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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Robert Kay improved his father John's flying shuttle by inventing the drop box, in which up to four shuttles could be stored one below the other. The weaver's left hand controlled levers and catches to raise or lower the drop box in order to bring the appropriate shuttle into line with the shuttle race on the slay. The shuttle could then be driven across the loom, leaving its particular type or colour of weft. On the earliest power looms of Edmund Cartwright in 1785, and for many years later, it was possible to use only one shuttle. In 1845 Squire Diggle of Bury, Lancashire, took out a patent for mechanizing the drop box so that different types or colours of weft could be woven without the weaver attending to the shuttles. He used an endless chain on which plates of different heights could be fixed to raise the boxes to the required height; later this would be operated by either the dobby or Jacquard pattern-selecting mechanisms. He took out further patents for improvements to looms. One, in 1854, was for taking up the cloth with a positive motion. Two more, in 1858, improved his drop box mechanism: the first was for actually operating the drop box, while the second was for tappet chains which operated the timing for raising the boxes.

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See also: Kay, John

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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To give a smooth surface to cloth such as the old English broadcloth, the nap was raised and then sheared off. Hand-operated shears of enormous size cut the fibres standing proud of the surface while the cloth was laid over a curved table top. Great skill was required to achieve a smooth finish. Various attempts, such as that in 1784 by James Harmer, a clergyman of Sheffield, were made to mechanize the process by placing several pairs of shears in a frame and operating them by cranks, but these were not successful. The first version of a rotary machine was made by Samuel Griswold Dore (sometimes spelt Dorr), an American from Albany, New York. His first frame, patented in 1792 in America, consisted of a wheel of twelve "spring knives" that were fixed like spokes and set at an angle of about 45° to the horizontal. Under this wheel, and on the same axle, rode a second one, carrying four "tangent knives" that lay almost flat upon the cloth. As the two wheels rotated above the cloth's surface, they acted in "the manner of shears". The principle used in Dore's machine is certainly different from that in the later, successful machine of John Lewis. The machine was thought to be too complicated and expensive for American woollen manufacturers and was much better suited to circumstances in the English industry, Dore therefore moved to England. However, in his British patent in 1793, he introduced a different design, which was more like that on which both Lewis's machine and the lawnmower were based, with knives set across the periphery of a hollow cylinder or barrel. Little more was heard of his machine in Britain, possibly because of Dore's death, which is mentioned in his patent of 1794, although it was used in America and France. Dore's son and others improved the machine in America and brought new specifications to England in 1811, when several patents were taken out.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Of New England ancestry, his family returned there soon after his birth and later moved to Cleveland, Ohio. In 1884, Dow entered the Case School of Applied Science, graduating in science four years later. His thesis dealt partly with the brines of Ohio, and he was persuaded to present a paper on brine to the meeting of the American Association for he Advancement of Science being held in Cleveland the same year. That entailed visits to collect samples of brines from various localities, and led to the observation that their composition varied, one having a higher lithium content while another was richer in bromine. This study of brines proved to be the basis for his career in industrial chemistry. In 1888 Dow was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the Homeopathic Hospital College in Cleveland, but he continued to work on brine, obtaining a patent in the same year for extracting bromine by blowing air through slightly electrolysed brine. He set up a small company to exploit the process, but it failed; the process was taken up and successfully worked by the Midland Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan. The electrolysis required a direct-current generator which, when it was installed in 1892, was probably the first of its kind in America. Dow next set up a company to produce chlorine by the electrolysis of brine. It moved to Midland in 1896, and the Dow Central Company purchased the Midland Chemical Company in 1900. Its main concern was the manufacture of bleaching powder, but the company continued to grow, based on Dow's steady development of chemical compounds that could be derived from brines. His search for further applications of chlorine led to the making of insecticides and an interest in horticulture. Meanwhile, his experience at the Homeopathic Hospital doubtless fired an interest in pharmaceuticals. One of the substances found in brine was magnesium chloride, and by 1918 magnesium metal was being produced on a small scale by electrolysis. An intensive study of its alloys followed, leading to the large-scale production of these important light-metal alloys, under the name of Dowmetals. Two other "firsts" achieved by the company were the synthetic indigo process and the production of the element iodine in the USA. The Dow company became one of the leading chemical manufacturers in the USA, and at the same time Dow played an active part in public life, serving on many public and education boards.