my+work+is+in+civil+engineering

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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Villard was one of the thirteenth-century architect-engineers who were responsible for the design and construction of the great Gothic cathedrals and other churches of the time. Their responsibilities covered all aspects of the work, including (in the spirit of the Roman architect Vitruvius) the invention and construction of mechanical devices. In their time, these men were highly esteemed and richly rewarded, although few of the inscriptions paying tribute to their achievements have survived. Villard stands out among them because a substantial part of his sketchbook has survived, in the form of thirty-three parchment sheets of drawings and notes, now kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Villard's professional career lasted roughly from 1225 to 1250. As a boy, he went to work on the building of the Cistercian monastery at Vaucelles, not far from Honnecourt, and afterwards he was apprenticed to the masons' lodge at Cambrai Cathedral, where he began copying the drawings and layouts on the tracing-house floor. All his drawings are, therefore, of the plans, elevations and sections of cathedrals. These buildings have long since been destroyed, but his drawings, perhaps among his earliest, bear witness to their architecture. He travelled widely in France and recorded features of the great works at Reims, Laon and Chartres. These include the complex system of passageways built into the fabric of a great cathedral; Villard comments that one of their purposes was "to allow circulation in case of fire".

Villard was invited to Hungary and reached there c. 1235. He may have been responsible for the edifice dedicated to St Elizabeth of Hungary, canonized in 1235, at Kassa (now Košice, Slovakia). Villard probably returned to France c. 1240, at least before the Tartar invasion of Hungary in 1241.

His sketchbook, which dates to c. 1235, stands as a memorial to Villard's skill as a draughtsman, a student of perspective and a mechanical engineer. He took his sketchbook with him on his travels, and used ideas from it in his work abroad. It contains architectural designs, geometrical constructions for use in building, surveying exercises and drawings for various kinds of mechanical devices, for civil or military use. He was transmitting details from the highly developed French Gothic masons to the relatively underdeveloped eastern countries. The notebooks were annotated for the use of pupils and other master masons, and the notes on geometry were obviously intended for pupils. The prize examples are the pages in the book, clearly Villard's own work, related to mechanical devices. Whilst he, like many others of the period and after, played with designs for perpetual-motion machines, he concentrated on useful devices. These included the first Western representation of a perpetualmotion machine, which at least displays a concern to derive a source of energy: this was a water-powered sawmill, with automatic feed of the timber into the mill. This has been described as the first industrial automatic power-machine to involve two motions, for it not only converts the rotary motion of the water-wheel to the reciprocating motion of the saw, but incorporates a means of keeping the log pressed against the saw. His other designs included water-wheels, watermills, the Archimedean screw and other curious devices.

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KM / LRD

SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Gregory's father was Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.C.H. Gregory himself, after working for Robert Stephenson, was appointed Engineer to the London \& Croydon Railway in 1839. On it, at New Cross in 1841, he installed a semaphore signal derived from signalling apparatus used by the Royal Navy; two hinged semaphore arms projected either side from the top of a post, signalling to drivers of trains in each direction of travel. In horizontal position each arm signified "danger", an arm inclined at 45° meant "caution" and the vertical position, in which the arms disappeared within a slot in the post, meant "all right". Gregory's signal was the forerunner of semaphore signals adopted on railways worldwide. In 1843 Gregory invented the stirrup frame: signal arms were connected to stirrups that were pushed down by the signalman's foot in order to operate them, while the points were operated by levers. The stirrups were connected together to prevent conflicting signals from being shown. This was a predecessor of interlocking. In 1846 Gregory became Engineer to the Bristol \& Exeter Railway, where in 1848 he co-operated with W.B. Adams in the development and operation of the first self-propelled railcar. He later did civil engineering work in Italy and France, was Engineer to the Somerset Central and Dorset Central railways and became Consulting Engineer for the government railways in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Cape of Good Hope, Straits Settlements and Trinidad.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Sir John MacNeill became a pupil of Thomas Telford and served under him as Superintendent of the Southern Division of the Holyhead Road from London to Shrewsbury. In this capacity he invented a "Road Indicator" or dynamometer. Like other Telford followers, he viewed the advent of railways with some antipathy, but after the death of Telford in 1834 he quickly became involved in railway construction and in 1837 he was retained by the Irish Railway Commissioners to build railways in the north of Ireland (Vignoles received the commission for the south). Much of his subsequent career was devoted to schemes for Irish railways, both those envisaged by the Commissioners and other private lines with more immediately commercial objectives. He was knighted in 1844 on the completion of the Dublin \& Drogheda Railway along the east coast of Ireland. In 1845 MacNeill lodged plans for over 800 miles (1,300 km) of Irish railways. Not all of these were built, many falling victim to Irish poverty in the years after the Famine, but he maintained a large staff and became financially embarrassed. His other schemes included the Grangemouth Docks in Scotland, the Liverpool \& Bury Railway, and the Belfast Waterworks, the latter completed in 1843 and subsequently extended by Bateman.

