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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Benton spent his childhood in Milwaukee and La Crosse, where he early showed a talent for mechanical invention. His father was a lawyer with an interest in newspapers and who acquired the Milwaukee Daily News. Benton became familiar with typesetting equipment in his father's newspaper office. He learned the printer's trade at another newspaper office, at La Crosse, and later worked as bookkeeper at a type foundry in Milwaukee. When that failed in 1873, Benton acquired the plant, and when he was joined by R.V.Waldo the firm became Benton, Waldo \& Co. Benton began learning and improving type-cutting practice. He first devised unit-width or "self-spacing" type which became popular with compositors, saving, it was reckoned, 20 per cent of their time. Meanwhile, Benton worked on a punch-cutting machine to speed up the process of cutting letters in the steel punches from which matrices or moulds were formed to enable type to be cast from molten metal. His first mechanical punch-cutter worked successfully in 1884. The third machine, patented in 1885, was the model that revolutionized the typefounding operation. So far, punch-cutting had been done by hand, a rare and expensive skill that was insufficient to meet the demands of the new typesetting machines, the monotype of Lanston and the linotype of Merganthaler. These were threatened with failure until Benton saved the day with his automatic punch-cutter. Mechanizing punch-cutting and the forming of matrices made possible the typesetting revolution brought about by mono-and linotype.

In 1892 Benton's firm merged with others to form the American Type Founders Company. Benton's equipment was moved to New York and he with it, to become a board member and Chief Technical Advisor. In 1894 he became Manager of the company's new plant for type manufacture in Jersey City. Benton steadily improved both machinery and processes, for which he was granted twenty patents. With his son Morris Fuller, he was also notable and prolific in the field of type design. Benton remained in active association with his company until just two weeks before his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Mining and extraction technology

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Biringuccio spent much of his life in the service of, or under the patronage of, the Petruccis, one of the leading families of Siena. In his youth, he was able to travel widely in Italy and Germany, observing mining and metallurgical processes at first hand. For example, his visit to the brass-works in Milan was to be the source of the detailed description in Pirotechnia, published alter his death. He held various appointments in charge of mines or other concerns, such as the Siena mint, under the patronage of the Petruccis. During two periods of exile, while the Petrucci fortunes were in eclipse, he engaged in military activities such as the casting of cannon. That included the great culverin of Florence cast in 1529, also described in the Pirotechnia. In December 1534 Pope Paul III offered him the post of Director of the papal foundry and munitions. He did not take up the post until 1536, but he died the following year.

P irotechnia, which made Biringuccio famous, was published in Venice in 1540, three years after his death. The word "pirotechnia" had a wider meaning than that of fireworks, extending to the action of fire on various substances and including distillation and the preparation of acids. While owing something to earlier written sources, the book is substantially based on a lifetime of practical experience of mining and metalworking, including smelting, casting and alloying, and evidence in the book suggests that it was written between 1530 and 1535. Curzio Navo brought out the second and third editions in 1550 and 1559, as well as a Latin edition. A fourth edition was also printed in 1559. The appearance of four editions in such a short time testifies to the popularity and usefulness of the work.

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SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors, Textiles

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Blanchard was the daughter of a wealthy ship owner. She was said to have had inventive talents but seems to have had no technical training. She patented nothing until she was over 30, although that may have been due to shortage of funds. Inheriting the family wealth after the death of her father brought her talents out into the open. She moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and made and patented a number of mechanical devices to improve the sewing machine: these included the "over seaming" machine, a crochet attachment and methods of making knitwear. In 1881, with an unmarried sister, she founded the Blanchard Overseam Machine Company to exploit her sewing machine inventions. Her company seems to have prospered, for in 1891 she was said to own "great estates", a factory and many patent rights, the returns from which made her a wealthy woman. Patents for sewing machine improvements and attachments continued to flow until 1915. She suffered a stroke in 1916, and died six years later; no will was ever probated, so the fate of her wealth can only be surmised.

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SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors

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After the early death of his father, Böttger spent his childhood in Magdeburg, where he received instruction in mathematics, fortification and pyrotechnics. He spent twelve years with the apothecary F.Zorn in Berlin, where there was a flourishing colony of alchemists. Böttger became an adept himself and claimed to have achieved transmutations into gold by 1701.