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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The young Eastman was a clerk-bookkeeper in the Rochester Savings Bank when in 1877 he took up photography. Taking lessons in the wet-plate process, he became an enthusiastic amateur photographer. However, the cumbersome equipment and noxious chemicals used in the process proved an obstacle, as he said, "It seemed to be that one ought to be able to carry less than a pack-horse load." Then he came across an account of the new gelatine dry-plate process in the British Journal of Photography of March 1878. He experimented in coating glass plates with the new emulsions, and was soon so successful that he decided to go into commercial manufacture. He devised a machine to simplify the coating of the plates, and travelled to England in July 1879 to patent it. In April 1880 he prepared to begin manufacture in a rented building in Rochester, and contacted the leading American photographic supply house, E. \& H.T.Anthony, offering them an option as agents. A local whip manufacturer, Henry A.Strong, invested $1,000 in the enterprise and the Eastman Dry Plate Company was formed on 1 January 1881. Still working at the Savings Bank, he ran the business in his spare time, and demand grew for the quality product he was producing. The fledgling company survived a near disaster in 1882 when the quality of the emulsions dropped alarmingly. Eastman later discovered this was due to impurities in the gelatine used, and this led him to test all raw materials rigorously for quality. In 1884 the company became a corporation, the Eastman Dry Plate \& Film Company, and a new product was announced. Mindful of his desire to simplify photography, Eastman, with a camera maker, William H.Walker, designed a roll-holder in which the heavy glass plates were replaced by a roll of emulsion-coated paper. The holders were made in sizes suitable for most plate cameras. Eastman designed and patented a coating machine for the large-scale production of the paper film, bringing costs down dramatically, the roll-holders were acclaimed by photographers worldwide, and prizes and medals were awarded, but Eastman was still not satisfied. The next step was to incorporate the roll-holder in a smaller, hand-held camera. His first successful design was launched in June 1888: the Kodak camera. A small box camera, it held enough paper film for 100 circular exposures, and was bought ready-loaded. After the film had been exposed, the camera was returned to Eastman's factory, where the film was removed, processed and printed, and the camera reloaded. This developing and printing service was the most revolutionary part of his invention, since at that time photographers were expected to process their own photographs, which required access to a darkroom and appropriate chemicals. The Kodak camera put photography into the hands of the countless thousands who wanted photographs without complications. Eastman's marketing slogan neatly summed up the advantage: "You Press the Button, We Do the Rest." The Kodak camera was the last product in the design of which Eastman was personally involved. His company was growing rapidly, and he recruited the most talented scientists and technicians available. New products emerged regularly—notably the first commercially produced celluloid roll film for the Kodak cameras in July 1889; this material made possible the introduction of cinematography a few years later. Eastman's philosophy of simplifying photography and reducing its costs continued to influence products: for example, the introduction of the one dollar, or five shilling, Brownie camera in 1900, which put photography in the hands of almost everyone. Over the years the Eastman Kodak Company, as it now was, grew into a giant multinational corporation with manufacturing and marketing organizations throughout the world. Eastman continued to guide the company; he pursued an enlightened policy of employee welfare and profit sharing decades before this was common in industry. He made massive donations to many concerns, notably the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and supported schemes for the education of black people, dental welfare, calendar reform, music and many other causes, he withdrew from the day-to-day control of the company in 1925, and at last had time for recreation. On 14 March 1932, suffering from a painful terminal cancer and after tidying up his affairs, he shot himself through the heart, leaving a note: "To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?" Although Eastman's technical innovations were made mostly at the beginning of his career, the organization which he founded and guided in its formative years was responsible for many of the major advances in photography over the years.

