Category: Inventions

Professor Dr Eric Laithwaite (1921-97) from Lancashire was a naturally gifted lecturer and was attached firstly to Manchester University, then Imperial College, London. He was well-known for his radio and television appearances and has been called the UK’s first ‘media engineer’. Another accolade assigned to Laithwaite is ‘the father of Maglev‘, even though he insisted that he did not invent it, but re-discovered it.

In fact, it was Laithwaite who took the neglected theory of magnetic levitation (Maglev) and, from 1947, devised many practical applications of it, most notably in low-speed trains. One such was in commercial use in 1984-95 as a 26mph shuttle from Birmingham’s airport to its international railway station, a distance of 2,000ft.. However, government funds were withdrawn and this futuristic technology went to Japan and Germany.

Maglev is the principle used in the linear motor designed by Laithwaite, which needs no gearbox or wheels and is therefore friction-free. Instead of torque providing propulsion, an electro-magnetic set-up forms a ‘travelling magnetic field’ or ‘magnetic river’ along which an object literally floats. It can be low- or high-acceleration, the latter being intended for space vehicles potentially. Laithwaite also believed he had found amazing gyroscopic properties but struggled to convince his peers.

(Top image: Dan Meerbeek at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Currently one of the most common surgical operations, the hip replacement is the legacy of Professor Sir John Charnley (1911-82) from Lancashire, and it was the British inventions of the high-density plastic polyethylene and PMMA cement that Charnley used to join a stainless steel femoral head to the thigh bone. This inspired combination was first successfully used by Charnley at Wrightington Hospital in his home county in 1962.

Wrightington still offers this treatment today and has become a place of ‘pilgrimage’ for young surgeons. Charnley himself was motivated by his experience as an Army doctor in WW2. Early prosthetics were made of glass, ivory and even Teflon, but these had failed and patients had caught infections during the procedure. Charnley, who recorded everything meticulously, said that “failure is a relentless teacher” as he persevered in his quest to find the optimal materials and technique.

Charnley tracked all of his orthopaedic patients and when any died, he sent his staff to retrieve the hip to check on its status. He set a new high standard for cleanliness and reporting and his influence spread worldwide, giving millions of sufferers renewed quality of life. He also pioneered fusion of joints by compression, and trauma surgery.

(Images LtoR: Public domain and Laboratoires Servier at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)

In 1770 King William III (1738-1820) purchased a gold watch from the country’s greatest watchmaker, Devon-born Thomas Mudge (1715-94). Mudge had placed his pioneering detached-lever escapement in the mechanism and it made the pocket watch so much more reliable that the field of horology was transformed. It was a present for William’s wife, Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) and it became known as ‘the Queen’s Watch‘. It still sits in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle today [pictured above].

The problem had been that spring-driven watch mechanisms included two wheels that were in constant contact, causing friction and wear, leading to gradual loss of accuracy. Mudge’s solution was an escapement which kept these components apart.

Mudge had refined his exceptional skills  during his apprenticeship in London under Yorkshireman George Graham (1673-1751), himself an inventor of several improvements to clocks and watches. After Graham died, Mudge established his own business and customers including royalty flocked to his door.

Mudge published ‘Thoughts on the Means of Improving Watches, Particularly Those for Use at Sea’ in 1765 and after moving back to Devon in 1771 to be near his doctor brother, he worked on a new type of marine chronometer. It is said that some of Mudge’s mechanisms are the most complex ever made.

(Image of Thomas Mudge: Public domain)

Yorkshireman Sir George Cayley (1773-1857) was a man ahead of his time. For the want of a suitable engine, he would have invented the powered aircraft; instead it was the glider which successfully made it from his drawing board to the skies in 1849. The pilot, or intrepid passenger, was a 10-year-old boy and, scaling up his experiments, Cayley persuaded a grown man to be carried aloft in his 1853 version.

The story goes that the gentleman was Cayley’s coachman and after the 900ft-long. flight, he promptly resigned! His survival of the glider’s crash-landing was doubtless partly due to the seatbelt which Cayley had thoughtfully designed and added to the wheeled carriage beneath the wings. A galloping horse drew the contraption (which Cayley called a “governable parachute”) to lift-off and one can only imagine the astonishment of any onlookers.

Previously, would-be aviators had tried to imitate birds with flapping wings but Cayley’s extensive research showed that wings should be fixed and he identified, and produced calculations for, lift, weight, thrust and drag as being the key factors. He delved into all forms of aircraft including airships and helicopters, and he laid a foundation just waiting for the technology to catch up decades later.