MacNeill was an engineer of originality, being the person who introduced iron-lattice bridges into Britain, employing the theoretical and experimental work of Fairbairn and Eaton Hodgkinson (the Boyne Bridge at Drogheda had two such spans of 250ft (76m) each). He also devised the Irish railway gauge of 5 ft 2 in. (1.57 m). Consulted by the Board of Trinity College, Dublin, regarding a School of Engineering in 1842, he was made an Honorary LLD of the University and appointed the first Professor of Civil Engineering, but he relinquished the chair to his assistant, Samuel Downing, in 1846. MacNeill was a large and genial man, but not, we are told, "of methodical and business habit": he relied heavily on his subordinates. Blindness obliged him to retire from practice several years before his death. He was an early member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, joining in 1827, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1838.

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SUBJECT AREA: Canals, Civil engineering

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Born into a prosperous farming family, he early demonstrated his natural mechanical and structural aptitude. As a boy he spent a great deal of time, often as a truant, near his home in the workshop of Andrew Meikle. Meikle was a millwright and the inventor of a threshing machine. After local education and an apprenticeship with Meikle, Rennie went to Edinburgh University until he was 22. He then travelled south and met James Watt, who in 1784 offered him the post of Engineer at the Albion Flour Mills, London, which was then under construction. Rennie designed all the mill machinery, and it was while there that he began to develop an interest in canals, opening his own business in 1791 in Blackfriars. He carried out work on the Kennet and Avon Canal and in 1794 became Engineer for the company. He meanwhile carried out other surveys, including a proposed extension of the River Stort Navigation to the Little Ouse and a Basingstoke-to-Salisbury canal, neither of which were built. From 1791 he was also engaged on the Rochdale Canal and the Lancaster Canal, as well as the great masonry aqueduct carrying the latter canal across the river Lune at Lancaster. He also surveyed the Ipswich and Stowmarket and the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigations. He advised on the Horncastle Canal in 1799 and on the River Ancholme in 1799, both of which are in Lincolnshire. In 1802 he was engaged on the Royal Canal in Ireland, and in the same year he was commissioned by the Government to prepare a plan for flooding the Lea Valley as a defence on the eastern approach to London in case Napoleon invaded England across the Essex marshes. In 1809 he surveyed improvements on the Thames, and in the following year he was involved in a proposed canal from Taunton to Bristol. Some of his schemes, particularly in the Fens and Lincolnshire, were a combination of improvements for both drainage and navigation. Apart from his canal work he engaged extensively in the construction and development of docks and harbours including the East and West India Docks in London, Holyhead, Hull, Ramsgate and the dockyards at Chatham and Sheerness. In 1806 he proposed the great breakwater at Plymouth, where work commenced on 22 June 1811.

He was also highly regarded for his bridge construction. These included Kelso and Musselburgh, as well as his famous Thames bridges: London Bridge (uncompleted at the time of his death), Waterloo Bridge (1810–17) and Southwark Bridge (1815–19). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1798.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Land transport, Railways and locomotives, Telecommunications