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SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

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When Arthur Woolf left the Griffin Brewery, London, in October 1808, he formed a partnership with Humphrey Edwards, described as a millwright at Mill Street, Lambeth, where they started an engine works to build Woolf's type of compound engine. A number of small engines were constructed and other ordinary engines modified with the addition of a high-pressure cylinder. Improvements were made in each succeeding engine, and by 1811 a standard form had been evolved. During this experimental period, engines were made with cylinders side by side as well as the more usual layout with one behind the other. The valve gear and other details were also improved. Steam pressure may have been around 40 psi (2.8 kg/cm²). In an advertisement of February 1811, the partners claimed that their engines had been brought to such a state of perfection that they consumed only half the quantity of coal required for engines on the plan of Messrs Boulton \& Watt. Woolf visited Cornwall, where he realized that more potential for his engines lay there than in London; in May 1811 the partnership was dissolved, with Woolf returning to his home county. Edwards struggled on alone in London for a while, but when he saw a more promising future for the engine in France he moved to Paris. On 25 May 1815 he obtained a French patent, a Brevet d'importation, for ten years. A report in 1817 shows that during the previous two years he had imported into France fifteen engines of different sizes which were at work in eight places in various parts of the country. He licensed a mining company in the north of France to make twenty-five engines for winding coal. In France there was always much more interest in rotative engines than pumping ones. Edwards may have formed a partnership with Goupil \& Cie, Dampierre, to build engines, but this is uncertain. He became a member of the firm Scipion, Perrier, Edwards \& Chappert, which took over the Chaillot Foundry of the Perrier Frères in Paris, and it seems that Edwards continued to build steam engines there for the rest of his life. In 1824 it was claimed that he had made about 100 engines in England and another 200 in France, but this is probably an exaggeration.

The Woolf engine acquired its popularity in France because its compound design was more economical than the single-cylinder type. To enable it to be operated safely, Edwards first modified Woolf s cast-iron boiler in 1815 by placing two small drums over the fire, and then in 1825 replaced the cast iron with wrought iron. The modified boiler was eventually brought back to England in the 1850s as the "French" or "elephant" boiler.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Public utilities

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Ferranti, who had taken an interest in electrical and mechanical devices from an early age, was educated at St Augustine's College in Ramsgate and for a short time attended evening classes at University College, London. Rather than pursue an academic career, Ferranti, who had intense practical interests, found employment in 1881 with the Siemens Company (see Werner von Siemens) in their experimental department. There he had the opportunity to superintend the installation of electric-lighting plants in various parts of the country. Becoming acquainted with Alfred Thomson, an engineer, Ferranti entered into a short-lived partnership with him to manufacture the Ferranti alternator. This generator, with a unique zig-zag armature, had an efficiency exceeding that of all its rivals. Finding that Sir William Thomson had invented a similar machine, Ferranti formed a company with him to combine the inventions and produce the Ferranti- Thomson machine. For this the Hammond Electric Light and Power Company obtained the sole selling rights.

In 1885 the Grosvenor Gallery Electricity Supply Corporation was having serious problems with its Gaulard and Gibbs series distribution system. Ferranti, when consulted, reviewed the design and recommended transformers connected across constant-potential mains. In the following year, at the age of 22, he was appointed Engineer to the company and introduced the pattern of electricity supply that was eventually adopted universally. Ambitious plans by Ferranti for London envisaged the location of a generating station of unprecedented size at Deptford, about eight miles (13 km) from the city, a departure from the previous practice of placing stations within the area to be supplied. For this venture the London Electricity Supply Corporation was formed. Ferranti's bold decision to bring the supply from Deptford at the hitherto unheard-of pressure of 10,000 volts required him to design suitable cables, transformers and generators. Ferranti planned generators with 10,000 hp (7,460 kW)engines, but these were abandoned at an advanced stage of construction. Financial difficulties were caused in part when a Board of Trade enquiry in 1889 reduced the area that the company was able to supply. In spite of this adverse situation the enterprise continued on a reduced scale. Leaving the London Electricity Supply Corporation in 1892, Ferranti again started his own business, manufacturing electrical plant. He conceived the use of wax-impregnated paper-insulated cables for high voltages, which formed a landmark in the history of cable development. This method of flexible-cable manufacture was used almost exclusively until synthetic materials became available. In 1892 Ferranti obtained a patent which set out the advantages to be gained by adopting sector-shaped conductors in multi-core cables. This was to be fundamental to the future design and development of such cables.

