passed+to+an+account

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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He was the son of a country lawyer who became legal advisor and travelling companion to certain rich Americans. At an early age Cousteau acquired a love of travel, of the sea and of cinematography: he made his first film at the age of 13. After an interrupted education he nevertheless passed the difficult entrance examination to the Ecole Navale in Brest, but his naval career was cut short in 1936 by injuries received in a serious motor accident. For his long recuperation he was drafted to Toulon. There he met Philippe Tailliez, a fellow naval officer, and Frédéric Dumas, a champion spearfisher, with whom he formed a long association and began to develop his underwater swimming and photography. He apparently took little part in the Second World War, but under cover he applied his photographic skills to espionage, for which he was awarded the Légion d'honneur after the war.

Cousteau sought greater freedom of movement underwater and, with Emile Gagnan, who worked in the laboratory of Air Liquide, he began experimenting to improve portable underwater breathing apparatus. As a result, in 1943 they invented the aqualung. Its simple design and robust construction provided a reliable and low-cost unit and revolutionized scientific and recreational diving. Gagnan shunned publicity, but Cousteau revelled in the new freedom to explore and photograph underwater and exploited the publicity potential to the full.

The Undersea Research Group was set up by the French Navy in 1944 and, based in Toulon, it provided Cousteau with the Opportunity to develop underwater exploration and filming techniques and equipment. Its first aims were minesweeping and exploration, but in 1948 Cousteau pioneered an extension to marine archaeology. In 1950 he raised the funds to acquire a surplus US-built minesweeper, which he fitted out to further his quest for exploration and adventure and named Calypso. Cousteau also sought and achieved public acclaim with the publication in 1953 of The Silent World, an account of his submarine observations, illustrated by his own brilliant photography. The book was an immediate success and was translated into twenty-two languages. In 1955 Calypso sailed through the Red Sea and the western Indian Ocean, and the outcome was a film bearing the same title as the book: it won an Oscar and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival. This was his favoured medium for the expression of his ideas and observations, and a stream of films on the same theme kept his name before the public.

Cousteau's fame earned him appointment by Prince Rainier as Director of the Oceanographie Institute in Monaco in 1957, a post he held until 1988. With its museum and research centre, it offered Cousteau a useful base for his worldwide activities.

In the 1980s Cousteau turned again to technological development. Like others before him, he was concerned to reduce ships' fuel consumption by harnessing wind power. True to form, he raised grants from various sources to fund research and enlisted technical help, namely Lucien Malavard, Professor of Aerodynamics at the Sorbonne. Malavard designed a 44 ft (13.4 m) high non-rotating cylinder, which was fitted onto a catamaran hull, christened Moulin à vent. It was intended that its maiden Atlantic crossing in 1983 should herald a new age in ship propulsion, with large royalties to Cousteau. Unfortunately the vessel was damaged in a storm and limped to the USA under diesel power. A more robust vessel, the Alcyone, was fitted with two "Turbosails" in 1985 and proved successful, with a 40 per cent reduction in fuel consumption. However, oil prices fell, removing the incentive to fit the new device; the lucrative sales did not materialize and Alcyone remained the only vessel with Turbosails, sharing with Calypso Cousteau's voyages of adventure and exploration. In September 1995, Cousteau was among the critics of the decision by the French President Jacques Chirac to resume testing of nuclear explosive devices under the Mururoa atoll in the South Pacific.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Francis Egerton was the younger of the two surviving sons of Scroop, 1st Duke of Bridgewater, and on the death of his brother, the 2nd Duke, he succeeded to the title in 1748. Until that time he had received little or no education as his mother considered him to be of feeble intellect. His guardians, the Duke of Bedford and Lord Trentham, decided he should be given an opportunity and sent him to Eton in 1749. He remained there for three years and then went on the "grand tour" of Europe. During this period he saw the Canal du Midi, though whether this was the spark that ignited his interest in canals is hard to say. On his return to England he indulged in the social round in London and raced at Newmarket. After two unsuccessful attempts at marriage he retired to Lancashire to further his mining interests at Worsley, where the construction of a canal to Manchester was already being considered. In fact, the Act for the Bridgewater Canal had been passed at the time he left London. John Gilbert, his land agent at Worsley, encouraged the Duke to pursue the canal project, which had received parliamentary approval in March 1759. Brindley had been recommended on account of his work at Trentham, the estate of the Duke's brother-in-law, and Brindley was consulted and subsequently appointed Engineer; the canal opened on 17 July 1761. This was immediately followed by an extension project from Longford Brook to Runcorn to improve communications between Manchester and Liverpool; this was completed on 31 December 1772, after Brindley's death. The Duke also invested heavily in the Trent \& Mersey Canal, but his interests were confined to his mines and the completed canals for the rest of his life.