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Gooch gained experience as a pupil with several successive engineering firms, including Vulcan Foundry and Robert Stephenson \& Co. In 1837 he was engaged by I.K. Brunel, who was then building the Great Western Railway (GWR) to the broad gauge of 7 ft 1/4 in. (2.14 m), to take charge of the railway's locomotive department. He was just 21 years old. The initial locomotive stock comprised several locomotives built to such extreme specifications laid down by Brunel that they were virtually unworkable, and two 2–2–2 locomotives, North Star and Morning Star, which had been built by Robert Stephenson \& Co. but left on the builder's hands. These latter were reliable and were perpetuated. An enlarged version, the "Fire Fly" class, was designed by Gooch and built in quantity: Gooch was an early proponent of standardization. His highly successful 4–2–2 Iron Duke of 1847 became the prototype of GWR express locomotives for the next forty-five years, until the railway's last broad-gauge sections were narrowed. Meanwhile Gooch had been largely responsible for establishing Swindon Works, opened in 1843. In 1862 he designed 2–4–0 condensing tank locomotives to work the first urban underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway in London. Gooch retired in 1864 but was then instrumental in arranging for Brunel's immense steamship Great Eastern to be used to lay the first transatlantic electric telegraph cable: he was on board when the cable was successfully laid in 1866. He had been elected Member of Parliament for Cricklade (which constituency included Swindon) in 1865, and the same year he had accepted an invitation to become Chairman of the Great Western Railway Company, which was in financial difficulties; he rescued it from near bankruptcy and remained Chairman until shortly before his death. The greatest engineering work undertaken during his chairmanship was the boring of the Severn Tunnel.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering, Railways and locomotives

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Fox was a pupil of John Ericsson, helped to build the locomotive Novelty, and drove it at the Rainhill Trials in 1829. He became a driver on the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway and then a pupil of Robert Stephenson, who appointed him an assistant engineer for construction of the southern part of the London \& Birmingham Railway, opened in 1837. He was probably responsible for the design of the early bow-string girder bridge which carried the railway over the Regent's Canal. He also invented turnouts with switch blades, i.e. "points". With Robert Stephenson he designed the light iron train sheds at Euston Station, a type of roof that was subsequently much used elsewhere. He then became a partner in Fox, Henderson \& Co., railway contractors and manufacturers of railway equipment and bridges. The firm built the Crystal Palace in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851: Fox did much of the detail design work personally and was subsequently knighted. It also built many station roofs, including that at Paddington. From 1857 Fox was in practice in London as a consulting engineer in partnership with his sons, Charles Douglas Fox and Francis Fox. Sir Charles Fox became an advocate of light and narrow-gauge railways, although he was opposed to break-of-gauge unless it was unavoidable. He was joint Engineer for the Indian Tramway Company, building the first narrow-gauge (3 ft 6 in. or 107 cm) railway in India, opened in 1865, and his firm was Consulting Engineer for the first railways in Queensland, Australia, built to the same gauge at the same period on recommendation of Government Engineer A.C.Fitzgibbon.

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SUBJECT AREA: Canals, Civil engineering, Ports and shipping

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Trained as a surveyor in John Rennie's organization, Giles carried out surveys on behalf of Rennie before setting up in practice on his own. His earliest survey seems to have been on the line of the proposed Weald of Kent Canal in 1809. Then in 1811 he surveyed the proposed London \& Cambridge Canal linking Bishops Stortford on the Stort with Cambridge and with a branch to Shefford on the Ivel. In the same year he surveyed the line of the Wey \& Arun Junction Canal, and in 1816, in the same area, the Portsmouth \& Arundel Canal. In 1819 he carried out what is regarded as his first independent commission—the extension of the River Ivel Navigation from Biggleswade to Shefford. At this time he was helping John Rennie on the Aire \& Calder Navigation and continued there after Rennie's death in 1821. In 1825 he was engaged on plans for a London to Portsmouth Ship Canal and also on a suggested link between the Basingstoke and Kennet \& Avon Canals. Later, on behalf of Sir George Duckett, he was Engineer to the Hertford Union Canal, which was completed in 1830, and linked the Regent's Canal to the Lee Navigation. In 1833 he completed the extension of the Sankey Brook Navigation from Fiddler's Ferry to the Mersey at Widnes. One of his last canal works was a survey of the River Lee in 1844. Apart from his canal work, he was appointed Engineer to the Newcastle \& Carlisle Railway in 1829 and designed, among other works, the fine viaducts at Wetheral and Cor by. He was also, for a very short time, Engineer to the London \& Southampton Railway. Among other commissions, he was involved in harbour surveys and works at Dover, Rye, Holyhead, Dundee, Bridport and Dun Laoghaire (Kingstown). He was elected a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1842 and succeeded Telford on the Exchequer Bill Loans Board.