A total of 176 patents were taken out by S.Z. de Ferranti. His varied and numerous inventions included a successful mercury-motor energy meter and improvements to textile-yarn produc-tion. A transmission-line phenomenon where the open-circuit voltage at the receiving end of a long line is greater than the sending voltage was named the Ferranti Effect after him.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

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In 1938, whilst working for a German electrical company, Flechsig filed a patent in which he described the use of an array of stretched parallel wires to control the landing of either one or three electron beams on separate red, green and blue phosphor stripes within a single cathode ray tube. Whilst the single-beam arrangement required subsidiary deflection to alternate the beam landing angle, the three-beam version effectively used the wires to "mask" the landing of the electron beams so that each one only illuminated the relevant colour phosphor stripes. Although not developed at the time, the concept anticipated the subsequent invention of the shadowmask tube by RCA in the early 1950s and, even more closely, the development of the Sony Trinitron some years later.

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See also: Baird, John Logie; Goldmark, Peter Carl

SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Synthetic materials

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Dr Gibson's work towards the discovery of polythene had its origin in a visit in 1925 to Dr A. Michels of Amsterdam University; the latter had made major advances in techniques for studying chemical reactions at very high pressures. After working with Michels for a time, in 1926 Gibson joined Brunner Mond, one of the companies that went on to form the chemical giant Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). The company supported research into fundamental chemical research that had no immediate commercial application, including the field being cultivated by Michels and Gibson. In 1933 Gibson was joined by another ICI chemist, E.O.Fawcett, who had worked with W.H. Carothers in the USA on polymer chemistry. They were asked to study the effects of high pressure on various reaction systems, including a mixture of benzaldehyde and ethylene. Gibson's notebook for 27 March that year records that after a loss of pressure during which the benzaldehyde was blown out of the reaction tube, a waxy solid was observed in the tube. This is generally recognized as the first recorded observation of polythene. By the following June they had shown that the white, waxy solid was a fairly high molecular weight polymer of ethylene formed at a temperature of 443°K and a pressure of 2,000 bar. However, only small amounts of the material were produced and its significance was not immediately recognized. It was not until two years later that W.P.Perrin and others, also ICI chemists, restarted work on the polymer. They showed that it could be moulded, drawn into threads and cast into tough films. It was a good electrical insulator and almost inert chemically. A British patent for producing polythene was taken out in 1936, and after further development work a production plant began operating in September 1939, just as the Second World War was breaking out. Polythene had arrived in time to make a major contribution to the war effort, for it had the insulating properties required for newly developing work on radar. When peacetime uses became possible, polythene production surged ahead and became the major industry it is today, with a myriad uses in industry and in everyday life.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Early drawing and spinning processes failed to give linen yarn the requisite fineness and homogeneity. In 1810 Napoleon offered a prize of a million francs for a successful flax-spinning machine as part of his policy of stimulating the French textile industries. Spurred on by this offer, Girard suggested three improvements. He was too late to win the prize, but his ideas were patented in England in 1814, although not under his own name. He proposed that the fibres should be soaked in a very hot alkaline solution both before drawing and immediately before they went to the spindles. The actual drawing was to be done by passing the dried material through combs or gills that moved alternately; gill drawing was taken up in England in 1816. His method of wet spinning was never a commercial success, but his processes were adopted in part and developed in Britain and spread to Austria, Poland and France, for his ideas were essentially good and produced a superior product. The successful power-spinning of linen thread from flax depended primarily upon the initial processes of heckling and drawing. The heckling of the bundles or stricks of flax, so as to separate the long fibres of "line" from the shorter ones of "tow", was extremely difficult to mechanize, for each strick had to be combed on both sides in turn and then in the reverse direction. It was to this problem that Girard next turned his attention, inventing a successful machine in 1832 that subsequently was improved in England. The strick was placed between two vertical sheets of combs that moved opposite to each other, depositing the tow upon a revolving cylinder covered with a brush at the bottom of the machine, while the holder from which the strick was suspended moved up and down so as to help the teeth to penetrate deeper into the flax. The tow was removed from the cylinder at the bottom of the machine and taken away to be spun like cotton. The long line fibres were removed from the top of the machine and required further processing if the yarn was to be uniform.

