the+business+area

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: Textiles

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As a youth, Dyer constructed an unsinkable life-boat but did not immediately pursue his mechanical bent, for at 16 he entered the counting-house of a French refugee named Nancrède and succeeded to part of the business. He first went to England in 1801 and finally settled in 1811 when he married Ellen Jones (d. 1842) of Gower Street, London. Dyer was already linked with American inventors and brought to England Perkins's plan for steel engraving in 1809, shearing and nail-making machines in 1811, and also received plans and specifications for Fulton's steamboats. He seems to have acted as a sort of British patent agent for American inventors, and in 1811 took out a patent for carding engines and a card clothing machine. In 1813 there was a patent for spinning long-fibred substances such as hemp, flax or grasses, and in 1825 there was a further patent for card making machinery. Joshua Field, on his tour through Britain in 1821, saw a wire drawing machine and a leather splitting machine at Dyer's works as well as the card-making machines. At first Dyer lived in Camden Town, London, but he had a card clothing business in Birmingham. He moved to Manchester c.1816, where he developed an extensive engineering works under the name "Joseph C.Dyer, patent card manufacturers, 8 Stanley Street, Dale Street". In 1832 he founded another works at Gamaches, Somme, France, but this enterprise was closed in 1848 with heavy losses through the mismanagement of an agent. In 1825 Dyer improved on Danforth's roving frame and started to manufacture it. While it was still a comparatively crude machine when com-pared with later versions, it had the merit of turning out a large quantity of work and was very popular, realizing a large sum of money. He patented the machine that year and must have continued his interest in these machines as further patents followed in 1830 and 1835. In 1821 Dyer had been involved in the foundation of the Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) and he was linked with the construction of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway. He was not so successful with the ill-fated Bank of Manchester, of which he was a director and in which he lost £98,000. Dyer played an active role in the community and presented many papers to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. He helped to establish the Royal Institution in London and the Mechanics Institution in Manchester. In 1830 he was a member of the delegation to Paris to take contributions from the town of Manchester for the relief of those wounded in the July revolution and to congratulate Louis-Philippe on his accession. He called for the reform of Parliament and helped to form the Anti-Corn Law League. He hated slavery and wrote several articles on the subject, both prior to and during the American Civil War.

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See also: Arnold, Aza

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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The son of an immigrant merchant, he was educated at the local school, leaving at the age of 13 to take on various jobs, eventually becoming a purser on a Mississippi steamboat. He was struck by the number of wrecks lying in the river; he devised a diving bell and, at the age of 22, set up in business as a salvage engineer. So successful was he at this venture that he was able to retire in three years' time and set up the first glassworks west of the Ohio River. This, however, was a failure and in 1848 he returned to the business of salvage on the Ohio River. He was so successful that he was able to retire permanently in 1857. From the start of the American Civil War in 1861 he recommended to President Lincoln that he should obtain a fleet of armour-plated, steam-powered gunboats to operate on the western rivers. He built seven of these himself, later building or converting a further eighteen. After the end of the war he obtained the contract to design and build a bridge over the Mississippi at St Louis. In this he made use of his considerable knowledge of the river-bed currents. He built a bridge with a 500 ft (150 m) centre span and a clearance of 50 ft (15 m) that was completed in 1874. The three spans are, respectively, 502 ft, 520 ft and 502 ft (153 m, 158 m and 153 m), each being spanned by an arch. The Mississippi river is subject to great changes, both seasonal and irregular, with a range of over 41 ft (12.5 m) between low and high water and a velocity varying from 4 ft (1.2 m) to 12 1/2 ft (3.8 m) per second. The Eads Bridge was completed in 1874 and in the following year Eads was commissioned to open one of the mouths of the Mississippi, for which he constructed a number of jetty traps. He was involved later in attempts to construct a ship railway across the isthmus of Panama. He had been suffering from indifferent health for some years, and this effort was too much for him. He died on 8 March 1887. He was the first American to be awarded the Royal Society of Arts' Albert Medal.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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Very little is known about the life of James Fox, but according to Samuel Smiles (1863) he was as a young man a butler in the service of the Reverend Thomas Gisborne of Foxhall Lodge, Staffordshire. His mechanical abilities were evident from his spare-time activities in the handling of tools and so impressed his employer that he supplied the capital to enable Fox to set up a business in Derby for the manufacture of machinery for the textile and lacemaking industries. To construct this machinery, Fox had to build his own machine tools and later, in the early nineteenth century, made them for sale, some being exported to France, Germany and Poland. He was renowned for his lathes, some of which were quite large; one built in 1830 has been preserved and is 22 ft (6.7 m) long with a swing of 27 in. (69 cm). He was responsible for many improve-ments in the design of the lathe and he also built some of the earliest planing machines (the first, it has been claimed, as early as 1814) and a gear-cutting machine, although this was apparently for cutting wooden patterns for cast gears. The business was continued by his sons Joseph and James (who died in 1859 aged 69) and into the 1860s by the sons of Joseph.

