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121 Ewart, Peter
SUBJECT AREA: Textiles[br]b. 14 May 1767 Traquair, near Peebles, Scotlandd. September 1842 London, England[br]Scottish pioneer in the mechanization of the textile industry.[br]Peter Ewart, the youngest of six sons, was born at Traquair manse, where his father was a clergyman in the Church of Scotland. He was educated at the Free School, Dumfries, and in 1782 spent a year at Edinburgh University. He followed this with an apprenticeship under John Rennie at Musselburgh before moving south in 1785 to help Rennie erect the Albion corn mill in London. This brought him into contact with Boulton \& Watt, and in 1788 he went to Birmingham to erect a waterwheel and other machinery in the Soho Manufactory. In 1789 he was sent to Manchester to install a steam engine for Peter Drinkwater and thus his long connection with the city began. In 1790 Ewart took up residence in Manchester as Boulton \& Watt's representative. Amongst other engines, he installed one for Samuel Oldknow at Stockport. In 1792 he became a partner with Oldknow in his cotton-spinning business, but because of financial difficulties he moved back to Birmingham in 1795 to help erect the machines in the new Soho Foundry. He was soon back in Manchester in partnership with Samuel Greg at Quarry Bank Mill, Styal, where he was responsible for developing the water power, installing a steam engine, and being concerned with the spinning machinery and, later, gas lighting at Greg's other mills.In 1798, Ewart devised an automatic expansion-gear for steam engines, but steam pressures at the time were too low for such a device to be effective. His grasp of the theory of steam power is shown by his paper to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1808, On the Measure of Moving Force. In 1813 he patented a power loom to be worked by the pressure of steam or compressed air. In 1824 Charles Babbage consulted him about automatic looms. His interest in textiles continued until at least 1833, when he obtained a patent for a self-acting spinning mule, which was, however, outclassed by the more successful one invented by Richard Roberts. Ewart gave much help and advice to others. The development of the machine tools at Boulton \& Watt's Soho Foundry has been mentioned already. He also helped James Watt with his machine for copying sculptures. While he continued to run his own textile mill, Ewart was also in partnership with Charles Macintosh, the pioneer of rubber-coated cloth. He was involved with William Fairbairn concerning steam engines for the boats that Fairbairn was building in Manchester, and it was through Ewart that Eaton Hodgkinson was introduced to Fairbairn and so made the tests and calculations for the tubes for the Britannia Railway Bridge across the Menai Straits. Ewart was involved with the launching of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway as he was a director of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce at the time.In 1835 he uprooted himself from Manchester and became the first Chief Engineer for the Royal Navy, assuming responsibility for the steamboats, which by 1837 numbered 227 in service. He set up repair facilities and planned workshops for overhauling engines at Woolwich Dockyard, the first establishment of its type. It was here that he was killed in an accident when a chain broke while he was supervising the lifting of a large boiler. Engineering was Ewart's life, and it is possible to give only a brief account of his varied interests and connections here.[br]Further ReadingObituary, 1843, "Institution of Civil Engineers", Annual General Meeting, January. Obituary, 1843, Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society Memoirs (NS) 7. R.L.Hills, 1987–8, "Peter Ewart, 1767–1843", Manchester Literary and PhilosophicalSociety Memoirs 127.M.B.Rose, 1986, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill The Rise and Decline of a Family Firm, 1750–1914, Cambridge (covers E wart's involvement with Samuel Greg).R.L.Hills, 1970, Power in the Industrial Revolution, Manchester; R.L.Hills, 1989, Powerfrom Steam, Cambridge (both look at Ewart's involvement with textiles and steam engines).RLH -
122 Fox, Samson
SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Metallurgy, Steam and internal combustion engines[br]b. 11 July 1838 Bowling, near Bradford, Yorkshire, Englandd. 24 October 1903 Walsall, Staffordshire, England[br]English engineer who invented the corrugated boiler furnace.[br]He was the son of a cloth mill worker in Leeds and at the age of 10 he joined his father at the mill. Showing a mechanical inclination, he was apprenticed to a firm of machine-tool makers, Smith, Beacock and Tannett. There he rose to become Foreman and Traveller, and designed and patented tools for cutting bevelled gears. With his brother and one Refitt, he set up the Silver Cross engineering works for making special machine tools. In 1874 he founded the Leeds Forge Company, acting as Managing Director until 1896 and then as Chairman until shortly before his death.It was in 1877 that he patented his most important invention, the corrugated furnace for steam-boilers. These furnaces could withstand much higher pressures than the conventional form, and higher working pressures in marine boilers enabled triple-expansion engines to be installed, greatly improving the performance of steamships, and the outcome was the great ocean-going liners of the twentieth century. The first vessel to be equipped with the corrugated furnace was the Pretoria of 1878. At first the furnaces were made by hammering iron plates using swage blocks under a steam hammer. A plant for rolling corrugated plates was set up at Essen in Germany, and Fox installed a similar mill at his works in Leeds in 1882.In 1886 Fox installed a Siemens steelmaking plant and he was notable in the movement for replacing wrought iron with steel. He took out several patents for making pressed-steel underframes for railway wagons. The business prospered and Fox opened a works near Chicago in the USA, where in addition to wagon underframes he manufactured the first American pressed-steel carriages. He later added a works at Pittsburgh.Fox was the first in England to use water gas for his metallurgical operations and for lighting, with a saving in cost as it was cheaper than coal gas. He was also a pioneer in the acetylene industry, producing in 1894 the first calcium carbide, from which the gas is made.Fox took an active part in public life in and around Leeds, being thrice elected Mayor of Harrogate. As a music lover, he was a benefactor of musicians, contributing no less than £45,000 towards the cost of building the Royal College of Music in London, opened in 1894. In 1897 he sued for libel the author Jerome K.Jerome and the publishers of the Today magazine for accusing him of misusing his great generosity to the College to give a misleading impression of his commercial methods and prosperity. He won the case but was not awarded costs.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsRoyal Society of Arts James Watt Silver Medal and Howard Gold Medal. Légion d'honneur 1889.Bibliography1877, British Patent nos. 1097 and 2530 (the corrugated furnace or "flue", as it was often called).Further ReadingObituary, 1903, Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers: 919–21.Obituary, 1903, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers (the fullest of the many obituary notices).G.A.Newby, 1993, "Behind the fire doors: Fox's corrugated furnace 1877 and the high pressure steamship", Transactions of the Newcomen Society 64.LRD -
123 Gamond, Aimé Thomé de
SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering[br]b. 1807d. 1876[br]French civil engineer and early advocate of the Channel Tunnel.[br]He became interested in the possibility of a tunnel or a bridge link between England and France in 1833 when he did his own geological survey of a route between Calais and Dover, and in 1834 he proposed an immersed tube tunnel. However, at the Great Exhibition of 1855 he promoted a scheme incorporating an artificial stone isthmus with movable bridges, which was estimated to cost £33,600,000, but this idea was eventuallv abandoned. He reverted to the idea of a tunnel and did further survey in 1855, with 180 lb (80 kg) of flint for ballast, ten inflated pig bladders to bring him to the surface and pieces of buttered lint plastered over his ears to protect them against the water pressure. He touched bottom between 99 and 108 ft (30 and 33 m). In 1856 Napoleon III granted him an audience and promised a scientific commission to evaluate his scheme, which it eventually approved. In 1858 he went to London and got the backing of Robert Stephenson, Isambard K. Brunel and Joseph Locke. He also obtained an interview with Prince Albert. In 1858, after an assassination attempt on Napoleon III, relations between France and England cooled off and Thomé de Gamond's plans were halted. He revived them in 1867, but others were by now also putting forward schemes. He had worked on the scheme for thirty-five years and expended a small fortune. In 1875 The Times reported that he was "living in humble circumstances, his daughter supporting him by giving lessons on the piano". He died the following year.[br]Further ReadingT.Whiteside, 1962, The Tunnel under the Channel.IMcN
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