When N.L.Sadi Carnot's book Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu, was published in 1824, Girard made a favourable report on it.

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SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

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At the age of seventeen Goddard climbed a tree and, seeing the view from above, he became determined to make some device with which to ascend towards the planets. In an autobiography, published in 1959 in the journal Astronautics, he stated, "I was a different boy when I descended the ladder. Life now had a purpose for me." His first idea was to launch a projectile by centrifugal force, but in 1909 he started to design a rocket that was to be multi-stage and fuelled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. Not long before the First World War he produced a report, "A method of reaching extreme altitudes", which was for the Smithsonian Institution and was published in book form in 1919. During the war he worked on solid-fuelled rockets as weapons. His book contained notes on the amount of fuel required to raise 1 lb (454 g) of payload to an infinite altitude. He incurred ridicule as "the moon man" when he proposed the use of flash powder to indicate successful arrival on the moon. In 1923 he severed his connections with military work and returned to the University of Massachusetts. On 16 March 1926 he launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket from his aunt's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts; powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen, it flew to a height of 12 m (40 ft) and travelled 54 m (177 ft) in 2.4 seconds.

In November 1929 he met the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who persuaded both the Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Institute to support Goddard's experiments financially. He moved to the more suitable location of the Mescalere Ranch, near Roswell, New Mexico, where he worked until 1941. His liquid-fuelled rockets reached speeds of 1,100 km/h (700 mph) and heights of 2,500 m (8,000ft). He investigated the use of the gyroscope to steady his rockets and the assembly of power units in clusters to increase the total thrust. In 1941 he moved to the naval establishment at Annapolis, Maryland, working on liquid-fuelled rockets to assist the take-off of aircraft from carriers. He worked for the US Government on this and the development of military rockets until his death from throat cancer in 1945. In all, he was granted 214 patents, roughly three per year of his life.

In 1960 the US Government admitted infringement of Goddard's patents during the rocket programme of the 1950s and awarded his widow a payment of $1,000,000, while the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) honoured him by naming the Goddard Spaceflight Center near Washington, DC, after him. The Goddard Memorial Library at Clark University, in his home town of Worcester, Massachusetts, was also named in his honour.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology

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At the age of 12 he was working for his father, who was a chemist and druggist. When he was old enough, he started in the same trade on his own account at Leamington, but soon turned to the making of salt and alkali at a works in Stoke Prior, Worcestershire. In 1850 he moved to Widnes, Lancashire, and established a plant for the manufacture of alkali and soap. Gossage's soap became famous, and some 200,000 tons of it were sold during the period 1862 to 1887. Gossage made important improvements to the Leblanc process. Hitherto, the large quantities of hydrogen chloride discharged into the atmosphere had been a considerable nuisance and a cause of much litigation from aggrieved parties. Gossage introduced the absorption tower, in which the ascending hydrogen chloride was absorbed by a descending stream of water. An outcome of this improvement was the Alkali Act of 1863, which required manufacturers to absorb up to 95 per cent of the offending gas. Gossage later took out many other industrial chemical patents, and for a time he was engaged in copper smelting with works in both Widnes and Neath, South Wales.

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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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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy

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Hadfield's father, Robert, set up a steelworks in Sheffield in 1872, one of the earliest to specialize in steel castings. After his education in Sheffield, during which he showed an interest in chemistry, Hadfield entered his father's works. His first act was to set up a laboratory, where he began systematically experimenting with alloy steels in order to improve the quality of the products of the family firm. In 1883 Hadfield found that by increasing the manganese content to 12.5 per cent, with a carbon content of 1.4 per cent, the resulting alloy showed extraordinary resistance to abrasive wear even though it was quite soft. It was soon applied in railway points and crossings, crushing and grinding machinery, and wherever great resistance to wear is required. Its lack of brittleness led to its use in steel helmets during the First World War. Hadfield's manganese steel was also non-magnetic, which was later of importance in the electrical industry. Hadfield's other great invention was that of silicon steel. Again after careful and systematic laboratory work, Hadfield found that a steel containing 3–4 per cent silicon and as little as possible of other elements was highly magnetic, which was to prove important in the electrical industry (e.g. reducing the weight and bulk of electrical transformers). Hadfield took over the firm on the death of his father in 1888, but he continued to lay great stress on the need for laboratory research to improve the quality and range of products. The steel-casting side of the business led to a flourishing armaments industry, and this, together with their expertise in alloy steels, made Hadfield's one of the great names in Sheffield and British steel until, sadly, it succumbed along with so many other illustrious names during the British economic recession of 1983. Hadfield had a keen interest in metallurgical history, particularly in his characteristically thorough examination of the alloys of iron prepared by Faraday at the Royal Institution. Hadfield was an enlightened employer and was one of the first to introduce the eight-hour day.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Photography, film and optics, Steam and internal combustion engines

