patent+use

SUBJECT AREA: Electricity

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After passing a legal examination, Hjorth found employment in the state treasury in Copenhagen and in 1830 advanced to be Clerk of the Exchequer and Secretary. In 1834 he visited England to study the use of steam road and rail vehicles. Hjorth was involved in the formation of the first railway company in Denmark and became Technical Director of Denmark's first railway, a line between Copenhagen and Roskilde that opened in 1847. In 1848 he petitioned the Government for funds to visit England and have built there an electric motor of his own design with oscillating motion. This petition, supported by Hans Christian Oersted (1777–1851), was granted. A British patent was obtained for the machine, an example being exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Turning his attention to the generation of electricity, he conceived as early as May 1851 the dynamo electric principle with self-excitation that was incorporated in his patent in 1855. Unfortunately, Hjorth held the firm but mistaken belief that if he could use his dynamo to drive a motor he would obtain more power than was consumed in driving the dynamo. The theory of conservation of energy was being only slowly accepted at that time, and Hjorth, with little scientific training, was to be disappointed at the failure of his schemes. He worked with great perseverance and industry to the end of his life on the design of his electrical machines.

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v < Geschäft> make use of, use

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- licence by estoppel

SUBJECT AREA: Horology

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Huygens was born into a cultured and privileged class. His father, Constantijn, was a poet and statesman who had wide interests. Constantijn exerted a strong influence on his son, who was educated at home until he reached the age of 16. Christiaan studied law and mathematics at Ley den University from 1645 to 1647, and continued his studies at the Collegium Arausiacum in Breda until 1649. He then lived at The Hague, where he had the means to devote his time entirely to study. In 1666 he became a Member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris and settled there until his return to The Hague in 1681. He also had a close relationship with the Royal Society and visited London on three occasions, meeting Newton on his last visit in 1689. Huygens had a wide range of interests and made significant contributions in mathematics, astronomy, optics and mechanics. He also made technical advances in optical instruments and horology.

Despite the efforts of Burgi there had been no significant improvement in the performance of ordinary clocks and watches from their inception to Huygens's time, as they were controlled by foliots or balances which had no natural period of oscillation. The pendulum appeared to offer a means of improvement as it had a natural period of oscillation that was almost independent of amplitude. Galileo Galilei had already pioneered the use of a freely suspended pendulum for timing events, but it was by no means obvious how it could be kept swinging and used to control a clock. Towards the end of his life Galileo described such a. mechanism to his son Vincenzio, who constructed a model after his father's death, although it was not completed when he himself died in 1642. This model appears to have been copied in Italy, but it had little influence on horology, partly because of the circumstances in which it was produced and possibly also because it differed radically from clocks of that period. The crucial event occurred on Christmas Day 1656 when Huygens, quite independently, succeeded in adapting an existing spring-driven table clock so that it was not only controlled by a pendulum but also kept it swinging. In the following year he was granted a privilege or patent for this clock, and several were made by the clockmaker Salomon Coster of The Hague. The use of the pendulum produced a dramatic improvement in timekeeping, reducing the daily error from minutes to seconds, but Huygens was aware that the pendulum was not truly isochronous. This error was magnified by the use of the existing verge escapement, which made the pendulum swing through a large arc. He overcame this defect very elegantly by fitting cheeks at the pendulum suspension point, progressively reducing the effective length of the pendulum as the amplitude increased. Initially the cheeks were shaped empirically, but he was later able to show that they should have a cycloidal shape. The cheeks were not adopted universally because they introduced other defects, and the problem was eventually solved more prosaically by way of new escapements which reduced the swing of the pendulum. Huygens's clocks had another innovatory feature: maintaining power, which kept the clock going while it was being wound.

Pendulums could not be used for portable timepieces, which continued to use balances despite their deficiencies. Robert Hooke was probably the first to apply a spring to the balance, but his efforts were not successful. From his work on the pendulum Huygens was well aware of the conditions necessary for isochronism in a vibrating system, and in January 1675, with a flash of inspiration, he realized that this could be achieved by controlling the oscillations of the balance with a spiral spring, an arrangement that is still used in mechanical watches. The first model was made for Huygens in Paris by the clockmaker Isaac Thuret, who attempted to appropriate the invention and patent it himself. Huygens had for many years been trying unsuccessfully to adapt the pendulum clock for use at sea (in order to determine longitude), and he hoped that a balance-spring timekeeper might be better suited for this purpose. However, he was disillusioned as its timekeeping proved to be much more susceptible to changes in temperature than that of the pendulum clock.

