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121 Fox, Uffa
SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping[br]b. 15 January 1898 Cowes, Isle of Wight, Englandd. 27 October 1972 Isle of Wight (?), England[br]English yacht designer.[br]Coming from a family that had originated in East Anglia, his first name was that of an early British king and was to typify his unusual and refreshing zest for life. Fox commenced his professional career as an apprentice with the flying boat and high-speed craft builders Messrs S.E.Saunders, and shortly after the outbreak of the First World War he was conscripted into the Royal Naval Air Service. In 1920 he made his first transatlantic crossing under sail, a much greater adventure then than now, and returned to the United Kingdom as deck-hand on a ship bound for Liverpool. He was to make the crossing under sail twice more. Shortly after his marriage in 1925, he purchased the old Floating Bridge at Cowes and converted it to living accommodation, workshops and drawing offices. By the 1930s his life's work was in full swing, with designs coming off his drawing board for some of the most outstanding mass-produced craft ever built, as well as for some remarkable one-off yachts. His experimentation with every kind of sailing craft, and even with the Eskimo kayak, gave him the knowledge and experience that made his name known worldwide. During the Second World War he designed and produced the world's first airborne parachuted lifeboat. Despite what could be described as a robust lifestyle, coupled with interests in music, art and horseriding, Fox continued to produce great designs and in the late 1940s he introduced the Firefly, followed by the beautiful Flying Fifteen class of racing keel boats. One of his most unusual vessels was Britannia, the 24 ft (7.3 m) waterline craft that John Fairfax was to row across the Atlantic. Later came Britannia II, which Fairfax took across the Pacific![br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsCBE 1959. Royal Designer to Industry (RDI).BibliographyFox produced a series of yachting books, most first published in the late 1930s, and some more lighthearted volumes of reminiscences in the 1960s. Some of the best-known titles are: Sail and Power, Racing and Cruising Design, Uffa Fox's Second Book and The Crest of the Wave.Further ReadingJ.Dixon, 1978, Uffa Fox. A Personal Biography, Brighton: Angus \& Robertson.FMW -
122 Gaskill, Harvey Freeman
SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering[br]b. 19 January 1845 Royalton, New York, USAd. 1 April 1889 Lockport, New York, USA[br]American mechanical engineer, inventor of the water-pumping engine with flywheel and reciprocating pumps.[br]Gaskill's father was a farmer near New York, where the son attended the local schools until he was 16 years old. At the age of 13 he already showed his mechanical aptitude by inventing a revolving hayrake, which was not exploited because the family had no money. His parents moved to Lockport, New York, where Harvey became a student at Lockport Union School and then the Poughkeepsie Commercial College, from which he graduated in 1866. After a period in his uncle's law office, he entered the firm of Penfield, Martin \& Gaskill to manufacture a patent clock. Then he was involved in a planing mill and a sash-and-blind manufactory. He devised a clothes spinner and a horse hayrake, but he did not manufacture them. In 1873 he became a draughtsman in the Holly Manufacturing Company in Lockport, which made pumping machinery for waterworks. He was promoted first to Engineer and then to Superintendent of the company in 1877. In 1885 he became a member of the Board of Directors and Vice-President. But for his untimely death, he might have become President. He was also a director of several other manufacturing concerns, public utilities and banks. In 1882 he produced a pump driven by a Woolf compound engine, which was the first time that rotary power with a crank and flywheel had been applied in waterworks. His design was more compact, more economical and lower in cost than previous types and gave the Holly Company a considerable advantage for a time over their main rivals, the Worthington Pump \& Machinery Company. These steam pumps became very popular in the United States and the type was also adopted in Britain.[br]Further ReadingAs well as obituaries appearing in many American engineering journals on Gaskill's death, there is an entry in the Dictionary of American Biography, 1931, Vol. VII, New York, C.Scribner's Sons.RLHBiographical history of technology > Gaskill, Harvey Freeman
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123 Mavor, Henry Alexander
