 by James Harmer, a clergyman of Sheffield, were made to mechanize the process by placing several pairs of shears in a frame and operating them by cranks, but success was not achieved. Samuel G. Dow of Albany, New York, patented a rotary shearer in England in 1794, and there was Samuel Dore in the same year too. John Lewis never claimed that he invented the rotary cutter, and it is possible that he made have seen drawings or actual examples of these earlier machines. His claim in his patent of 1815 was that, for the first time, he brought together a number of desirable features in one machine for shearing cloth to achieve the first really successful example. The local story in the Stroudwater district in Gloucestershire is that Lewis obtained this idea from Budding, who as a lad worked for the Lewis family, clothiers at Brinscombe Mills; Budding invented a lawn mower with rotary barrel blades that works on the same principle, patenting it in 1830. In the shearing machine, the cloth was moved underneath the blades, which could be of the same width so that only one operation was needed for each side. Other inventors had similar ideas, and a Stroud engineer, Stephen Price, took out a patent a month after Lewis did. These machines spread quickly in the Gloucestershire textile industry, and by 1830 hand-shearing was extinct. John Lewis was the son of Joseph, who had inherited the Brinscombe Mills in 1790 but must have died before 1815, when his children mortgaged the property for £12,000. Joseph's three sons, George, William and John, worked the mill for a time, but in 1840 William was there alone.

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SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace, Steam and internal combustion engines

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He was the son of Francis Barber, coalmaster of Greasley, and Elizabeth Fletcher. In his will of 1765. his uncle, John Fletcher, left the bulk of his property, including collieries and Stainsby House, Horsley Woodhouse, Derbyshire, to John Barber. Another uncle, Robert, bequeathed him property in the next village, Smalley. It is clear that at this time John Barber was a man of considerable means. On a tablet erected by John in 1767, he acknowledges his debt to his uncle John in the words "in remembrance of the man who trained him up from a youth". At this time John Barber was living at Stainsby House and had already been granted his first patent, in 1766. The contents of this patent, which included a reversible water turbine, and his subsequent patents, suggest that he was very familiar with mining equipment, including the Newcomen engine. It comes as rather a surprise that c.1784 he became bankrupt and had to leave Stainsby House, evidently moving to Attleborough. In a strange twist, a descendent of Mr Sitwell, the new owner, bought the prototype Akroyd Stuart oil engine from the Doncaster Show in 1891.

The second and fifth (final) patents, in 1773 and 1792, were concerned with smelting and the third, in 1776, featured a boiler-mounted impulse steam turbine. The fourth and most important patent, in 1791, describes and engine that could be applied to the "grinding of corn, flints, etc.", "rolling, slitting, forging or battering iron and other metals", "turning of mills for spinning", "turning up coals and other minerals from mines", and "stamping of ores, raising water". Further, and importantly, the directing of the fluid stream into smelting furnaces or at the stern of ships to propel them is mentioned. The engine described comprised two retorts for heating coal or oil to produce an inflammable gas, one to operate while the other was cleansed and recharged. The resultant gas, together with the right amount of air, passed to a beam-operated pump and a water-cooled combustion chamber, and then to a water-cooled nozzle to an impulse gas turbine, which drove the pumps and provided the output. A clear description of the thermodynamic sequence known as the Joule Cycle (Brayton in the USA) is thus given. Further, the method of gas production predates Murdoch's lighting of the Soho foundry by gas.

It seems unlikely that John Barber was able to get his engine to work; indeed, it was well over a hundred years before a continuous combustion chamber was achieved. However, the details of the specification, for example the use of cooling water jackets and injection, suggest that considerable experimentation had taken place.

To be active in the taking out of patents over a period of 26 years is remarkable; that the best came after bankruptcy is more so. There is nothing to suggest that the cost of his experiments was the cause of his financial troubles.