It is said that he lacked a sense of humour and even refused to read books. He was untidy in his dress and habits yet he was devoted to the Worsley undertakings. When travelling to Worsley he would have his coach placed on a barge so that he could inspect the canal during the journey. He amassed a great fortune from his various activities, but when he died, instead of leaving his beloved canal to the beneficiaries under his will, he created a trust to ensure that the canal would endure; the trust did not expire until 1903. The Duke is commemorated by a large Corinthian pillar, which is now in the care of the National Trust, in the grounds of his mansion at Ashridge, Hertfordshire.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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James Hargreaves was first a carpenter and then a hand-loom weaver at Stanhill, Blackburn, probably making Blackburn Checks or Greys from linen warps and cotton weft. An invention ascribed to him doubled production in the preparatory carding process before spinning. Two or three cards were nailed to the same stock and the upper one was suspended from the ceiling by a cord and counterweight. Around 1762 Robert Peel (1750–1830) sought his assistance in constructing a carding engine with cylinders that may have originated with Daniel Bourn, but this was not successful. In 1764, inspired by seeing a spinning wheel that continued to revolve after it had been knocked over accidentally, Hargreaves invented his spinning jenny. The first jennies had horizontal wheels and could spin eight threads at once. To spin on this machine required a great deal of skill. A length of roving was passed through the clamp or clove. The left hand was used to close this and draw the roving away from the spindles which were rotated by the spinner turning the horizontal wheel with the right hand. The spindles twisted the fibres as they were being drawn out. At the end of the draw, the spindles continued to be rotated until sufficient twist had been put into the fibres to make the finished yarn. This was backed off from the tips of the spindles by reversing them and then, with the spindles turning in the spinning direction once more, the yarn was wound on by the right hand rotating the spindles, the left hand pushing the clove back towards them and one foot operating a pedal which guided the yarn onto the spindles by a faller wire. A piecer was needed to rejoin the yarns when they broke. At first Hargreaves's jenny was worked only by his family, but then he sold two or three of them, possibly to Peel. In 1768, local opposition and a riot in which his house was gutted forced him to flee to Nottingham. He entered into partnership there with Thomas James and established a cotton mill. In 1770 he followed Arkwright's example and sought to patent his machine and brought an action for infringement against some Lancashire manufacturers, who offered £3,000 in settlement. Hargreaves held out for £4,000, but he was unable to enforce his patent because he had sold jennies before leaving Lancashire. Arkwright's "water twist" was more suitable for the Nottingham hosiery industry trade than jenny yarn and in 1777 Hargreaves replaced his own machines with Arkwright's. When he died the following year, he is said to have left property valued at £7,000 and his widow received £400 for her share in the business. Once the jenny had been made public, it was quickly improved by other inventors and the number of spindles per machine increased. In 1784, there were reputed to be 20,000 jennies of 80 spindles each at work. The jenny greatly eased the shortage of cotton weft for weavers.

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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: Electricity, Metallurgy, Public utilities, Telecommunications

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Born Carl Wilhelm, he attended craft schools in Lübeck and Magdeburg, followed by an intensive course in natural science at Göttingen as a pupil of Weber. At the age of 19 Siemens travelled to England and sold an electroplating process developed by his brother Werner Siemens to Richard Elkington, who was already established in the plating business. From 1843 to 1844 he obtained practical experience in the Magdeburg works of Count Stolburg. He settled in England in 1844 and later assumed British nationality, but maintained close contact with his brother Werner, who in 1847 had co-founded the firm Siemens \& Halske in Berlin to manufacture telegraphic equipment. William began to develop his regenerative principle of waste-heat recovery and in 1856 his brother Frederick (1826–1904) took out a British patent for heat regeneration, by which hot waste gases were passed through a honeycomb of fire-bricks. When they became hot, the gases were switched to a second mass of fire-bricks and incoming air and fuel gas were led through the hot bricks. By alternating the two gas flows, high temperatures could be reached and considerable fuel economies achieved. By 1861 the two brothers had incorporated producer gas fuel, made by gasifying low-grade coal.

Heat regeneration was first applied in ironmaking by Cowper in 1857 for heating the air blast in blast furnaces. The first regenerative furnace was set up in Birmingham in 1860 for glassmaking. The first such furnace for making steel was developed in France by Pierre Martin and his father, Emile, in 1863. Siemens found British steelmakers reluctant to adopt the principle so in 1866 he rented a small works in Birmingham to develop his open-hearth steelmaking furnace, which he patented the following year. The process gradually made headway; as well as achieving high temperatures and saving fuel, it was slower than Bessemer's process, permitting greater control over the content of the steel. By 1900 the tonnage of open-hearth steel exceeded that produced by the Bessemer process.

In 1872 Siemens played a major part in founding the Society of Telegraph Engineers (from which the Institution of Electrical Engineers evolved), serving as its first President. He became President for the second time in 1878. He built a cable works at Charlton, London, where the cable could be loaded directly into the holds of ships moored on the Thames. In 1873, together with William Froude, a British shipbuilder, he designed the Faraday, the first specialized vessel for Atlantic cable laying. The successful laying of a cable from Europe to the United States was completed in 1875, and a further five transatlantic cables were laid by the Faraday over the following decade.