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SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors, Metallurgy

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Gillette's formal education in Chicago was brought to an end when a disastrous fire destroyed all his father's possessions. Forced to fend for himself, he worked first in the hardware trade in Chicago and New York, then as a travelling salesman. Gillette inherited the family talent for invention, but found that his successful inventions barely paid for those that failed. He was advised by a previous employer, William Painter (inventor of the Crown Cork), to look around for something that could be used widely and then thrown away. In 1895 he succeeded in following that advice of inventing something which people could use and then throw away, so that they would keep coming back for more. An idea came to him while he was honing an old-fashioned razor one morning; he was struck by the fact that only a short piece of the whole length of a cutthroat razor is actually used for shaving, as well as by the potentially dangerous nature of the implement. He "rushed out to purchase some pieces of brass, some steel ribbon used for clock springs, a small hand vise and some files". He thought of using a thin steel blade sharpened on each side, placed between two plates and held firmly together by a handle. Though coming from a family of inventors, Gillette had no formal technical education and was entirely ignorant of metallurgy. For six years he sought a way of making a cheap blade from sheet steel that could be hardened, tempered and sharpened to a keen edge.

Gillette eventually found financial supporters: Henry Sachs, a Boston lamp manufacturer; his brother-in-law Jacob Heilbron; and William Nickerson, who had a considerable talent for invention. By skilled trial and error rather than expert metallurgical knowledge, Nickerson devised ways of forming and sharpening the blades, and it was these that brought commercial success. In 1901, the American Safety Razor Company, later to be renamed the Gillette Safety Razor Company, was set up. When it started production in 1903 the company was badly in debt, and managed to sell only fifty-one razors and 168 blades; but by the end of the following year, 90,000 razors and 12.4 million blades had been sold. A sound invention coupled with shrewd promotion ensured further success, and eight plants manufacturing safety razors were established in various parts of the world. Gillette's business experiences led him into the realms of social theory about the way society should be organized. He formulated his views in a series of books published over the years 1894 to 1910. He believed that competition led to a waste of up to 90 per cent of human effort and that want and crime would be eliminated by substituting a giant trust to plan production centrally. Unfortunately, the public in America, or anywhere else for that matter, were not ready for this form of Utopia; no omniscient planners were available, and human wants and needs were too various to be supplied by a single agency. Even so, some of his ideas have found favour: air conditioning and government provision of work for the unemployed. Gillette made a fortune from his invention and retired from active participation in the business in 1913, although he remained President until 1931 and Director until his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Horology

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Graham's father died soon after his birth, so he was raised by his brother. In 1688 he was apprenticed to the London clockmaker Henry Aske, and in 1695 he gained his freedom. He was employed as a journeyman by Tompion in 1696 and later married his niece. In 1711 he formed a partnership with Tompion and effectively ran the business in Tompion's declining years; he took over the business after Tompion died in 1713. In addition to his horological interests he also made scientific instruments, specializing in those for astronomical use. As a person, he was well respected and appears to have lived up to the epithet "Honest George Graham". He befriended John Harrison when he first went to London and lent him money to further his researches at a time when they might have conflicted with his own interests.