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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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Arkwright was the youngest of thirteen children and was apprenticed to a barber; when he was about 18, he followed this trade in Bol ton. In 1755 he married Patients Holt, who bore him a son before she died, and he remarried in 1761, to Margaret Biggins. He prospered until he took a public house as well as his barber shop and began to lose money. After this failure, he travelled around buying women's hair for wigs.

In the late 1760s he began spinning experiments at Preston. It is not clear how much Arkwright copied earlier inventions or was helped by Thomas Highs and John Kay but in 1768 he left Preston for Nottingham, where, with John Smalley and David Thornley as partners, he took out his first patent. They set up a mill worked by a horse where machine-spun yarn was produced successfully. The essential part of this process lay in drawing out the cotton by rollers before it was twisted by a flyer and wound onto the bobbin. The partners' resources were not sufficient for developing their patent so Arkwright found new partners in Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt, hosiers of Nottingham and Derby. Much experiment was necessary before they produced satisfactory yarn, and in 1771 a water-driven mill was built at Cromford, where the spinning process was perfected (hence the name "waterframe" was given to his spinning machine); some of this first yarn was used in the hosiery trade. Sales of all-cotton cloth were initially limited because of the high tax on calicoes, but the tax was lowered in 1774 by Act of Parliament, marking the beginning of the phenomenal growth of the cotton industry. In the evidence for this Act, Arkwright claimed that he had spent £12,000 on his machine. Once Arkwright had solved the problem of mechanical spinning, a bottleneck in the preliminary stages would have formed but for another patent taken out in 1775. This covered all preparatory processing, including some ideas not invented by Arkwright, with the result that it was disputed in 1783 and finally annulled in 1785. It contained the "crank and comb" for removing the cotton web off carding engines which was developed at Cromford and solved the difficulty in carding. By this patent, Arkwright had mechanized all the preparatory and spinning processes, and he began to establish water-powered cotton mills even as far away as Scotland. His success encouraged many others to copy him, so he had great difficulty in enforcing his patent Need died in 1781 and the partnership with Strutt ended soon after. Arkwright became very rich and financed other spinning ventures beyond his immediate control, such as that with Samuel Oldknow. It was estimated that 30,000 people were employed in 1785 in establishments using Arkwright's patents. In 1786 he received a knighthood for delivering an address of thanks when an attempt to assassinate George III failed, and the following year he became High Sheriff of Derbyshire. He purchased the manor of Cromford, where he died in 1792.

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SUBJECT AREA: Automotive engineering, Land transport, Metallurgy

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From his early years, Haynes was a practising Presbyterian and an active prohibitionist. He graduated in 1881 at Worcester, Massachusetts, and a spell of teaching in his home town was interrupted in 1884–5 while he attended the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1886 he became permanently diverted by the discovery of natural gas in Portland. He was soon appointed Superintendent of the local gas undertaking, and then in 1890 he was hired by the Indiana Natural Gas \& Oil Company. While continuing his gas-company employment until 1901, Haynes conducted numerous metallurgical experiments. He also designed an automobile: this led to the establishment of the Haynes- Apperson Company at Kokomo as one of the earliest motor-car makers in North America. From 1905 the firm traded as the Haynes Automobile Company, and before its bankruptcy in 1924 it produced more than 50,000 cars. After 1905, Haynes found the first "Stellite" alloys of cobalt and chromium, and in 1910 he was publicizing the patented material. He then discovered the valuable hardening effect of tungsten, and in 1912 began applying the "improved" Stellite to cutting tools. Three years later, the Haynes Stellite Company was incorporated, with Haynes as President, to work the patents. It was largely from this source that Haynes became a millionaire in 1920. In April 1912, Haynes's attempt to patent the use of chromium with iron to render the product rustless was unsuccessful. However, he re-applied for a US patent on 12 March 1915 and, although this was initially rejected, he persevered and finally obtained recognition of his modified claim. The American Stainless Steel Company licensed the patents of Brearley and Haynes jointly in the USA until the 1930s.

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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, Photography, film and optics

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At the age of 14 Swan was apprenticed to a Sunderland firm of druggists, later joining John Mawson who had opened a pharmacy in Newcastle. While in Sunderland Swan attended lectures at the Athenaeum, at one of which W.E. Staite exhibited electric-arc and incandescent lighting. The impression made on Swan prompted him to conduct experiments that led to his demonstration of a practical working lamp in 1879. As early as 1848 he was experimenting with carbon as a lamp filament, and by 1869 he had mounted a strip of carbon in a vessel exhausted of air as completely as was then possible; however, because of residual air, the filament quickly failed.