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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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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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John Ridley was a preacher in his youth, and then became a mill owner before migrating to Australia with his wife and daughters in 1839. Intending to continue his business in the new colony, he took with him a "Grasshopper" overbeam steam-engine made by James Watt, together with milling equipment. Cereal acreages were insufficient for the steam power he had available, and he expanded into saw milling as well as farming 300 acres. Aware of the Adelaide trials of reaping machines, he eventually built a prototype using the same principles as those developed by Wrathall Bull. After a successful trial in 1843 Ridley began the patent procedure in England, although he never completed the project. The agricultural press was highly enthusiastic about his machine, but when trials took place in 1855 the award went to a rival. The development of the stripper enabled a spectacular increase in the cereal acreage planted over the next decade. Ridley left Australia in 1853 and returned to England. He built a number of machines to his design in Leeds; however, these failed to perform in the much damper English climate. All of the machines were exported to South America, anticipating a substantial market to be exploited by Australian manufacturers.

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

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As a boy, Smeaton showed mechanical ability, making for himself a number of tools and models. This practical skill was backed by a sound education, probably at Leeds Grammar School. At the age of 16 he entered his father's office; he seemed set to follow his father's profession in the law. In 1742 he went to London to continue his legal studies, but he preferred instead, with his father's reluctant permission, to set up as a scientific instrument maker and dealer and opened a shop of his own in 1748. About this time he began attending meetings of the Royal Society and presented several papers on instruments and mechanical subjects, being elected a Fellow in 1753. His interests were turning towards engineering but were informed by scientific principles grounded in careful and accurate observation.

In 1755 the second Eddystone lighthouse, on a reef some 14 miles (23 km) off the English coast at Plymouth, was destroyed by fire. The President of the Royal Society was consulted as to a suitable engineer to undertake the task of constructing a new one, and he unhesitatingly suggested Smeaton. Work began in 1756 and was completed in three years to produce the first great wave-swept stone lighthouse. It was constructed of Portland stone blocks, shaped and pegged both together and to the base rock, and bonded by hydraulic cement, scientifically developed by Smeaton. It withstood the storms of the English Channel for over a century, but by 1876 erosion of the rock had weakened the structure and a replacement had to be built. The upper portion of Smeaton's lighthouse was re-erected on a suitable base on Plymouth Hoe, leaving the original base portion on the reef as a memorial to the engineer.

The Eddystone lighthouse made Smeaton's reputation and from then on he was constantly in demand as a consultant in all kinds of engineering projects. He carried out a number himself, notably the 38 mile (61 km) long Forth and Clyde canal with thirty-nine locks, begun in 1768 but for financial reasons not completed until 1790. In 1774 he took charge of the Ramsgate Harbour works.

On the mechanical side, Smeaton undertook a systematic study of water-and windmills, to determine the design and construction to achieve the greatest power output. This work issued forth as the paper "An experimental enquiry concerning the natural powers of water and wind to turn mills" and exerted a considerable influence on mill design during the early part of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1753 and 1790 Smeaton constructed no fewer than forty-four mills.

Meanwhile, in 1756 he had returned to Austhorpe, which continued to be his home base for the rest of his life. In 1767, as a result of the disappointing performance of an engine he had been involved with at New River Head, Islington, London, Smeaton began his important study of the steam-engine. Smeaton was the first to apply scientific principles to the steam-engine and achieved the most notable improvements in its efficiency since its invention by Newcomen, until its radical overhaul by James Watt. To compare the performance of engines quantitatively, he introduced the concept of "duty", i.e. the weight of water that could be raised 1 ft (30 cm) while burning one bushel (84 lb or 38 kg) of coal. The first engine to embody his improvements was erected at Long Benton colliery in Northumberland in 1772, with a duty of 9.45 million pounds, compared to the best figure obtained previously of 7.44 million pounds. One source of heat loss he attributed to inaccurate boring of the cylinder, which he was able to improve through his close association with Carron Ironworks near Falkirk, Scotland.