The two common forms of escapement in use in Graham's time, the anchor escapement for clocks and the verge escapement for watches, shared the same weakness: they interfered severely with the free oscillation of the pendulum and the balance, and thus adversely affected the timekeeping. Tompion's two frictional rest escapements, the dead-beat for clocks and the horizontal for watches, had provided a partial solution by eliminating recoil (the momentary reversal of the motion of the timepiece), but they had not been successful in practice. Around 1720 Graham produced his own much improved version of the dead-beat escapement which became a standard feature of regulator clocks, at least in Britain, until its supremacy was challenged at the end of the nineteenth century by the superior accuracy of the Riefler clock. Another feature of the regulator clock owed to Graham was the mercury compensation pendulum, which he invented in 1722 and published four years later. The bob of this pendulum contained mercury, the surface of which rose or fell with changes in temperature, compensating for the concomitant variation in the length of the pendulum rod. Graham devised his mercury pendulum after he had failed to achieve compensation by means of the difference in expansion between various metals. He then turned his attention to improving Tompion's horizontal escapement, and by 1725 the cylinder escapement existed in what was virtually its final form. From the following year he fitted this escapement to all his watches, and it was also used extensively by London makers for their precision watches. It proved to be somewhat lacking in durability, but this problem was overcome later in the century by using a ruby cylinder, notably by Abraham Louis Breguet. It was revived, in a cheaper form, by the Swiss and the French in the nineteenth century and was produced in vast quantities.

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See also: Barlow, Edward; Guillaume, Charles-Edouard

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

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George B.Grant was descended from families who came from Britain in the seventeenth century and was educated at the Bridgton (Maine) Academy, the Chandler Scientific School of Dartmouth College and the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard College, where he graduated with the degree of BS in 1873. As an undergraduate he became interested in calculating machines, and his paper "On a new difference engine" was published in the American Journal of Science in August 1871. He also took out his first patents relating to calculating machines in 1872 and 1873. A machine of his design known as "Grant's Difference Engine" was exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Similar machines were also manufactured for sale; being sturdy and reliable, they did much to break down the prejudice against the use of calculating machines in business. Grant's work on calculating machines led to a requirement for accurate gears, so he established a machine shop for gear cutting at Charlestown, Massachusetts. He later moved the business to Boston and incorporated it under the name of Grant's Gear Works Inc., and continued to control it until his death. He also established two other gear-cutting shops, the Philadelphia Gear Works Inc., which he disposed of in 1911, and the Cleveland Gear Works Inc., which he also disposed of after a few years. Grant's commercial success was in connection with gear cutting and in this field he obtained several patents and contributed articles to the American Machinist. However, he continued to take an interest in calculating machines and in his later years carried out experimental work on their development.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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After graduating in 1935 from the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture, New York, Henry served in different government agencies until 1938 when he joined the fast expanding US Maritime Commission. He assisted in the design and construction of troop-carrying vessels, Cl cargo ships, and he supervised the construction of two wartime attack transports. At the end of hostilities, he set up as a consultant naval architect and by 1951 had incorporated the business as J.J.Henry \& Company Inc. The opportunities that consultancy gave him were grasped eagerly; he became involved in the conversion of war-built tonnage to peaceful purposes (such as T2 tankers to ore carriers), the development of the new technologies of the carriage of liquefied gases at cryogenic temperatures and low pressures and, possibly the greatest step forward of all, the development of containerization. Containerization and the closely related field of barge transportation were to provide considerable business during the 1960s and the 1970s. The company designed the wonderful 33-knot container ships for Sea-Land and the auspicious Sea-bee barge carriers for the Lykes Brothers of New Orleans. James Henry's professional achievements were recognized internationally when he was elected President of the (United States) Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers in 1969. By then he had served on many boards and committees and was especially honoured to be Chairman of the Board of Trustees of his graduating college, the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture of New York.

SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors

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Hoover was descended from a Swiss farming family called Hofer who emigrated from Basle and settled in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the early eighteenth century. By 1832 the family had become tanners and lived near North Berlin in Ohio. In 1870 William Henry Hoover, who had studied at Mount Union College, bought the tannery with his brothers and soon expanded the business to make horse collars and saddlery. The firm expanded to become W.H.Hoover \& Co. In the early years of the first decade of the twentieth century, horses were beginning to be replaced by the internal combustion engine, so Hoover needed a new direction for his firm. This he found in the suction vacuum cleaner devised in 1907 by J.Murray Spangler, a cousin of Hoover's wife. The first successful cleaner of this type had been operating in England since 1901 (see Booth), but was not a portable model. Attracted by the development of the small electric motor, Spangler produced a vertical cleaner with such a motor that sucked the dust through the machine and blew it into a bag attached to the handle. Spangler applied for a patent for his invention on 14 September in the same year; it was granted for a carpet sweeper and cleaner on 2 June 1908, but Spangler was unable to market it himself and sold the rights to Hoover. The Model O machine, which ran on small wheels, was immediately manufactured and marketed. Hoover's model was the first electric, one-person-operated, domestic vacuum cleaner and was instantly successful, although the main expansion of the business was delayed for some time until the greater proportion of houses were wired for electricity. The Hoover slogan, "it beats as it sweeps as it cleans", came to be true in 1926 with the introduction of the Model 700, which was the first cleaner to offer triple-action cleaning, a process which beat, swept and sucked at the carpet. Further advances in the 1930s included the use of magnesium and the early plastics.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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When only 5 years old, Laird travelled with his family to Merseyside, where his father William Laird was setting up a ship-repair yard. Fourteen years later his father established the Birkenhead Ironworks for ship and engine repairs, which in later years was to achieve great things with John Laird at the helm. John Laird trained as a solicitor, but instead of going into practice he joined the family business. Between 1829 and 1832 they built three iron barges for inland use in Ireland; this form of construction had become less of a novelty and followed the example set by Thomas Wilson in 1819, but Laird was fired with enthusiasm for this mode of construction. New iron ships followed in rapid succession, with two of especial note: the paddle steamer Lady Lansdown of 1833, which was dismantled and later re-erected on the river Shannon, becoming one of Britain's first "knock-down" contracts; and the early steamer Robert F.Stockton, which had a double Ericsson screw propeller and the first iron transverse watertight bulkheads. With the good name of the shipyard secure, they received orders from MacGregor Laird (John Laird's younger brother) for iron ships for the West African trade. This African connection was to grow and the yard's products were to include the Ma Roberts for Dr David Livingstone. Being of steel and with constant groundings on African rivers, this craft only lasted 18 months in steady operation. In 1858 a new yard dedicated to iron construction was opened at Monk's Ferry. In 1861 John Laird was returned as the first Member of Parliament for Birkenhead and his sons took over the day-to-day affairs of the business. Laird was to suffer acute embarrassment by questions at Westminster over the building in the Birkenhead Works of the United States Confederate raider Alabama in 1862. In 1874 he suffered serious injuries in a riding accident; his health declined and he died later that year.

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SUBJECT AREA: Horology

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Le Roy was born into a distinguished horological family: his father, Julien, was Clockmaker to the King. Pierre became Master in 1737 and continued to work with his father, taking over the business when his father died in 1759. However, he seems to have left the commercial side of the business to others so that he could concentrate on developing the marine chronometer. Unlike John Harrison, he believed that the solution lay in detaching the escapement from the balance, and in 1748 he submitted a proposal for the first detached escapement to the Académie des Sciences in Paris. He also differed from Harrison in his method of temperature compensation, which acted directly on the balance by altering its radius of gyration. This was achieved either by mounting thermometers on the balance or by using bimetallic strips which effectively reduced the diameter of the balance as the temperature rose (with refinements, this later became the standard method of temperature compensation in watches and chronometers). Le Roy had already discovered that for every spiral balance spring there was a particular length at which it would be isochronous, and this method of temperature compensation did not destroy that isochronism by altering the length, as other methods did. These innovations were incorporated in a chronometer with an improved detached escapement which he presented to Louis XV in 1766 and described in a memoir to the Académie des Sciences. This instrument contained the three essential elements of all subsequent chronometers: an isochronous balance spring, a detached escapement and a balance with temperature compensation. Its performance was similar to that of Harrison's fourth timepiece, and Le Roy was awarded prizes by the Académie des Sciences for the chronometer and for his memoir. However, his work was never fully appreciated in France, where he was over-shadowed by his rival Ferdinand Berthoud. When Berthoud was awarded the coveted title of Horloger de la Marine, Le Roy became disillusioned and shortly afterwards gave up chronometry and retired to the country.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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In about 1800 Daniel Massey's family moved to Upper Canada. At the age of 6 he was sent back to stay with his grandparents in Waterton, USA, where he attended school for three years. He returned to his parents in 1807, and for the next twelve years he remained on his father's farm.

