july+revolution

   (MFA)

   The organization of career military who overthrew the Estado Novo in a virtually bloodless military coup or pronunciamento generating the Revolution of 25 April 1974. This organization began as a clandestine group of junior career officers, largely from the army, but later including air force and navy officers, who had a series of secret meetings in Évora and other cities beginning in the summer and fall of 1973. The general grievances of these officers, who tended to be junior officers in their thirties and forties with the ranks of lieutenant, captain, and major, centered on the colonial wars in Portugal's African Empire. By 1973, these conflicts were more than a decade old, and in two of the wars, namely Guinea- Bissau and Mozambique, the Portuguese forces were taking heavy losses and losing ground. The catalyst for organizing a formal protest at first was not political but professional and corporate: a July 1973 law passed by the Marcello Caetano government that responded to a shortage of officer candidates in the African wars by lowering the professional qualifications for officer candidates for militia officers, something deeply resented by the career officers. The MFA organized the military coup of 1974 that met little resistance.

    See also Carvalho, Otelo Saraiva de; Captains, Movement of the.

   Presently an independent African state and formerly Portugal's main colonial territory in East Africa. After Angola, Portugal's largest colony in Africa, with some 784,090 kilometers (297,000 square miles) of territory. Lisbon controlled sections of what is now Mozambique from the early 16th century to 1975. In its long history as a Portuguese colony and outpost, Mozambique was influenced by its geography and its position in the Portuguese empire. Mozambique's location adjacent to industrializing South Africa was an important factor in its economic life. The colony's location on the sea route to Portugal's empire in India, mainly Goa, and its administrative subordination to Portuguese India during the centuries were also important historical factors.

   Until the 20th century, except for sections of the disease-ridden Zambezi valley, what little Portuguese colonization there was remained coastal. After 1910, Portuguese colonization in the interior burgeoned and plantations of sugar, cotton, and other crops were developed. As in Angola and other African colonies of Portugal, long after slavery was abolished in the 19th century, forced labor of Africans continued into the 1960s in Mozambique. In 1964, a colonial war in Mozambique began, a conflict between Portuguese armed forces and nationalist forces of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO). This conflict ceased following the Revolution of 25 April 1974 in Portugal. Mozambique obtained its independence in July 1975.

(1894-1987)

   Admiral Tomás was the last president of the republic of the Estado Novo (1958-74). Although he was selected by Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar for his exceptional qualities of loyalty to the system's principles and to the dictator, the last period of the regime, a time of crisis, tested those very characteristics. In the crisis of September 1968, when Salazar was suddenly incapacitated, Tomás selected Salazar's successor, Marcello Caetano. Later, when Caetano faltered and wished to resign his besieged office, it was Tomás' intransigence that worked to make Caetano go on.

   A career naval officer who graduated from the Naval School in 1916, Tomás rose steadily through naval ranks to top positions, including minister of the navy. Salazar chose him to be the regime's presidential candidate in the controversial 1958 elections, because he considered Tomás to be the most reliable, honest, and hardworking of the regime's military officers of the day. Twice Tomás was reelected in the managed presidential elections of 1965 and 1972, as pressures on the regime mounted.

   After the Revolution of 25 April 1974, Tomás, along with Caetano, his now reluctant prime minister, was sent into exile on Madeira Island and later to Brazil. Despite demands from leftist forces for the arrest and prosecution of Tomás, the new Lisbon government never initiated a legal case against him. Tomás was allowed to return from his Brazilian exile in July 1978, to settle in Cascais, outside Lisbon. In 1980, he was granted a state pension, but, despite numerous requests, he was not restored to his rank and membership in the navy. He died peacefully at home at age 92.

SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Domestic appliances and interiors, Public utilities

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Son of a clockmaker, he studied physics and chemistry under H.-D. de Saussure (1740– 99). In 1775 he moved to Paris, where he taught chemistry and presented a paper on electrical phenomena to the Académie Royale des Sciences. He assisted the Montgolfier brothers in their Paris balloon ascents.