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SUBJECT AREA: Canals, Civil engineering

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First, from 1262, he was engaged in hydraulic-engineering works for Kublai Khan. He began astronomical and calendrical investigations in 1276, and became the greatest astronomer of the Yuan dynasty. He perfected interpolation formulae (a method of finite differences) and was the founder of the study of spherical trigonometry in China; this was applied to the circles of the heavenly sphere. He planned the Ji Zhou, the summit section of the Grand Canal through the Shandong foothills, in 1283. Although the canal had to await further improvement before it could become fully effective, it was nevertheless the world's first successful entirely artificial summit canal.

Guo Shoujing was responsible for the construction of the Tong Hui He (Channel of Communicating Grace) canal with twenty lock gates in 1293, in addition to the overhaul of the entire Grand Canal. He constructed a number of devices, including 40 ft (12 m) gnomons in 1276, with which he made some of the most accurate measurements of the sun's solstitial shadows, the results of which were collected in a book that is now lost. Between 1276 and 1279 he also constructed at least one water-driven mechanical escapement clock with sophisticated jack work, and the Beijing observatory and its equipment.

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

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

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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Frederick Ransome was the son of James Ransome (1782–1849) and grandson of Robert Ransome, founder of the well-known Ipswich firm of engineers. He did not become a partner in the family firm, but devoted his life to experiments to develop an artificial stone. These experiments were recorded in a paper which he presented to the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1848 and in a long series of over thirty patents dating from 1844. The material so formed was a sandstone, the particles of which were bonded together by a silicate of lime. It could be moulded into any required form while in its initial soft state, and when hard was suitable for surface-dressing or carving. It was used for many public buildings, but time proved it unsuitable for outside work. Ransome also used his artificial stone to make grinding wheels by incorporating emery powder in the mixture. These were found to be much superior to those made of natural stone. Another use of the artificial stone was in a porous form which could be used as a filter. In later years Ransome turned his attention to the manufacture of Portland cement and of a cheaper substitute incorporating blast-furnace slag. He also invented a rotary kiln for burning the cement, the first of these being built in 1887. It was 26 ft (7.9 m) long and 5 ft (1.5 m) in diameter; although reasonably successful, the development of such kilns of much greater length was carried out in America rather than England. Ransome was elected an Associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1848 and served as an Associate of

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SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace, Steam and internal combustion engines

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Harry Ricardo was the eldest child and only son of Halsey Ricardo (architect) and Catherine Rendel (daughter of Alexander Rendel, senior partner in the firm of consulting civil engineers that later became Rendel, Palmer and Tritton). He was educated at Rugby School and at Cambridge. While still at school, he designed and made a steam engine to drive his bicycle, and by the time he went up to Cambridge in 1903 he was a skilled craftsman. At Cambridge, he made a motor cycle powered by a petrol engine of his own design, and with this he won a fuel-consumption competition by covering almost 40 miles (64 km) on a quart (1.14 1) of petrol. This brought him to the attention of Professor Bertram Hopkinson, who invited him to help with research on turbulence and pre-ignition in internal combustion engines. After leaving Cambridge in 1907, he joined his grandfather's firm and became head of the design department for mechanical equipment used in civil engineering. In 1916 he was asked to help with the problem of loading tanks on to railway trucks. He was then given the task of designing and organizing the manufacture of engines for tanks, and the success of this enterprise encouraged him to set up his own establishment at Shoreham, devoted to research on, and design and development of, internal combustion engines.

Leading on from the work with Hopkinson were his discoveries on the suppression of detonation in spark-ignition engines. He noted that the current paraffinic fuels were more prone to detonation than the aromatics, which were being discarded as they did not comply with the existing specifications because of their high specific gravity. He introduced the concepts of "highest useful compression ratio" (HUCR) and "toluene number" for fuel samples burned in a special variable compression-ratio engine. The toluene number was the proportion of toluene in heptane that gave the same HUCR as the fuel sample. Later, toluene was superseded by iso-octane to give the now familiar octane rating. He went on to improve the combustion in side-valve engines by increasing turbulence, shortening the flame path and minimizing the clearance between piston and head by concentrating the combustion space over the valves. By these means, the compression ratio could be increased to that used by overhead-valve engines before detonation intervened. The very hot poppet valve restricted the advancement of all internal combustion engines, so he turned his attention to eliminating it by use of the single sleeve-valve, this being developed with support from the Air Ministry. By the end of the Second World War some 130,000 such aero-engines had been built by Bristol, Napier and Rolls-Royce before the piston aero-engine was superseded by the gas turbine of Whittle. He even contributed to the success of the latter by developing a fuel control system for it.

