January 19, 1922J 



NATURE 



93 



, Calendar of Industrial Pioneers. 



L January 19, 1891. Robert Forester Mushet died The 



e. son of the discoverer of the black-band ironstone, 

 p Mushet made experiments on spiegeleisen — iron and 

 manganese — which proved of great value in the 

 development of the Bessemer process of steel-making. 

 He also investigated alloys of iron with titanium, 

 tungsten, and chromium, and about 1870 introduced 

 the first of the self-hardening steels. 



January 20, 1901. Zenobe Theophile Gramme died A 



Belgian carpenter, Gramme went to Paris, where at 

 one time he worked under Ruhmkorff. His fame as 

 an electrician is due to his re-invention in 1870 of the 

 ring-armature dynamo first devised by Pacinotti. A 

 monument to him stands in the Conservatoire des 

 Arts et Metiers in Paris. 



January 21, 1901. Elisha Gray died. — A distinguished 



ker of electrical appliances, Gray took out upwards 



-ixty patents, and was connected with the Western 



I.I. ctrical Co. of Chicago. On February 14, 1876, he 



njjplied for a patent for a telephone only a few hours 



after Bell had deposited his specification. 



January 22, 1831. John Blenkinsop died. — One of the 

 pioneers of the locomotive, Blenkinsop was an agent 

 to some collieries. He took out a patent in 181 1, and 

 in 1812 at Leeds constructed an engine with a pinion 

 s'rnring into a fixed rack. One of his engines was 

 1 by George Stephenson. 



lanuary 22, 1887. Sir Joseph Whitworth died Among 



i ii' greatest mechanical engineers of the nineteenth 

 crntury, Whitworth worked with Maudslay, 

 lloJtzapfTel, and Clement, and in 1833 set up as a tool- 

 maker at Manchester. He improved machine-tools, 

 I" rfpcted measuring machines, introduced standard 

 ii*es, and in the 'fifties brought out his valuable 

 em of screw-threads. He also made experiments 

 artillery and developed the process of compressing 

 nitlted steel under hydraulic pressure. The Whitworth 

 scliolarships and exhibitions were founded bv him in 

 1869. 



January 22, 1918. Sir John Wolfe Wolfe-Barry died ■ 



An acknowledged leader in the world of civil engineer- 

 ing, Wolfe-Barry was prominently associated with the 

 transport problems of London. Among his notable 

 iks was the Tower Bridge, completed in 1894. He 

 ^ president of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 

 .7, and he initiated the Engineering Standards 

 nmittees. 



lanuary 23, 1805. Claude Chappe died.— The inventor 

 >! the semaphore signalling apparatus, Chappe was 

 horn in 1763. The statue of him in the Boulevard 

 Saint-Germain in Paris depicts him explaining his 

 invention to the Legislative Assembly in 1792. One 

 of the first messages by semaphore was sent from the 

 roof of the Louvre. 



January 23, 1896. Ferdinand Schichau died A native 



of Elbing, where he opened a small shop in 1837, 

 Schichau built Germany's first steam dredger, engined 

 some of the earliest German steam men-of-war. and 

 became a famous constructor of locomotives and tor- 

 pedo craft. 



January 25, 1917. George Andrew Hobson died As 



|)artner with the late Sir Douglas Fox, Hobson was 

 rf^ponsible for many pioneering construction works 

 in America and South Africa, his most remarkable 

 work being the railway bridge over the Zambezi River 

 at the Victoria Falls, the central span of which is 

 500 ft. long with a rise of 90 ft. He also worked out 

 the plans for generating electricity at the Victoria 

 Falls for the gold-mines of the Rand. E. C. S. 



NO. 2725, VOL. TO9] 



Societies and Academies. 



London. 

 Royal Society, December 8, 192 1.— Sir C. S. 

 Sherrington, president, in the chair.— Lord Rayleigh : 

 A study of the glow of phosphorus : Periodic 

 luminosity and action of inhibiting substances. The 

 intermittent or periodic luminosity observed when the 

 last traces of oxygen are being removed from air by 

 means of phosphorus, or when air is allowed slowly 

 to leak into an exhausted vessel containing phos- 

 phorus, requires the presence of water-vapour. 

 Moderate drying {e.g. by sulphuric acid) makes the 

 glow perfectly steady. Water-vapour has therefore 

 the power of inhibiting the combination of phosphorus- 

 vapour and oxygen within certain limits. When the 

 composition of the mixture becomes favourable beyond 

 those limits, a wave of combustion is propagated. 

 Other substances are known to inhibit the glow of 

 phosphorus, and exhibit the above phenomena in a 

 more striking form than water. Camphor, ammonia, 

 and pear-oil are among the most effective. The pro- 

 pagation of these waves of combustion cannot be 

 attributed to the rise of temperature of one layer 

 igniting the next layer, for the rise of temperature is 

 too small. An alternative theory of the propagation 

 is proposed, which assumes that it depends on the 

 provision of nuclei, as in the propagation of crystal- 

 lisation through a super-cooled liquid. On this basis 

 a theory of the action of the inhibitors or " negative 

 catalysts " is developed. — Lord Rayleigh : The aurora 

 line in the spectrum of the night sky. The spectrum 

 of the night sky at Terling (near London) has been 

 photographed systematically. The aurora line at 

 wave-length 5578 A.U. is' recofded on about _ two 

 nights out of three. Its intensity on ordinary nights 

 is not obviously related either to the amount of mag- 

 netic disturbance or to the transit of spots over^the 

 sun's central meridian. The intensity in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Newcastle is notably less than near 

 London, thus the effect appears to increase towards 

 the south. It appears, therefore, 10 be due to some 

 different cause from the Polar aurora. The aurora 

 line does not coincide with krypton, and experiments 

 to determine its origin gave negative results. — E. F. 

 Armstrong and T. P. Hilditch . A study of catalytic 

 actions at solid surfaces. VII. : The influence of 

 pressure on the rate of hydrogenation of liquids in 

 presence of nickel. The comparative rates of ab- 

 sorption of hydrogen at different pressures by a variety 

 of unsaturated compounds in presence of nickel have 

 been studied ; the relation between the hydrogen pres- 

 sure and the rate of hydrogenation is dependent on 

 the tvpe of organic compound examined. Simple 

 ethvlenic compounds are hydrogenated at rates almost 

 proportional to the absolute pressure of the hydrogen. 

 At verv low concentrations of catalyst the increase in 

 rate of hydrogenation becomes less than proportional 

 to the increase in pressure. If the unsaturated com- 

 pound contains another group which has affinity 

 towards nickel, but is not open to hydrogenation, in- 

 crease in hvdrogen pressure causes an increase in the 

 rate of hydrogen absorption. These results are in 

 harmony with the authors' theorv that catalytic hydro- 

 genation is primarilv conditioned bv an association of 

 the ethvlenic linkage with the catalvst, the latter being 

 also associated with hvdrogen.— W. D. Womerslcy : 

 The energy in air. steam, and carbon dioxide from 

 100° C. to 2000° C. Hydrogen and carbon monoxide 

 mixed with either air or oxvden were exploded in a 

 Hopkinson recording calorimeter for explosions. 

 Curves showing the energv in the various gases and 



