production experiments

1) Engineering: full-scale test, industrial test, use test

2) Railway term: production testing

3) Economy: commercial tests

4) Telecommunications: performance test

5) Information technology: release testing

6) Automation: industrial acceptance, production experiments, runoff

7) Makarov: commercial test, commercial testing, field trials, production tests

8) Electrical engineering: industrial tests

SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Mining and extraction technology

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After studying chemistry in Breslau and Leipzig and assisting inter alia at the institute of Fritz Haber in Karlsruhe on the catalysis of ammonia under high pressure, in 1909 he went to Hannover to pursue his idea of turning coal into liquid hydrocarbon under high hydrogen pressure (200 atm) and high temperatures (470° C). As experiments with high pressure in chemical processes were still in their initial stages and the Technical University could not support him sufficiently, he set up a private laboratory to develop the methods and to construct the equipment himself. Four years later, in 1913, his process for producing liquid or organic compounds from coal was patented.

The economic aspects of this process were apparent as the demand for fuels and lubricants increased more rapidly than the production of oil, and Bergius's process became even more important after the outbreak of the First World War. The Th. Goldschmidt company of Essen contracted him and tried large-scale production near Mannheim in 1914, but production failed because of the lack of capital and experience to operate with high pressure on an industrial level. Both capital and experience were provided jointly by the BASF company, which produced ammonia at Merseburg, and IG Farben, which took over the Bergius process in 1925, the same year that the synthesis of hydrocarbon had been developed by Fischer-Tropsch. Two years later, at the Leuna works, almost 100,000 tonnes of oil were produced from coal; during the following years, several more hydrogenation plants were to follow, especially in the eastern parts of Germany as well as in the Ruhr area, while the government guaranteed the costs. The Bergius process was extremely important for the supply of fuels to Germany during the Second World War, with the monthly production rate in 1943–4 being more than 700,000 tonnes. However, the plants were mostly destroyed at. the end of the war and were later dismantled.

As a consequence of this success Bergius, who had gained an international reputation, went abroad to work as a consultant to several foreign governments. Experiments aiming to reduce the costs of production are still continued in some countries. By 1925, after he had solved all the principles of his process, he had turned to the production of dextrose by hydrolyzing wood with highly concentrated hydrochloric acid.

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SUBJECT AREA: Public utilities

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Lebon was the son of a court official under Louis XV. He entered the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and graduated in 1792, by which time he had acquired a considerable reputation as a scientific engineer. He is credited with the invention of the firetube steam boiler and of the superheater, and he also devised an engine to work by gas, but from 1792 until his untimely death he worked mainly on his experiments to produce an inflammable gas for lighting purposes. He submitted a paper on the subject in 1799 to the Institut National and received a patent in the same year. The patent covers the detailed making and application of gas for light, heat and power, and the recovery of by-products. It describes the production of the gas by the carbonization of coal, although Lebon in feet used only wood gas for his experiments and demonstrations. He began demonstrations in a private house in Paris, but these attracted little attention. He achieved wider public interest when he moved to the Hôtel Seignelay, where he started a series of public demonstrations in 1801, but he attracted little profit, and in fact lost his money in his experiments. He then set up a plant near Rouen to manufacture wood tar, but his career was brought to an end by his brutal murder in the Champs Elysées in Paris. William Murdock was working along similar lines in England, although Lebon knew nothing of his experiments. The German entrepreneur F.A. Winsor visited Lebon and managed to discover the essentials of his processes, which he turned to good account in England with the founding of the Gas, Light \& Coke Company.

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magnolia.

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► nombre femenino

1 (árbol, flor) magnolia

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SF magnolia

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femenino magnolia

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= magnolia.

Ex. In this paper the results of experiments for the use of tissue cultures in the production of vanilla, patchouli, and magnolia aromas is discussed.

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femenino magnolia

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magnolia

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magnolia nf

magnolia

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f BOT magnolia

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magnolia nf

: magnolia (flower)

patchouli.

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► nombre masculino

1 patchouli

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1) (=planta, perfume) patchouli

2) Esp ** (=tío) bloke **, guy *

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pachuli masculino patchouli

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= patchouli.

Ex. In this paper the results of experiments for the use of tissue cultures in the production of vanilla, patchouli, and magnolia aromas is discussed.

