were+devoted+to

〈 het〉

1 [iets aangenaams] joy

2 [formeel] [geliefde] beloved ⇒ love

♦voorbeelden:

1   lief en leed met iemand delen • share life's joys and sorrows with someone

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I 〈 bijvoeglijk naamwoord〉

1 [geliefd] dear ⇒ beloved

2 [vriendelijk; aangenaam] nice ⇒ sweet

3 [mooi] dear ⇒ sweet

4 [aanspreekvorm] dear

5 [gewenst] fond

6 [dierbaar] dear ⇒ treasured

♦voorbeelden:

1   (maar) mijn lieve kind • (but) my dear

     iemand lief krijgen • come to love someone; 〈 verliefd worden ook〉 fall in love with someone

2   een lief karakter • a sweet nature, a kind heart

     zij zijn erg lief voor elkaar • they are very devoted to each other

     wees nu eens lief, toe nou • there's a good boy/girl/fellow

     dat was lief van haar om jou mee te nemen • it was nice of her to take you along

3   er lief uitzien • look sweet/lovely

4   lieve mensen, willen jullie alsjeblieft niet door mijn tuin lopen • would you please be so kind as to not walk through my garden

5   zijn liefste wens • his fondest wish

     langer blijven dan (iemand) lief is • overstay one's welcome

     meer dan mij lief was • more than I cared for

     het gebeurde vaker dan mij lief was • it happened more often than I care to remember

6   dat kost een lieve cent • that costs a pretty penny

     ze heeft er een lief ding voor over om te slagen • she would give her right arm to pass

     de vrijheid is ons boven alles lief • we value freedom above all

     iets voor lief nemen • put up with something; make do with something 〈 bij gebrek aan beter〉

     tegenslagen voor lief nemen • take the rough with the smooth

II 〈 bijwoord〉

1 [op vriendelijke wijze] sweetly ⇒ nicely

2 [gaarne] 〈zie voorbeelden 2〉

♦voorbeelden:

1   iemand lief aankijken • give someone an affectionate look

     ze deden lief tegen elkaar • they were (being) very nice to each other

     als je het heel lief vraagt dan … • if you ask nicely, then …

2   ik deed het net zo lief niet • I'd (just) as soon not do it

SUBJECT AREA: Canals, Civil engineering

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Aubert was educated at the Lycée Louis-leGrand in Paris, and entered the Ecole Polytechnique in 1913. His studies were interrupted by the First World War, when he served as an artillery officer, being wounded twice and awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1916. He returned to the Ecole Polytechnique in 1919, and from 1920 to 1922 he attended the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées; he graduated as Bachelor of Law from the University of Paris.

In 1922 he began his long career, devoted principally to river and canal works. He was engineer in charge of the navigation works in Paris until 1932; he was then appointed Professor in the Chair of Internal Navigation at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, a post he held until his retirement in 1961. From 1933 to 1945 he was general manager and later chairman of the Compagnie Nationale du Rhône; from 1945 to 1953, chairman of the electricity board of the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer français; and from 1949 to 1967, chairman of the Rhine Navigation Company. Following his retirement, he was chairman of the Société des Constructions des Batignolles, and from 1966 consulting engineer and honorary chairman of SPIE Batignolles; he was also chairman of several other companies.

In 1919 he published La Probabilité dans les tires de guerre, for which he was awarded the Pierson-Perrim prize by the Académie des Sciences in 1922. During his career he wrote numerous articles and papers on technical and economic subjects, his last, entitled "Philosophic de la pente d'eau", appearing in the journal Travaux in 1984 when he was ninety years old.

Aubert's principal works included the construction of the Pont Edouard-Herriort on the Rhône at Lyon; the design and construction of the Génissiat and Lonzères-Mondragon dams on the Rhône; and the conception and design of the Denouval dam on the Seine near Andresy, completed in 1980. He was awarded the Caméré prize in 1934 by the Académie des Sciences for a new type of movable dam. Overseas governments and the United Nations consulted him on river navigation inter alia in Brazil, on the Mahanadi river in India, on the Konkomé river in Guinea, on the Vistula river in Poland, on the Paraguay river in South America and others.

In 1961 he published his revolutionary ideas on the pente d'eau, or "water slope", which was designed to eliminate delays and loss of water in transferring barges from one level to another, without the use of locks. This design consisted of a sloping flume or channel through which a wedge of water, in which the barge was floating, was pushed by a powered unit. A prototype at Mon tech on the Canal Latéral at La Garonne, bypassing five locks, was opened in 1973. A second was opened in 1984 on the Canal du Midi at Fonserannes, near Béziers.

