-
41 Lanchester, Frederick William
[br]b. 28 October 1868 Lewisham, London, Englandd. 8 March 1946 Birmingham, England[br]English designer and builder of the first all-British motor car.[br]The fourth of eight children of an architect, he spent his childhood in Hove and attended a private preparatory school, from where, aged 14, he went to the Hartley Institution (the forerunner of Southampton University). He was then granted a scholarship to the Royal College of Science, South Kensington, and also studied practical engineering at Finsbury Technical College, London. He worked first for a draughtsman and pseudo-patent agent, and was then appointed Assistant Works Manager of the Forward Gas Engine Company of Birmingham, with sixty men and a salary of £1 per week. He was then aged 21. His younger brother, George, was apprenticed to the same company. In 1889 and 1890 he invented a pendulum governor and an engine starter which earned him royalties. He built a flat-bottomed river craft with a stern paddle-wheel and a vertical single-cylinder engine with a wick carburettor of his own design. From 1892 he performed a number of garden experiments on model gliders relating to problems of lift and drag, which led him to postulate vortices from the wingtips trailing behind, much of his work lying behind the theory of modern aerodynamics. The need to develop a light engine for aircraft led him to car design.In February 1896 his first experimental car took the road. It had a torsionally rigid chassis, a perfectly balanced and almost noiseless engine, dynamically stable steering, epicyclic gear for low speed and reverse with direct drive for high speed. It turned out to be underpowered and was therefore redesigned. Two years later an 8 hp, two-cylinder flat twin appeared which retained the principle of balancing by reverse rotation, had new Lanchester valve-gear and a new method of ignition based on a magneto generator. For the first time a worm and wheel replaced chain-drive or bevel-gear transmission. Lanchester also designed the machinery to make it. The car was capable of about 18 mph (29 km/h): future cars of his travelled at twice that speed. From 1899 to 1904 cars were produced for sale by the Lanchester Engine Company, which was formed in 1898. The company had to make every component except the tyres. Lanchester gave up the managership but remained as Chief Designer, and he remained in this post until 1914.In 1907–8 his two-volume treatise Aerial Flight was published; it included consideration of skin friction, boundary-layer theory and the theory of stability. In 1909 he was appointed to the Government's Committee for Aeronautics and also became a consultant to the Daimler Company. At the age of 51 he married Dorothea Cooper. He remained a consultant to Daimler and worked also for Wolseley and Beardmore until 1929 when he started Lanchester Laboratories, working on sound reproduction. He also wrote books on relativity and on the theory of dimensions.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsFRS.Bibliographybht=1907–8, Aerial Flight, 2 vols.Further ReadingP.W.Kingsford, 1966, F.W.Lanchester, Automobile Engineer.E.G.Semler (ed.), 1966, The Great Masters. Engineering Heritage, Vol. II, London: Institution of Mechanical Engineers/Heinemann.IMcNBiographical history of technology > Lanchester, Frederick William
-
42 Lucas, Anthony Francis
SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology[br]b. 9 September 1855 Spalato, Dalmatia, Austria-Hungary (now Split, Croatia)d. 2 September 1921 Washington, DC, USA[br]Austrian (naturalized American) mining engineer who successfully applied rotary drilling to oil extraction.[br]A former Second Lieutenant of the Austrian navy (hence his later nickname "Captain") and graduate of the Polytechnic Institute of Graz, Lucas decided to stay in Michigan when he visited his relatives in 1879. He changed his original name, Lucie, into the form his uncle had adopted and became a naturalized American citizen at the age of 30. He worked in the lumber industry for some years and then became a consulting mechanical and mining engineer in Washington, DC. He began working for a salt-mining company in Louisiana in 1893 and became interested in the geology of the Mexican Gulf region, with a view to prospecting for petroleum. In the course of this work he came to the conclusion that the hills in this elevated area, being geological structures distinct from the surrounding deposits, were natural reservoirs of petroleum. To prove his unusual theory he subsequently chose Spindle Top, near Beaumont, Texas, where in 1899 he began to bore a first oil-well. A second drill-hole, started in October 1900, was put through clay and quicksand. After many difficulties, a layer of rock containing marine shells was reached. When the "gusher" came out on 10 January 1901, it not only opened up a new era in the oil and gas business, but it also led to the future exploration of the terrestrial crust.Lucas's boring was a breakthrough for the rotary drilling system, which was still in its early days although its principles had been established by the English engineer Robert Beart in his patent of 1884. It proved to have advantages over the pile-driving of pipes. A pipe with a simple cutter at the lower end was driven with a constantly revolving motion, grinding down on the bottom of the well, thus gouging and chipping its way downward. To deal with the quicksand he adopted the use of large and heavy casings successively telescoped one into the other. According to Fauvelle's method, water was forced through the pipe by means of a pump, so the well was kept full of circulating liquid during drilling, flushing up the mud. When the salt-rock was reached, a diamond drill was used to test the depth and the character of the deposit.When the well blew out and flowed freely he developed a preventer in order to save the oil and, even more importantly at the time, to shut the well and to control the oil flow. This assembly, patented in 1903, consisted of a combined system of pipes, valves and casings diverting the stream into a horizontal direction.Lucas's fame spread around the world, but as he had to relinquish the larger part of his interest to the oil company supporting the exploration, his financial reward was poor. One year after his success at Spindle Top he started oil exploration in Mexico, where he stayed until 1905, when he resumed his consulting practice in Washington, DC.[br]Bibliography1899, "Rock-salt in Louisiana", Transactions of the American Institution of Mining Engineers 29:462–74.1902, "The great oil-well near Beaumont, Texas", Transactions of the AmericanInstitution of Mining Engineers 31:362–74.Further ReadingR.S.McBeth, 1918, Pioneering the Gulf Coast, New York (a very detailed description of Lucas's important accomplishments in the development of the oil industry).R.T.Hill, 1903, "The Beaumont oil-field, with notes on other oil-fields of the Texas region", Transactions of the American Institution of Mining Engineers 33:363–405;Transactions of the American Institution of Mining Engineers 55:421–3 (contain shorter biographical notes).WK -