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SUBJECT AREA: Horology, Ports and shipping

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John Harrison was the son of a carpenter and was brought up to that trade. He was largely self-taught and learned mechanics from a copy of Nicholas Saunderson's lectures that had been lent to him. With the assistance of his younger brother, James, he built a series of unconventional clocks, mainly of wood. He was always concerned to reduce friction, without using oil, and this influenced the design of his "grasshopper" escapement. He also invented the "gridiron" compensation pendulum, which depended on the differential expansion of brass and steel. The excellent performance of his regulator clocks, which incorporated these devices, convinced him that they could also be used in a sea dock to compete for the longitude prize. In 1714 the Government had offered a prize of £20,000 for a method of determining longitude at sea to within half a degree after a voyage to the West Indies. In theory the longitude could be found by carrying an accurate timepiece that would indicate the time at a known longitude, but the requirements of the Act were very exacting. The timepiece would have to have a cumulative error of no more than two minutes after a voyage lasting six weeks.

In 1730 Harrison went to London with his proposal for a sea clock, supported by examples of his grasshopper escapement and his gridiron pendulum. His proposal received sufficient encouragement and financial support, from George Graham and others, to enable him to return to Barrow and construct his first sea clock, which he completed five years later. This was a large and complicated machine that was made out of brass but retained the wooden wheelwork and the grasshopper escapement of the regulator clocks. The two balances were interlinked to counteract the rolling of the vessel and were controlled by helical springs operating in tension. It was the first timepiece with a balance to have temperature compensation. The effect of temperature change on the timekeeping of a balance is more pronounced than it is for a pendulum, as two effects are involved: the change in the size of the balance; and the change in the elasticity of the balance spring. Harrison compensated for both effects by using a gridiron arrangement to alter the tension in the springs. This timekeeper performed creditably when it was tested on a voyage to Lisbon, and the Board of Longitude agreed to finance improved models. Harrison's second timekeeper dispensed with the use of wood and had the added refinement of a remontoire, but even before it was tested he had embarked on a third machine. The balance of this machine was controlled by a spiral spring whose effective length was altered by a bimetallic strip to compensate for changes in temperature. In 1753 Harrison commissioned a London watchmaker, John Jefferys, to make a watch for his own personal use, with a similar form of temperature compensation and a modified verge escapement that was intended to compensate for the lack of isochronism of the balance spring. The time-keeping of this watch was surprisingly good and Harrison proceeded to build a larger and more sophisticated version, with a remontoire. This timekeeper was completed in 1759 and its performance was so remarkable that Harrison decided to enter it for the longitude prize in place of his third machine. It was tested on two voyages to the West Indies and on both occasions it met the requirements of the Act, but the Board of Longitude withheld half the prize money until they had proof that the timekeeper could be duplicated. Copies were made by Harrison and by Larcum Kendall, but the Board still continued to prevaricate and Harrison received the full amount of the prize in 1773 only after George III had intervened on his behalf.

Although Harrison had shown that it was possible to construct a timepiece of sufficient accuracy to determine longitude at sea, his solution was too complex and costly to be produced in quantity. It had, for example, taken Larcum Kendall two years to produce his copy of Harrison's fourth timekeeper, but Harrison had overcome the psychological barrier and opened the door for others to produce chronometers in quantity at an affordable price. This was achieved before the end of the century by Arnold and Earnshaw, but they used an entirely different design that owed more to Le Roy than it did to Harrison and which only retained Harrison's maintaining power.

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See also: Burgi, Jost; Huygens, Christiaan

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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At the conclusion of his apprenticeship at the Royal Dockyard, Portsmouth, Biles entered the Royal School of Naval Architecture, South Kensington, London; as it was absorbed by the Royal Naval College, he graduated from Greenwich to the Naval Construction Branch, first at Pembroke and later at the Admiralty. From the outset of his professional career it was apparent that he had the intellectual qualities that would enable him to oversee the greatest changes in ship design of all time. He was one of the earliest proponents of the revolutionary work of the hydrodynamicist William Froude.