Discouraged by the cost of current from primary batteries and the difficulty of achieving a good vacuum, Swan began to devote much of his attention to photography. With Mawson's support the pharmacy was expanded to include a photographic business. Swan's interest in making permanent photographic records led him to patent the carbon process in 1864 and he discovered how to make a sensitive dry plate in place of the inconvenient wet collodian process hitherto in use. He followed this success with the invention of bromide paper, the subject of a British patent in 1879.

Swan resumed his interest in electric lighting. Sprengel's invention of the mercury pump in 1865 provided Swan with the means of obtaining the high vacuum he needed to produce a satisfactory lamp. Swan adopted a technique which was to become an essential feature in vacuum physics: continuing to heat the filament during the exhaustion process allowed the removal of absorbed gases. The inventions of Gramme, Siemens and Brush provided the source of electrical power at reasonable cost needed to make the incandescent lamp of practical service. Swan exhibited his lamp at a meeting in December 1878 of the Newcastle Chemical Society and again the following year before an audience of 700 at the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society. Swan's failure to patent his invention immediately was a tactical error as in November 1879 Edison was granted a British patent for his original lamp, which, however, did not go into production. Parchmentized thread was used in Swan's first commercial lamps, a material soon superseded by the regenerated cellulose filament that he developed. The cellulose filament was made by extruding a solution of nitro-cellulose in acetic acid through a die under pressure into a coagulating fluid, and was used until the ultimate obsolescence of the carbon-filament lamp. Regenerated cellulose became the first synthetic fibre, the further development and exploitation of which he left to others, the patent rights for the process being sold to Courtaulds.

Swan also devised a modification of Planté's secondary battery in which the active material was compressed into a cellular lead plate. This has remained the central principle of all improvements in secondary cells, greatly increasing the storage capacity for a given weight.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles, Weapons and armour

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The son of a prosperous farmer, Eli Whitney as a teenager showed more interest in mechanics than school work. At the age of 15 he began an enterprise business manufacturing nails in his father's workshop, even having to hire help to fulfil his orders. He later determined to acquire a university education and, his father having declined to provide funds, he taught at local schools to obtain the means to attend Leicester Academy, Massachusetts, in preparation for his entry to Yale in 1789. He graduated in 1792 and then decided to study law. He accepted a position in Georgia as a tutor that would have given him time for study; this post did not materialize, but on his journey south he met General Nathanael Greene's widow and the manager of her plantations, Phineas Miller (1764–1803). A feature of agriculture in the southern states was that the land was unsuitable for long-staple cotton but could yield large crops of green-seed cotton. Green-seed cotton was difficult to separate from its seed, and when Whitney learned of the problem in 1793 he quickly devised a machine known as the cotton gin, which provided an effective solution. He formed a partnership with Miller to manufacture the gin and in 1794 obtained a patent. This invention made possible the extraordinary growth of the cotton industry in the United States, but the patent was widely infringed and it was not until 1807, after amendment of the patent laws, that Whitney was able to obtain a favourable decision in the courts and some financial return.

In 1798 Whitney was in financial difficulties following the failure of the initial legal action against infringement of the cotton gin patent, but in that year he obtained a government contract to supply 10,000 muskets within two years with generous advance payments. He built a factory at New Haven, Connecticut, and proposed to use a new method of manufacture, perhaps the first application of the system of interchangeable parts. He failed to supply the firearms in the specified time, and in fact the first 500 guns were not delivered until 1801 and the full contract was not completed until 1809.

In 1812 Whitney made application for a renewal of his cotton gin patent, but this was refused. In the same year, however, he obtained a second contract from the Government for 15,000 firearms and a similar one from New York State which ensured the success of his business.

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f <Finanz, Geschäft, Ind, Patent> exploitation, liquidation, working

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1 agent (representante).

agente de cambio (y bolsa) stockbroker

agente comercial broker

agente en exclusiva sole agent

agente inmobiliario(a) estate agent (British), real estate agent (United States)

agente libre de seguros insurance broker

agente marítimo(a) shipping agent

2 officer (funcionario).

agente de aduanas customs officer

agente doble double agent

agente especial special agent

agente de inmigración immigration officer

agente de policía police officer, policeman, f. policewoman

agente secreto secret agent

agente de seguridad security officer

3 operator.

4 factor.

5 detective constable.

agent (causa activa).