In March 1702 Böttger moved near to Dresden, in the service of August II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. While there, he made friends with E.W.von Tschirnhaus (1651–1708), scientist and possessor of glass-and ironworks. It was this association that led eventually to the founding of the celebrated Meissen porcelain factory. By 1708, Böttger had succeeded in making fine red stoneware by adding a flux, alabaster or marble, to infusible Saxony clay. By varying his raw materials, and in particular in using white china clay from the Erzgebirge, he obtained the first European true, hard, white porcelain, which had eluded European workers for centuries. At the same time he improved the furnace to achieve a temperature of around 1,350°C. To exploit his discovery, the Meissen factory was set up in 1710 and its products began to be marketed in 1713. Böttger managed the factory until his death in 1719, although throughout the period of experimentation and exploitation he had worked in conditions of great secrecy, in a vain attempt to preserve the secret of the process.

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SUBJECT AREA: Mining and extraction technology

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In 1842, as a graduate of the Ecole des Mines in Liège, he became a member of the Belgian Corps Royal des Mines, which he left ten years later as Chief Engineer. By that time he had become decisively influential in the Société Anglo-Belge des Mines du Rhin, founded in 1848. After it became the Gelsenkirchen-based Bergwerkgesellschaft Dahlbusch in 1873, he became President of its Board of Directors and remained in this position until his death. Thanks to his outstanding technical and financial abilities, the company developed into one of the largest in the Ruhr coal district.

When K.G. Kind practised his shaft-boring for the company in the early 1850s but did not overcome the difficulty of making the bottom of the bore-hole watertight, Chaudron joined forces with him to solve the problem and constructed a rotary heading which was made watertight with a box stuffed with moss; rings of iron tubing were placed on this as the sinking progressed, effectively blocking off the aquiferous strata as a result of the hydrostatic pressure which helped support the weight of the tubing until it was secured permanently. The Kind-Chaudron system of boring shafts in the full section marked an important advance upon existing methods, and was completely applied for the first time at a coalmine near Mons, Belgium, in 1854–6. In Brussels Chaudron and Kind founded the Société de Fonçage par le Procédé Kind et Chaudron in 1854, and Chaudron was granted a patent the next year. Foreign patents followed and the Kind-Chaudron system was the one most frequently applied in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Altogether, under Chaudron's control, there were more than eighty shafts sunk in wet strata in Germany, Belgium, France and England.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Francis Crossley was the youngest of three brothers employed in their father's carpet-weaving business in Halifax and who took over the running of the company on their father's death in 1837. Francis seems to have been the one with technical ability, for it was he who saw the possibilities of weaving by power. Growth of the company was rapid through his policy of acquiring patents and then improving them, and it was soon at the forefront of the carpet-manufacturing trade. He had taken out rights on the patents of John Hill of Manchester, but his experiments with Hill's looms for weaving carpets were not successful.

In the spring of 1850 Francis asked a textile inventor, George Collier of Barnsley, to develop a power loom for carpet manufacture. Collier produced a model that was a distinct advance on earlier looms, and Francis engaged him to perfect a power loom for weaving tapestry and Brussels carpets. After a great deal of money had been expended, a patent was taken out in 1850 in the name of his brother, Joseph Crossley, for a loom that could weave velvet as well as carpets and included some of the ideas of the American E.B. Bigelow. This new loom proved to be a great advance on all the earlier ones, and thus brought the Crossleys a great fortune from both sales of patent rights and the production of carpets from their mills, which were soon enlarged.

According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Francis Crossley was Mayor of Halifax in 1849 and 1850, but Hogg gives this position to his elder brother John. In 1852 Francis was returned to Parliament as the Liberal member for Halifax, and in 1859 he became the member for the West Riding. Among his benefactions, in 1855 he gave to the town of Halifax a twelve-acre park that cost £41,300; a statue of him was erected there. In the same year he endowed twenty-one almshouses. In 1863 a baronetcy was conferred upon him in recognition of his commercial and public services, which he continued to perform until his death. In 1870 he gave the London Missionary Society £20,000, their largest single donation up to that time, and another £10,000 to the Congregational Pastor's Retiring Fund. He became ill when on a journey to the Holy Land in 1869, but although he made a partial recovery he grew worse again towards the end of 1871 and died early in the following year. He left £800,000 in his will.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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The son of a scientific instrument maker, Dancer was educated privately in Liverpool, where from 1817 his father practised his trade. John Benjamin became a skilled instrument maker in his own right, assisting in the family business until his father's death in 1835. He set up on his own in Liverpool in 1840 and in Manchester in 1841. In the course of his career Dancer made instruments for several of the leading scientists of the day, his clients including Brewster, Dalton and Joule.