At the age of 19 he forfeited his rights to his inheritance and rented land further west, which he began to clear. By the age of 21 he owned 200 acres, and during the next twelve years he bought, cleared and sold a further 1,200 acres. In 1820 he married Lucina Bradley from Water-town and returned with her to Canada.

In 1830 he decided to settle down to farming and brought one of the first US threshing machines into Canada. From frequent visits to his family in the US he would return with new farm equipment, and in 1844 he handed his farm over to his eldest son so that he could concentrate on the development of his farm workshop. In 1845 he formed a brief partnership with R.F.Vaughan, who owned a small factory in Durham County near Lake Ontario. He began the production of ploughs, harrows, scufflers and rollers at a time when the Canadian Government was imposing heavy import duties on agricultural equipment being brought in from the USA. His business flourished and within six months he bought out his partner.

In 1848 he bought another foundry in Newcastle, together with 50 acres of land, and in 1851 his son Hart joined him in the business. The following year Hart returned from the USA with the sole rights to manufacture the Ketchum mower and the Burrell reaper.

The advent of the railway four years later opened up wider markets, and from these beginnings the Massey Company was to represent Canada at the Paris Exhibition of 1867. The European market was secured by the successes of the Massey reaper in the "World" trials held in France in 1889. Two years later the company merged with the Harris Company of Canada, to become the Massey Harris Company. Daniel Massey retired from the company four years after his son joined it, and he died the following year.

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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: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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James Nasmyth was the youngest son of Alexander Nasmyth (1758–1840), the portrait and landscape painter. According to his autobiography he was named James Hall after his father's friend, the geologist Sir James Hall (1761–1832), but he seems never to have used his second name in official documents. He received an elementary education at Edinburgh High School, but left at the age of 12. He attended evening classes at the Edinburgh School of Arts for the instruction of Mechanics between 1821 and 1825, and gained experience as a mechanic at an early age in his father's workshop. He shared these early experiences with his brother George, who was only a year or so older, and in the 1820s the brothers built several model steam engines and a steam-carriage capable of carrying eight passengers on the public roads. In 1829 Nasmyth obtained a position in London as personal assistant to Henry Maudslay, and after Maudslay's death in February 1831 he remained with Maudslay's partner, Joshua Field, for a short time. He then returned to Edinburgh, where he and his brother George started in a small way as general engineers. In 1834 they moved to a small workshop in Manchester, and in 1836, with the aid of financial backing from some Manchester businessmen, they established on a site at Patricroft, a few miles from the city, the works which became known as the Bridgewater Foundry. They were soon joined by a third partner, Holbrook Gaskell (1813–1909), who looked after the administration of the business, the firm then being known as Nasmyths Gaskell \& Co. They specialized in making machine tools, and Nasmyth invented many improvements so that they soon became one of the leading manufacturers in this field. They also made steam locomotives for the rapidly developing railways. James Nasmyth's best-known invention was the steam-hammer, which dates from 1839 but was not patented until 1842. The self-acting control gear was probably the work of Robert Wilson and ensured the commercial success of the invention. George Nasmyth resigned from the partnership in 1843 and in 1850 Gaskell also resigned, after which the firm continued as James Nasmyth \& Co. James Nasmyth himself retired at the end of 1856 and went to live at Penshurst, Kent, in a house which he named "Hammerfield" where he devoted his time mainly to his hobby of astronomy. Robert Wilson returned to become Managing Partner of the firm, which later became Nasmyth, Wilson \& Co. and retained that style until its closure in 1940. Nasmyth's claim to be the sole inventor of the steam-hammer has been disputed, but his patent of 1842 was not challenged and the fourteen-year monopoly ensured the prosperity of the business so that he was able to retire at the age of 48. At his death in 1890 he left an estate valued at £243,805.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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The son of a Quaker schoolmaster, Ransome served his apprenticeship with a Norfolk iron manufacturer and then went into business on his own in the same town, setting up one of the first brass and iron foundries in East Anglia. At an early stage of his career he was selling into Norfolk and Suffolk, well beyond the boundaries to be expected from a local craftsman. He achieved this through the use of forty-seven agents acting on his behalf. In 1789, with one employee and £200 capital, he transferred to Ipswich, where the company was to remain and where there was easier access to both raw materials and his markets. It was there that he discovered that cooling one part of a metal share during its casting could result in a self-sharpening share, and he patented the process in 1785.

