July 15, 1922] 



NA TURE 



99 



Calendar of Industrial Pioneers. 



July 16, 1824. Simone Stratico died. — An Italian 

 engineer and mathematician, Stratico held professor- 

 ships at Padua and Pavia, where he assisted Y< ilta in 

 his physical work, while under the rule of Napoleon 

 he became an inspector of roads and bridges. He 

 was also the author of works on hydraulics. 



July 17, 1794. John Roebuck died. — The friend 

 of Joseph Black and "Watt, Roebuck was trained as a 

 doctor and practised for a time at Birmingham. 

 Turning his attention to chemical manufacture, he 

 was successful in introducing leaden chambers in 

 place of glass ones in the manufacture of sulphuric 

 acid. In 1760 he founded the famous Carron Iron 

 Works on the river Carron in Stirlingshire, but though 

 a sound metallurgist, his business operations failed 

 financially. 



July 17, 1857. Pierre Louis Frederic Sauvage 

 died. — Remembered as one of the independent 

 inventors of the screw propeller, Sauvage was well 

 known as an ingenious mechanician, and had works 

 in the neighbourhood of Boulogne. He patented the 

 propeller in 1832, but reaped no benefit from it ; and 

 though granted a pension by Louis Philippe, the 

 failure of his scheme affected his mind and he died in 

 an asvlum. A statue of him was erected at Boulogne 

 in 1881. 



July 17, 1886. David Stevenson died. — A member 

 of the well-known- Scottish family of lighthouse 

 engineers, Stevenson was trained as a mechanic, made 

 surveys, wrote scientific papers, and with his brother 

 Thomas (1818-1887) designed and built 28 beacons 

 and 30 lighthouses in various parts of the world. He 

 also took a leading part in the introduction of paraffin 

 in place of colza oil. 



July 17, 1891. Willoughby Smith died. — Entering 

 the service of the Gutta-Percha Company in 1848, 

 Smith superintended the making and assisted in the 

 laying of the first submarine cables, and became chief 

 electrician and manager of the Telegraph Construction 

 and Maintenance Company. He made experiments 

 on coating wire with gutta-percha, introduced 

 improvements in cable manufacture, and was con- 

 nected with the various Atlantic cable enterprises. 

 In 1882 he served as president of the Society of 

 Telegraph Engineers, now the Institution of Electrical 

 Engineers. 



July 19, 1879. Louis Favre died. — The son of a 

 Swiss carpenter, Favre learned his father's trade and 

 afterwards became noted as a builder of railways 

 in the south of France and in Switzerland. In 

 1872 he became the engineer of the St. Gothard's 

 tunnel, in the construction of which he made use of 

 compressed air as suggested by Colladon. This 

 tunnel is 14,900 metres in length. Favre's death 

 occurred suddenly in the tunnel a short time before 

 its completion. 



July 22, 1869. John Augustus Roebling died. — 

 One of the greatest bridge builders of last century, 

 Roebling was a native of Germany, being born on 

 June 12, 1S06, at Mulhausen, Thuringia. He 

 graduated from the Polytechnic School at Berlin, and 

 in 1 83 1 emigrated to the United States, where, after 

 experience in canal and railway engineering, he 

 founded a wire-rope manufactory. He constructed a 

 wire-rope suspension aqueduct and a bridge over the 

 Monongahela River, and suspension bridges over the 

 Niagara Falls and the Ohio River, the latter 

 having a span of 1057 feet. The success of his work 

 led to the acceptance of his design for a great bridge 

 over the East River to connect New York and 

 Brooklyn, and it was while superintending the laying 

 out of one of the towers of this bridge that he received 

 the injury from the effects of which he died. E. C. S. 



NO. 2750, VOL. 1 IO] 



Societies and Academies. 



London. 



Royal Microscopical Society, June 21. — Prof. F. J. 

 Cheshire, president, in the chair. — A. Chaston Chap- 

 man : The use of the microscope in the brewing in- 

 dustry. The use of the microscope for research and 

 control purposes has been directly responsible for 

 greater technical advances and, indirectly, for more 

 far-reaching discoveries in brewing than in any other 

 industry. The larger breweries have laboratories in 

 which both chemical and biological tests are carried 

 out and much time is devoted to the examination 

 ( >1 yeast, to the forcing of beers as a test of stability, 

 to "the testing of the efficiency of the air-filters, etc. 

 The successful conduct of brewing operations depends 

 almost entirely on such control work. The introduc- 

 tion of the microscope into the brewery as the result, 

 chiefly, of Pasteur's investigations, has been respon- 

 sible for the replacement of empirical methods by 

 processes based on scientific knowledge. — J. Strachan : 

 The microscope in paper - making. The microscope 

 was introduced into the industry by amateur micro- 

 scopists more than a century ago, and during the past 

 twenty-five years, which have witnessed the applica- 

 tion of exact scientific methods to paper-making, the 

 technologist found the microscope already in common 

 use. The microscope is used in the paper-mill 

 chiefly for the analysis of paper and of its raw 

 materials and in controlling the blending and prepara- 

 tion of these substances. It has also been applied 

 to the beating process, which is largely a matter of 

 colloid physics, and to sizing, dyeing, impurities in air 

 and water, the valuation of new raw materials, etc . 1 11 

 spite of recent research work, which indicates that 

 the cellulose basis of plants is of a uniform chemical 

 composition, and that X-ray spectrographic methods 

 have proved this substance to be of definite crystalline 

 character, the constitution of cellulose remains 

 unsettled. No important work had been done on its 

 refractive index (about 1-555). Microscopic work 

 on this matter and the application of the polariscope 

 and ultra-microscope would probably yield important 

 evidence. 



Mineralogical Society, June 27. — Dr. A. Hutchinson, 

 president, in the chair. — A. Brammall and H. F. 

 Harwood : The Dartmoor granite ; its accessory 

 minerals and petrology. Minerals of general occur- 

 rence : tourmaline, ilmenite, magnetite, apatite, 

 monazite, garnet, zircon [(1) in water-clear, small 

 crystals. (2) in tawny, zoned, larger, and more 

 abundant crystals], pyrites and pyrrhotine. More 

 restricted : fluor (colourless, blue, and purple), topaz, 

 cassiterite, andalusite, sphene, anatasc, barytes. 

 Biotite is abundant ; muscovite is scanty. Streams 

 have yielded, in addition, rutile, brookite, and blue- 

 green anatase. Analyses are given of granite types 

 (bulk), biotite, porphyritic felspars (baryta-bearing), 

 and some accessory- minerals. In the tor area 

 (Haytor-Widecombe), the granite occurs as successive 

 sheets or flows, differing appreciably in chemical 

 composition. The texture becomes coarser, por- 

 phyritic felspars become more abundant and richer 

 in plagioclase content, and the percentage of biotite 

 and accessories increases with vertical descent in a 

 flow. The relationship of topography to pseudo- 

 bedding, jointing, veining, and probable faulting 

 is discussed. — W. F. P. McLintock and F. R. Ennos : 

 On the structure and composition of the Strathmore 

 meteorite. From microscopical examination of thin 

 sections of this meteorite, stones of which fell in 

 Perthshire and Forfarshire on December 3, mi;, 

 the structure is that of the intermediate chondrite 

 group (Ci). An apatite-like mineral is present. 

 Detailed chemical analyses of the magnetic and non- 