Concurrent with this was work on the diesel engine. He designed and developed the engine that halved the fuel consumption of London buses. He invented and perfected the "Comet" series of combustion chambers for diesel engines, and the Company was consulted by the vast majority of international internal combustion engine manufacturers. He published and lectured widely and fully deserved his many honours; he was elected FRS in 1929, was President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1944–5 and was knighted in 1948. This shy and modest, though very determined man was highly regarded by all who came into contact with him. It was said that research into internal combustion engines, his family and boats constituted all that he would wish from life.

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SUBJECT AREA: Canals, Civil engineering, Ports and shipping

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An Army officer serving at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and later in the Low Countries, Steers thus gained experience in water control and development, canals and drainage. After his return to England he was associated with George Sorocold in the construction of Howland Great Dock, Rotherhithe, London, opened in 1699 and the first wet dock built in England. He was again associated with Sorocold in planning the first of Liverpool's wet docks and subsequently was responsible for its construction. On its completion, he became Dockmaster in 1717.

In 1712 he surveyed the River Douglas for navigation, and received authorization to make it navigable from the Ribble estuary to Wigan in 1720. Although work was started by Steers, the undertaking was hit by the collapse of the South Sea Bubble and Steers was no longer associated with it when it was restarted in 1738. In 1721 he proposed making the Mersey and Irwell navigable.

In 1736 he surveyed and engineered the first summit-level canal in the British Isles, between Portadown and Newry in Ulster, thus providing through-water communication between Lough Neagh and the Irish Sea. The canal was completed in 1741. He also carried out a survey of the river Boyne. Also in 1736, he surveyed the Worsley Brook in South Lancashire to provide navigation from Worsley to the Mersey. This was done on behalf of Scroop, 1st Duke of Bridgewater; an Act was obtained in 1737, but no work was started on the scheme at that time. It was left to Francis Egerton, the 3rd Duke, to initiate the Bridgewater Canal to provide water transport for coal from the Worsley pits direct to Manchester. In 1739 Steers was elected Mayor of Liverpool. The following year, jointly with John Eyes of Liverpool, he surveyed a possible navigation along the Calder from its junction with the Aire \& Calder at Wakefield to the Hebble and so through to Halifax, but, owing to opposition at the time, the construction of the Calder \& Hebble Navigation had to wait until after Steers's death. In the opinion of Professor A.W. Skempton, Steers was the most distinguished civil engineer before Smeaton's time.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering, Mining and extraction technology

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Greathead came to England in 1859 to complete his education. In 1864 he began a three-year pupillage with the civil engineer Peter W. Barlow, after which he was engaged as an assistant engineer on the extension of the Midland Railway from Bedford to London. In 1869 he was entrusted with the construction of the Tower Subway under the River Thames; this was carried out using a cylindrical wrought-iron shield which was forced forward by six large screws as material was excavated in front of it. This work was completed the same year. In 1870 he set himself up as a consulting engineer, and from 1873 he was Resident Engineer on the Hammersmith and Richmond extensions of the Metropolitan District Railway. He assisted in the preparation of several other railway projects including the Regent's Canal Railway in 1880, the Dagenham Dock and the Metropolitan Outer Circle Railways in 1881, a new line from London to Eastbourne and a number of Irish light railways. He worked on a bill for the City and South London Railway, which was built between 1886 and 1890; here compressed air was used to prevent the inrush of water, a method for tunnelling which was generally adopted from then on. He invented apparatus for the application of water to excavate in front of the shield as well as for injecting cement-grout behind the lining of the tunnel.

