the+first+of+july

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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The third son of a merchant sea captain, he was at first educated in the village school. At the age of 17 he was working under a Mr Larmer, a civil engineer, constructing the Lancaster and Carlisle railway. He later moved to be a resident engineer on the Stockton \& Darlington Railway, and from 1849 was Engineer and Manager of the Edinburgh \& Northern Railway. In this last position he became aware of the great inconvenience caused to traffic by the broad estuaries of the Tay and the Forth on the eastern side of Scotland. The railway later became the Edinburgh, Perth \& Dundee, and was then absorbed into the North British in 1854 when Bouch produced his first plans for a bridge across the Tay at an estimated cost of £200,000. A bill was passed for the building of the bridge in 1870. Prior to this, Bouch had built many bridges up to the Redheugh Viaduct, at Newcastle upon Tyne, which had two spans of 240 ft (73 m) and two of 260 ft (79 m). He had also set up in business on his own. He is said to have designed nearly 300 miles (480 km) of railway in the north, as well as a "floating railway" of steam ferries to carry trains across the Forth and the Tay. The Tay bridge, however, was his favourite project; he had hawked it for some twenty years before getting the go-ahead, and the foundation stone of the bridge was laid on 22 July 1871. The total length of the bridge was nearly two miles (3.2 km), while the shore-to-shore distance over the river was just over one mile (1.6 km). It consisted of eighty-five spans, thirteen of which, i.e. "the high girders", were some 245 ft (75 m) long and 100 ft (30 m) above water level to allow for shipping access to Perth, and was a structure of lattice girders on brick and masonry piers topped with ironwork. The first crossing of the bridge was made on 26 September 1877, and the official opening was on 31 May 1878. On Sunday 28 December 1879, at about 7.20 pm, in a wind of probably 90 mph (145 km/h), the thirteen "high girders" were blown into the river below, drowning the seventy-five passengers and crew aboard the 5.20 train from Burntisland. A Court of Enquiry was held and revealed design faults in that the effect of wind pressure had not been adequately taken into account, faults in manufacture in the plugging of flaws in the castings, and inadequate inspection and maintenance; all of these faults were attributed to Bouch, who had been knighted for the building of the bridge. He died at his house in Moffat four months after the enquiry.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

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William Buckle was the son of Thomas Buckle (1759–1849), a millwright who later assisted the 9th Earl of Dundonald (1749–1831) in his various inventions, principally machines for the manufacture of rope. Soon after the birth of William, the family moved from Alnwick to Hull, Yorkshire, where he received his education. The family again moved c.1808 to London, and William was apprenticed to Messrs Woolf \& Edwards, millwrights and engineers of Lambeth. During his apprenticeship he attended evening classes at a mechanical drawing school in Finsbury, which was then the only place of its kind in London.

After completing his apprenticeship, he was sent by Messrs Humphrys to Memel in Prussia to establish steamboats on the rivers and lakes there under the patronage of the Prince of Hardenburg. After about four years he returned to Britain and was employed by Boulton, Watt \& Co. to install the engines in the first steam mail packet for the service between Dublin and Holyhead. He was responsible for the engines of the steamship Lightning when it was used on the visit of George IV to Ireland.

About 1824 Buckle was engaged by Boulton, Watt \& Co. as Manager of the Soho Foundry, where he is credited with introducing the first large screw-cutting lathe. At Soho about 700 or 800 men were employed on a wide variety of engineering manufacture, including coining machinery for mints in many parts of the world, with some in 1826 for the Mint at the Soho Manufactory. In 1851, following the recommendations of a Royal Commission, the Royal Mint in London was reorganized and Buckle was asked to take the post of Assistant Coiner, the senior executive officer under the Deputy Master. This he accepted, retaining the post until the end of his life.

