principal+model

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

[br]

[br]

[br]

Francis Crossley was the youngest of three brothers employed in their father's carpet-weaving business in Halifax and who took over the running of the company on their father's death in 1837. Francis seems to have been the one with technical ability, for it was he who saw the possibilities of weaving by power. Growth of the company was rapid through his policy of acquiring patents and then improving them, and it was soon at the forefront of the carpet-manufacturing trade. He had taken out rights on the patents of John Hill of Manchester, but his experiments with Hill's looms for weaving carpets were not successful.

In the spring of 1850 Francis asked a textile inventor, George Collier of Barnsley, to develop a power loom for carpet manufacture. Collier produced a model that was a distinct advance on earlier looms, and Francis engaged him to perfect a power loom for weaving tapestry and Brussels carpets. After a great deal of money had been expended, a patent was taken out in 1850 in the name of his brother, Joseph Crossley, for a loom that could weave velvet as well as carpets and included some of the ideas of the American E.B. Bigelow. This new loom proved to be a great advance on all the earlier ones, and thus brought the Crossleys a great fortune from both sales of patent rights and the production of carpets from their mills, which were soon enlarged.

According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Francis Crossley was Mayor of Halifax in 1849 and 1850, but Hogg gives this position to his elder brother John. In 1852 Francis was returned to Parliament as the Liberal member for Halifax, and in 1859 he became the member for the West Riding. Among his benefactions, in 1855 he gave to the town of Halifax a twelve-acre park that cost £41,300; a statue of him was erected there. In the same year he endowed twenty-one almshouses. In 1863 a baronetcy was conferred upon him in recognition of his commercial and public services, which he continued to perform until his death. In 1870 he gave the London Missionary Society £20,000, their largest single donation up to that time, and another £10,000 to the Congregational Pastor's Retiring Fund. He became ill when on a journey to the Holy Land in 1869, but although he made a partial recovery he grew worse again towards the end of 1871 and died early in the following year. He left £800,000 in his will.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

[br]

[br]

[br]

From 1844 until 1962, the Clyde shipyard of William Denny and Brothers, Dumbarton, produced over 1,500 ships, trained innumerable students of all nationalities in shipbuilding and marine engineering, and for the seventy-plus years of their existence were accepted worldwide as the leaders in the application of science to ship design and construction. Until the closure of the yard members of the Denny family were among the partners and later directors of the firm: they included men as distinguished as Dr Peter Denny (1821(?)–95), Sir Archibald Denny (1860–1936) and Sir Maurice Denny (1886– 1955), the main collaborator in the design of the Denny-Brown ship stabilizer.

One of the most influential of this shipbuilding family was William Denny, now referred to as William 3! His early education was at Dumbarton, then on Jersey and finally at the Royal High School, Edinburgh, before he commenced an apprenticeship at his father's shipyard. From the outset he not only showed great aptitude for learning and hard work but also displayed an ability to create good relationships with all he came into contact with. At the early age of 21 he was admitted a partner of the shipbuilding business of William Denny and Brothers, and some years later also of the associated engineering firm of Denny \& Co. His deep-felt interest in what is now known as industrial relations led him in 1871 to set up a piecework system of payment in the shipyard. In this he was helped by the Yard Manager, Richard Ramage, who later was to found the Leith shipyard, which produced the world's most elegant steam yachts. This research was published later as a pamphlet called The Worth of Wages, an unusual and forward-looking action for the 1860s, when Denny maintained that an absentee employer should earn as much contempt and disapproval as an absentee landlord! In 1880 he initiated an awards scheme for all company employees, with grants and awards for inventions and production improvements. William Denny was not slow to impose new methods and to research naval architecture, a special interest being progressive ship trials with a view to predicting effective horsepower. In time this led to his proposal to the partners to build a ship model testing tank beside the Dumbarton shipyard; this scheme was completed in 1883 and was to the third in the world (after the Admiralty tank at Torquay, managed by William Froude and the Royal Netherlands Navy facility at Amsterdam, under B.J. Tideman. In 1876 the Denny Shipyard started work with mild-quality shipbuilding steel on hulls for the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, and in 1879 the world's first two ships of any size using this weight-saving material were produced: they were the Rotomahana for the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand and the Buenos Ayrean for the Allan Line of Glasgow. On the naval-architecture side he was involved in Denny's proposals for standard cross curves of stability for all ships, which had far-reaching effects and are now accepted worldwide. He served on the committee working on improvements to the Load Line regulations and many other similar public bodies. After a severe bout of typhoid and an almost unacceptable burden of work, he left the United Kingdom for South America in June 1886 to attend to business with La Platense Flotilla Company, an associate company of William Denny and Brothers. In March the following year, while in Buenos Aires, he died by his own hand, a death that caused great and genuine sadness in the West of Scotland and elsewhere.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