In 1880 Biles turned to the merchant sector, taking the post of Naval Architect to J. \& G. Thomson (later John Brown \& Co.). Using Froude's Law of Comparisons he was able to design the record-breaking City of Paris of 1887, the ship that started the fabled succession of fast and safe Clyde bank-built North Atlantic liners. For a short spell, before returning to Scotland, Biles worked in Southampton. In 1891 Biles accepted the Chair of Naval Architecture at the University of Glasgow. Working from the campus at Gilmorehill, he was to make the University (the oldest school of engineering in the English-speaking world) renowned in naval architecture. His workload was legendary, but despite this he was admired as an excellent lecturer with cheerful ways which inspired devotion to the Department and the University. During the thirty years of his incumbency of the Chair, he served on most of the important government and international shipping committees, including those that recommended the design of HMS Dreadnought, the ordering of the Cunarders Lusitania and Mauretania and the lifesaving improvements following the Titanic disaster. An enquiry into the strength of destroyer hulls followed the loss of HMS Cobra and Viper, and he published the report on advanced experimental work carried out on HMS Wolf by his undergraduates.

In 1906 he became Consultant Naval Architect to the India Office, having already set up his own consultancy organization, which exists today as Sir J.H.Biles and Partners. His writing was prolific, with over twenty-five papers to professional institutions, sundry articles and a two-volume textbook.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Mining and extraction technology