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pachuli masculino patchouli

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patchouli

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pachulí (pl pachulíes) nm

patchouli

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m patchouli

1 vanilla.

2 ladyfinger, finger biscuit, sponge finger.

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► nombre femenino

1 vanilla

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SF vanilla

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femenino (Bot, Coc) vanilla

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= vanilla.

Ex. In this paper the results of experiments for the use of tissue cultures in the production of vanilla, patchouli, and magnolia aromas is discussed.

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* extracto de vainilla = vanilla extract.

* helado de vainilla = vanilla ice cream.

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femenino (Bot, Coc) vanilla

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A ( Bot, Coc) vanilla

helado de vainilla vanilla ice-cream

B ( AmL) vainica

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vainilla nf

1. [esencia] vanilla;

yogur de vainilla vanilla yogurt

2. Am [vainica] drawnwork

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f vanilla

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vainilla nf

: vanilla

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vainilla n vanilla

SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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After Menzies conceived his idea of breaking off coal with machines in 1761, many inventors subsequently followed his proposals through into the practice of underground working. More than one century later, Garforth became one of the principal pioneers of machine-holing combined with the longwall method of working in order to reduce production costs and increase the yield of coal. Having been appointed agent to Pope \& Pearson's Collieries, West Yorkshire, in 1879, of which company he later became Managing Director and Chairman, he gathered a great deal of experience with different methods of cutting coal. The first disc machine was exhibited in London as early as 1851, and ten years later a pick machine was invented. In 1893 he introduced an improved type of deep undercutting machine, his "diamond" disc coal-cutter, driven by compressed air, which also became popular on the European continent.

Besides the considerable economic advantages it created, the use of machinery for mining coal increased the safety of working in hard and thin seams. The improvement of safety in mining technology was always his primary concern, and as a result of his inventions and his many publications he became the leading figure in the British coal mining industry at the beginning of the twentieth century; safety lamps still carry his name. In 1885 he invented a firedamp detector, and following a severe explosion in 1886 he concentrated on coal-dust experiments. From the information he obtained of the effect of stone-dust on a coal-dust explosion he proposed the stone-dust remedy to prevent explosions of coal-dust. As a result of discussions which lasted for decades and after he had been entrusted with the job of conducting the British coal-dust experiments, in 1921 an Act made it compulsory in all mines which were not naturally wet throughout to treat all roads with incombustible dust so as to ensure that the dust always consisted of a mixture containing not more than 50 per cent combustible matter. In 1901 Garforth erected a surface gallery which represented the damaged roadways of a mine and could be filled with noxious fumes to test self-contained breathing apparata. This gallery formed the model from which all the rescue-stations existing nowadays have been developed.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Few biographical details are known of Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg, yet it has been said that he was responsible for Germany's most notable contribution to civilization. He was a goldsmith by trade, of a patrician family of the city of Mainz. He seems to have begun experiments on printing while a political exile in Strasbourg c. 1440. He returned to Mainz between 1444 and 1448 and continued his experiments, until by 1450 he had perfected his invention sufficiently to justify raising capital for its commercial exploitation.

Circumstances were propitious for the invention of printing at that time. Rises in literacy and prosperity had led to the formation of a social class with the time and resources to develop a taste for reading, and the demand for reading matter had outstripped the ability of the scribes to satisfy it. The various technologies required were well established, and finally the flourishing textile industry was producing enough waste material, rag, to make paper, the only satisfactory and cheap medium for printing. There were others working along similar lines, but it was Gutenberg who achieved the successful adaptation and combination of technologies to arrive at a process by which many identical copies of a text could be produced in a wide variety of forms, of which the book was the most important. Gutenberg did make several technical innovations, however. The two-piece adjustable mould for casting types of varying width, from T to "M", was ingenious. Then he had to devise an oil-based ink suitable for inking metal type, derived from the painting materials developed by contemporary Flemish artists. Finally, probably after many experiments, he arrived at a metal alloy of distinctive composition suitable for casting type.