[br]

[br]

[br]

Ferguson's father was a small farmer who expected his son to help on the farm from an early age. As a result he received little formal education, and on leaving school joined his brother in a backstreet workshop in Belfast repairing motor bikes. By the age of 19 he had built his own bike and began hill-climbing competitions and racing. His successes in these ventures gained useful publicity for the workshop. In 1907 he built his own car and entered it into competitions, and in 1909 became the first person in Britain to build and fly a machine that was heavier than air.

On the outbreak of the First World War he was appointed by the Irish Department of Agriculture to supervise the operation and maintenance of all farm tractors. His experiences convinced him that even the Ford tractor and the implements available for it were inadequate for the task, and he began to experiment with his own plough designs. The formation of the Ferguson-Sherman Corporation resulted in the production of thousands of the ploughs he had designed for the Ford tractor, but in 1928 Ford discontinued production of tractors, and Ferguson returned to Ireland. He immediately began to design his own tractor. Six years of development led to the building of a prototype that weighed only 16 cwt (813kg). In 1936 David Brown of Huddersfield, Yorkshire, began production of these tractors for Ferguson, but the partnership was not wholly successful and was dissolved after three years. In 1939 Ferguson and Ford reached their famous "Handshake agreement", in which no formal contract was signed, and the mass production of the Ford Ferguson system tractors began that year. During the next nine years 300,000 tractors and a million implements were produced under this agreement. However, on the death of Henry Ford the company began production, under his son, of their own tractor. Ferguson returned to the UK and negotiated a deal with the Standard Motor Company of Coventry for the production of his tractor. At the same time he took legal action against Ford, which resulted in that company being forced to stop production and to pay damages amounting to US$9.5 million.

Aware that his equipment would only operate when set up properly, Ferguson established a training school at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire which was to be a model for other manufacturers. In 1953, by amicable agreement, Ferguson amalgamated with the Massey Harris Company to form Massey Ferguson, and in so doing added harvesting machinery to the range of equipment produced. A year later he disposed of his shares in the new company and turned his attention again to the motor car. Although a number of experimental cars were produced, there were no long-lasting developments from this venture other than a four-wheel-drive system based on hydraulics; this was used by a number of manufacturers on occasional models. Ferguson's death heralded the end of these developments.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Weapons and armour

[br]

[br]

[br]

Fermi was one of the most versatile of twentieth-century physicists, one of the few to excel in both theory and experiment. His greatest theoretical achievements lay in the field of statistics and his theory of beta decay. His statistics, parallel to but independent of Dirac, were the key to the modern theory of metals and the statistical modds of the atomic nucleus. On the experimental side, his most notable discoveries were artificial radioactivity produced by neutron bombardment and the realization of a controlled nuclear chain reaction, in the world's first nuclear reactor.