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Nothing is known of Hero, or Heron, apart from what can be gleaned from the books he wrote. Their scope and style suggest that he was a teacher at the museum or the university of Alexandria, writing textbooks for his students. The longest book, and the one with the greatest technological interest, is Pneumatics. Some of its material is derived from the works of the earlier writers Ctesibius of Alexandria and Philo of Byzantium, but many of the devices described were invented by Hero himself. The introduction recognizes that the air is a body and demonstrates the effects of air pressure, as when air must be allowed to escape from a closed vessel before water can enter. There follow clear descriptions of a variety of mechanical contrivances depending on the effects of either air pressure or heated gases. Most of the devices seem trivial, but such toys or gadgets were popular at the time and Hero is concerned to show how they work. Inventions with a more serious purpose are a fire pump and a water organ. One celebrated gadget is a sphere that is set spinning by jets of steam—an early illustration of the reaction principle on which modern jet propulsion depends.

M echanics, known only in an Arabic version, is a textbook expounding the theory and practical skills required by the architect. It deals with a variety of questions of mechanics, such as the statics of a horizontal beam resting on vertical posts, the theory of the centre of gravity and equilibrium, largely derived from Archimedes, and the five ways of applying a relatively small force to exert a much larger one: the lever, winch, pulley, wedge and screw. Practical devices described include sledges for transporting heavy loads, cranes and a screw cutter.

Hero's Dioptra describes instruments used in surveying, together with an odometer or device to indicate the distance travelled by a wheeled vehicle. Catoptrics, known only in Latin, deals with the principles of mirrors, plane and curved, enunciating that the angle of incidence is equal to that of reflection. Automata describes two forms of puppet theatre, operated by strings and drums driven by a falling lead weight attached to a rope wound round an axle. Hero's mathematical work lies in the tradition of practical mathematics stretching from the Babylonians through Islam to Renaissance Europe. It is seen most clearly in his Metrica, a treatise on mensuration.

Of all his works, Pneumatics was the best known and most influential. It was one of the works of Greek science and technology assimilated by the Arabs, notably Banu Musa ibn Shakir, and was transmitted to medieval Western Europe.

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SUBJECT AREA: Automotive engineering, Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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Carl Edvard Johansson was first apprenticed to a shoemaker, but he soon abandoned that career. In 1882 he went to America to join his brother Arvid working at a sawmill in the summer; in winter the brothers obtained further general education at the Gustavus Adolphus College at St Peter, Minnesota. They returned to Sweden in November 1884 and in the following year Carl obtained employment with a small engineering firm which rented a workshop in the government small-arms factory at Eskilstuna. In his spare time he attended the Eskilstuna Technical College and in 1888 he was accepted as an apprentice armourer inspector. After completion of his apprenticeship he was appointed an armourer inspector, and it was in his work of inspection that he realized that the large number of gauges then required could be reduced if several accurate gauges could be used in combination. This was in 1896, and the first set of gauges was made for use in the rifle factory. With these, any dimension between 1 mm and 201 mm could be made up to the nearest 0.01 mm, the gauges having flat polished surfaces that would adhere together by "wringing". Johansson obtained patents for the system from 1901, but it was not until c.1907 that the sets of gauges were marketed generally. Gauges were made in inch units for Britain and America—slightly different as the standards were not then identical. Johansson formed his own company to manufacture the gauges in 1910, but he did not give up his post in the rifle factory until 1914. By the 1920s Johansson gauges were established as the engineering dimensional standards for the whole world; the company also made other precision measuring instruments such as micrometers and extensometers. A new company, C.E.Johansson Inc., was set up in America for manufacture and sales, and the gauges were extensively used in the American automobile industry. Henry Ford took a special interest and Johansson spent several years in a post with the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, Michigan, until he returned to Sweden in 1936.