At Soho, Buckle helped to establish a literary and scientific institution to provide evening classes for the apprentices and took part in the teaching. He was an original member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, which was founded in Birmingham in January 1847, and a member of their Council from then until 1855. He contributed a number of papers in the early years, including a memoir of William Murdock whom he had known at Soho; he resigned from the Institution in 1856 after his move to London. He was an honorary member of the London Association of Foreman Engineers.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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The son of a minor official in a magistrate's court, Daguerre showed an early aptitude for drawing. He was first apprenticed to an architect, but in 1804 he moved to Paris to learn the art of stage design. He was particularly interested in perspective and lighting, and later showed great ingenuity in lighting stage sets. Fascinated by a popular form of entertainment of the period, the panorama, he went on to create a variant of it called the diorama. It is assumed that he used a camera obscura for perspective drawings and, by purchasing it from the optician Chevalier, he made contact with Joseph Nicéphore Niepce. In 1829 Niepce and Daguerre entered into a formal partnership to perfect Niepce's heliographic process, but the partnership was dissolved when Niepce died in 1833, when only limited progress had been made. Daguerre continued experimenting alone, however, using iodine and silver plates; by 1837 he had discovered that images formed in the camera obscura could be developed by mercury vapour and fixed with a hot salt solution. After unsuccessfully attempting to sell his process, Daguerre approached F.J.D. Arago, of the Académie des Sciences, who announced the discovery in 1839. Details of Daguerre's work were not published until August of that year when the process was presented free to the world, except England. With considerable business acumen, Daguerre had quietly patented the process through an agent, Miles Berry, in London a few days earlier. He also granted a monopoly to make and sell his camera to a Monsieur Giroux, a stationer by trade who happened to be a relation of Daguerre's wife. The daguerreotype process caused a sensation when announced. Daguerre was granted a pension by a grateful government and honours were showered upon him all over the world. It was a direct positive process on silvered copper plates and, in fact, proved to be a technological dead end. The future was to lie with negative-positive photography devised by Daguerre's British contemporary, W.H.F. Talbot, although Daguerre's was the first practicable photographic process to be announced. It captured the public's imagination and in an improved form was to dominate professional photographic practice for more than a decade.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Dickson was born in France of English and Scottish parents. As a young man of almost 19 years, he wrote in 1879 to Thomas Edison in America, asking for a job. Edison replied that he was not taking on new staff at that time, but Dickson, with his mother and sisters, decided to emigrate anyway. In 1883 he contacted Edison again, and was given a job at the Goerk Street laboratory of the Edison Electric Works in New York. He soon assumed a position of responsibility as Superintendent, working on the development of electric light and power systems, and also carried out most of the photography Edison required. In 1888 he moved to the Edison West Orange laboratory, becoming Head of the ore-milling department. When Edison, inspired by Muybridge's sequence photographs of humans and animals in motion, decided to develop a motion picture apparatus, he gave the task to Dickson, whose considerable skills in mechanics, photography and electrical work made him the obvious choice. The first experiments, in 1888, were on a cylinder machine like the phonograph, in which the sequence pictures were to be taken in a spiral. This soon proved to be impractical, and work was delayed for a time while Dickson developed a new ore-milling machine. Little progress with the movie project was made until George Eastman's introduction in July 1889 of celluloid roll film, which was thin, tough, transparent and very flexible. Dickson returned to his experiments in the spring of 1891 and soon had working models of a film camera and viewer, the latter being demonstrated at the West Orange laboratory on 20 May 1891. By the early summer of 1892 the project had advanced sufficiently for commercial exploitation to begin. The Kinetograph camera used perforated 35 mm film (essentially the same as that still in use in the late twentieth century), and the kinetoscope, a peep-show viewer, took fifty feet of film running in an endless loop. Full-scale manufacture of the viewers started in 1893, and they were demonstrated on a number of occasions during that year. On 14 April 1894 the first kinetoscope parlour, with ten viewers, was opened to the public in New York. By the end of that year, the kinetoscope was seen by the public all over America and in Europe. Dickson had created the first commercially successful cinematograph system. Dickson left Edison's employment on 2 April 1895, and for a time worked with Woodville Latham on the development of his Panoptikon projector, a projection version of the kinetoscope. In December 1895 he joined with Herman Casier, Henry N.Marvin and Elias Koopman to form the American Mutoscope Company. Casier had designed the Mutoscope, an animated-picture viewer in which the sequences of pictures were printed on cards fixed radially to a drum and were flipped past the eye as the drum rotated. Dickson designed the Biograph wide-film camera to produce the picture sequences, and also a projector to show the films directly onto a screen. The large-format images gave pictures of high quality for the period; the Biograph went on public show in America in September 1896, and subsequently throughout the world, operating until around 1905. In May 1897 Dickson returned to England and set up as a producer of Biograph films, recording, among other subjects, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897, Pope Leo XIII in 1898, and scenes of the Boer War in 1899 and 1900. Many of the Biograph subjects were printed as reels for the Mutoscope to produce the "what the butler saw" machines which were a feature of fairgrounds and seaside arcades until modern times. Dickson's contact with the Biograph Company, and with it his involvement in cinematography, ceased in 1911.