43 McAdam, John Loudon
[br]b. 21 September 1756 Ayr, Ayrshire, Scotlandd. 26 November 1836 Moffat, Dumfriesshire, Scotland[br]Scottish road builder, inventor of the macadam road surface.[br]McAdam was the son of one of the founder of the first bank in Ayr. As an infant, he nearly died in a fire which destroyed the family's house of Laywyne, in Carsphairn parish; the family then moved to Blairquhan, near Straiton. Thence he went to the parish school in Maybole, where he is said to have made a model section of a local road. In 1770, when his father died, he was sent to America where he was brought up by an uncle who was a merchant in New York. He stayed in America until the close of the revolution, becoming an agent for the sale of prizes and managing to amass a considerable fortune. He returned to Scotland where he settled at Sauchrie in Ayrshire. There he was a magistrate, Deputy-Lieutenant of the county and a road trustee, spending thirteen years there. In 1798 he moved to Falmouth in Devon, England, on his appointment as agent for revictualling of the Royal Navy in western ports.He continued the series of experiments started in Ayrshire on the construction of roads. From these he concluded that a road should be built on a raised foundation with drains formed on either side, and should be composed of a number of layers of hard stone broken into angular fragments of roughly cubical shape; the bottom layer would be larger rocks, with layers of progressively smaller rocks above, all bound together with fine gravel. This would become compacted and almost impermeable to water by the action of the traffic passing over it. In 1815 he was appointed Surveyor-General of Bristol's roads and put his theories to the test.In 1823 a Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to consider the use of "macadamized" roads in larger towns; McAdam gave evidence to this committee, and it voted to give him £10,000 for his past work. In 1827 he was appointed Surveyor-General of Roads and moved to Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire. From there he made yearly visits to Scotland and it was while returning from one of these that he died, at Moffat in the Scottish Borders. He had married twice, both times to American women; his first wife was the mother of all seven of his children.McAdam's method of road construction was much cheaper than that of Thomas Telford, and did much to ease travel and communications; it was therefore adopted by the majority of Turnpike Trusts in Britain, and the macadamization process quickly spread to other countries.[br]Bibliography1819. A Practical Essay on the Scientific Repair and Preservation of Roads.1820. Present State of Road-Making.Further ReadingR.Devereux, 1936, John Loudon McAdam: A Chapter from the History of Highways, London: Oxford University Press.IMcN
См. также в других словарях:
melting layer method — išlydytojo sluoksnio metodas statusas T sritis radioelektronika atitikmenys: angl. melting layer method vok. Schmelzschichtmethode, f rus. метод расплавленного слоя, m pranc. méthode fusion couche, f … Radioelektronikos terminų žodynas
Layer Jump Recording (LJR) — is a writing method used for DVD R DL (Dual Layer).It permits recording the disc per increments called session (see Optical disc authoring), aka multi session. It also permits a faster closing of the disc by saving extraneous padding when the… … Wikipedia
Layer four traceroute — (LFT) is a fast traceroute engine, that also implements numerous other features including AS number lookups through several reliable sources, loose source routing, netblock name lookups, etc. and goes through many configurations of packet filter… … Wikipedia
Layer by layer — (LbL)deposition is a thin film fabrication technique. The films are formed by depositing alternating layers of oppositely charged materials with wash steps in between. A simple representation can be made by defining two oppositely charged… … Wikipedia
Method of matched asymptotic expansions — In mathematics, particularly in solving singularly perturbed differential equations, the method of matched asymptotic expansions is a common approach to finding an accurate approximation to a problem s solution. Contents 1 Method overview 2… … Wikipedia
Layer 2 MPLS VPN — A Layer 2 MPLS VPN is a term in computer networking. It is a method that Internet service providers use to segregate their network for their customers, to allow them to transmit data over an IP network. This is often sold as a service to… … Wikipedia
Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol — In computer networking, the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) is a tunneling protocol used to support virtual private networks (VPNs). History and future Published in 1999 as proposed standard RFC 2661, L2TP has its origins primarily in two older … Wikipedia
Method (computer science) — In object oriented programming, the term method refers to a subroutine that is exclusively associated either with a class (called class methods, static methods, or factory methods) or with an object (called instance methods). Like a procedure in… … Wikipedia
Method (computer programming) — In object oriented programming, a method is a subroutine (or procedure or function) associated with a class. Methods define the behavior to be exhibited by instances of the associated class at program run time. Methods have the special property… … Wikipedia
Layer (HTML tag) — Layers were the core of a method of dynamic HTML programming specific to Netscape 4. Each layer was treated as a separate document object in JavaScript. The content could be either included in the same file within the non standard lt;layer gt;… … Wikipedia
method — The mode or manner or orderly sequence of events of a process or procedure. SEE ALSO: fixative, operation, procedure, stain, technique. [G. methodos; fr. meta, after, + hodos, way] Abell Kendall m. a … Medical dictionary