Ransome won a number of awards at the early Bath and West shows, a fact which demonstrates the extent of his markets. In 1808 he patented an all-metal plough made up of interchangeable parts, and the following year was making complete ploughs for sale. With interchangeable parts he was able to make composite ploughs suitable for a wide variety of conditions and therefore with potential markets all over the country.

In 1815 he was joined by his son James, and at about the same time by William Cubitt. With the expertise of the latter the firm moved into bridge building and millwrighting, and was therefore able to withstand the agricultural depression which began to affect other manufacturers from about 1815. In 1818, under Cubitt's direction, Ransome built the gas-supply system for the town of Ipswich. In 1830 his grandson James Ransome joined the firm, and it was under his influence that the agricultural side was developed. There was a great expansion in the business after 1835.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport

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Little is known of Shillibeer's early life except that he was for some years resident in France. He served as a midshipman in the Royal Navy before joining the firm of Hatchetts in Long Acre, London, to learn coachbuilding. He set up as a coachbuilder in Paris soon after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and prospered. Early in the 1820s Jacques Laffite ordered two improved buses from Shillibeer. Their success prompted Shillibeer to sell up his business and return to London to start a similar service. His first two buses in London ran for the first time on 4 July 1829, from the Yorkshire Stingo at Paddington to the Bank, a distance of 9 miles (14 km) which had taken three hours by the existing short-stagecoaches. Shillibeer's vehicle was drawn by three horses abreast, carried twenty-two passengers at a charge of one shilling for the full journey or sixpence for a part-journey. These fares were a third of that charged for an inside seat on a short-stagecoach. The conductors were the sons of friends of Shillibeer from his naval days. He was soon earning £1,000 per week, each bus making twelve double journeys a day. Dishonesty was rife among the conductors, so Shillibeer fitted a register under the entrance step to count the passengers; two of the conductors who had been discharged set out to wreck the register and its inventor. Expanded routes were soon being travelled by a larger fleet but the newly formed Metropolitan Police force complained that the buses were too wide, so the next buses had only two horses and carried sixteen passengers inside with two on top. Shillibeer's partner, William Morton, failed as competition grew. Shillibeer sold out in 1834 when he had sixty buses, six hundred horses and stabling for them. He started a long-distance service to Greenwich, but a competing railway opened in 1835 and income declined; the Official Stamp and Tax Offices seized the omnibuses and the business was bankrupted. Shillibeer then set up as an undertaker, and prospered with a new design of hearse which became known as a "Shillibeer".

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SUBJECT AREA: Telecommunications

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Enlisting in the 8th New York Cavalry on his twenty-second birthday at the beginning of the American Civil War, Strowger reached the rank of Second Lieutenant. After the war he taught in a number of schools, including that where he had been a pupil, then bought an undertaking business in North Topeka, Kansas. After the death of his wife, he remarried and moved the business to Kansas City.

