Cases 1-10
Eugene Bourdon was a brilliant French watchmaker and engineer. Bourdon specialized in scientific instruments and model steam engines. In the late 1840s there was an increasing number of horrific accidents involving very high-pressure steam locomotive engines. In 1849 he patented a new pressure measurement device which enabled accurate measurement of much higher pressures than existing ones. Bourdon designed the device for steam locomotive engines, but the notably more useful and robust pressure measurement device allowed engineers to develop a range of industrial machinery that operated at higher pressures. Besides its relative simplicity and accuracy, the Bourdon gauge can measure much higher pressures than the U-tube manometer pressure gauges used at the time. The Bourdon pressure gauge uses the principle that a flattened tube tends to straighten or regain its circular form in cross-section when pressurized.
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Wikipedia | Eugène Bourdon
Wikipedia | Bourdon gauge
Titan Clydebank, more commonly known as the Titan Crane, is a 46-meters-high cantilever crane at Clydebank, Scotland. It was designed to be used in the lifting of heavy equipment, such as engines and boilers, during the fitting-out of battleships and ocean liners, as the Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Elizabeth 2. When tested on April 1907, Titan was the largest cantilever crane ever built and was the first one electrically powered. The Titan crane was constructed by the Scottish civil and structural engineer Adam Hunter, who was working as Chief Engineer for the engineering firm Arrol & Co. In his early years as engineer he participated in the construction of the Forth Bridge in Scotland and the Tower Bridge in London. Throughout his career he designed road and railway bridges, steelwork for power stations and workshops, and carried out the construction of cranes. He published several books on structural engineering and was member of the several prestigious institutions, as the Institution of Civil Engineers or the American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Grace's Guide | Adam Hunter
Wikipedia | Titan Clydebank
During the first quarter of twentieth century, engineers of the US American Telephone and Telegraph Company pioneered using a theorem concerning the equivalent generator circuit in electrical network analysis. It was called the Thevenin’s theorem. The name was given in honour of Leon Charles Thevenin, a French telegraph engineer and educator who published it in 1883. Based on the Ohm’s Law and Kirchoff’s law, Thévenin’s theorem constitute core content of present electrical engineering courses. Along is career, he demonstrated to be a model engineer and employee, hard-working on the development of long-distance telegraph lines. It seems that Thévenin discovered his theorem independently of the same published by Helmholtz in 1853, while working on electrophysiology. Nevertheless, the widespread use of the theorem by communications engineers since 1904 has led to its being known as Thevenin's Theorem. This interest was shared by the AT&T engineers who encountered the theorem and named it for him. It is an interesting case study in the social history of engineering.
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Wikipedia | Leon Charles Thévenin
Wikipedia | Thévenin's theorem
Gustaf de Laval was a Swedish mechanical engineer. In 1882 he invented an impulse steam turbine, with a jet of steam impinging on a set of blades around the periphery of a wheel. The blades had to rotate at high velocity, close to 30,000 revolutions per minute, which produced immense centrifugal forces for the materials available at that time. Laval developed a nozzle, now known as a de Laval nozzle, to increase the steam jet to supersonic speed, and is still used in modern rocket engine nozzles. Production started in 1893 in Sweden and in other countries about the same time. In 1887 he invented the high-speed centrifugal cream separator, which was probably the greatest advance in butter-making up to that time. By 1880 the separators were being successfully marketed all over the world, for they were quickly adopted in larger dairies where they effected enormous savings in labour and space. In 1883 he founded the Alfa Laval AB company, which continues today as supplier of specialised products for heavy industry.
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Wikipedia | Gustaf de Laval
Wikipedia | de Laval nozzle
Wikipedia | Alfa Laval
By 1920 a Spanish engineer invented a single-rotor type of aircraft. In 1923, he developed the articulated rotor, which resulted in the world’s first successful flight of a stable rotary-wing aircraft: the C4 prototype, named autogiro. His name was Juan de la Cierva. Although an autogiro looks like a helicopter, its rotor blades are not driven by an engine, but free-wheel like a windmill. Forward speed is provided by a conventional engine and propeller, and even if this engine fails, the autogiro’s rotor continues to free-wheel and it descends safely. In 1925 he moved to England and established the Cierva Autogiro Company Limited. He patented the invention and marketed it under license in several countries. The C30A model served in the Royal Air Force from 1935 to 1945. Juan de la Cierva's work on rotor-wing dynamics made possible the modern helicopter, which extinguished interest in the autogiro.