In 1450 Gutenberg borrowed 800 guldens from Johannes Fust, a lawyer of Mainz, and two years later Fust advanced a further 800 guldens, securing for himself a partnership in Gutenberg's business. But in 1455 Fust foreclosed and the bulk of Gutenberg's equipment passed to Peter Schöffer, who was in the service of Fust and later married his daughter. Like most early printers, Gutenberg seems not to have appreciated, or at any rate to have been able to provide for, the great dilemma of the publishing trade, namely the outlay of considerable capital in advance of each publication and the slowness of the return. Gutenberg probably retained only the type for the 42- and 36-line bibles and possibly the Catholicon of 1460, an encyclopedic work compiled in the thirteenth century and whose production pointed the way to printing's role as a means of spreading knowledge. The work concluded with a short descriptive piece, or colophon, which is probably by Gutenberg himself and is the only output of his mind that we have; it manages to omit the names of both author and printer.

Gutenberg seems to have abandoned printing after 1460, perhaps due to failing eyesight as well as for financial reasons, and he suffered further loss in the sack of Mainz in 1462. He received a kind of pension from the Archbishop in 1465, and on his death was buried in the Franciscan church in Mainz. The only major work to have issued for certain from Gutenberg's workshop is the great 42-line bible, begun in 1452 and completed by August 1456. The quality of this Graaf piece of printing is a tribute to Gutenberg's ability as a printer, and the soundness of his invention is borne out by the survival of the process as he left it to the world, unchanged for over three hundred years save in minor details.

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wool.

1 dealer in wool.

2 warehouse for wool (almacén).

3 wool dealer, wool seller, wool stapler, wool merchant.

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► adjetivo

1 wool

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ADJ wool antes de s, woollen, woolen (EEUU)

SM / F (=persona) wool dealer

SM (=almacén) wool warehouse

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- ra adjetivo wool (before n)

- ra masculino, femenino wool merchant

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= woollen [woolen, -USA].

Ex. Results of experiments have indicated that because the beetles favour fleecy woollen material, this material can be used to trap insects in library book depositories.

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- ra adjetivo wool (before n)

- ra masculino, femenino wool merchant

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wool ( before n)

wool merchant

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♦ adj

wool;

la producción lanera wool production

♦ nm,f

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I adj wool atr

II m, lanera f wool merchant, wool trader

SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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Robert Bakewell was the son of the tenant farming the 500-acre (200 hectare) Dishley Grange Farm, near Loughborough, where he was born. The family was sufficiently wealthy to allow Robert to travel, which he began to do at an early age, exploring the farming methods of the West Country, Norfolk, Ireland and Holland. On taking over the farm he continued the development of the irrigation scheme begun by his father. Arthur Young visited the farm during his tour of east England in 1771. At that time it consisted of 440 acres (178 hectares), 110 acres (45 hectares) of which were arable, and carried a stock of 60 horses, 400 sheep and 150 other assorted beasts. Of the arable land, 30 acres (12 hectares) were under root crops, mainly turnips.

Bakewell was not the first to pioneer selective breeding, but he was the first successfully to apply selection to both the efficiency with which an animal utilized its food, and its physical appearance. He always had a clear idea of the animal he wanted, travelled extensively to collect a range of animals possessing the characteristics he sought, and then bred from these towards his goal. He was aware of the dangers of inbreeding, but would often use it to gain the qualities he wanted. His early experiments were with Longhorn cattle, which he developed as a meat rather than a draught animal, but his most famous achievement was the development of the Improved Leicester breed of sheep. He set out to produce an animal that would put on the most meat in the least time and with the least feeding. As his base he chose the Old Leicester, but there is still doubt as to which other breeds he may have introduced to produce the desired results. The Improved Leicester was smaller than its ancestor, with poorer wool quality but with greatly improved meat-production capacity.

Bakewell let out his sires to other farms and was therefore able to study their development under differing conditions. However, he made stringent rules for those who hired these animals, requiring the exclusive use of his rams on the farms concerned and requiring particular dietary conditions to be met. To achieve this control he established the Dishley Society in 1783. Although his policies led to accusations of closed access to his stock, they enabled him to keep a close control of all offspring. He thereby pioneered the process now recognized as "progeny testing".