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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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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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William Kelly, a Larnack clockmaker, was Manager of David Dale's New Lanark cotton-spinning mills. He was writing to Boulton \& Watt in 1796 about the different ways in which he heated the mills and the New Institution. He must also have been responsible for supervising the millwrights' and mechanics' shops where much of the spinning machinery for the mills was constructed. At one time there were eighty-seven men employed in these shops alone. He devised a better method of connecting the water wheel to the line shafting which he reckoned would save a quarter of the water power required. Kelly may have been the first to apply power to the mule, for in 1790 he drove the spinning sequence from the line shafting, which operated the gear mechanism to turn the rollers and spindles as well as draw out the carriage. The winding on of the newly spun yarn still had to be done by hand. Then in 1792 he applied for a patent for a self-acting mule in which all the operations would be carried out by power. However, winding the yarn on in a conical form was a problem; he tried various ways of doing this, but abandoned his attempts because the mechanism was cumbersome and brought no economic advantage as only a comparatively small number of spindles could be operated. Even so, his semi-automatic mule became quite popular and was exported to America in 1803. Kelly was replaced as Manager at New Lanark by Robert Owen in 1800.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Kennedy was the third son of his father, Robert, and went to the village school in Dalry. On his father's death, he was sent at the age of 14 to Chowbent, Lancashire, where he was apprenticed to William Cannan, a maker of textile machines such as carding frames, Hargreaves's jennies and Arkwright's waterframes. On completion of his apprenticeship in 1791, he moved to Manchester and entered into partnership with Benjamin and William Sandford and James M'Connel, textile machine makers and mule spinners. In 1795 this partnership was terminated and one was made with James M'Connel to form the firm M'Connel \& Kennedy, cotton spinners.

Kennedy introduced improvements for spinning fine yarns and the firm of M'Connel \& Kennedy became famous for the quality of these products, which were in great demand. He made the spindles turn faster during the second part of the mule carriage's outward draw, and from 1793 onwards he experimented with driving mules by steam engines. Like William Kelly at New Lanark, he succeeded in making the spinning sequences power-operated by 1800, although the spinner had to take over the winding on. This made the mule into a factory machine, but it still required skilled operators. He was also involved with Henry Houldsworth, Junior, in the improvement of the roving frame. In 1803 Kennedy joined the Manchester Literary \& Philosophical Society, to which he presented several papers, including one in 1830 on "A memoir of Samuel Crompton". He retired from the spinning business in 1826, but continued his technical and mechanical pursuits. He was consulted about whether the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway should have moving or stationary steam engines and was an umpire at the Rainhill Trials in 1829.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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At the age of 13, Kirtley was a pupil of George Stephenson on the Stockton \& Darlington Railway. He subsequently became a fireman and then a driver of locomotives: he drove the first locomotive to enter London on the London \& Birmingham Railway. When the Midland Railway was formed in 1844 he was appointed Locomotive Superintendent. Ever since the Act of Parliament for the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway had required that its locomotives consume their own smoke (probably as a reaction to the clouds of black smoke emitted by steamboats at Liverpool), the usual fuel for locomotives had been coke. Early multi-tubular boilers, with their small fireboxes and short tubes, were in any case unsuitable for coal because they did not allow the burning gases sufficient time to combust properly. Many engineers attempted to solve the problem with weird and complex boiler designs. Kirtley and Charles Markham, who was working under him, succeeded by inserting a deflector plate above the firedoor and an arch of firebricks in the front of the firebox: this helped to maintain the high temperatures needed and lengthened the route by which the gases travelled. The brick arch and deflector plate became the usual components of locomotive fireboxes, and expensive coke was replaced as fuel by coal.

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