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SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors, Textiles

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Son of Elias Howe, a farmer, he acquired his mechanical knowledge in his father's mill. He left school at 12 years of age and was apprenticed for two years in a machine shop in Lowell, Massachusetts, and later to an instrument maker, Ari Davis in Boston, Massachusetts, where his master's services were much in demand by Harvard University. Fired by a desire to invent a sewing machine, he utilized the experience gained in Lowell to devise a shuttle carrying a lower thread and a needle carrying an upper thread to make lock-stitch in straight lines. His attempts were so rewarding that he left his job and was sustained first by his father and then by a partner. By 1845 he had built a machine that worked at 250 stitches per minute, and the following year he patented an improved machine. The invention of the sewing machine had an enormous impact on the textile industry, stimulating demand for cloth because making up garments became so much quicker. The sewing machine was one of the first mass-produced consumer durables and was essentially an American invention. William Thomas, a London manufacturer of shoes, umbrellas and corsets, secured the British rights and persuaded Howe to come to England to apply it to the making of shoes. This Howe did, but he quarrelled with Thomas after less than one year. He returned to America to face with his partner, G.W.Bliss, a bigger fight over his patent (see I.M. Singer), which was being widely infringed. Not until 1854 was the case settled in his favour. This litigation threatened the very existence of the new industry, but the Great Sewing Machine Combination, the first important patent-pooling arrangement in American history, changed all this. For a fee of $5 on every domestically-sold machine and $1 on every exported one, Howe contributed to the pool his patent of 1846 for a grooved eye-pointed needle used in conjunction with a lock-stitch-forming shuttle. Howe's patent was renewed in 1861; he organized and equipped a regiment during the Civil War with the royalties. When the war ended he founded the Howe Machine Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Textiles

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As the son of the well-known and inventive dyer George Macintosh, Charles had an early interest in chemistry. At the age of 19 he gave up his work as a clerk with a Glasgow merchant to manufacture sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) and developed new processes in dyeing. In 1797 he started the first Scottish alum works, finding the alum in waste shale from coal mines. His first works was at Hurlet, Renfrewshire, and was followed later by others. He then formed a partnership with Charles Tennant, the proprietor of a chemical works at St Rollox, near Glasgow, and sold "lime bleaching liquor" made with chlorine and milk of lime from their bleach works at Darnley. A year later the use of dry lime to make bleaching powder, a process worked out by Macintosh, was patented. Macintosh remained associated with Tennant's St Rollox chemical works until 1814. During this time, in 1809, he had set up a yeast factory, but it failed because of opposition from the London brewers.

There was a steady demand for the ammonia that gas works produced, but the tar was often looked upon as an inconvenient waste product. Macintosh bought all the ammonia and tar that the Glasgow works produced, using the ammonia in his establishment to produce cudbear, a dyestuff extracted from various lichens. Cudbear could be used with appropriate mordants to make shades from pink to blue. The tar could be distilled to produce naphtha, which was used as a flare. Macintosh also became interested in ironmaking. In 1825 he took out a patent for converting malleable iron into steel by taking it to white heat in a current of gas with a carbon content, such as coal gas. However, the process was not commercially successful because of the difficulty keeping the furnace gas-tight. In 1828 he assisted J.B. Neilson in bringing hot blast into use in blast furnaces; Neilson assigned Macintosh a share in the patent, which was of dubious benefit as it involved him in the tortuous litigation that surrounded the patent until 1843.