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Wikipedia | Juan de la Cierva
Wikipedia | Autogiro
John Smeaton was an English civil and mechanical engineer. As civil engineer, he carried out many remarkable works as bridges, lighthouses, canals and harbours. On the mechanical side, Smeaton undertook a systematic study of waterwheels and windmills, to determine the design and construction to achieve the greatest power output. The paper published in 1759 exerted a considerable influence on mill design during the nineteenth century. The pioneering “constant of proportionality” describing pressure varying inversely as the square of the velocity when applied to objects moving in air was named Smeaton's coefficient in his honour, and was used by the Wright brothers in their pursuit of the first successful aircraft. His later works also influenced the development of studies to improve the efficiency of steam engines. He founded the Society of Civil Engineers in 1771 and coined for the first time the term civil engineer. His works as engineer were informed always by scientific principles grounded in careful and accurate observation.
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Wikipedia | John Smeaton
Wikipedia | Waterwheel
Because of frequent shipwrecks of long-distance sea travels, the British Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 in 1714 for a method of determining the longitude at sea to within a half a degree after a voyage to the West Indies (a cumulative error of no more than two minutes after a voyage lasting six weeks). The British clockmaker John Harrison started in 1730 his first design of a marine chronometer. During the following forty years he produced five versions of the sea clock, finally reaching the accuracy required. The difficulty was producing a clock that was not affected by variations in temperature, pressure, or humidity, resisted corrosion in salt air, and was able to function on board a constantly moving ship. Due to some controversy on the validation method, the official prize was never awarded to anyone, but Harrison received a monetary award for his achievements in 1773, when he was 80 years old. Though Harrison’s marine chronometer was too complex and costly to be produced in quantity, he opened the door for others to produce chronometers in quantity at an affordable prize.
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Wikipedia | John Harrison
Wikipedia | Marine chronometer
Laszlo Biró was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest. While working as a journalist, in 1930 Biró noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. But the ink was too viscous as to use it in a fountain pen. With the help of his brother György, he developed a special ink, which was dispensed over a hard ball at its point. This ball point was commonly made of steel, brass, or tungsten carbide. He had invented the practical ballpoint pen, overcoming previous designs of other inventors. At the beginning of World War II, Biro and his brother fled the Nazi occupation of Hungary and settled in Argentine. In 1943 filed a patent and formed the Biro Pens of Argentina (known as Birome). This new design was licensed for production in United States and United Kingdom, for supply to Royal Air Force aircrew. In 1945, Marcel Bich bought the patent for the pen from Biró, producing the brand Bic Cristal for more than 100 billion ballpoints pens worldwide.
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Wikipedia | Laszlo Biro
Wikipedia | Ballpoint pen
Several mechanical dishwashing devices were patented in the United States since 1850, but neither were practical nor widely accepted. The first successful of the hand-powered dishwashers was patented in 1886 by Josephine Cochrane. Her machine was the first to use water pressure instead of scrubbers to clean dishes. She founded Garis-Cochrane Manufacturing Company to manufacture her machines. Cochrane showed her new machine at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 where nine Garis-Cochrane washers were installed in the restaurants and pavilions of the fair and was met with interest from restaurants and hotels. The business was renamed Cochrane’s Crescent Washing Machine Co. in 1897. Cochrane patented additional designs of dishwashers in the following decades, but never saw her machines become sought-after household appliances. She died in 1913. Her dishwashers became popular with the hospitality industry, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that dishwashers caught on with the public. For Cochrane’s invention, she was inducted into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.
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Wikipedia | Josephine Cochrane
Wikipedia | Dishwasher
Leo Baekeland was a Belgian chemist. Educated in Belgium and Germany, he spent most of his career in the United States. He has been called the “Father of the Plastics Industry”, for his invention of Bakelite. In 1893 he invented the photographic paper Velox, the first commercially successful photographic paper printed by artificial light. The company he founded to produce Velox was sold to the Eastman Kodak Company in 1899. He then established a new laboratory in Yonkers, New York, to investigate on synthetic resins. He invented the Bakelite in 1907, an inexpensive, non-flammable and versatile plastic, which marked the beginning of the modern plastics industry. Bakelite was made from phenol and formaldehyde. It was the first plastic invented that retained its shape after being heated. Radios, telephones and electrical insulators were made of Bakelite because of its excellent electrical insulation and heat-resistance. Baekeland received many awards and honours, and he held more than 100 patens.