Bakewell's fame and that of his farm spread throughout the country and overseas. He engaged in an extensive correspondence and acted as host to all of influence in British and overseas agriculture, but it would appear that he was an over-generous host, since he is known to have been in financial difficulties in about 1789. He was saved from bankruptcy by a public subscription raised to allow him to continue with his breeding experiments; this experience may well have been the reason why he was such a staunch advocate of State funding of agricultural research.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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Deering began work in his father's woollen mill and, with this business experience, developed Deering, Milliken \& Co., a wholesale dry goods business. Deering invested $40,000 in the Marsh reaper business in 1870, and became a partner in 1872. In 1880 he gained full control of the company and took up residence in Chicago, where he set up a factory. In 1878 he saw the Appleby binders, and in November of that year he negotiated a licence agreement for their manufacture. Deering was aware that with only two twine manufacturers operating in the US, the high price of twine was discouraging sales of binders. He therefore entered into an agreement with Edwin H.Fitler of Philadelphia for the production of very large quantities of twine, and in so doing dramatically reduced its price. In 1880 Deering released onto the market 3,000 binders and ten cartloads of twine that he had manufactured secretly. By 1890 McCormick and Deering were market leaders; Deering anticipated McCormick in a number of technical areas and also diversified his business into ore, timber, and a rolling and casting mill. After several false starts, a merger between the two companies took place on 12 August 1902 to form the International Harvester Company, with Deering as chairman of the voting trust which was established to control it. The company expanded into Canada in 1903 and into Europe in 1905. It began its first experiments with tractors in that same year and produced the first production models in 1906. The company went into truck production in 1907.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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Joseph Gilbert was the son of a congregational minister. His schooling was interrupted by the loss of an eye as the result of a shooting accident, but despite this setback he entered Glasgow University to study analytical chemistry, and then went to University College, London, where he was a fellow student of John Bennet Lawes. During his studies he visited Giessen, Germany, and worked in the laboratory of Justus von Liebig. In 1843, at the age of 26, he was hired as an assistant by Lawes, who was 29 at that time; an unbroken friendship and collaboration existed between the two until Lawes died in 1900. They began a series of experiments on grain production and grew plots under different applications of nitrogen, with control plots that received none at all. Much of the work at Rothampsted was on the nitrogen requirements of plants and how this element became available to them. The grain grown in these experiments was analyzed to determine whether nitrogen input affected grain quality. Gilbert was a methodical worker who by the time of his death had collected together some 50,000 carefully stored and recorded samples.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Guinand received little formal education and followed his father's trade of joiner. He specialized in making clock cases, but after learning how to cast metals he took up the more lucrative work of making watch cases. When he was about 20 years old, in a customer's house he caught sight of an English telescope, a rarity in a Swiss mountain village. Intrigued, he obtained permission to examine it. This aroused his interest in optical matters and he began making spectacles and small telescopes.

Achromatic lenses were becoming known, their use being to remove the defect of chromatic aberration or coloured optical images, but there remained defects due to imperfections in the glass itself. Stimulated by offers of prizes by scientific bodies, including the Royal Society of London, for removing these defects, Guinand set out to remedy them. He embarked in 1784 on a long and arduous series of experiments, varying the materials and techniques for making glass. The even more lucrative trade of making bells for repeaters provided the funds for a furnace capable of holding 2 cwt (102 kg) of molten glass. By 1798 or so he had succeeded in making discs of homogeneous glass. He impressed the famous Parisian astronomer de Lalande with them and his glass became well enough known for scientists to visit him. In 1805 Fraunhofer persuaded Guinand to join his optical-instrument works at Benediktheurn, in Bavaria, to make lenses. After nine years, Guinand returned to Brenets with a pension, on condition he made no more glass and disclosed no details of his methods. After two years these conditions had become irksome and he relinquished the pension. On 19 February 1823 Guinand described his discoveries in his classic "Memoir on the making of optical glass, more particularly of glass of high refractive index for use in the production of achromatic lenses", presented to the Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève. This gives details of his experiments and investigations and discusses a suitable pot-clay stirrer and stirring mechanism for the molten glass, with temperature control, to overcome optical-glass defects such as bubbles, seeds, cords and colours. Guinand was hailed as the man in Europe who had achieved this and has thus rightly been called the founder of the era of optical glassmaking.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Medical technology