* * *

► adjetivo

1 agent

► nombre masulino o femenino

1 agent

► nombre masculino

1 agent

\

agente de cambio y bolsa stockbroker

agente de policía (hombre) policeman 2 (mujer) policewoman

agente de tráfico (hombre) traffic policeman 2 (mujer) traffic policewoman

agente inmobiliario estate agent

* * *

- agente de bolsa

* * *

SMF (=representante) agent; (=policía) policeman/policewoman; LAm (=oficial) officer, official

SM (Quím) agent

* * *

masculino y femenino

1) (Com, Fin) agent

- agente artístico/de publicidad

- agente de seguros

- agente de viajes

2) (frml) ( funcionario) employee

- agente de policía or del orden

- agente de tráfico or de tránsito

- agente secreto

3) agente masculino (Med, Tec, Ling) agent

* * *

= agent, instrumentality, officer, broker, enforcer.

Ex. These forms usually provide space for the user or his agent to enter the relevant information.

Ex. But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use.

Ex. All officers were remorseful about taking a life but all would make the same decision again if necessary.

Ex. Above all, the information manager is a resource manager as well as a kind of broker between increasingly complex information technology and managers/users.

Ex. They merely act as a conduit of state funds rather than an enforcer of the rules meant to guarantee the lawful use of those funds.

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* agente aglutinante = binder, bonding agent.

* agente antiaglutinante = anti-caking agent.

* agente antiapelmazante = anti-caking agent.

* agente bibliotecario = library agent.

* agente biológico = biological agent.

* agente cancerígeno = carcinogen.

* agente comercial = commercial vendor.

* agente de absorción = absorber.

* agente de bolsa = stockbroker, market trader, stock market trader, share market trader.

* agente de búsqueda = intelligent search agent, search agent.

* agente de cambio = agent of(for) change, force for change, force of change.

* agente de fermentación = leavening agent, leavening, raising agent.

* agente del cambio = change agent.

* agente del orden = law enforcement officer, law-enforcement official, law enforcer.

* agente de noticias web = newsbot.

* agente depresivo = downer, depressant.

* agente de seguros = insurance agent, insurer, insurance broker.

* agente de viajes = travel agent.

* agente estresante = stressor.

* agente extranjero = foreign agent.

* agente federal = federal agent.

* agente furtivo = infiltrator.

* agente informático = software agent.

* agente inmobiliario = realtor.

* agente inteligente = intelligent agent, mining agent, intelligent search agent, search agent.

* agente inteligente de compras = shopping agent.

* agente irritante = irritant, allergen.

* Agente Naranja = Agent Orange.

* agente neutralizador = neutralising agent.

* agente oxidante = oxidant, oxidising agent.

* agente patógeno = pathogen.

* agente provocador = agent-provocateur.

* agente químico = chemical agent.

* agente reactivo = reagent.

* agente secador = drying agent.

* agente secreto = undercover agent, secret agent.

* agentes federales, los = feds, the.

* hacerse agente secreto = go undercover.

* * *

masculino y femenino

1) (Com, Fin) agent

- agente artístico/de publicidad

- agente de seguros

- agente de viajes

2) (frml) ( funcionario) employee

- agente de policía or del orden

- agente de tráfico or de tránsito

- agente secreto

3) agente masculino (Med, Tec, Ling) agent

* * *

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A ( Com, Fin) agent

artistic agent

sales representative, sales rep ( colloq)

stockbroker

export agent

real estate agent ( AmE), realtor ( AmE), estate agent ( BrE)

patent agent

advertising agent

insurance broker

sales agent

travel agent

real estate agent ( AmE), realtor ( AmE), estate agent ( BrE)

( Inf) intelligent agent

literary agent

advertising agent

B ( frml) (funcionario) employee

( period); police officer

police officer

security guard

≈ traffic policeman ( in US), ≈ traffic warden ( in UK)

(Arg, Méx) agente de tráfico

undercover agent

special agent

agent provocateur

secret agent

agente masculine

1 ( Med, Tec) agent

2 ( Ling) agent

3 ( Quím) agent

agente oxidante/químico oxidizing/chemical agent

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◊ agente de bolsa stockbroker;

◊ agente de policía police officer;

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♦ nmf

1. [representante] agent

agente de bolsa stockbroker;

agente de cambio stockbroker;

agente comercial broker;

agente inmobiliario Br estate agent, US real estate agent;

agente libre de seguros insurance broker;

agente literario literary agent;

agente de patentes patent agent;

agente de la propiedad Br estate agent, US real estate agent;

agente de seguros insurance broker;

agente teatral theatrical agent

2. [funcionario] officer

agente doble double agent;

agente de inmigración immigration officer;

agente de policía police officer, policeman, f policewoman;

agente secreto secret agent;

agente de seguridad security officer;

3. Econ agentes económicos o sociales social partners

♦ nm

1. [causa activa] agent

2. Gram agent

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I m agent

II m/f agent

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agente nmf

1) : agent

agente de viajes : travel agent

agente de bolsa : stockbroker

agente de tráfico : traffic officer

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agente n

1. (representante) agent

2. (policía) policeman [pl. policemen] / policewoman [pl. policewomen]

obstacle, drag, snag, balk.