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John Coster, son of an iron-forge manager in the Forest of Dean, by the age of 38 was at Bristol, where he was "chief agent and sharer therein" in the new lead-smelting methods using coal fuel. In 1685 the work, under Sir Clement Clerke, was abandoned because of patent rights claimed by Lord Grandison, who financed of earlier attempts. Clerke's business turned to the coal-fired smelting of copper under Coster, later acknowledged as responsible for the subsequent success through using an improved reverberatory furnace which separated coal fume from the ores being smelted. The new technique, applicable also to lead and tin smelting, revitalized copper production and provided a basis for new British industry in both copper and brass manufacture during the following century. Coster went on to manage a copper-smelting works, and by the 1690s was supplying Esher copper-and brass-works in Surrey from his Redbrook, Gloucestershire, works on the River Wye. In the next decade he extended his activities to Cornish copper mining, buying ore and organizing ore sales, and supplying the four major copper and brass companies which by then had become established. He also made copper goods in additional water-powered rolling and hammer mills acquired in the Bristol area. Coster was ably assisted by three sons; of these, John and Robert were mainly active in Cornwall. In 1714 the younger John, with his father, patented an "engine for drawing water out of deep mines". The eldest son, Thomas, was more involved at Redbrook, in South Wales and the Bristol area. A few years after the death of his father, Thomas became partner in the brass company of Bristol and sold them the Redbrook site. He became Member of Parliament for Bristol and, by then the only surviving son, planned a large new smelting works at White Rock, Swansea, South Wales, before his death in 1734. Partners outside the family continued the business under a new name.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Heathcote was the son of a small farmer who became blind, obliging the family to move to Long Whatton, near Loughborough, c.1790. He was apprenticed to W.Shepherd, a hosiery-machine maker, and became a frame-smith in the hosiery industry. He moved to Nottingham where he entered the employment of an excellent machine maker named Elliott. He later joined William Caldwell of Hathern, whose daughter he had married. The lace-making apparatus they patented jointly in 1804 had already been anticipated, so Heathcote turned to the problem of making pillow lace, a cottage industry in which women made lace by arranging pins stuck in a pillow in the correct pattern and winding around them thread contained on thin bobbins. He began by analysing the complicated hand-woven lace into simple warp and weft threads and found he could dispense with half the bobbins. The first machine he developed and patented, in 1808, made narrow lace an inch or so wide, but the following year he made much broader lace on an improved version. In his second patent, in 1809, he could make a type of net curtain, Brussels lace, without patterns. His machine made bobbin-net by the use of thin brass discs, between which the thread was wound. As they passed through the warp threads, which were arranged vertically, the warp threads were moved to each side in turn, so as to twist the bobbin threads round the warp threads. The bobbins were in two rows to save space, and jogged on carriages in grooves along a bar running the length of the machine. As the strength of this fabric depended upon bringing the bobbin threads diagonally across, in addition to the forward movement, the machine had to provide for a sideways movement of each bobbin every time the lengthwise course was completed. A high standard of accuracy in manufacture was essential for success. Called the "Old Loughborough", it was acknowledged to be the most complicated machine so far produced. In partnership with a man named Charles Lacy, who supplied the necessary capital, a factory was established at Loughborough that proved highly successful; however, their fifty-five frames were destroyed by Luddites in 1816. Heathcote was awarded damages of £10,000 by the county of Nottingham on the condition it was spent locally, but to avoid further interference he decided to transfer not only his machines but his entire workforce elsewhere and refused the money. In a disused woollen factory at Tiverton in Devonshire, powered by the waters of the river Exe, he built 300 frames of greater width and speed. By continually making inventions and improvements until he retired in 1843, his business flourished and he amassed a large fortune. He patented one machine for silk cocoon-reeling and another for plaiting or braiding. In 1825 he brought out two patents for the mechanical ornamentation or figuring of lace. He acquired a sound knowledge of French prior to opening a steam-powered lace factory in France. The factory proved to be a successful venture that lasted many years. In 1832 he patented a monstrous steam plough that is reputed to have cost him over £12,000 and was claimed to be the best in its day. One of its stated aims was "improved methods of draining land", which he hoped would develop agriculture in Ireland. A cable was used to haul the implement across the land. From 1832 to 1859, Heathcote represented Tiverton in Parliament and, among other benefactions, he built a school for his adopted town.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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John Kay was the youngest of five sons of a yeoman farmer of Walmersley, near Bury, Lancashire, who died before his birth. John was apprenticed to a reedmaker, and just before he was 21 he married a daughter of John Hall of Bury and carried on his trade in that town until 1733. It is possible that his first patent, taken out in 1730, was connected with this business because it was for an engine that made mohair thread for tailors and twisted and dressed thread; such thread could have been used to bind up the reeds used in looms. He also improved the reeds by making them from metal instead of cane strips so they lasted much longer and could be made to be much finer. His next patent in 1733, was a double one. One part of it was for a batting machine to remove dust from wool by beating it with sticks, but the patent is better known for its description of the flying shuttle. Kay placed boxes to receive the shuttle at either end of the reed or sley. Across the open top of these boxes was a metal rod along which a picking peg could slide and drive the shuttle out across the loom. The pegs at each end were connected by strings to a stick that was held in the right hand of the weaver and which jerked the shuttle out of the box. The shuttle had wheels to make it "fly" across the warp more easily, and ran on a shuttle race to support and guide it. Not only was weaving speeded up, but the weaver could produce broader cloth without any aid from a second person. This invention was later adapted for the power loom. Kay moved to Colchester and entered into partnership with a baymaker named Solomon Smith and a year later was joined by William Carter of Ballingdon, Essex. His shuttle was received with considerable hostility in both Lancashire and Essex, but it was probably more his charge of 15 shillings a year for its use that roused the antagonism. From 1737 he was much involved with lawsuits to try and protect his patent, particularly the part that specified the method of winding the thread onto a fixed bobbin in the shuttle. In 1738 Kay patented a windmill for working pumps and an improved chain pump, but neither of these seems to have been successful. In 1745, with Joseph Stell of Keighley, he patented a narrow fabric loom that could be worked by power; this type may have been employed by Gartside in Manchester soon afterwards. It was probably through failure to protect his patent rights that Kay moved to France, where he arrived penniless in 1747. He went to the Dutch firm of Daniel Scalongne, woollen manufacturers, in Abbeville. The company helped him to apply for a French patent for his shuttle, but Kay wanted the exorbitant sum of £10,000. There was much discussion and eventually Kay set up a workshop in Paris, where he received a pension of 2,500 livres. However, he was to face the same problems as in England with weavers copying his shuttle without permission. In 1754 he produced two machines for making card clothing: one pierced holes in the leather, while the other cut and sharpened the wires. These were later improved by his son, Robert Kay. Kay returned to England briefly, but was back in France in 1758. He was involved with machines to card both cotton and wool and tried again to obtain support from the French Government. He was still involved with developing textile machines in 1779, when he was 75, but he must have died soon afterwards. As an inventor Kay was a genius of the first rank, but he was vain, obstinate and suspicious and was destitute of business qualities.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Nash's name is synonymous with the great scheme carried out for his patron, the Prince Regent, in the early nineteenth century: the development of Marylebone Park from 1811 constituted a "garden city" for the wealthy in the centre of London. Although only a part of Nash's great scheme was actually achieved, an immense amount was carried out, comprising the Regent's Park and its surrounding terraces, the Regent's Street, including All Souls' Church, and the Regent's Palace in the Mall. Not least was Nash's exotic Royal Pavilion at Brighton.