[br]b. 1858 Stranraer, Scotlandd. 16 July 1915 Mauchline, Ayrshire, Scotland[br]Scottish engineer who pioneered the use of electricity for lighting, power and the propulsion of ships.[br]Mavor came from a distinguished Scottish family with connections in medicine, industry and the arts. On completion of his education at Glasgow University, he joined R.J.Crompton \& Co.; then in 1883, along with William C.Muir, he established the Glasgow firm which later became well known as Mavor and Coulson. It pioneered the supply of electricity to public undertakings and equipped the first two generating stations in Scotland. Mavor and his fellow directors appreciated the potential demand by industry in Glasgow for electricity. Two industries were especially well served; first, the coal-mines, where electric lighting and power transformed efficiency and safety beyond recognition; and second, marine engineering. Here Mavor recognized the importance of the variable-speed motor in working with marine propellers which have a tighter range of efficient working speeds. In 1911 he built a 50 ft (15 m) motor launch, appropriately named Electric Arc, at Dumbarton and fitted it with an alternating-current motor driven by a petrol engine and dynamo. Within two years British shipyards were building electrically powered ships, and by the beginning of the First World War the United States Navy had a 20,000-ton collier with this new form of propulsion.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsVice-President, Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland 1894–6.BibliographyMavor published several papers on electric power supply, distribution and the use of electricity for marine purposes in the Transactions of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland between the years 1890 and 1912.Further ReadingMavor and Coulson Ltd, 1911, Electric Propulsion of Ships, Glasgow.FMW -
124 Merritt, William Hamilton
[br]b. 3 July 1793 Bedford, Winchester County, New York, USAd. 5 July 1862 aboard a vessel on the Cornwall Canal, Canada[br]American-born Canadian merchant, entrepreneur and promoter of the First and Second Welland Canals bypassing the Niagara Falls and linking Lakes Ontario and Erie.[br]Although he was born in the USA, his family moved to Canada in 1796. Educated in St Catharines and Niagara, he received a good training in mathematics, navigation and surveying. He served with distinction in the 1812–14 war, although he was captured by the Americans in 1814. After the war he established himself in business operating a sawmill, a flour mill, a small distillery, a potashery, a cooperage and a smithy, as well as running a general store. By 1818 he was one of the leading figures in the area and realized that for real economic progress it was essential to improve communications in the Niagara peninsula; in that year he surveyed a route for a waterway that would carry boats.In c. 1820 he began discussions with neighbouring landowners and businessmen, who, on 19 January 1824 together obtained a charter for building the first Welland Canal to link Lakes Ontario and Erie. They were greatly influenced by the realization that the completion of the Erie Canal would attract trade through the United States instead of through Canada. Construction began on 30 November 1824, largely with redundant labour from the Erie Canal. Merritt foresaw the need for financial support and for publicity to sustain interest in the project. Accordingly he started a newspaper, the Farmer's Journal and Welland Canal Intelligencer, which was published until 1835. He also visited York (now Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada, and obtained some support, but the Government was reluctant to assist financially. He was more successful in raising money in New York. Then in 1828 he visited England to see Telford and persuaded both Telford and the Duke of Wellington, among others, to purchase shares. The Canal opened on 30 November 1829. In 1832 Merritt became a member of the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada, and after the Union of the Canadas in 1841 he was elected to the new Assembly, later serving as Minister of Public Works and then as President of the Assembly. He advocated improvements to the St Lawrence River and also promoted railways. He pioneered a bridge across the Niagara River that was opened in 1849 and later carried a railway. He was not a canal engineer, but he did pioneer communications in developing territory.[br]Further ReadingR.M.Styran and R.R.Taylor, 1988, The Welland Canals. The Growth of Mr Merritt'sDitch, Erin, Ont.: Boston Mills Press.JHBBiographical history of technology > Merritt, William Hamilton
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125 Papanicolaou, George Nicolas
SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology[br]b. 13 May 1883 Kimi, Greeced. 19 February 1962 Miami, Florida, USA[br]Greek physician and pathological anatomist, developer of the Papanicolaou cytological smear test (Pap test).[br]Of a medical family, he graduated at Athens in 1904. After postgraduate study at Jena, Freiburg and Munich, he returned to Greece and turned to an academic career. After a year at the Oceanographie Institute at Monaco and a period in Paris, he again returned to Greece and in 1911 served in the army in the Balkan War.In 1913 he emigrated to the United States and was appointed to the pathology department of New York Hospital and Cornell Medical College. He became Emeritus Professor of Clinical Anatomy at Cornell in 1951. In 1961 he moved to Florida to head the Miami Cancer Institute, but he died shortly thereafter.Almost all his research was devoted to the physiology of reproduction and exfoliative cyto-logy, and from his studies in 1917 on vaginal discharge in animals he developed his human studies culminating in cancer diagnostic tests, which after some early scepticism soon gained wide acceptance as a routine screening technique. There are laboratories at both Cornell and Miami that are named after him.[br]Bibliography1943, with H.Traut, Diagnosis of Uterine Cancer by the Vaginal Smear, New York. 1954, Atlas of Exfoliative Cytology, Cambridge, Mass.Further ReadingD.E.Carmichael, 1973, The Pap Smear: Life of George N.Papanicolaou, Springfield, 111.MGBiographical history of technology > Papanicolaou, George Nicolas