From 1780 Argand spent some time in Montpellier, where he conceived the idea of the lamp that was to make him famous. It was an oil lamp with gravity oil feed, in which the flame was enlarged by burning it in a current of air induced by two concentric iron tubes. It produced ten times the illumination of the simple oil lamp. From the autumn of 1783 to summer 1785, Argand travelled to London and Birmingham to promote the manufacture and sale of his lamp. Upon his return to Paris, he found that his design had been plagiarized; with others, Argand sought to establish his priority, and Paul Abeille published a tract, Déscouverte des lampes à courant d'air et à cylindre (1785). As a result, the Académie granted Argand a licence to manufacture the lamp. However, during the Revolution, Argand's factories were destroyed and his licence annulled. He withdrew to Versoix, near Geneva. In 1793, the English persuaded him to take refuge in England and tried, apparently without success, to obtain recompense for his losses.

Argand is also remembered for his work on distillation and on the water distributor or hydraulic ram, which was conceived with Joseph Montgolfier in 1797 and recognized by the grant of a patent in the same year.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Benton spent his childhood in Milwaukee and La Crosse, where he early showed a talent for mechanical invention. His father was a lawyer with an interest in newspapers and who acquired the Milwaukee Daily News. Benton became familiar with typesetting equipment in his father's newspaper office. He learned the printer's trade at another newspaper office, at La Crosse, and later worked as bookkeeper at a type foundry in Milwaukee. When that failed in 1873, Benton acquired the plant, and when he was joined by R.V.Waldo the firm became Benton, Waldo \& Co. Benton began learning and improving type-cutting practice. He first devised unit-width or "self-spacing" type which became popular with compositors, saving, it was reckoned, 20 per cent of their time. Meanwhile, Benton worked on a punch-cutting machine to speed up the process of cutting letters in the steel punches from which matrices or moulds were formed to enable type to be cast from molten metal. His first mechanical punch-cutter worked successfully in 1884. The third machine, patented in 1885, was the model that revolutionized the typefounding operation. So far, punch-cutting had been done by hand, a rare and expensive skill that was insufficient to meet the demands of the new typesetting machines, the monotype of Lanston and the linotype of Merganthaler. These were threatened with failure until Benton saved the day with his automatic punch-cutter. Mechanizing punch-cutting and the forming of matrices made possible the typesetting revolution brought about by mono-and linotype.

In 1892 Benton's firm merged with others to form the American Type Founders Company. Benton's equipment was moved to New York and he with it, to become a board member and Chief Technical Advisor. In 1894 he became Manager of the company's new plant for type manufacture in Jersey City. Benton steadily improved both machinery and processes, for which he was granted twenty patents. With his son Morris Fuller, he was also notable and prolific in the field of type design. Benton remained in active association with his company until just two weeks before his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Carlson studied physics at the California Institute of Technology and in 1930 he took a research position at Bell Telephone Laboratories, but soon transferred to their patent department. To equip himself in this field, Carlson studied law, and in 1934 he became a patent attorney at P.R.Mallory \& Co., makers of electrical apparatus. He was struck by the difficulty in obtaining copies of documents and drawings; indeed, while still at school, he had encountered printing problems in trying to produce a newsletter for amateur chemists. He began experimenting with various light-sensitive substances, and by 1937 he had conceived the basic principles of xerography ("dry writing"), using the property of certain substances of losing an electrostatic charge when light impinges on them. His work for Mallory brought him into contact with the Battelle Memorial Institute, the world's largest non-profit research organization; their subsidiary, set up to develop promising ideas, took up Carlson's invention. Carlson received his first US patent for the process in 1940, with two more in 1942, and he assigned to Battelle exclusive patent rights in return for a share of any future proceeds. It was at Battelle that selenium was substituted as the light-sensitive material.

In 1946 the Haloid Company of Rochester, manufacturers of photographic materials and photocopying equipment, heard of the Xerox copier and, seeing it as a possible addition to their products, took out a licence to develop it commercially. The first Xerox Copier was tested during 1949 and put on the market the following year. The process soon began to displace older methods, such as Photostat, but its full impact on the public came in 1959 with the advent of the Xerox 914 Copier. It is fair to apply the overworked word "revolution" to the change in copying methods initiated by Carlson. He became a multimillionaire from his royalties and stock holding, and in his last years he was able to indulge in philanthropic activities.