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► nombre masculino

1 (barrera) obstacle

■ las escaleras pueden ser un insuperable obstáculo para el minusválido stairs can be an unsurmountable obstacle for a disabled person

2 (inconveniente) objection

■ no vamos a avanzar si sigues poniendo obstáculos we won't get anywhere if you keep raising objections

3 (valla) fence, jump

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salvar un obstáculo to overcome an obstacle

carrera de obstáculos (para niños) obstacle race 2 (de caballos, atletas) steeplechase

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1) [físico] obstacle

2) (=dificultad) obstacle, hindrance

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masculino obstacle

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= encumbrance, handicap, hurdle, impairment, impediment, rough spot, wall, barrier, bottleneck, hindrance, obstacle, inhibition, obstruction, stumbling block, bar, blockage, roadblock, block.

Ex. Meanwhile we are asked to accept encumbrances that will needlessly impair the effectiveness of our catalogs for an indefinite time to come.

Ex. A high exhaustivity of indexing, then, is beneficial where a thorough search is required, but may be a handicap when only a few highly relevant documents are sought.

Ex. Schoolchildren, students, and other whose native language is written in a non-Roman script may find alphabetical order according to Roman characters an almost insurmountable hurdle in the use of catalogues and indexes.

Ex. A well-designed multimodal application can be used by people with a wide variety of impairments.

Ex. It may be decided that the practical impediments to the distribution and assignment of such numbers outweigh their potential usefulness.

Ex. But despite the many catalog worlds, and herein lies the rub -- or at least a rough spot -- we have been proceeding on the assumption that the catalog exists in the form of the data distributed by the Library of Congress.

Ex. In the map library, the electronic medium is shaking the foundations of cartographic communication and threatening the bring the walls crashing down.

Ex. While the number of projects proposed was innumerable, 3 barriers remain: red tape; hard currency; and Western barriers to providing high technology to the Eastern bloc.

Ex. A number of research groups have investigated the use of knowledge-based systems as a means of avoiding this bottleneck.

Ex. The overall effect of the labels and signs is not so much help but hindrance through information overload.

Ex. Conversely, an unsympathetic principal can be the greatest obstacle to library development within a school.

Ex. This has been a major source of inhibition to the development of British efforts to create a bank of microcopy versions of theses accepted.

Ex. Harmonization of technical standards is one of the Community's principal goals in creating a common market devoid of obstructions to the free movement of goods.

Ex. These stumbling blocks can often be bypassed in the initial stages of OSI implementation by choosing applications that do not require close integration with existing library systems.

Ex. Publications describing or revealing an invention can be a bar to issuance of a patent.

Ex. The problem in relation to communication is probably the most difficult of them all, as the blockage lies in people rather than with the library.

Ex. The roadblock to increasing book translations into English is not that there is insufficient funding but that few publishers know about grant schemes that are available.

Ex. Emotional blocks to reading can be formed by an unsatisfactory relationship with a teacher.

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* ayudar a eliminar obstáculos = clear + the path, clear + the way.

* carrera de obstáculos = steeplechase.

* constituir un obstáculo = constitute + an obstacle.

* creación de obstáculos = fence building.

* eliminar obstáculos = clear + the path, clear + the way.

* eliminar un obstáculo = remove + barrier, sweep away + obstacle.

* encontrarse con un obstáculo = face + obstacle.

* enfrentarse a un obstáculo = address + barrier.

* obstáculo insalvable = insurmountable obstacle.

* obstáculos = logjam [log-jam].

* poner obstáculos = cramp.

* preparación del terreno eliminando todo tipo de obstáculos = land-clearing.

* presentar un obstáculo = pose + obstacle.

* que pone obstáculos = obstructive.

* reducir un obstáculo = lower + barrier.

* remover un obstáculo = remove + barrier.

* remover un obstáculo, eliminar un obstáculo = remove + obstacle.

* ser un obstáculo = stand in + the way (of).

* sin obstáculos = unchecked, unhindered, unimpeded.

* sin obstáculos de por medio = uncluttered.

* sin obstáculos, sin obstrucciones = unobstructed.

* superar un obstáculo = overcome + obstacle, jump over + hurdle, overcome + barrier, conquer + barrier.

* vencer un obstáculo = surmount + obstacle, conquer + barrier.