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126 Pilkington, Sir Lionel Alexander Bethune (Alastair)
SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology[br]b. 7 January 1920 Calcutta, India[br]English inventor of the float-glass process.[br]Pilkington was educated at Sherborne School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in mechanical science. He spent one year at Cambridge followed by war service, which lasted until 1945. He returned to complete his degree and then joined Pilkington, the well-known glass manufacturer at St Helens' Lancashire, in 1947. Sir Alastair is not, however, related to the Pilkington family of glassmakers.The forming of perfectly flat glass that retained its fire finish had eluded glassmakers for centuries. Until the 1950s the only way of making really flat glass was to form plate glass by continuous casting between steel rollers. This destroyed the fire finish, which had to be restored by expensive grinding and polishing. The process entailed the loss of 20 per cent of good glass. The idea of floating glass on molten metal occurred to Sir Alastair in October 1952, and thereafter he remained in charge of development until commercial success had been achieved. The idea of floating molten glass on molten tin had been patented in the United States as early as 1902, but had never been pursued. The Pilkington process in essence was to float a ribbon of molten glass on a bath of molten tin in an inert atmosphere of nitrogen, to prevent oxidation of the tin. It was patented in Britain in 1957 and in the USA two years later. The first production glass issued from the plant in May 1957, although the first good glass did not appear until July 1958. The process was publicly announced the following year and was quickly taken up by the industry. It is now the universal method for manufacturing high quality flat glass.Having seen through the greatest single advance in glassmaking and one of the most important technological developments this century, Sir Alastair became Chairman of Pilkingtons until 1980 and President thereafter.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsKnighted 1970. FRS 1969. Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1991.Bibliography1969, "Float glass process—the review lecture", Royal Society (13 February). 1975, "Floating windows", Proceedings of the Royal Institution, Vol. 48.1976, "Float glass—evolution and revolution over 60 years", Glass Technology, Vol. 17, no. 5.1963, "The development of float glass", Glass Industry, (February).Further ReadingJ.Jewkes et al., 1969, The Sources of Invention, 2nd ed., London: Macmillan.LRDBiographical history of technology > Pilkington, Sir Lionel Alexander Bethune (Alastair)
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127 Siemens, Sir Charles William
[br]b. 4 April 1823 Lenthe, Germanyd. 19 November 1883 London, England[br]German/British metallurgist and inventory pioneer of the regenerative principle and open-hearth steelmaking.[br]Born Carl Wilhelm, he attended craft schools in Lübeck and Magdeburg, followed by an intensive course in natural science at Göttingen as a pupil of Weber. At the age of 19 Siemens travelled to England and sold an electroplating process developed by his brother Werner Siemens to Richard Elkington, who was already established in the plating business. From 1843 to 1844 he obtained practical experience in the Magdeburg works of Count Stolburg. He settled in England in 1844 and later assumed British nationality, but maintained close contact with his brother Werner, who in 1847 had co-founded the firm Siemens \& Halske in Berlin to manufacture telegraphic equipment. William began to develop his regenerative principle of waste-heat recovery and in 1856 his brother Frederick (1826–1904) took out a British patent for heat regeneration, by which hot waste gases were passed through a honeycomb of fire-bricks. When they became hot, the gases were switched to a second mass of fire-bricks and incoming air and fuel gas were led through the hot bricks. By alternating the two gas flows, high temperatures could be reached and considerable fuel economies achieved. By 1861 the two brothers had incorporated producer gas fuel, made by gasifying low-grade coal.Heat regeneration was first applied in ironmaking by Cowper in 1857 for heating the air blast in blast furnaces. The first regenerative furnace was set up in Birmingham in 1860 for glassmaking. The first such furnace for making steel was developed in France by Pierre Martin and his father, Emile, in 1863. Siemens found British steelmakers reluctant to adopt the principle so in 1866 he rented a small works in Birmingham to develop his open-hearth steelmaking furnace, which he patented the following