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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: Textiles

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Kennedy was the third son of his father, Robert, and went to the village school in Dalry. On his father's death, he was sent at the age of 14 to Chowbent, Lancashire, where he was apprenticed to William Cannan, a maker of textile machines such as carding frames, Hargreaves's jennies and Arkwright's waterframes. On completion of his apprenticeship in 1791, he moved to Manchester and entered into partnership with Benjamin and William Sandford and James M'Connel, textile machine makers and mule spinners. In 1795 this partnership was terminated and one was made with James M'Connel to form the firm M'Connel \& Kennedy, cotton spinners.

Kennedy introduced improvements for spinning fine yarns and the firm of M'Connel \& Kennedy became famous for the quality of these products, which were in great demand. He made the spindles turn faster during the second part of the mule carriage's outward draw, and from 1793 onwards he experimented with driving mules by steam engines. Like William Kelly at New Lanark, he succeeded in making the spinning sequences power-operated by 1800, although the spinner had to take over the winding on. This made the mule into a factory machine, but it still required skilled operators. He was also involved with Henry Houldsworth, Junior, in the improvement of the roving frame. In 1803 Kennedy joined the Manchester Literary \& Philosophical Society, to which he presented several papers, including one in 1830 on "A memoir of Samuel Crompton". He retired from the spinning business in 1826, but continued his technical and mechanical pursuits. He was consulted about whether the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway should have moving or stationary steam engines and was an umpire at the Rainhill Trials in 1829.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Coming from a prosperous family, Niepce was educated in a Catholic seminary and destined for the priesthood. The French Revolution intervened and Niepce became an officer in an infantry regiment. An attack of typhoid fever in Italy ended his military career, and he returned to France and was married. Returning to his paternal home in Chalon in 1801, he joined with his brother Claude to construct an ingenious engine called the pyréolophore, which they patented in 1807. The French Government also encouraged the brothers in their attempts to produce large quantities of indigo-blue dye from wood, a venture that was ultimately unsuccessful.

Nicéphore began to experiment with lithography, which led him to take an interest in the properties of light-sensitive materials. He pursued this interest after Claude moved to Paris in 1816 and is reported to have made negative images in a camera obscura using paper soaked in silver chloride. Niepce went on to experiment with bitumen of judea, a substance that hardened on exposure to light. In 1822, using bitumen of judea on glass, he produced a heliograph from an engraving. The first images from nature may have been made as early as 1824, but the world's earliest surviving photographic image was made in 1826. A view of the courtyard of Niepce's home in Chalon was captured on a pewter plate coated with bitumen of judea; an exposure of several hours was required, the softer parts of the bitumen being dissolved away by a solvent to reveal the image.

In 1827 he took examples of his work to London where he met Francis Bauer, Secretary of the Royal Society. Nothing came of this meeting, but on returning to France Niepce continued his work and in 1829 entered into a formal partnership with L.J.M. Daguerre with a view to developing their mutual interest in capturing images formed by the camera obscura. However, the partnership made only limited progress and was terminated by Niepce's death in 1833. It was another six years before the announcement of the first practicable photographic processes was made.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology

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Pilkington was educated at Sherborne School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in mechanical science. He spent one year at Cambridge followed by war service, which lasted until 1945. He returned to complete his degree and then joined Pilkington, the well-known glass manufacturer at St Helens' Lancashire, in 1947. Sir Alastair is not, however, related to the Pilkington family of glassmakers.