He was joint engineer with Sir Douglas Fox for the construction of the Liverpool Overhead Railway, and held the same post with W.R.Galbraith on the Waterloo and City Railway; he was also associated with Sir John Fowler and Sir Benjamin Baker in the construction of the Central London Railway. He died, aged 52, before the completion of some of these projects.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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Eugène Freyssinet was an army engineer during the First World War who pioneered pre-stressed reinforced concrete and experimented with building concrete bridges. After 1918 he formed his own company to develop his ideas. He investigated the possibilities of very high-strength concrete, and in so doing studied shrinkage and creep. He combined high-quality concrete with highly stressed, stretched steel to give top quality results. His work in 1926 on Plougastel Bridge, at that time the longest reinforced concrete bridge, is a notable example of his use of this technique. In 1916 Freyssinet had built his famous airship hangars at Orly, which were destroyed in the Second World War; the hangars were roofed in parabolic sections to a height of about 200 ft. In 1934 he succeeded in saving the Ocean Terminal at Le Havre from sinking into the mud and being covered by the sea by using his pre-stressing techniques. By 1938 he had developed a superior method of pre-stressing with steel which led to widespread adoption of his methods.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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Auguste Perret belonged to the family contracting firm of A. \& G.Perret, which early specialized in the use of reinforced concrete. His eight-storey building at 25 bis Rue Franklin in Paris, built in 1902–3, was the first example of frame construction in this material and established its viability for structural design. Both ground plan and façade are uncompromisingly modern, the simplicity of the latter being relieved by unobtrusive faience decoration. The two upper floors, which are set back, and the open terrace roof garden set a pattern for future schemes. All of Perret's buildings had reinforced-concrete structures and this was clearly delineated on the façade designs. The concept was uncommon in Europe at the time, when eclecticism still largely ruled, but was derived from the late nineteenth-century skyscraper façades built by Louis Sullivan in America. In 1905–6 came Perret's Garage Ponthieu in Paris; a striking example of exposed concrete, it had a central façade window glazed in modern design in rich colours. By the 1920s ferroconcrete was in more common use, but Perret still led the field in France with his imaginative, bold use of the material. His most original structure is the Church of Notre Dame at Le Raincy on the outskirts of Paris (1922–3). The imposing exterior with its tall tower in diminishing stages is finely designed, but the interior has magnificence. It is a wide, light church, the segmented vaulted roof supported on slender columns. The whole structure is in concrete apart from the glass window panels, which extend the full height of the walls all around the church. They provide a symphony of colour culminating in deep blue behind the altar. Because of the slenderness of the columns and the richness of the glass, this church possesses a spiritual atmosphere and unimpeded sight and sound of and from the altar for everyone. It became the prototype for churches all over Europe for decades, from Moser in prewar Switzerland to Spence's postwar Coventry Cathedral.

In a long working life Perret designed buildings for a wide range of purposes, adhering to his preference for ferroconcrete and adapting its use according to each building's needs. In the 1940s he was responsible for the railway station at Amiens, the Atomic Centre at Saclay and, one of his last important works, the redevelopment after wartime damage of the town centre of Le Havre. For the latter, he laid out large open squares enclosed by prefabricated units, which display a certain monotony, despite the imposing town hall and Church of St Joseph in the Place de L'Hôtel de Ville.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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The American skyscraper was, in the 1870s and 1880s, very much the creation of what came to be known as the Chicago school of architecture. It was the most important American contribution to the urban architectural scene. At this time conditions were ripe for this type of office development, and in the big cities, notably Chicago and New York, steeply rising land values provided the incentive to build high; the structural means to do so had been triggered by the then low costs of making quality iron and steel. The skyscraper appeared after the invention of the passenger lift by Otis and the pioneer steel-frame work of Jenney. In 1875 Holabird was working in Jenney's office in Chicago. By 1883 he had set up in private practice, joined by another young architect, Martin Roche (1855–1927), and together they were responsible for the Tacoma Building (1887–9) in Chicago. In this structure the two front façades were entirely non-load-bearing and were carried by an internal steel skeleton; only the rear walls were load-bearing. The design of the building was not revolutionary (this had to wait for L.H. Sullivan) but was traditional in form. It was the possibility of being able to avoid load-bearing outer walls that enabled a building to rise above some nine storeys, and the thirteen-storeyed Tacoma Building pointed the way to the future development of the skyscraper. The firm of Holabird \& Roche continued in the following decades in Chicago to design and construct further high-quality, although lower, commercial buildings such as those in South Michigan Avenue and the McClurg Building. However, they are best remembered for their contribution in engineering to the development of high-rise construction.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