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masculino obstacle

* * *

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obstacle

quitaron los obstáculos del camino they cleared the obstacles from the road, they cleared the road of obstacles

superar or salvar un obstáculo to overcome an obstacle

no fue obstáculo para que ganara it did not stop o prevent him (from) winning

me puso muchos obstáculos he put many obstacles in my path

el único obstáculo entre nosotros y la victoria the only obstacle between us and victory, the only thing that stands/stood between us and victory

un obstáculo para el éxito del proyecto an obstacle to the success of the project

carrera

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obstáculo nm

1. [impedimento] obstacle ( para to);

2. [en una carrera] hurdle

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m obstacle;

carrera de obstáculos obstacle race;

ponerle obstáculos a alguien make things difficult for s.o.;

ponerle obstáculos a algo make sth difficult

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obstáculo nm

impedimento: obstacle

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obstáculo n obstacle

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Several members of Champion's Quaker family were actively engaged as merchants in Bristol during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Port records show Nehemiah in receipt of Cornish copper ore at Bristol's Crews Hole smelting works by 1706, in association with the newly formed brassworks of the city. He later became a leading partner, managing the company some time after Abraham Darby left the Bristol works to pursue his interest at Coalbrookdale. Champion, probably in company with his father, became the largest customer for Darby's Coalbrookdale products and also acted as Agent, at least briefly, for Thomas Newcomen.

A patent in 1723 related to two separate innovations introduced by the brass company.

The first improved the output of brass by granulating the copper constituent and increasing its surface area. A greater proportion of zinc vapour could permeate the granules compared with the previous practice, resulting in the technique being adopted generally in the cementation process used at the time. The latter part of the same patent introduced a new type of coal-fired furnace which facilitated annealing in bulk so replacing the individual processing of pieces. The principle of batch annealing was generally adopted, although the type of furnace was later improved. A further patent, in 1739, in the name of Nehemiah, concerned overshot water-wheels possibly intended for use in conjunction with the Newcomen atmospheric pumping engine employed for recycling water by his son William.

Champion's two sons, John and William, and their two sons, both named John, were all concerned with production of non-ferrous metals and responsible for patented innovations. Nehemiah, shortly before his death, is believed to have partnered William at the Warmley works to exploit his son's new patent for producing metallic zinc.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity

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When he was 14 years old Davenport was apprenticed to a blacksmith for seven years. At the close of his apprenticeship in 1823 he opened a blacksmith's shop in Brandon, Vermont. He began experimenting with electromagnets after observing one in use at the Penfield Iron Works at Crown Point, New York, in 1831. He saw the device as a possible source of power and by July 1834 had constructed his first electric motor. Having totally abandoned his regular business, Davenport built and exhibited a number of miniature machines; he utilized an electric motor to propel a model car around a circular track in 1836, and this became the first recorded instance of an electric railway. An application for a patent and a model were destroyed in a fire at the United States Patent Office in December 1836, but a second application was made and Davenport received a patent the following year for Improvements in Propelling Machinery by Magnetism and Electromagnetism. A British patent was also obtained. A workshop and laboratory were established in New York, but Davenport had little financial backing for his experiments. He built a total of over one hundred motors but was defeated by the inability to obtain an inexpensive source of power. Using an electric motor of his own design to operate a printing press in 1840, he undertook the publication of a journal, The Electromagnet and Mechanics' Intelligencer. This was the first American periodical on electricity, but it was discontinued after a few issues. In failing health he retired to Vermont where in the last year of his life he continued experiments in electromagnetism.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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He was the fifth child of Charles and Ann Stalcrop Evans, and by the age of 15 he had four sisters and seven brothers. Nothing is known of his schooling, but at the age of 17 he was apprenticed to a Newport wheelwright and wagon-maker. At 19 he was enrolled in a Delaware Militia Company in the Revolutionary War but did not see active service. About this time he invented a machine for bending and cutting off the wires in textile carding combs. In July 1782, with his younger brother, Joseph, he moved to Tuckahoe on the eastern shore of the Delaware River, where he had the basic idea of the automatic flour mill. In July 1782, with his elder brothers John and Theophilus, he bought part of his father's Newport farm, on Red Clay Creek, and planned to build a mill there. In 1793 he married Sarah Tomlinson, daughter of a Delaware farmer, and joined his brothers at Red Clay Creek. He worked there for some seven years on his automatic mill, from about 1783 to 1790.