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After attending Corpus Christi, Cambridge, he was admitted as a Fellow in 1702. During the ensuing years he was engaged in botanical, astronomical and chemical activities and research. He was appointed Minister at Teddington, Middlesex, in 1708 and remained in that post until his death. During these years, he continued to engage in a wide range of botanical and physiological activities involving studies of the nutrition of plants, blood pressure and the flow of blood in animals. He was also the inventor of improved ventilation by systems of partition and ducting, and the production of fresh water by distillation for ships at sea. The wide range of his interests did not preclude his care for his pastoral duties, and he was involved in the education of the Prince of Wales's children, although he declined a canonry of Windsor. In his writings he set a standard for the scientific method as related to principles based on facts and observation.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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A farmer's son, at the age of 17 McKay developed modifications to the existing stripper harvester and created a machine that would not only strip the seed from standing corn, but was able to produce a threshed, winnowed and clean sample in one operation. The prototype was produced in 1884 and worked well on the two acres of wheat that had been set aside on the family farm. By arrangement with a Melbourne plough maker, five machines were made and sold for the 1885 season. In 1886 the McKay Harvester Company was formed, with offices at Ballarat, from which the machines, built by various companies, were sold. The business expanded quickly, selling sixty machines in 1888, and eventually rising to the production of nearly 2,000 harvesters in 1905. The name "Sunshine" was given to the harvester, and the "Sun" prefix was to appear on all other implements produced by the company as it diversified its production interests. In 1902 severe drought reduced machinery sales and left 2,000 harvesters unsold. McKay was forced to look to export markets to dispose of his surplus machines. By 1914 a total of 10,000 machines were being exported annually. During the First World War McKay was appointed to the Business Board of the Defence Department. Increases in the scale of production resulted in the company moving to Melbourne, where it was close to the port of entry of raw materials and was able to export the finished article more readily. In 1909 McKay produced one of the first gas-engined harvesters, but its cost prevented it from being more than an experimental prototype. By this time McKay was the largest agricultural machinery manufacturer in the Southern hemisphere, producing a wide range of implements, including binders. In 1916 McKay hired Headlie Taylor, who had developed a machine capable of harvesting fallen crops. The jointly developed machine was a major success, coming as it did in what would otherwise have been a disastrous Australian harvest. Further developments included the "Sun Auto-header" in 1923, the first of the harvesting machines to adopt the "T" configuration to be seen on modern harvesters. The Australian market was expanding fast and a keen rivalry developed between McKay and Massey Harris. Confronted by the tariff regulations with which the Australian Government had protected its indigenous machinery industry since 1906, Massey Harris sold all its Australian assets to the H.V. McKay company in 1930. Twenty-three years later Massey Ferguson acquired the old Sunshine works and was still operating from there in the 1990s.

Despite a long-running history of wage disputes with his workforce, McKay established a retiring fund as well as a self-help fund for distressed cases. Before his death he created a charitable trust and requested that some funds should be made available for the "aerial experiments" which were to lead to the establishment of the Flying Doctor Service.

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SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Photography, film and optics, Recording, Telecommunications

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De Forest was born into the family of a Congregational minister that moved to Alabama in 1879 when the father became President of a college for African-Americans; this was a position that led to the family's social ostracism by the white community. By the time he was 13 years old, De Forest was already a keen mechanical inventor, and in 1893, rejecting his father's plan for him to become a clergyman, he entered the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University. Following his first degree, he went on to study the propagation of electromagnetic waves, gaining a PhD in physics in 1899 for his thesis on the "Reflection of Hertzian Waves from the Ends of Parallel Wires", probably the first US thesis in the field of radio.

He then joined the Western Electric Company in Chicago where he helped develop the infant technology of wireless, working his way up from a modest post in the production area to a position in the experimental laboratory. There, working alone after normal working hours, he developed a detector of electromagnetic waves based on an electrolytic device similar to that already invented by Fleming in England. Recognizing his talents, a number of financial backers enabled him to set up his own business in 1902 under the name of De Forest Wireless Telegraphy Company; he was soon demonstrating wireless telegraphy to interested parties and entering into competition with the American Marconi Company.

Despite the failure of this company because of fraud by his partners, he continued his experiments; in 1907, by adding a third electrode, a wire mesh, between the anode and cathode of the thermionic diode invented by Fleming in 1904, he was able to produce the amplifying device now known as the triode valve and achieve a sensitivity of radio-signal reception much greater than possible with the passive carborundum and electrolytic detectors hitherto available. Patented under the name Audion, this new vacuum device was soon successfully used for experimental broadcasts of music and speech in New York and Paris. The invention of the Audion has been described as the beginning of the electronic era. Although much development work was required before its full potential was realized, the Audion opened the way to progress in all areas of sound transmission, recording and reproduction. The patent was challenged by Fleming and it was not until 1943 that De Forest's claim was finally recognized.