From the early years of the nineteenth century, Nash and a number of other architects took advantage of the use of structural materials developed as a result of the Industrial Revolution; these included wrought and cast iron and various cements. Nash utilized iron widely in the Regent Street Quadrant, Carlton House Terrace and at the Brighton Pavilion. In the first two of these his iron columns were masonry clad, but at Brighton he unashamedly constructed iron column supports, as in the Royal Kitchen, and his ground floor to first floor cast-iron staircase, in which he took advantage of the malleability of the material to create a "Chinese" bamboo design, was particularly notable. The great eighteenth-century terrace architecture of Bath and much of the later work in London was constructed in stone, but as nineteenth-century needs demanded that more buildings needed to be erected at lower cost and greater speed, brick was used more widely for construction; this was rendered with a cement that could be painted to imitate stone. Nash, in particular, employed this method at Regent's Park and used a stucco made from sand, brickdust, powdered limestone and lead oxide that was suited for exterior work.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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John Smalley of Preston was the second son of John, a chapman of Blackburn. He was a distant relative of Richard Arkwright through marrying, in 1751, Elizabeth Baxter, whose mother Ellen was the widow of Arkwright's uncle, Richard. In the Preston Guild Rolls of 1762 he was described as a grocer and painter, and he was also Landlord of the Bull Inn. The following year he became a bailiff of Preston and in 1765 he became a Corporation steward. On 14 May 1768 Arkwright, Smalley and David Thornley became partners in a cotton-spinning venture in Nottingham. They agreed to apply for a patent for Arkwright's invention of spinning by rollers, and Smalley signed as a witness. It is said that Smalley provided much of the capital for this new venture as he sold his business at Preston for about £1,600, but this was soon found to be insufficient and the partnership had to be enlarged to include Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt.

Smalley may have helped to establish the spinning mill at Nottingham, but by 28 February 1771 he was back in Preston, for on that day he was chosen a "Councilman in the room of Mr. Thomas Jackson deceased" (Fitton 1989:38). He attended meetings for over a year, but either in 1772 or the following year he sold the Bull Inn, and certainly by August 1774 the Smalleys were living in Cromford, where he became Manager of the mill. He soon found himself at logger-heads with Arkwright; however, Strutt was able to smooth the dispute over for a while. Things came to a head in January 1777 when Arkwright was determined to get rid of Smalley, and the three remaining partners agreed to buy out Smalley's share for the sum of £10,751.

Although he had agreed not to set up any textile machinery, Smalley moved to Holywell in North Wales, where in the spring of 1777 he built a cotton-spinning mill in the Greenfield valley. He prospered there and his son was later to build two more mills in the same valley. Smalley used to go to Wrexham to sell his yarn, and there met John Peers, a leather merchant, who was able to provide a better quality leather for covering the drawing rollers which came to be used in Lancashire. Smalley died in 1782, shortly before Arkwright could sue him for infringement of his patents.