His system for the automatic flour mill consisted of bucket elevators to raise the grain, a horizontal screw conveyor, other conveying devices and a "hopper boy" to cool and dry the meal before gathering it into a hopper feeding the bolting cylinder. Together these components formed the automatic process, from incoming wheat to outgoing flour packed in barrels. At that time the idea of such automation had not been applied to any manufacturing process in America. The mill opened, on a non-automatic cycle, in 1785. In January 1786 Evans applied to the Delaware legislature for a twenty-five-year patent, which was granted on 30 January 1787 although there was much opposition from the Quaker millers of Wilmington and elsewhere. He also applied for patents in Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Hampshire. In May 1789 he went to see the mill of the four Ellicot brothers, near Baltimore, where he was impressed by the design of a horizontal screw conveyor by Jonathan Ellicot and exchanged the rights to his own elevator for those of this machine. After six years' work on his automatic mill, it was completed in 1790. In the autumn of that year a miller in Brandywine ordered a set of Evans's machinery, which set the trend toward its general adoption. A model of it was shown in the Market Street shop window of Robert Leslie, a watch-and clockmaker in Philadelphia, who also took it to England but was unsuccessful in selling the idea there.

In 1790 the Federal Plant Laws were passed; Evans's patent was the third to come within the new legislation. A detailed description with a plate was published in a Philadelphia newspaper in January 1791, the first of a proposed series, but the paper closed and the series came to nothing. His brother Joseph went on a series of sales trips, with the result that some machinery of Evans's design was adopted. By 1792 over one hundred mills had been equipped with Evans's machinery, the millers paying a royalty of $40 for each pair of millstones in use. The series of articles that had been cut short formed the basis of Evans's The Young Millwright and Miller's Guide, published first in 1795 after Evans had moved to Philadelphia to set up a store selling milling supplies; it was 440 pages long and ran to fifteen editions between 1795 and 1860.

Evans was fairly successful as a merchant. He patented a method of making millstones as well as a means of packing flour in barrels, the latter having a disc pressed down by a toggle-joint arrangement. In 1801 he started to build a steam carriage. He rejected the idea of a steam wheel and of a low-pressure or atmospheric engine. By 1803 his first engine was running at his store, driving a screw-mill working on plaster of Paris for making millstones. The engine had a 6 in. (15 cm) diameter cylinder with a stroke of 18 in. (45 cm) and also drove twelve saws mounted in a frame and cutting marble slabs at a rate of 100 ft (30 m) in twelve hours. He was granted a patent in the spring of 1804. He became involved in a number of lawsuits following the extension of his patent, particularly as he increased the licence fee, sometimes as much as sixfold. The case of Evans v. Samuel Robinson, which Evans won, became famous and was one of these. Patent Right Oppression Exposed, or Knavery Detected, a 200-page book with poems and prose included, was published soon after this case and was probably written by Oliver Evans. The steam engine patent was also extended for a further seven years, but in this case the licence fee was to remain at a fixed level. Evans anticipated Edison in his proposal for an "Experimental Company" or "Mechanical Bureau" with a capital of thirty shares of $100 each. It came to nothing, however, as there were no takers. His first wife, Sarah, died in 1816 and he remarried, to Hetty Ward, the daughter of a New York innkeeper. He was buried in the Bowery, on Lower Manhattan; the church was sold in 1854 and again in 1890, and when no relative claimed his body he was reburied in an unmarked grave in Trinity Cemetery, 57th Street, Broadway.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Thomas Johnson was an assistant to William Radcliffe c.1802 in his developments of the sizing machine and hand looms. Johnson is described by Edward Baines (1835) as "an ingenious but dissipated young man to whom he [Radcliffe] explained what he wanted, and whose fertile invention suggested a great variety of expedients, so that he obtained the name of the “conjuror” among his fellow-workmen". Johnson's genius, and Radcliffe's judgement and perseverance, at length produced the dressing-machine that was soon applied to power looms and made their use economic. Cotton warps had to be dressed with a starch paste to prevent them from fraying as they were being woven. Up to this time, the paste had had to be applied as the warp was unwound from the back of the loom, which meant that only short lengths could be treated and then left to dry, holding up the weaver. Radcliffe carried out the dressing and beaming in a separate machine so that weaving could proceed without interruption. Work on the dressing-machine was carried out in 1802 and patents were taken out in 1803 and 1804. These were made out in Johnson's name because Radcliffe was afraid that if his own name were used other people, particularly foreigners, would discover his secrets. Two more patents were taken out for improvements to hand looms. The first of these was a take-up motion for the woven cloth that automatically wound the cloth onto a roller as the weaver operated the loom. This was later incorporated by H.Horrocks into his own power loom design.

Radcliffe and Johnson also developed the "dandy-loom", which was a more compact form of hand loom and later became adapted for weaving by power. Johnson was the inventor of the first circular or revolving temples, which kept the woven cloth at the right width. In the patent specifications there is a patent in 1805 by Thomas Johnson and James Kay for an improved power loom and another in 1807 for a vertical type of power loom. Johnson could have been involved with further patents in the 1830s and 1840s for vertical power looms and dressing-machines, which would put his death after 1846.