year. The process gradually made headway; as well as achieving high temperatures and saving fuel, it was slower than Bessemer's process, permitting greater control over the content of the steel. By 1900 the tonnage of open-hearth steel exceeded that produced by the Bessemer process.In 1872 Siemens played a major part in founding the Society of Telegraph Engineers (from which the Institution of Electrical Engineers evolved), serving as its first President. He became President for the second time in 1878. He built a cable works at Charlton, London, where the cable could be loaded directly into the holds of ships moored on the Thames. In 1873, together with William Froude, a British shipbuilder, he designed the Faraday, the first specialized vessel for Atlantic cable laying. The successful laying of a cable from Europe to the United States was completed in 1875, and a further five transatlantic cables were laid by the Faraday over the following decade.The Siemens factory in Charlton also supplied equipment for some of the earliest electric-lighting installations in London, including the British Museum in 1879 and the Savoy Theatre in 1882, the first theatre in Britain to be fully illuminated by electricity. The pioneer electric-tramway system of 1883 at Portrush, Northern Ireland, was an opportunity for the Siemens company to demonstrate its equipment.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsKnighted 1883. FRS 1862. Institution of Civil Engineers Telford Medal 1853. President, Institution of Mechanical Engineers 1872. President, Society of Telegraph Engineers 1872 and 1878. President, British Association 1882.Bibliography27 May 1879, British patent no. 2,110 (electricarc furnace).1889, The Scientific Works of C.William Siemens, ed. E.F.Bamber, 3 vols, London.Further ReadingW.Poles, 1888, Life of Sir William Siemens, London; repub. 1986 (compiled from material supplied by the family).S.von Weiher, 1972–3, "The Siemens brothers. Pioneers of the electrical age in Europe", Transactions of the Newcomen Society 45:1–11 (a short, authoritative biography). S.von Weihr and H.Goetler, 1983, The Siemens Company. Its Historical Role in theProgress of Electrical Engineering 1847–1980, English edn, Berlin (a scholarly account with emphasis on technology).GWBiographical history of technology > Siemens, Sir Charles William
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128 Yourkevitch, Vladimir Ivanovitch
SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping[br]b. 17 June 1885 Moscow, Russiad. 14 December 1964 USA[br]Russian (naturalized American) naval architect who worked in Russia, Western Europe and the United States and who profoundly influenced the hull design of large ships.[br]Yourkevitch came from an academic family, but one without any experience or tradition of sea service. Despite this he decided to become a naval architect, and after secondary education at Moscow and engineering training at the St Petersburg Polytechnic, he graduated in 1909. For the following ten years he worked designing battleships and later submarines, mostly at the Baltic Shipyard in St Petersburg. Around 1910 he became a full member of the Russian Naval Constructors Corps, and in 1915 he was a founder member and first Scientific Secretary of the Society of Naval Engineers.Using the published data of the American Admiral D.W. Taylor and taking advantage of access to the Norddeutscher Lloyd Testing Tank at Bremerhaven, Yourkevitch proposed a new hull form with bulbous bow and long entrances and runs. This was the basis for the revolutionary battleships then laid down at St Petersburg, the "Borodino" class. Owing to the war these ships were launched but never completed. At the conclusion of the war Yourkevitch found himself in Constantinople, where he experienced the life of a refugee, and then he moved to Paris where he accepted almost any work on offer. Fortunately in 1928, through an introduction, he was appointed a draughtsman at the St Nazaire shipyard. Despite his relatively lowly position, he used all his personality to persuade the French company to alter the hull form of the future record breaker Normandie. The gamble paid off and Yourkevitch was able to set up his own naval architecture company, BECNY, which designed many well-known liners, including the French Pasteur.In 1939 he settled in North America, becoming a US citizen in 1945. On the night of the fire on the Normandie, he was in New York but was prevented from going close to the ship by the police, and the possibility of saving the ship was thrown away. He was involved in many projects as well as lecturing at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He maintained connections with his technical colleagues in St Petersburg in the later years of his life. His unfulfilled dream was the creation of a superliner to carry 5,000 passengers and thus able to make dramatic cuts in the cost of transatlantic travel. Yourkevitch was a fine example of a man whose vision enabled him to serve science and engineering without consideration of inter-national boundaries.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsAK/FMWBiographical history of technology > Yourkevitch, Vladimir Ivanovitch
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