In 1887, suspecting that the local telephone operator was diverting his potential clients to a rival, he devised a cardboard mock-up of an automatic switching mechanism comprising ten layers of ten contacts, in which electromagnets would be used to lift and rotate the contact wiper arm and thus connect the caller to any one of 100 telephone destinations. Two years later he filed a patent for a 1,000-line automatic exchange.

With the help of his nephew he made a 100line working demonstration and eventually, with the aid of financial backers, the Strowger Automatic Exchange Company was established on 30 October 1891; its first exchange was installed in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892. By the end of 1896 Strowger exchanges had been established in a number of other towns. That year the Strowger engineers introduced the dial system to replace the confusing push-button mechanism, an innovation that was to survive until relatively recently, and the following year saw development of a "trunking" system. In failing health, Strowger retired to Florida, but the company flourished and eventually became part of General Telephones and Electronics (GTE).

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Jedediah Strutt was the second of three sons of William, a small farmer and maltster at South Normanton, near Alfreton, Derbyshire, where the only industry was a little framework knitting. At the age of 14 Jedediah was apprenticed to Ralph Massey, a wheelwright near Derby, and lodged with the Woollats, whose daughter Elizabeth he later married in 1755. He moved to Leicester and in 1754 started farming at Blackwell, where an uncle had died and left him the stock on his farm. It was here that he made his knitting invention.

William Lee's knitting machine remained in virtually the same form as he left it until the middle of the eighteenth century. The knitting industry moved away from London into the Midlands and in 1730 a Nottingham workman, using Indian spun yarn, produced the first pair of cotton hose ever made by mechanical means. This industry developed quickly and by 1750 was providing employment for 1,200 frameworkers using both wool and cotton in the Nottingham and Derby areas. It was against this background that Jedediah Strutt obtained patents for his Derby rib machine in 1758 and 1759.

The machine was a highly ingenious mechanism, which when placed in front of an ordinary stocking frame enabled the fashionable ribbed stockings to be made by machine instead of by hand. To develop this invention, he formed a partnership first with his brother-in-law, William Woollat, and two leading Derby hosiers, John Bloodworth and Thomas Stamford. This partnership was dissolved in 1762 and another was formed with Woollat and the Nottingham hosier Samuel Need. Strutt's invention was followed by a succession of innovations which enabled framework knitters to produce almost every kind of mesh on their machines. In 1764 the stocking frame was adapted to the making of eyelet holes, and this later lead to the production of lace. In 1767 velvet was made on these frames, and two years later brocade. In this way Strutt's original invention opened up a new era for knitting. Although all these later improvements were not his, he was able to make a fortune from his invention. In 1762 he was made a freeman of Nottingham, but by then he was living in Derby. His business at Derby was concerned mainly with silk hose and he had a silk mill there.

It was partly his need for cotton yarn and partly his wealth which led him into partnership with Richard Arkwright, John Smalley and David Thornley to exploit Arkwright's patent for spinning cotton by rollers. Together with Samuel Need, they financed the Arkwright partnership in 1770 to develop the horse-powered mill in Nottingham and then the water-powered mill at Cromford. Strutt gave advice to Arkwright about improving the machinery and helped to hold the partnership together when Arkwright fell out with his first partners. Strutt was also involved, in London, where he had a house, with the parliamentary proceedings over the passing of the Calico Act in 1774, which opened up the trade in British-manufactured all-cotton cloth.

In 1776 Strutt financed the construction of his own mill at Helper, about seven miles (11 km) further down the Derwent valley below Cromford. This was followed by another at Milford, a little lower on the river. Strutt was also a partner with Arkwright and others in the mill at Birkacre, near Chorley in Lancashire. The Strutt mills were developed into large complexes for cotton spinning and many experiments were later carried out in them, both in textile machinery and in fireproof construction for the mills themselves. They were also important training schools for engineers.