Fermi received a conventional education with a chemical bias, but reached proficiency in mathematics and physics largely through his own reading. He studied at Pisa University, where he taught himself modern physics and then travelled to extend his knowledge, spending time with Max Born at Göttingen. On his return to Italy, he secured posts in Florence and, in 1927, in Rome, where he obtained the first Italian Chair in Theoretical Physics, a subject in which Italy had so far lagged behind. He helped to bring about a rebirth of physics in Italy and devoted himself to the application of statistics to his model of the atom. For this work, Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938, but in December of that year, finding the Fascist regime uncongenial, he transferred to the USA and Columbia University. The news that nuclear fission had been achieved broke shortly before the Second World War erupted and it stimulated Fermi to consider this a way of generating secondary nuclear emission and the initiation of chain reactions. His experiments in this direction led first to the discovery of slow neutrons.

Fermi's work assumed a more practical aspect when he was invited to join the Manhattan Project for the construction of the first atomic bomb. His small-scale work at Columbia became large-scale at Chicago University. This culminated on 2 December 1942 when the first controlled nuclear reaction took place at Stagg Field, Chicago, an historic event indeed. Later, Fermi spent most of the period from September 1944 to early 1945 at Los Alamos, New Mexico, taking part in the preparations for the first test explosion of the atomic bomb on 16 July 1945. President Truman invited Fermi to serve on his Committee to advise him on the use of the bomb. Then Chicago University established an Institute for Nuclear Studies and offered Fermi a professorship, which he took up early in 1946, spending the rest of his relatively short life there.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

[br]

[br]

[br]

Following his education at Brisbane Academy in Largs, William Fife (the third generation of the name) became apprenticed at the age of 14 to the already famous yacht-building yard owned by his family at Fairlie in Ayrshire. On completion of his apprenticeship, he joined the Paisley shipbuilders John Fullerton \& Co. to gain experience in iron shipbuilding before going on as Manager to the Marquis of Ailsa's Culzean Steam Launch and Yacht Works. Initially the works was sited below the famous castle at Culzean, but some years later it moved a few miles along the Ayrshire Coast to Maidens. The Culzean Company was wound up in 1887 and Fife then returned to the family yard, where he remained for the rest of his working life. Many outstanding yachts were the product of his hours on the drawing board, including auxiliary sailing cruisers, motor yachts and well-known racing craft. The most outstanding designs were for two of Sir Thomas Lipton's challengers for the America's Cup: Shamrock I and Shamrock III. The latter yacht was tested at the Ship Model Experiment Tank owned by Denny of Dumbarton before being built at their Leven Shipyard in 1903. Shamrock III may have been one of the earliest America's Cup yachts to have been designed with a high level of scientific input. The hull construction was unusual for the early years of the twentieth century, being of alloy steel with decks of aluminium.

William Fife was decorated for his service to shipbuilding during the First World War. With the onset of the Great Depression the shipyard's output slowed, and in the 1930s it was sold to other interests; this was the end of the 120-year Fife dynasty.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Public utilities

[br]

[br]

[br]

Gramme trained as a carpenter and showed an early talent for working with machinery. Moving to Paris he found employment in the Alliance factory as a model maker. With a growing interest in electricity he left to become an instrument maker with Heinrich Daniel Rühmkorff. In 1870 he patented the uniformly wound ring-armature dynamo with which his name is associated. Together with Hippolyte Fontaine, in 1871 Gramme opened a factory to manufacture his dynamos. They rapidly became a commercial success for both arc lighting and electrochemical purposes, international publicity being achieved at exhibitions in Vienna, Paris and Philadelphia. It was the realization that a Gramme machine was capable of running as a motor, i.e. the reversibility of function, that illustrated the entire concept of power transmission by electricity. This was first publicly demonstrated in 1873. In 1874 Gramme reduced the size and increased the efficiency of his generators by relying completely on the principle of self-excitation. It was the first practical machine in which were combined the features of continuity of commutation, self-excitation, good lamination of the armature core and a reasonably good magnetic circuit. This dynamo, together with the self-regulating arc lamps then available, made possible the innumerable electric-lighting schemes that followed. These were of the greatest importance in demonstrating that electric lighting was a practical and economic means of illumination. Gramme also designed an alternator to operate Jablochkoff candles. For some years he took an active part in the operations of the Société Gramme and also experimented in his own workshop without collaboration, but made no further contribution to electrical technology.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Horology