Dancer became interested in photography as soon as the new art was announced in 1839 and practised the processes of both Talbot and Daguerre. It was later claimed that as early as 1839 he used an achromatic lens combination to produce a minute image on a daguerreotype plate, arguably the world's first microphotograph and the precursor of modern microfilm. It was not until the introduction of Archer's wet-collodion process in 1851 that Dancer was able to perfect the technique however. He went on to market a long series of microphotographs which proved extremely popular with both the public and contemporary photographers. It was examples of Dancer's microphotographs that prompted the French photographer Dagron to begin his work in the same field. In 1853 Dancer constructed a binocular stereoscopic camera, the first practicable instrument of its type. In an improved form it was patented and marketed in 1856.

Dancer also made important contributions to the magic lantern. He was the first to suggest the use of limelight as an illuminant, pioneered the use of photographic lantern slides and devised an ingenious means of switching gas from one lantern illuminant to another to produce what were known as dissolving views. He was a resourceful innovator in other fields of instrumentation and suggested several other minor improvements to scientific apparatus before his working life was sadly terminated by the loss of his sight.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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From 1844 until 1962, the Clyde shipyard of William Denny and Brothers, Dumbarton, produced over 1,500 ships, trained innumerable students of all nationalities in shipbuilding and marine engineering, and for the seventy-plus years of their existence were accepted worldwide as the leaders in the application of science to ship design and construction. Until the closure of the yard members of the Denny family were among the partners and later directors of the firm: they included men as distinguished as Dr Peter Denny (1821(?)–95), Sir Archibald Denny (1860–1936) and Sir Maurice Denny (1886– 1955), the main collaborator in the design of the Denny-Brown ship stabilizer.

One of the most influential of this shipbuilding family was William Denny, now referred to as William 3! His early education was at Dumbarton, then on Jersey and finally at the Royal High School, Edinburgh, before he commenced an apprenticeship at his father's shipyard. From the outset he not only showed great aptitude for learning and hard work but also displayed an ability to create good relationships with all he came into contact with. At the early age of 21 he was admitted a partner of the shipbuilding business of William Denny and Brothers, and some years later also of the associated engineering firm of Denny \& Co. His deep-felt interest in what is now known as industrial relations led him in 1871 to set up a piecework system of payment in the shipyard. In this he was helped by the Yard Manager, Richard Ramage, who later was to found the Leith shipyard, which produced the world's most elegant steam yachts. This research was published later as a pamphlet called The Worth of Wages, an unusual and forward-looking action for the 1860s, when Denny maintained that an absentee employer should earn as much contempt and disapproval as an absentee landlord! In 1880 he initiated an awards scheme for all company employees, with grants and awards for inventions and production improvements. William Denny was not slow to impose new methods and to research naval architecture, a special interest being progressive ship trials with a view to predicting effective horsepower. In time this led to his proposal to the partners to build a ship model testing tank beside the Dumbarton shipyard; this scheme was completed in 1883 and was to the third in the world (after the Admiralty tank at Torquay, managed by William Froude and the Royal Netherlands Navy facility at Amsterdam, under B.J. Tideman. In 1876 the Denny Shipyard started work with mild-quality shipbuilding steel on hulls for the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, and in 1879 the world's first two ships of any size using this weight-saving material were produced: they were the Rotomahana for the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand and the Buenos Ayrean for the Allan Line of Glasgow. On the naval-architecture side he was involved in Denny's proposals for standard cross curves of stability for all ships, which had far-reaching effects and are now accepted worldwide. He served on the committee working on improvements to the Load Line regulations and many other similar public bodies. After a severe bout of typhoid and an almost unacceptable burden of work, he left the United Kingdom for South America in June 1886 to attend to business with La Platense Flotilla Company, an associate company of William Denny and Brothers. In March the following year, while in Buenos Aires, he died by his own hand, a death that caused great and genuine sadness in the West of Scotland and elsewhere.

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