he sat in Parliament for Honiton. He was suddenly and prema- 

 turely cut off by an attack of iliac passion at Moffat, on the 18th of 

 September, 1860. 



CHARLES MAY, son of a member of the Society of Friends, was 

 born at Alton, Hampshire, in the year 1800. At an early age he 

 began to exhibit proofs of the mechanical genius which became con- 

 spicuous in his later years, and with but little help from schooling, 

 for his education is said to have been scarcely better than that now 

 within reach of workmen. He was apprenticed to Mr. Sims, a chemist 

 and druggist of Stockport, whose daughter he afterwards married ; 

 and having returned to Ampthill, to which town his parents had 

 removed from Alton, he commenced business on his own account, as 

 a retail and manufacturing chemist, and to this in course of time he 

 added the business of a millwright. 



In 1836 he accepted a partnership with Messrs. Ransome, agri- 

 cultural implement makers of Ipswich, taking charge of the engi- 

 neering department, and the results of his vigorous management 

 were speedily shown by the rising importance of the firm and increase 

 of business. During this connexion Mr. May constructed a dome 

 for the observatory at Hartwell House, and for Mr. Barclay's obser- 

 vatory at Bury Hill, the equatoreal mounting for Ross' large object- 

 glass, which occupied a conspicuous place in the Exhibition of 1851, 

 and the great Transit Circle and the Altazimuth, now in use at the 

 Greenwich Observatory. The latter are deservedly admired for their 

 perfect construction, which completely realized the conceptions of the 

 Astronomer Royal, and improved to an unprecedented extent the 

 mechanical resources of astronomical science. Mr. May moreover 

 erected an observatory for his own use, and furnished it with a 

 transit instrument and clock, and a Merz achromatic telescope of 

 6 1 inches aperture. And in other departments of the engineering 

 business he instituted experiments on the strength of iron, effected 

 improvements in the permanent way of railways, invented the com- 

 pressed tree-nails for fixing railway chairs to the sleepers, and was the 

 first to introduce the process of ' chilling ' for the pivots of large 

 instruments. 



Mr. May was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society and 

 of the Institution of Civil Engineers ; he was elected into the Royal 