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SUBJECT AREA: Steam and internal combustion engines

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During the thirty years prior to his death, Brayton devoted considerable effort to the development of internal-combustion engines. He designed the first commercial gas engine of American origin in 1872. An oil-burning engine was produced in 1875. An aptitude for mechanical innovation became apparent whilst he was employed at the Exeter Machine Works, New Hampshire, where he developed a successful steam generator for use in domestic and industrial heating systems. Brayton engines were distinguished by the method of combustion. A pressurized air-fuel mixture from a reservoir was ignited as it entered the working cylinder—a precursor of the constant-pressure cycle. A further feature of these early engines was a rocking beam. There exist accounts of Brayton engines fitted into river craft, and of one in a carriage which operated for a few months in 1872–3. However, the appearance of the four-stroke Otto engine in 1876, together with technical problems associated with backfiring into the fuel reservoir, prevented large-scale acceptance of the Brayton engine. Although Thompson Sterne \& Co. of Glasgow became licensees, the engine failed to gain usage in Britain. A working model of Brayton's gas engine is exhibited in the Museum of History and Technology in Washington, DC.

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SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

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Brunschwig was a widely read and highly respected surgeon of the city of Strasbourg. He was a writer of two works, one on surgery and the other, of greater importance, on chemical distillation. In this he was the inheritor of a tradition of the practice of distillation going back to the first centuries AD. The most familiar chemical tradition in the Middle Ages was that of alchemy, devoted to the attempt to make gold. The appearance of a number of printed books of a severely practical nature after 1500, however, testifies to the existence of a practical tradition that had flourished alongside alchemy. Brunsch-wig's first essay in this field was printed in 1500 and dealt with the preparation of "simples", or remedies with a single active constituent. In 1507 he brought out a work on the distilling of "composites", remedies with two or more active constituents. In these works Brunschwig sought to present a comprehensive account of the various kinds of apparatus available and the methods of preparing medicines, together with an account of the diseases it was hoped to cure with them. It was one of the earliest printed books on a chemical subject and the earliest to include illustrations of chemical apparatus. The works were widely used and did much to turn chemistry away from its preoccupation with gold-making, towards the making of substances useful in medicine.

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SUBJECT AREA: Canals

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After gaining his degree at Columbia College, Clinton studied law and then entered politics. After a defeat in 1795 he studied natural science, until in 1798 he was elected to the State Senate. In 1802 he was elected to the US Senate, but he resigned in 1803 to become Mayor of New York City; he occupied this post, apart from two short breaks, until 1815, when he was removed from office. He was very concerned for the welfare of ordinary people and introduced many improvements. From 1815 Clinton devoted himself to what was to become the Erie Canal. He had already been appointed one of the canal commissioners in 1810 and had himself surveyed a possible route to Lake Erie that would be a safer passage from New York to the Great Lakes in the event of war with Great Britain. The war of 1812, in fact, interfered with the project, but in 1816 Clinton realized that the time was propitious. He arranged meetings, and on 17 April 1816 the legislature adopted his idea and a new survey for a link between the Hudson and Lake Erie was undertaken. In March 1817 he became Governor of New York State and vigorously pursued the canal scheme both in writing and by personal supervision of the works. Party politics removed him from his post as Canal Commissioner on 12 April 1824, but in November he was re-elected as Governor. He held this position when the Erie Canal (362 miles or 583 km long) and the Champlain Canal (71 miles or 114 km) were opened in 1825. In his character he was overbearing, but he was administratively competent.

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SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

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Samuel Downing had a formative influence on the development of engineering education in Ireland. He was educated at Kilkenny College and Trinity College, Dublin, where he took a BA in 1834. He subsequently attended courses in natural philosophy at Edinburgh, before taking up work as a railway and bridge engineer. Amongst structures on which he worked were the timber viaduct connecting Portland Island to the mainland in Dorset, England, and the curved viaduct at Coed-re-Coed on the Taff Vale Railway, Wales. In 1847 he was persuaded to return to Trinity College, Dublin, as Assistant to Sir John MacNeill, who had been appointed Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering on its establishment in 1842. MacNeill always found it difficult to give up time on his engineering practice to spend on his teaching duties, so the addition of Downing to the staff gave a great impetus to the effectiveness of the School. When MacNeill retired from the Chair in 1852, Downing was his obvious successor and held the post until his death. For thirty years Downing devoted his engineering expertise and the energy of his warm personality to the School of Engineering and its students, of whom almost four hundred passed through the School in the years when he was responsible for it.