The Siemens factory in Charlton also supplied equipment for some of the earliest electric-lighting installations in London, including the British Museum in 1879 and the Savoy Theatre in 1882, the first theatre in Britain to be fully illuminated by electricity. The pioneer electric-tramway system of 1883 at Portrush, Northern Ireland, was an opportunity for the Siemens company to demonstrate its equipment.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Carding by hand required a pair of hand cards. The lump of tangled fibres was teased out by pulling one card across the other to even out the fibres and transfer them onto one of the cards from which they could be rolled up into a rollag or slubbing. When Arkwright began to use cylinder cards, the fibres were teased out as they passed from one cylinder to the next. In order to obtain a greater carding area, he soon introduced smaller cylinders and placed strips of flat card above the periphery of the main cylinder. These became clogged with short fibres and dirt, so they had to be lifted off and cleaned or "stripped" at intervals. The first to invent a self-stripping card was Archibald Buchanan, at the Catrine mills in Ayrshire, with his patent in 1823. In his arrangement each flat was turned upside down and stripped by a rotary brush. This was improved by Smith in 1834 and patented in the same year. Smith fixed the flats on an endless chain so that they travelled around the periphery of the top of the main cylinder. Just after the point where they left the cylinder, Smith placed a rotary brush and a comb to clear the brush. In this way each flat in turn was properly and regularly cleaned.

Smith was an able mechanic and Managing Partner of the Deanston mills in Scotland. He visited Manchester, where he was warmly received on the introduction of his machine there at about the same time as he patented it in Scotland. The carding engine he designed was complex, for he arranged a double feed to obtain greater production. While this part of his patent was not developed, his chain or endless flats became the basis used in later cotton carding engines. He took out at least half a dozen other patents for textile machinery. These included two in 1834, the first for a self-acting mule and the second with J.C. Dyer for improvements to winding on to spools. There were further spinning patents in 1839 and 1844 and more for preparatory machinery including carding in 1841 and 1842. He was also interested in agriculture and invented a subsoil plough and other useful things.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Raw cotton arrived in Britain in tightly packed bales. Before spinning, the fibres had to be opened out, and dirt, seeds and bits of plant had to be removed. This was an unpleasant and fatiguing job usually carried out by women and children. By 1800 it could be done by two machines. The first stage in opening was the "willow" and then the cotton was passed through the "scutcher" to open it further and give it a more effective cleaning. These machines reduced the labour of the operation to about one-twentieth of what it had been. The scutching machine was constructed by Snodgrass and first used at Houston's mill in Johnstone, near Paisley, in 1797. It was derived from the threshing machine invented by Andrew Meikle of Phantassie in 1786. In the scutcher, revolving bars beat the cotton to separate the fibres from the trash. As the dirt fell out, the cotton was blown forward by a fan and was rolled up into a lap at the end of the machine. Scutchers were not introduced to Manchester until 1808 or 1809 and further improvements were soon made to them.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics, Telecommunications

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Steinheil studied under Gauss at Göttingen and Bessel at Königsberg before jointing his parents at Munich. There he concentrated on optics before being appointed Professor of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Munich in 1832. Immediately after the announcement of the first practicable photographic processes in 1839, he began experiments on photography in association with another professor at the University, Franz von Kobell. Steinheil is reputed to have made the first daguerreotypes in Germany; he certainly constructed several cameras of original design and suggested minor improvements to the daguerreotype process. In 1849 he was employed by the Austrian Government as Head of the Department of Telegraphy in the Ministry of Commerce. Electromagnetic telegraphy was an area in which Steinheil had worked for several years previously, and he was now appointed to supervise the installation of a working telegraphic system for the Austrian monarchy. He is considered to be the founder of electromagnetic telegraphy in Austria and went on to perform a similar role in Switzerland.

Steinheil's son, Hugo Adolph, was educated in Munich and Augsburg but moved to Austria to be with his parents in 1850. Adolph completed his studies in Vienna and was appointed to the Telegraph Department, headed by his father, in 1851. Adolph returned to Munich in 1852, however, to concentrate on the study of optics. In 1855 the father and son established the optical workshop which was later to become the distinguished lens-manufacturing company C.A. Steinheil Söhne. At first the business confined itself almost entirely to astronomical optics, but in 1865 the two men took out a joint patent for a wide-angle photographic lens claimed to be free of distortion. The lens, called the "periscopic", was not in fact free from flare and not achromatic, although it enjoyed some reputation at the time. Much more important was the achromatic development of this lens that was introduced in 1866 and called the "Aplanet"; almost simultaneously a similar lens, the "Rapid Rentilinear", was introduced by Dallmeyer in England, and for many years lenses of this type were fitted as the standard objective on most photographic cameras. During 1866 the elder Steinheil relinquished his interest in lens manufacturing, and control of the business passed to Adolph, with administrative and financial affairs being looked after by another son, Edward. After Carl Steinheil's death Adolph continued to design and market a series of high-quality photographic lenses until his own death.

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