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Monier was a commercial gardener who in the course of his work was struck with the idea of inserting iron reinforcement in concrete tubs such as were used for growing orange trees. He patented this idea in 1867 and exhibited his invention the same year at the Paris Exposition. It soon occurred to him to apply the same principles to other engineering structures such as railway sleepers, pipes, floors, arches and bridges. In 1878 he took out a French patent for reinforced concrete beams and held numerous other patents for the material. Although he was not the only one to realize the benefits of combining a concrete girder or slab to resist compressive forces with iron or steel wires or rods to resist tensile stresses, "Das System Monier" was known as such by 1887 throughout Europe.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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At first he was educated by Andrew Little of Lan-gholm. At the age of 14 he was sent to school at Selkirk, where he stayed for two years until joining the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in August 1796. He was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery and transferred to the Royal Engineers on 1 April 1798. He served at Minorca, Malta, Naples, Sicily, Calabria and in the siege of Copenhagen and in other campaigns. He was promoted First Captain in 1807, and was on the staff of Sir John Moore at the battle of Coruna. He was wounded at the siege of Flushing in 1809 and was invalided for a year, employing his time in learning German.

In November 1810 he published his Essay on Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, which ran through four editions. In 1811 he was in command of a company of Royal Military Artificers at Plymouth and there he devised a method of education by which the NCOs and troops could teach themselves without "mathematical masters". His system was a great success and was adopted at Chatham and throughout the corps. In 1812 he was appointed Director of the School of Military Engineering at Chatham. He remained at Chatham until 1841, when he was appointed Inspector-General of Railways. During this period he organized improved systems of sapping, mining, telegraphing, pontooning and exploding gunpowder on land or under water, and prepared pamphlets and courses of instruction in these and other subjects. In May 1836 he started what is probably the most important work for which he is remembered. This, was a book on Limes, Calcareous Cements, Mortar, Stuccos and Concretes. The general adoption of Joseph Aspdin's Portland Cement was largely due to Pasley's recommendation of the material.

He was married twice: first in 1814 at Chatham to Harriet Cooper; and then on 30 March 1819 at Rochester to Martha Matilda Roberts, with whom he had six children— she died in 1881.

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SUBJECT AREA: Automotive engineering, Civil engineering, Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Little is known of Shaw's youth, but in the 1930s he was running a comparatively successful business repairing roads. One evening in 1933, he was driving to his home in Halifax, West Yorkshire; it was late, dark and foggy and only the reflection of his headlights from the tram-tracks guided him and kept him on the road. He decided to find or make an alternative to tramlines, which were not universal and by that time were being taken up as trams were being replaced with diesel buses.

Shaw needed a place to work and bought the old Boothtown Mansion, a cloth-merchant's house built in the mid-eighteenth century. There he devoted himself to the production of a prototype of the reflecting roadstud, inspired by the reflective nature of a cat's eyes. Shaw's design consisted of a prism backed by an aluminium mirror, set in pairs in a rubber casing; when traffic passed over the stud, the prisms would be wiped clean as the casing was depressed. In 1934, Shaw obtained permission from the county surveyor to lay, at his own expense, a short stretch of catseyes on a main highway near his home: fifty were laid at Brightlington cross-roads, an accident blackspot near Bradford. This was inspected by a number of surveyors in 1936. The first order for catseyes had already been placed in 1935, for a pedestrian crossing in Baldon, Yorkshire. There were alternative designs in existence, particularly in France, and in 1937 the Ministry of Transport laid an 8 km (5 mile) stretch in Oxfordshire with sample lengths of different types of studs. After two years, most of them had fractured, become displaced or ceased to reflect; only the product of Shaw's company, Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd, was still in perfect condition. The outbreak of the Second World War brought blackout regulations, which caused a great boost to sales of reflecting roadstuds; orders reached some 40,000 per week. Production was limited, however, due to the shortage of rubber supplies after the Japanese overran South-East Asia; until the end of the war, only about 12,000 catseyes were produced a year.

Over fifty million catseyes have been installed in Britain, where on average there are about two hundred and fifty catseyes in each kilometre of road, if laid in a single line. The success of Shaw's invention brought him great wealth, although he continued to live in the same house, without curtains—which obstructed his view—or carpets—which harboured odours and germs. He had three Rolls-Royce cars, and four television sets which were permanently switched on while he was at home, each tuned to a different channel.

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