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SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors, Textiles

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The son of a millwright, Singer was employed as an unskilled labourer at the age of 12, but later gained wide experience as a travelling machinist. He also found employment as an actor. On 16 May 1839, while living at Lockport, Illinois, he obtained his first patent for a rock-drilling machine, but he soon squandered the money he made. Then in 1849, while at Pittsburgh, he secured a patent for a wood-and metal-carving machine that he had begun five years previously; however, a boiler explosion in the factory destroyed his machine and left him penniless.

Near the end of 1850 Singer was engaged to redesign the Lerow \& Blodgett sewing machine at the Boston shop of Orson C.Phelps, where the machine was being repaired. He built an improved version in eleven days that was sufficiently different for him to patent on 12 August 1851. He formed a partnership with Phelps and G.B. Zieber and they began to market the invention. Singer soon purchased Phelps's interest, although Phelps continued to manufacture the machines. Then Edward Clark acquired a one-third interest and with Singer bought out Zieber. These two, with dark's flair for promotion and marketing, began to create a company which eventually would become the largest manufacturer of sewing machines exported worldwide, with subsidiary factories in England.

However, first Singer had to defend his patent, which was challenged by an earlier Boston inventor, Elias Howe. Although after a long lawsuit Singer had to pay royalties, it was the Singer machine which eventually captured the market because it could do continuous stitching. In 1856 the Great Sewing Machine Combination, the first important pooling arrangement in American history, was formed to share the various patents so that machines could be built without infringements and manufacture could be expanded without fear of litigation. Singer contributed his monopoly on the needle-bar cam with his 1851 patent. He secured twenty additional patents, so that his original straight-needle vertical design for lock-stitching eventually included such refinements as a continuous wheel-feed, yielding presser-foot, and improved cam for moving the needle-bar. A new model, introduced in 1856, was the first to be intended solely for use in the home.

Initially Phelps made all the machines for Singer. Then a works was established in New York where the parts were assembled by skilled workers through filing and fitting. Each machine was therefore a "one-off" but Singer machines were always advertised as the best on the market and sold at correspondingly high prices. Gradually, more specialized machine tools were acquired, but it was not until long after Singer had retired to Europe in 1863 that Clark made the change to mass production. Sales of machines numbered 810 in 1853 and 21,000 ten years later.

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1) лицензия

2) официальное разрешение

SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

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Interested from childhood in anything mechanical, as a teenager Armstrong constructed a variety of wireless equipment in the attic of his parents' home, including spark-gap transmitters and receivers with iron-filing "coherer" detectors capable of producing weak Morse-code signals. In 1912, while still a student of engineering at Columbia University, he applied positive, i.e. regenerative, feedback to a Lee De Forest triode amplifier to just below the point of oscillation and obtained a gain of some 1,000 times, giving a receiver sensitivity very much greater than hitherto possible. Furthermore, by allowing the circuit to go into full oscillation he found he could generate stable continuous-waves, making possible the first reliable CW radio transmitter. Sadly, his claim to priority with this invention, for which he filed US patents in 1913, the year he graduated from Columbia, led to many years of litigation with De Forest, to whom the US Supreme Court finally, but unjustly, awarded the patent in 1934. The engineering world clearly did not agree with this decision, for the Institution of Radio Engineers did not revoke its previous award of a gold medal and he subsequently received the highest US scientific award, the Franklin Medal, for this discovery.

During the First World War, after some time as an instructor at Columbia University, he joined the US Signal Corps laboratories in Paris, where in 1918 he invented the superheterodyne, a major contribution to radio-receiver design and for which he filed a patent in 1920. The principle of this circuit, which underlies virtually all modern radio, TV and radar reception, is that by using a local oscillator to convert, or "heterodyne", a wanted signal to a lower, fixed, "intermediate" frequency it is possible to obtain high amplification and selectivity without the need to "track" the tuning of numerous variable circuits.

Returning to Columbia after the war and eventually becoming Professor of Electrical Engineering, he made a fortune from the sale of his patent rights and used part of his wealth to fund his own research into further problems in radio communication, particularly that of receiver noise. In 1933 he filed four patents covering the use of wide-band frequency modulation (FM) to achieve low-noise, high-fidelity sound broadcasting, but unable to interest RCA he eventually built a complete broadcast transmitter at his own expense in 1939 to prove the advantages of his system. Unfortunately, there followed another long battle to protect and exploit his patents, and exhausted and virtually ruined he took his own life in 1954, just as the use of FM became an established technique.

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