Overcoming the near failure of his new company, the De Forest Radio Telephone Company, as well as unsuccessful charges of fraudulent promotion of the Audion, he continued to exploit the potential of his invention. By 1912 he had used transformer-coupling of several Audion stages to achieve high gain at radio frequencies, making long-distance communication a practical proposition, and had applied positive feedback from the Audion output anode to its input grid to realize a stable transmitter oscillator and modulator. These successes led to prolonged patent litigation with Edwin Armstrong and others, and he eventually sold the manufacturing rights, in retrospect often for a pittance.

During the early 1920s De Forest began a fruitful association with T.W.Case, who for around ten years had been working to perfect a moving-picture sound system. De Forest claimed to have had an interest in sound films as early as 1900, and Case now began to supply him with photoelectric cells and primitive sound cameras. He eventually devised a variable-density sound-on-film system utilizing a glow-discharge modulator, the Photion. By 1926 De Forest's Phonofilm had been successfully demonstrated in over fifty theatres and this system became the basis of Movietone. Though his ideas were on the right lines, the technology was insufficiently developed and it was left to others to produce a system acceptable to the film industry. However, De Forest had played a key role in transforming the nature of the film industry; within a space of five years the production of silent films had all but ceased.

In the following decade De Forest applied the Audion to the development of medical diathermy. Finally, after spending most of his working life as an independent inventor and entrepreneur, he worked for a time during the Second World War at the Bell Telephone Laboratories on military applications of electronics.

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KF / JW

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology, Recording

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At the age of 23, Eisler obtained a Diploma in Engineering from the Technical University of Vienna. Because of the growing Nazi influence in Austria, he then accepted a post with the His Master's Voice (HMV) agents in Belgrade, where he worked on the problems of radio reception and sound transmission in railway trains. However, he soon returned to Vienna to found a weekly radio journal and file patents on graphical sound recording (for which he received a doctorate) and on a system of stereoscopic television based on lenticular vertical scanning.

In 1936 he moved to England and sold the TV patent to Marconi for £250. Unable to find a job, he carried out experiments in his rooms in a Hampstead boarding-house; after making circuits using strip wires mounted on bakelite sheet, he filed his first printed-circuit patent that year. He then tried to find ways of printing the circuits, but without success. Obtaining a post with Odeon Theatres, he invented a sound-level control for films and devised a mirror-drum continuous-film projector, but with the outbreak of war in 1939, when the company was evacuated, he chose to stay in London and was interned for a while. Released in 1941, he began work with Henderson and Spalding, a firm of lithographic printers, to whom he unwittingly assigned all future patents for the paltry sum of £1. In due course he perfected a means of printing conducting circuits and on 3 February 1943 he filed three patents covering the process. The British Ministry of Defence rejected the idea, considering it of no use for military equipment, but after he had demonstrated the technique to American visitors it was enthusiastically taken up in the US for making proximity fuses, of which many millions were produced and used for the war effort. Subsequently the US Government ruled that all air-borne electronic circuits should be printed.

In the late 1940s the Instrument Department of Henderson and Spalding was split off as Technograph Printed Circuits Ltd, with Eisler as Technical Director. In 1949 he filed a further patent covering a multilayer system; this was licensed to Pye and the Telegraph Condenser Company. A further refinement, patented in the 1950s, the use of the technique for telephone exchange equipment, but this was subsequently widely infringed and although he negotiated licences in the USA he found it difficult to license his ideas in Europe. In the UK he obtained finance from the National Research and Development Corporation, but they interfered and refused money for further development, and he eventually resigned from Technograph. Faced with litigation in the USA and open infringement in the UK, he found it difficult to establish his claims, but their validity was finally agreed by the Court of Appeal (1969) and the House of Lords (1971).

As a freelance inventor he filed many other printed-circuit patents, including foil heating films and batteries. When his Patent Agents proved unwilling to fund the cost of filing and prosecuting Complete Specifications he set up his own company, Eisler Consultants Ltd, to promote food and space heating, including the use of heated cans and wallpaper! As Foil Heating Ltd he went into the production of heating films, the process subsequently being licensed to Thermal Technology Inc. in California.