Elizabeth Strutt died in 1774 and Jedediah never married again. The family seem to have lived frugally in spite of their wealth, probably influenced by their Nonconformist background. He had built a house near the mills at Milford, but it was in his Derby house that Jedediah died in 1797. By the time of his death, his son William had long been involved with the business and became a more important cotton spinner than Jedediah.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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On 4 November 1766 David Thornley married Mary, daughter of Joseph Brown, roper, at St Peter's, Liverpool. In Gore's Dictionary for 1767 Thornley is described as "merchant" and his wife as "milliner" of Castle Street, Liverpool. David Thornley was distantly related to Richard Arkwright and certainly by 1768 Thornley had begun his active association with Arkwright when he joined him in Preston, an event recorded in the inquiry into the qualifications of those who had voted in the Burgoyne election. Thornley may have helped Arkwright with the technical development of his spinning machine.

On 14 May 1768, Arkwright, Smalley and Thornley became partners in the cotton-spinning venture at Nottingham for a term of fourteen years, or longer if a patent could be obtained. Each partner was to have three one-ninth shares and was to advance such money as might be necessary to apply for a patent as well as to develop the spinning machine. Profits were to be divided equally as often as convenient and the partners were to devote their whole time to the business after a period of two years. How-ever, it seems that in 1769 the partners had difficulty in raising the necessary money to finance the patent, and Thornley had to reduce his stake in the partnership to a one-ninth share. By this time Thornley must have moved to Nottingham, where Arkwright established his first mill. On 19 January 1770, additional finance was provided by two new partners, Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt, and alterations were made to the mill buildings that the partners had leased to work the spinning machines by horse power. Arkwright and Thornley were to be responsible for the day-to-day management of the mill, receiving £25 per annum for these duties. Thornley appears to have remained at Nottingham to supervise the mill, while the other partners moved to Cromford to establish the much larger enterprise there. It was at Nottingham that David Thornley died in January 1772, and his share in the partnership was bought from his wife, Mary, by Arkwright. Mary returned to her millinery business in Liverpool.

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SUBJECT AREA: Horology

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Little is known about Tompion's early life except that he was born into a family of blacksmiths. When he was admitted into the Clockmakers' Company in 1671 he was described as a "Great Clockmaker", which meant a maker of turret clocks, and as these clocks were made of wrought iron they would have required blacksmithing skills. Despite this background, he also rapidly established his reputation as a watchmaker. In 1674 he moved to premises in Water Lane at the sign of "The Dial and Three Crowns", where his business prospered and he remained for the rest of his life. Assisted by journeymen and up to eleven apprentices at any one time, the output from his workshop was prodigious, amounting to over 5,000 watches and 600 clocks. In his lifetime he was famous for his watches, as these figures suggest, but although they are of high quality they do not differ markedly from those produced by other London watchmakers of that period. He is now known more for the limited number of elaborate clocks that he produced, such as the equation clock and the spring-driven clock of a year's duration, which he made for William III. Around 1711 he took into partnership his nephew by marriage, George Graham, who carried on the business after his death.

Although Tompion does not seem to have been particularly innovative, he lived at a time when great advances were being made in horology, which his consummate skill as a craftsman enabled him to exploit. In this he was greatly assisted by his association with Robert Hooke, for whom Tompion constructed a watch with a balance spring in 1675; at that time Hooke was trying to establish his priority over Huygens for this invention. Although this particular watch was not successful, it made Tompion aware of the potential of the balance spring and he became the first person in England to apply Huygens's spiral spring to the balance of a watch. Although Thuret had constructed such a watch somewhat earlier in France, the superior quality of Tompion's wheel work, assisted by Hooke's wheel-cutting engine, enabled him to dominate the market. The anchor escapement (which reduced the amplitude of the pendulum's swing) was first applied to clocks around this time and produced further improvements in accuracy which Tompion and other makers were able to utilize. However, the anchor escapement, like the verge escapement, produced recoil (the clock was momentarily driven in reverse). Tompion was involved in attempts to overcome this defect with the introduction of the dead-beat escapement for clocks and the horizontal escapement for watches. Neither was successful, but they were both perfected later by George Graham.

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