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SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

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After serving an apprenticeship in the lace industry, Stringfellow left Nottingham in about 1820 and moved to Chard in Somerset, where he set up his own business. He had wide interests such as photography, politics, and the use of electricity for medical treatment. Stringfellow met William Samuel Henson, who also lived in Chard and was involved in lacemaking, and became interested in his "aerial steam carriage" of 1842–3. When support for this project foundered, Henson and Stringfellow drew up an agreement "Whereas it is intended to construct a model of an Aerial Machine". They built a large model with a wing span of 20 ft (6 m) and powered by a steam engine, which was probably the work of Stringfellow. The model was tested on a hillside near Chard, often at night to avoid publicity, but despite many attempts it never made a successful flight. At this point Henson emigrated to the United States. From 1848 Stringfellow continued to experiment with models of his own design, starting with one with a wing span of 10 ft (3m). He decided to test it in a disused lace factory, rather than in the open air. Stringfellow fitted a horizontal wire which supported the model as it gained speed prior to free flight. Unfortunately, neither this nor later models made a sustained flight, despite Stringfellow's efficient lightweight steam engine. For many years Stringfellow abandoned his aeronautical experiments, then in 1866 when the (Royal) Aeronautical Society was founded, his interest was revived. He built a steam-powered triplane, which was demonstrated "flying" along a wire at the world's first Aeronautical Exhibition, held at Crystal Palace, London, in 1868. Stringfellow also received a cash prize for one of his engines, which was the lightest practical power unit at the Exhibition. Although Stringfellow's models never achieved a really successful flight, his designs showed the way for others to follow. Several of his models are preserved in the Science Museum in London.

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SUBJECT AREA: Horology

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John Arnold was apprenticed to his father, a watchmaker, and then worked as an itinerant journeyman in the Low Countries and, later, in England. He settled in London in 1762 and rapidly established his reputation at Court by presenting George III with a miniature repeating watch mounted in a ring. He later abandoned the security of the Court for a more precarious living developing his chronometers, with some financial assistance from the Board of Longitude. Symbolically, in 1771 he moved from the vicinity of the Court at St James's to John Adam Street, which was close to the premises of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures \& Commerce.

By the time Arnold became interested in chronometry, Harrison had already demonstrated that longitude could be determined by means of a timekeeper, and the need was for a simpler instrument that could be sold at an affordable price for universal use at sea. Le Roy had shown that it was possible to dispense with a remontoire by using a detached escapement with an isochronous balance; Arnold was obviously thinking along the same lines, although he may not have been aware of Le Roy's work. By 1772 Arnold had developed his detached escapement, a pivoted detent which was quite different from that used on the European continent, and three years later he took out a patent for a compensation balance and a helical balance spring (Arnold used the spring in torsion and not in tension as Harrison had done). His compensation balance was similar in principle to that described by Le Roy and used riveted bimetallic strips to alter the radius of gyration of the balance by moving small weights radially. Although the helical balance spring was not completely isochronous it was a great improvement on the spiral spring, and in a later patent (1782) he showed how it could be made more truly isochronous by shaping the ends. In this form it was used universally in marine chronometers.

Although Arnold's chronometers performed well, their long-term stability was less satisfactory because of the deterioration of the oil on the pivot of the detent. In his patent of 1782 he eliminated this defect by replacing the pivot with a spring, producing the spring detent escapement. This was also done independendy at about the same time by Berthoud and Earnshaw, although Earnshaw claimed vehemently that Arnold had plagiarized his work. Ironically it was Earnshaw's design that was finally adopted, although he had merely replaced Arnold's pivoted detent with a spring, while Arnold had completely redesigned the escapement. Earnshaw also improved the compensation balance by fusing the steel to the brass to form the bimetallic element, and it was in this form that it began to be used universally for chronometers and high-grade watches.