(Images LtoR: Replica of Cayley’s glider in the Yorkshire Air Museum by Alan Wilson at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0 and Sir George Cayley portrait, Public Domain)

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) from Dorset was a polymath but lacked one skill, namely draughtmanship, and he was even frustrated with his attempts at using tracing devices to make illustrations for his various research papers. Luckily, his knowledge of chemistry enabled him, in the mid-1830s, to invent a method whereby sunlight would imprint an image for him, albeit in negative, on paper coated in salt, then silver nitrate and salt again. He then devised another process to turn this negative into a positive as many times as desired.

He later discovered that exposure need only be a few seconds to create a latent image which could then be developed in a gallic acid mixture. He patented this in 1841 as a ‘calotype’. His friend and fellow polymath, Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) from Buckinghamshire, suggested using hyposulphite of soda as a fixer and this is still used today for black-and-white photography.

Fox Talbot published the first book of photographs, ‘The Pencil of Nature’ (1844) to demonstrate how his “photogenic drawings”, as he called them, could be used. A new type of artistic expression was born, as well as the means for producing authentic historical records. In Talbot’s words, “It is a little bit of magic realised”.

(Images LtoR: Fox Talbot & photograph taken by him in 1842, both at Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

The pneumatic tyre was invented twice, since the second claimant was unaware of a patent registered in 1846 in France and 1847 in the USA that had lain undeveloped by the horse-drawn carriage industry for which it was intended. The two inventors were both Scotsmen ~ Robert William Thomson (1822-73) from Aberdeenshire and Dr. John Boyd Dunlop (1840-1921) from Ayrshire. Dunlop’s patent of 1889 was invalidated in 1890 but a shrewd, enthusiastic business partner overcame any difficulties and it is Dunlop’s name that became world famous.

Wheels had previously been trimmed in wood, then leather-clad wood, then solid rubber. These progressions aimed to soften the bumpy, noisy ride experienced on the new-fangled bicycle. In 1887 Dunlop, then working as a vet in Belfast, witnessed the discomfort of his young son riding a tricycle on cobbled streets, so made a rubber tube pumped full with air and held round the front wheel with sailcloth and later, for manufacturing purposes, with rubber cement.

Dunlop resigned from the ensuing Dunlop Rubber Company in 1895 and did not make much money from his idea. He was not to know that he was on the cusp of the motor car revolution which would see ‘Fort Dunlop’ built in Coventry to service a mushrooming sector.

(Top images LtoR of Dunlop racing tyre: Peter Taylor at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0 and of Dr. Dunlop: picryl.com / Public domain)

John Kay (1704-c.80) from Lancashire and one of his six sons, Robert (1728-1802), made vital contributions to the Industrial Revolution in the textile industry. John first invented, manufactured and installed wire reeds for looms. He later developed a card-making machine and a cording and twisting machine for yarn. In 1733 he invented the flying shuttle, the first step from hand looms to power looms.

His mechanism comprised a wheeled, aerodynamic bobbin tray ferrying the weft to and fro inside the warp ‘shed’ and operated by pulling on a cord attached to the hammers that whacked the tray along a ‘race’. A weaver could do this with one hand while simultaneously operating the reeds. This was far quicker than doing the job manually and enabled the production of much wider cloth.

Some newly laid-off weavers expressed their resentful and some rival businesses ignored Kay’s patent, which he could not afford to continue defending in court, and copied the idea anyway (patents were not fairly regulated then). However, Robert improved the loom further in 1760 by the addition of a ‘drop box’ to hold extra bobbins so that multi-coloured designs could be woven. In spite of any difficulties, the Kays’ innovations were a turning point.

(Top images LtoR: flying shuttle trays by Linda Spashett at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0, John Kay [cropped] by Wellcome Collection by Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)

A fearsome sight for many, the hypodermic syringe was nevertheless an improvement on the animal bladder and hollow goose quill used experimentally by Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) in 1656 and on the practice of introducing substances via scratches or cuts. In fact, its invention in 1853 coincided with that year’s Vaccination Act which made vaccination against smallpox compulsory for babies in their first 3 months and it handily enabled this mass delivery to be carried out. Two British doctors are credited with its appearance.