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SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

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Francis Egerton was the younger of the two surviving sons of Scroop, 1st Duke of Bridgewater, and on the death of his brother, the 2nd Duke, he succeeded to the title in 1748. Until that time he had received little or no education as his mother considered him to be of feeble intellect. His guardians, the Duke of Bedford and Lord Trentham, decided he should be given an opportunity and sent him to Eton in 1749. He remained there for three years and then went on the "grand tour" of Europe. During this period he saw the Canal du Midi, though whether this was the spark that ignited his interest in canals is hard to say. On his return to England he indulged in the social round in London and raced at Newmarket. After two unsuccessful attempts at marriage he retired to Lancashire to further his mining interests at Worsley, where the construction of a canal to Manchester was already being considered. In fact, the Act for the Bridgewater Canal had been passed at the time he left London. John Gilbert, his land agent at Worsley, encouraged the Duke to pursue the canal project, which had received parliamentary approval in March 1759. Brindley had been recommended on account of his work at Trentham, the estate of the Duke's brother-in-law, and Brindley was consulted and subsequently appointed Engineer; the canal opened on 17 July 1761. This was immediately followed by an extension project from Longford Brook to Runcorn to improve communications between Manchester and Liverpool; this was completed on 31 December 1772, after Brindley's death. The Duke also invested heavily in the Trent \& Mersey Canal, but his interests were confined to his mines and the completed canals for the rest of his life.

It is said that he lacked a sense of humour and even refused to read books. He was untidy in his dress and habits yet he was devoted to the Worsley undertakings. When travelling to Worsley he would have his coach placed on a barge so that he could inspect the canal during the journey. He amassed a great fortune from his various activities, but when he died, instead of leaving his beloved canal to the beneficiaries under his will, he created a trust to ensure that the canal would endure; the trust did not expire until 1903. The Duke is commemorated by a large Corinthian pillar, which is now in the care of the National Trust, in the grounds of his mansion at Ashridge, Hertfordshire.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Fourdrinier's father was a paper manufacturer and stationer of London, from a family of French Protestant origin. Henry took up the same trade and, with his brother Sealy (d. 1847), devoted many years to developing the papermaking machine. Their first patent was taken out in 1801, but success was still far off. A machine for making paper had been invented a few years previously by Nicolas Robert at the Didot's mill at Essonnes, south of Paris. Robert quarrelled with the Didots, who then contacted their brother-in-law in England, John Gamble, in an attempt to raise capital for a larger machine. Gamble and the Fourdriniers called in the engineer Bryan Donkin, and between them they patented a much improved machine in 1807. In the new machine, the paper pulp flowed on to a moving continuous woven wire screen and was then squeezed between rollers to remove much of the water. The paper thus formed was transferred to a felt blanket and passed through a second press to remove more water, before being wound while still wet on to a drum. For the first time, a continuous sheet of paper could be made. Other inventors soon made further improvements: in 1817 John Dickinson obtained a patent for sizing baths to improve the surface of the paper; while in 1820 Thomas Crompton patented a steam-heated drum round which the paper was passed to speed up the drying process. The development cost of £60,000 bankrupted the brothers. Although Parliament extended the patent for fourteen years, and the machine was widely adopted, they never reaped much profit from it. Tsar Alexander of Russia became interested in the papermaking machine while on a visit to England in 1814 and promised Henry Fourdrinier £700 per year for ten years for super-intending the erection of two machines in Russia; Henry carried out the work, but he received no payment. At the age of 72 he travelled to St Petersburg to seek recompense from the Tsar's successor Nicholas I, but to no avail. Eventually, on a motion in the House of Commons, the British Government awarded Fourdrinier a payment of £7,000. The paper trade, sensing the inadequacy of this sum, augmented it with a further sum which they subscribed so that an annuity could be purchased for Henry, then the only surviving brother, and his two daughters, to enable them to live in modest comfort. From its invention in ancient China (see Cai Lun), its appearance in the Middle Ages in Europe and through the first three and a half centuries of printing, every sheet of paper had to made by hand. The daily output of a hand-made paper mill was only 60–100 lb (27–45 kg), whereas the new machine increased that tenfold. Even higher speeds were achieved, with corresponding reductions in cost; the old mills could not possibly have kept pace with the new mechanical printing presses. The Fourdrinier machine was thus an essential element in the technological developments that brought about the revolution in the production of reading matter of all kinds during the nineteenth century. The high-speed, giant paper-making machines of the late twentieth century work on the same principle as the Fourdrinier of 1807.

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