As a result of the efforts of Arnold and Earnshaw, the marine chronometer emerged in what was essentially its final form by the end of the eighteenth century. The standardization of the design in England enabled it to be produced economically; whereas Larcum Kendall was paid £500 to copy Harrison's fourth timekeeper, Arnold was able to sell his chronometers for less than one-fifth of that amount. This combination of price and quality led to Britain's domination of the chronometer market during the nineteenth century.

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See also: Phillips, Edouard

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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The son of a Quaker merchant, John Fowler entered the business of a county corn merchant on leaving school, but he found this dull and left as soon as he came of age, joining the Middlesbrough company of Gilkes, Wilson \& Hopkins, railway locomotive manufacturers. In 1849, at the age of 23, Fowler visited Ireland and was so distressed by the state of Irish agriculture that he determined to develop a system to deal with the drainage of land. He designed an implement which he patented in 1850 after a period of experimentation. It was able to lay wooden pipes to a depth of two feet, and was awarded the Silver Medal at the 1850 Royal Agriculture Show. By 1854, using a steam engine made by Clayton \& Shuttleworth, he had applied steam power to his invention and gained another award that year at the Royal Show. The following year he turned his attention to steam ploughing. He first developed a single-engined system that used a double windlass with which to haul a plough backwards and forwards across fields. In 1856 he patented his balance plough, and the following year he read a paper to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers at their Birmingham premises, describing the system. In 1858 he won the Royal Agricultural Society award with a plough built for him by Ransomes. Fowler founded the Steam Plough Works in Leeds and in 1862 production began in partnership with William Watson Hewitson. Within two years they were producing the first of a series of engines which were to make the name Fowler known worldwide. John Fowler saw little of his success because he died in 1864 at his Yorkshire home as a result of tetanus contracted after a riding accident.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Electronics and information technology, Public utilities

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After attending Owens College, Manchester, Hopkinson was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1867 to read for the Mathematical Tripos. An appointment in 1872 with the lighthouse department of the Chance Optical Works in Birmingham directed his attention to electrical engineering. His most noteworthy contribution to lighthouse engineering was an optical system to produce flashing lights that distinguished between individual beacons. His extensive researches on the dielectric properties of glass were recognized when he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society at the age of 29. Moving to London in 1877 he became established as a consulting engineer at a time when electricity supply was about to begin on a commercial scale. During the remainder of his life, Hopkinson's researches resulted in fundamental contributions to electrical engineering practice, dynamo design and alternating current machine theory. In making a critical study of the Edison dynamo he developed the principle of the magnetic circuit, a concept also arrived at by Gisbert Kapp around the same time. Hopkinson's improvement of the Edison dynamo by reducing the length of the field magnets almost doubled its output. In 1890, in addition to-his consulting practice, Hopkinson accepted a post as the first Professor of Electrical Engineering and Head of the Siemens laboratory recently established at King's College, London. Although he was not involved in lecturing, the position gave him the necessary facilities and staff and student assistance to continue his researches. Hopkinson was consulted on many proposals for electric traction and electricity supply, including schemes in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds. He also advised Mather and Platt when they were acting as contractors for the locomotives and generating plant for the City and South London tube railway. As early as 1882 he considered that an ideal method of charging for the supply of electricity should be based on a two-part tariff, with a charge related to maximum demand together with a charge for energy supplied. Hopkinson was one the foremost expert witnesses of his day in patent actions and was himself the patentee of over forty inventions, of which the three-wire system of distribution and the series-parallel connection of traction motors were his most successful. Jointly with his brother Edward, John Hopkinson communicated the outcome of his investigations to the Royal Society in a paper entitled "Dynamo Electric Machinery" in 1886. In this he also described the later widely used "back to back" test for determining the characteristics of two identical machines. His interest in electrical machines led him to more fundamental research on magnetic materials, including the phenomenon of recalescence and the disappearance of magnetism at a well-defined temperature. For his work on the magnetic properties of iron, in 1890 he was awarded the Royal Society Royal Medal. He was a member of the Alpine Club and a pioneer of rock climbing in Britain; he died, together with three of his children, in a climbing accident.

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