The forming of perfectly flat glass that retained its fire finish had eluded glassmakers for centuries. Until the 1950s the only way of making really flat glass was to form plate glass by continuous casting between steel rollers. This destroyed the fire finish, which had to be restored by expensive grinding and polishing. The process entailed the loss of 20 per cent of good glass. The idea of floating glass on molten metal occurred to Sir Alastair in October 1952, and thereafter he remained in charge of development until commercial success had been achieved. The idea of floating molten glass on molten tin had been patented in the United States as early as 1902, but had never been pursued. The Pilkington process in essence was to float a ribbon of molten glass on a bath of molten tin in an inert atmosphere of nitrogen, to prevent oxidation of the tin. It was patented in Britain in 1957 and in the USA two years later. The first production glass issued from the plant in May 1957, although the first good glass did not appear until July 1958. The process was publicly announced the following year and was quickly taken up by the industry. It is now the universal method for manufacturing high quality flat glass.

Having seen through the greatest single advance in glassmaking and one of the most important technological developments this century, Sir Alastair became Chairman of Pilkingtons until 1980 and President thereafter.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Jedediah Strutt was the second of three sons of William, a small farmer and maltster at South Normanton, near Alfreton, Derbyshire, where the only industry was a little framework knitting. At the age of 14 Jedediah was apprenticed to Ralph Massey, a wheelwright near Derby, and lodged with the Woollats, whose daughter Elizabeth he later married in 1755. He moved to Leicester and in 1754 started farming at Blackwell, where an uncle had died and left him the stock on his farm. It was here that he made his knitting invention.

William Lee's knitting machine remained in virtually the same form as he left it until the middle of the eighteenth century. The knitting industry moved away from London into the Midlands and in 1730 a Nottingham workman, using Indian spun yarn, produced the first pair of cotton hose ever made by mechanical means. This industry developed quickly and by 1750 was providing employment for 1,200 frameworkers using both wool and cotton in the Nottingham and Derby areas. It was against this background that Jedediah Strutt obtained patents for his Derby rib machine in 1758 and 1759.

The machine was a highly ingenious mechanism, which when placed in front of an ordinary stocking frame enabled the fashionable ribbed stockings to be made by machine instead of by hand. To develop this invention, he formed a partnership first with his brother-in-law, William Woollat, and two leading Derby hosiers, John Bloodworth and Thomas Stamford. This partnership was dissolved in 1762 and another was formed with Woollat and the Nottingham hosier Samuel Need. Strutt's invention was followed by a succession of innovations which enabled framework knitters to produce almost every kind of mesh on their machines. In 1764 the stocking frame was adapted to the making of eyelet holes, and this later lead to the production of lace. In 1767 velvet was made on these frames, and two years later brocade. In this way Strutt's original invention opened up a new era for knitting. Although all these later improvements were not his, he was able to make a fortune from his invention. In 1762 he was made a freeman of Nottingham, but by then he was living in Derby. His business at Derby was concerned mainly with silk hose and he had a silk mill there.

It was partly his need for cotton yarn and partly his wealth which led him into partnership with Richard Arkwright, John Smalley and David Thornley to exploit Arkwright's patent for spinning cotton by rollers. Together with Samuel Need, they financed the Arkwright partnership in 1770 to develop the horse-powered mill in Nottingham and then the water-powered mill at Cromford. Strutt gave advice to Arkwright about improving the machinery and helped to hold the partnership together when Arkwright fell out with his first partners. Strutt was also involved, in London, where he had a house, with the parliamentary proceedings over the passing of the Calico Act in 1774, which opened up the trade in British-manufactured all-cotton cloth.

In 1776 Strutt financed the construction of his own mill at Helper, about seven miles (11 km) further down the Derwent valley below Cromford. This was followed by another at Milford, a little lower on the river. Strutt was also a partner with Arkwright and others in the mill at Birkacre, near Chorley in Lancashire. The Strutt mills were developed into large complexes for cotton spinning and many experiments were later carried out in them, both in textile machinery and in fireproof construction for the mills themselves. They were also important training schools for engineers.

Elizabeth Strutt died in 1774 and Jedediah never married again. The family seem to have lived frugally in spite of their wealth, probably influenced by their Nonconformist background. He had built a house near the mills at Milford, but it was in his Derby house that Jedediah died in 1797. By the time of his death, his son William had long been involved with the business and became a more important cotton spinner than Jedediah.

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