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SUBJECT AREA: Automotive engineering, Land transport, Mining and extraction technology, Steam and internal combustion engines

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Educated at Truro Grammar School, he then studied under Dr Avery at Wadebridge to become a doctor of medicine. He settled as a surgeon in Wadebridge, spending his leisure time in building an organ and in the study of chemistry and mechanical science. He married Elizabeth Symons in 1814, and in 1820 moved with his wife to London. He delivered a course of lectures at the Surrey Institution on the elements of chemical science, attended by, amongst others, the young Michael Faraday. While there, Gurney made his first invention, the oxyhydrogen blowpipe. For this he received the Gold Medal of the Society of Arts. He experimented with lime and magnesia for the production of an illuminant for lighthouses with some success. He invented a musical instrument of glasses played like a piano.

In 1823 he started experiments related to steam and locomotion which necessitated taking a partner in to his medical practice, from which he resigned shortly after. His objective was to produce a steam-driven vehicle to run on common roads. His invention of the steam-jet of blast greatly improved the performance of the steam engine. In 1827 he took his steam carriage to Cyfarthfa at the request of Mr Crawshaw, and while there applied his steam-jet to the blast furnaces, greatly improving their performance in the manufacture of iron. Much of the success of George Stephenson's steam engine, the Rocket was due to Gurney's steam blast.

In July 1829 Gurney made a historic trip with his road locomotive. This was from London to Bath and back, which was accomplished at a speed of 18 mph (29 km/h) and was made at the instigation of the Quartermaster-General of the Army. So successful was the carriage that Sir Charles Dance started to run a regular service with it between Gloucester and Cheltenham. This ran for three months without accident, until Parliament introduced prohibitive taxation on all self-propelled vehicles. A House of Commons committee proposed that these should be abolished as inhibiting progress, but this was not done. Sir Goldsworthy petitioned Parliament on the harm being done to him, but nothing was done and the coming of the railways put the matter beyond consideration. He devoted his time to finding other uses for the steam-jet: it was used for extinguishing fires in coal-mines, some of which had been burning for many years; he developed a stove for the production of gas from oil and other fatty substances, intended for lighthouses; he was responsible for the heating and the lighting of both the old and the new Houses of Parliament. His evidence after a colliery explosion resulted in an Act of Parliament requiring all mines to have two shafts. He was knighted in 1863, the same year that he suffered a stroke which incapacitated him. He retired to his house at Reeds, near Bude, where he was looked after by his daughter, Anna.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Junghans was of the family that owned Gebrüder Junghans, one of the largest firms in the German watch-and clockmaking industry. From 1906 to 1918 he served in the German Army, after which he took a course in metallurgy and analytical chemistry at the Technical High School in Stuttgart. Junghans was then given control of the brassworks owned by his family. He wanted to make castings simply and cheaply, but he found that he lacked the normal foundry equipment. By 1927, formulating his ideas on continuous casting, he had conceived a way of overcoming this deficiency and began experiments. By the time the firm was taken over by Wieland-Werke AG in 1931, Junghans had achieved positive results. A test plant was erected in 1932, and commercial production of continuously cast metal followed the year after. Wieland told Junghans that a brassfounder who had come up through the trade would never have hit on the idea: it took an outsider like Junghans to do it. He was made Technical Director of Wielands but left in 1935 to work privately on the development of continuous casting for all metals. He was able to license the process for non-ferrous metals during 1936–9 in Germany and other countries, but the Second World War interrupted his work; however, the German government supported him and a production plant was built. In 1948 he was able to resume work on the continuous casting of steel, which he had been considering since 1936. He pushed on in spite of financial difficulties and produced the first steel by this process at Schorndorf in March 1949. From 1950 he made agreements with four firms to work towards the pilot plant stage, and this was achieved in 1954 at Mannesmann's Huckingen works. The aim of continuous casting is to bypass the conventional processes of casting molten steel into ingots, reheating the ingots and shaping them by rolling them in a large mill. Essentially, in continuous casting, molten steel is drawn through the bottom of a ladle and down through a water-cooled copper mould. The unique feature of Junghans's process was the vertically reciprocating mould, which prevented the molten metal sticking as it passed through. A continuous length of steel is taken off and cooled until it is completely solidified into the required shape. The idea of continuous casting can be traced back to Bessemer, and although others tried to apply it later, they did not have any success. It was Junghans who, more than anybody, made the process a reality.

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