[br]

[br]

[br]

John Harwood served an apprenticeship as a watch repairer in Bolton, and after service in the First World War he obtained a post with a firm of jewellers in Douglas, Isle of Man. He became interested in the self-winding wrist watch, not because of the convenience of not having to wind it, but because of its potential to keep the mainspring fully wound and to exclude dust and moisture from the watch movement. His experience at the bench had taught him that these were the most common factors to affect adversely the reliability of watches. Completely unaware of previous work in this area, in 1922 he started experimenting and two years later he had produced a serviceable model for which he was granted a patent in 1924. The watch operated on the pedometer principle, the mainspring being wound by a pivoted weight that oscillated in the watch case as a result of the motion of the arm. The hands of his watch were set by rotating the bezel surrounding the dial, dispensing with the usual winding/hand-setting stem which allowed dust and moisture to enter the watch case. He took the watch to Switzerland, but he was unable to persuade the watchmaking firms to produce it until he had secured independent finance to cover the cost of tooling. The Harwood Self-Winding Watch Company Ltd was set up in 1928 to market the watches, but although several thousand were produced the company became a victim of the slump and closed down in 1932. The first practical self-winding watch also operated on the pedometer principle and is attributed to Abraham-Louis Perrellet (1770). The method was refined by Breguet in France and by Recordon, who patented the device in England, but it proved troublesome and went out of fashion. There was a brief revival of interest in self-winding watches towards the end of the nineteenth century, but they never achieved great popularity until after the Second World War, when they used either self-winding mechanisms similar to that devised by Harwood or weights which rotated in the case.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Horology, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

Son of Revd John Hooke, minister of the parish, he was a sickly child who was subject to headaches which prevented protracted study. He devoted his time while alone to making mechanical models including a wooden clock. On the death of his father in October 1648 he was left £100 and went to London, where he became a pupil of Sir Peter Lely and then went to Westminster School under Dr Busby. There he learned the classical languages, some Hebrew and oriental languages while mastering six books of Euclid in one week. In 1653 he entered Christ Church College, Oxford, where he graduated MA in 1663, after studying chemistry and astronomy. In 1662 he was appointed Curator of Experiments to the Royal Society and was elected a Fellow in 1663. In 1665 his appointment was made permanent and he was given apartments in Gresham College, where he lived until his death in 1703. He was an indefatigable experimenter, perhaps best known for the invention of the universal joint named after him. The properties of the atmosphere greatly engaged him and he devised many forms of the barometer. He was the first to apply the spiral spring to the regulation of the balance wheel of the watch in an attempt to measure longitude at sea, but he did not publish his results until after Huygens's reinvention of the device in 1675. Several of his "new watches" were made by Thomas Tompion, one of which was presented to King Charles II. He is said to have invented, among other devices, thirty different ways of flying, the first practical system of telegraphy, an odometer, a hearing aid, an arithmetical machine and a marine barometer. Hooke was a small man, somewhat deformed, with long, lank hair, who went about stooped and moved very quickly. He was of a melancholy and mistrustful disposition, ill-tempered and sharp-tongued. He slept little, often working all night and taking a nap during the day. John Aubrey, his near-contemporary, wrote of Hooke, "He is certainly the greatest Mechanick this day in the World." He is said to have been the first to establish the true principle of the arch. His eyesight failed and he was blind for the last year of his life. He is best known for his Micrographia, or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies, first published in 1665. After the Great Fire of London, he exhibited a model for the rebuilding of the City. This was not accepted, but it did result in Hooke's appointment as one of two City Surveyors. This proved a lucrative post and through it Hooke amassed a fortune of some thousands of pounds, which was found intact after his death some thirty years later. It had never been opened in the interim period. Among the buildings he designed were the new Bethlehem (Bedlam) Hospital, the College of Physicians and Montague House.

[br]