In June 1823, as a result of experiments into the possible uses of naphtha obtained as a by-product of the distillation of coal tar, Macintosh patented his process for waterproofing fabric. This comprised dissolving rubber in naphtha and applying the solution to two pieces of cloth which were afterwards pressed together to form an impermeable compound fabric. After an experimental period in Glasgow, Macintosh commenced manufacture in Manchester, where he formed a partnership with H.H.Birley, B.Kirk and R.W.Barton. Birley was a cotton spinner and weaver and was looking for ways to extend the output of his cloth. He was amongst the first to light his mills with gas, so he shared a common interest with Macintosh.

New buildings were erected for the production of waterproof cloth in 1824–5, but there were considerable teething troubles with the process, particularly in the spreading of the rubber solution onto the cloth. Peter Ewart helped to install the machinery, including a steam engine supplied by Boulton \& Watt, and the naphtha was supplied from Macintosh's works in Glasgow. It seems that the process was still giving difficulties when Thomas Hancock, the foremost rubber technologist of that time, became involved in 1830 and was made a partner in 1834. By 1836 the waterproof coat was being called a "mackintosh" [sic] and was gaining such popularity that the Manchester business was expanded with additional premises. Macintosh's business was gradually enlarged to include many other kinds of indiarubber products, such as rubber shoes and cushions.

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RLH / LRD

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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He was born Edward Muggeridge, but later changed his name, taking the Saxon spelling of his first name and altering his surname, first to Muygridge and then to Muybridge. He emigrated to America in 1851, working in New York in bookbinding and selling as a commission agent for the London Printing and Publishing Company. Through contact with a New York daguerreotypist, Silas T.Selleck, he acquired an interest in photography that developed after his move to California in 1855. On a visit to England in 1860 he learned the wet-collodion process from a friend, Arthur Brown, and acquired the best photographic equipment available in London before returning to America. In 1867, under his trade pseudonym "Helios", he set out to record the scenery of the Far West with his mobile dark-room, christened "The Flying Studio".

His reputation as a photographer of the first rank spread, and he was commissioned to record the survey visit of Major-General Henry W.Halleck to Alaska and also to record the territory through which the Central Pacific Railroad was being constructed. Perhaps because of this latter project, he was approached by the President of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford, to attempt to photograph a horse trotting at speed. There was a long-standing controversy among racing men as to whether a trotting horse had all four hooves off the ground at any point; Stanford felt that it did, and hoped than an "instantaneous" photograph would settle the matter once and for all. In May 1872 Muybridge photographed the horse "Occident", but without any great success because the current wet-collodion process normally required many seconds, even in a good light, for a good result. In April 1873 he managed to produce some better negatives, in which a recognizable silhouette of the horse showed all four feet above the ground at the same time.

Soon after, Muybridge left his young wife, Flora, in San Francisco to go with the army sent to put down the revolt of the Modoc Indians. While he was busy photographing the scenery and the combatants, his wife had an affair with a Major Harry Larkyns. On his return, finding his wife pregnant, he had several confrontations with Larkyns, which culminated in his shooting him dead. At his trial for murder, in February 1875, Muybridge was acquitted by the jury on the grounds of justifiable homicide; he left soon after on a long trip to South America.

He again took up his photographic work when he returned to North America and Stanford asked him to take up the action-photography project once more. Using a new shutter design he had developed while on his trip south, and which would operate in as little as 1/1,000 of a second, he obtained more detailed pictures of "Occident" in July 1877. He then devised a new scheme, which Stanford sponsored at his farm at Palo Alto. A 50 ft (15 m) long shed was constructed, containing twelve cameras side by side, and a white background marked off with vertical, numbered lines was set up. Each camera was fitted with Muybridge's highspeed shutter, which was released by an electromagnetic catch. Thin threads stretched across the track were broken by the horse as it moved along, closing spring electrical contacts which released each shutter in turn. Thus, in about half a second, twelve photographs were obtained that showed all the phases of the movement.

Although the pictures were still little more than silhouettes, they were very sharp, and sequences published in scientific and photographic journals throughout the world excited considerable attention. By replacing the threads with an electrical commutator device, which allowed the release of the shutters at precise intervals, Muybridge was able to take series of actions by other animals and humans. From 1880 he lectured in America and Europe, projecting his results in motion on the screen with his Zoopraxiscope projector. In August 1883 he received a grant of $40,000 from the University of Pennsylvania to carry on his work there. Using the vastly improved gelatine dry-plate process and new, improved multiple-camera apparatus, during 1884 and 1885 he produced over 100,000 photographs, of which 20,000 were reproduced in Animal Locomotion in 1887. The subjects were animals of all kinds, and human figures, mostly nude, in a wide range of activities. The quality of the photographs was extremely good, and the publication attracted considerable attention and praise.