The first was Alexander Wood (1817-84) from Fife who called his device a ‘subcutaneous’ syringe and published ‘A New Method for Treating Neuralgia by the Direct Application of Opiates to Painful Points’ , in 1855, reasoning that, like a bee sting, the effect was localised. The second was Charles Hunter (1835-78) from London who presented ‘On the Hypodermic Administration of Remedies in Neuralgia and Other Affections’ in 1858.

Hunter had made improvements to Wood’s design and had found that injections did not have to be made at the site of pain but at any convenient spot since their effect was systemic. Wood disagreed but a Commission found that Hunter was correct. Hunter also coined the word ‘hypodermic’, from the Greek hypo (under) and derma (skin).

(Image: Olia Danilevich at pexels.com / CC0)

As one of history’s greatest seafaring nations, Britain has made many contributions to oceanography, with the marine chronometer being one of the most important. This finely balanced clock enables the calculation of longitude at sea, thereby harnessing the grid model that allows Captains to pinpoint their position. Safe and accurate navigation was finally possible, thanks to the unceasing efforts of Yorkshireman John Harrison (1693-1776).

In 1714, after many shipwrecks mainly resulting from fierce competition with Spain, France and The Netherlands in war, territorial expansion and overseas trade, the British Parliament decided to offer monetary rewards for the invention of a foolproof method for finding longitude on the high seas. One suggestion had been to fire shots from moored vessels in certain locations at set intervals, others looked to the stars, but Harrison, a carpenter turned clockmaker, utilised the fixed 0° longitude at Greenwich to measure distance via time.

Harrison made a series of four chronometers, H1-4, from 1730 to 1762 and eventually received the full prize of £20,000 by 1773. After later simplifications to Harrison’s design, the Royal Observatory Greenwich established certification of chronometers for the Royal Navy and in 1884 the Greenwich Meridian was officially adopted internationally, resulting in better maps and safer, more direct shipping routes.

(Top images:- H1, H2, H3: Michael Manners at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0, H4: Colonel Warden at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 & painting of John Harrison with an H4 [cropped]: David Wright at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802-75) from Gloucestershire is best known for the ‘Wheatstone bridge’, a device for measuring electrical resistance, though he can only lay claim to its practical development and not the idea itself, which properly belongs to Samuel Christie (1784-1865). However, Wheatstone did invent both the symphonium and the concertina and his birthday, 6th February, was chosen for the annual ‘World Concertina Day‘. Indeed he patented two types of concertina ~ the English, in 1829, and the Duet, in 1844.

Wheatstone was from a musical family and his studies in physics led him in 1827 to devise the kaleidophone to visually demonstrate the different vibrations for different notes. He then experimented with reed instruments and this first resulted in the symphonium, similar to the mouth-organ but with buttons on two sides.

Next came the 4½-octave English concertina with the advantage that the blown air was produced mechanically by bellows, leaving the player able to sing along. The 48 buttons on the English alternate the diatonic tones between the two sides, whereas the Duet has all the lower notes on one side and the higher notes on the other. Being small and portable, concertinas are popular for travelling performers such as Morris dancers and the Salvation Army.

(Image of a Wheatstone concertina: Peter Trimming at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

For Yorkshireman Richard Clyburn (1796/7-1852) to become a consulting engineer in his early 30s, he must have shown impressive manual, technical and design skills early in life. He had moved down to Gloucestershire and went on to become a partner at Uley Iron Works, manufacturing tools with replaceable parts. The business was then purchased by Henry Reynolds-Moreton, the Earl of Ducie (1802-53) in order to produce new, efficient tools and machinery for his modernised farm.

Another talented engineer there was Edwin Beard Budding (1796-1846), the inventor of the lawnmower. The Earl, Budding and Clyburn worked together to successfully produce a newfangled chaff-cutter, among other implements. Clyburn alone, however, is credited with inventing the adjustable spanner, in 1842 and registering the patent in 1843. This saved time and space, since it replaced the need to select from a whole array of differently-sized fixed spanners. Today it also overcomes the problem of there being two measurement codes ~ imperial and metric.

The rack-and-worm ‘Clyburn spanner’ was available right up to the early 1960s and came in various lengths from 6″ to 24″. The featured photographs show the two styles ~ curved and ‘straight’. The vintage spanner below the drawing is not confirmed as a Clyburn but it is the right shape.

(Top images (top to bottom): 1871 drawing of Clyburn’s curved spanner in Spon’s via Internet Archive Book Images / Public domain & pszz at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)