Muybridge returned to England in 1894; his last publications were Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901). His influence on the world of art was enormous, over-turning the conventional representations of action hitherto used by artists. His work in pioneering the use of sequence photography led to the science of chronophotography developed by Marey and others, and stimulated many inventors, notably Thomas Edison to work which led to the introduction of cinematography in the 1890s.

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SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Recording, Telecommunications

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From an early age he was absorbed by phenomena of physics to the exclusion of all other subjects, including mathematics. When choosing his subjects for the final three years in Borgedydskolen in Christianshavn (Copenhagen) before university, he opted for languages and history. At the University of Copenhagen he embarked on the study of medicine in 1889, but broke it off and was apprenticed to the machine firm of A/S Frichs Eftf. in Aarhus. He was employed between 1893 and 1899 as a mechanic and assistant in the laboratory of the Copenhagen Telephone Company KTAS. Eventually he advanced to be Head of the line fault department. This suited his desire for experiment and measurement perfectly. After the invention of the telegraphone in 1898, he left the laboratory and with responsible business people he created Aktieselskabet Telegrafonen, Patent Poulsen in order to develop it further, together with Peder Oluf Pedersen (1874– 1941). Pedersen brought with him the mathematical background which eventually led to his professorship in electronic engineering in 1922.

The telegraphone was the basis for multinational industrial endeavours after it was demonstrated at the 1900 World's Exhibition in Paris. It must be said that its strength was also its weakness, because the telegraphone was unique in bringing sound recording and reproduction to the telephone field, but the lack of electronic amplifiers delayed its use outside this and the dictation fields (where headphones could be used) until the 1920s. However, commercial interest was great enough to provoke a number of court cases concerning patent infringement, in which Poulsen frequently figured as a witness.

In 1903–4 Poulsen and Pedersen developed the arc generator for continuous radio waves which was used worldwide for radio transmitters in competition with Marconi's spark-generating system. The inspiration for this work came from the research by William Duddell on the musical arc. Whereas Duddell had proposed the use of the oscillations generated in his electric arc for telegraphy in his 1901 UK patent, Poulsen contributed a chamber of hydrogen and a transverse magnetic field which increased the efficiency remarkably. He filed patent applications on these constructions from 1902 and the first publication in a scientific forum took place at the International Electrical Congress in St Louis, Missouri, in 1904.

In order to use continuous waves efficiently (the high frequency constituted a carrier), Poulsen developed both a modulator for telegraphy and a detector for the carrier wave. The modulator was such that even the more primitive spark-communication receivers could be used. Later Poulsen and Pedersen developed frequency-shift keying.

The Amalgamated Radio-Telegraph Company Ltd was launched in London in 1906, combining the developments of Poulsen and those of De Forest Wireless Telegraph Syndicate. Poulsen contributed his English and American patents. When this company was liquidated in 1908, its assets were taken over by Det Kontinentale Syndikat for Poulsen Radio Telegrafi, A/S in Copenhagen (liquidated 1930–1). Some of the patents had been sold to C.Lorenz AG in Berlin, which was very active.

The arc transmitting system was in use worldwide from about 1910 to 1925, and the power increased from 12 kW to 1,000 kW. In 1921 an exceptional transmitter rated at 1,800 kW was erected on Java for communications with the Netherlands. More than one thousand installations had been in use worldwide. The competing systems were initially spark transmitters (Marconi) and later rotary converters ( Westinghouse). Similar power was available from valve transmitters only much later.

From c. 1912 Poulsen did not contribute actively to further development. He led a life as a well-respected engineer and scientist and served on several committees. He had his private laboratory and made experiments in the composition of matter and certain resonance phenomena; however, nothing was published. It has recently been suggested that Poulsen could not have been unaware of Oberlin Smith's work and publication in 1888, but his extreme honesty in technical matters indicates that his development was indeed independent. In the case of the arc generator, Poulsen was always extremely frank about the inspiration he gained from earlier developers' work.

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