December 16, 1922] 



NA TURE 



829 



Calendar of Industrial Pioneers. 



December 18, 1888. Joseph James Coleman died. 

 — One of the pioneers of the cold storage industry, 

 Coleman was first a teacher of chemistry and then 

 chemical engineer to Young's Paraffin Works, 

 Bathgate, Glasgow, where he devised means of 

 liquifying gases, and with Bell introduced the Bell- 

 Coleman dry-air refrigerating system which re- 

 volutionised the meat-carrying trade. 



December 19, 1877. Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff 

 died. — Ruhmkorff was born in Hanover in 1803 and 

 in 1 81 9 went to Paris as assistant in a laboratory. 

 There he started in business for himself and became 

 a successful electrical instrument maker. In 1844 

 he invented a thermo-electric battery, and in 1851 

 brought out the Ruhmkorff coil for which he after- 

 wards received a prize of 50,000 francs at the French 

 Exhibition of Electrical Apparatus. 



December 20, 1904. Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell died. 

 — The son of an engineer of Newcastle, Bell studied 

 at Edinburgh and at the Sorbonne, and in 1854, 

 with his brothers, founded the Clarence Iron Works 

 on the Tees, the firm ultimately employing some 6000 

 men. Bell was distinguished as an investigator 

 and writer on metallurgy, and as a man of affairs 

 assisted to found the Iron and Steel Institute, of 

 which he served as president in 1873-75. He was 

 also the first recipient of the Bessemer Gold Medal. 



December 21, 1909. Charles B. Dudley died. — 

 From 1875 to 1909 Dudley was chemist to the 

 Pennsylvania Railroad Company, in which situation 

 he carried out a number of important researches on 

 the properties of materials and other matters con- 

 nected with railways. He was president of the 

 American Chemical Society, and at the time of his 

 death, president of the International Association for 

 Testing Materials. 



December 22, 1867. Jean Victor Poncelet died. — 

 A distinguished French engineer and mathematician, 

 Poncelet passed through the Ecole Polytechnique, 

 served in the army, was taken prisoner on the retreat 

 from Moscow, and during his confinement began 

 writing his " Trait6 des proprietes projectives des 

 figures." He rose to high military rank, held a 

 chair of mechanical physics in Paris, published a 

 treatise on practical mechanics, improved the water 

 wheel, and invented a turbine. 



December 23, 1895. Sir Edward James Harland 

 died. — The founder of the great shipbuilding firm 

 of Harland and Wolff, of Belfast, Harland was born 

 in 1 83 1 at Scarborough, served an apprenticeship 

 under Robert Stephenson at Newcastle, and became 

 draughtsman to J. and J. Thomson, Glasgow. In 

 1854 he removed to Ireland, becoming the owner 

 of a small shipbuilding concern, in which he was 

 joined by Wolff in i860. Among the most notable 

 vessels he constructed was the Atlantic liner Teutonic, 

 which, built in 1889, was the first mercantile vessel 

 to be fully armed and equipped as an auxiliary- 

 cruiser. She was 560 feet long, displaced 16,740 

 tons, and with 17,500 horsepower attained a speed 

 of twenty knots. 



December 23, 1865. Alan Stevenson died. — The 

 eldest son of Robert Stevenson (1772-1850), whom he 

 succeeded as engineer to the Scottish Lighthouse 

 Commissioners, Stevenson erected ten lighthouses, 

 among them being that at Skerry vore, " the finest 

 example for mass combined with elegance of outline 

 of any extant rock tower." This lighthouse, which 

 was built between 1838 and 1843, is 138 feet high 

 and weighs 4300 tons. E. C. S. 



NO. 2772, VOL. no] 



Societies and Academies. 



London. 

 Royal Microscopical Society, November 15. — Prof. 

 F. J. Cheshire, president, in the chair. — C. Singer : 

 The earliest drawings made by means of the micro- 

 scope. These drawings, probably the earliest made, 

 were prepared in 1625, 3 years before the birth of 

 Malpigbi and 8 years before the birth of Leeuwenhoek. 

 They T represent the anatomy of a bee, of which the 

 mouth parts are particularly accurately rendered. 

 The drawings are to be found on the fly-leaf of an 

 excessively rare book, the " Melissographia " of 

 Federigo Cesi, Duke of Aquasparta. The only 

 specimen of this book known to exist is in the 

 Lanuvian library at Rome. The drawings were 

 made under the supervision of Cesi himself and of 

 his colleague in the first " Academy of the Lynx," 

 Francesco Stelluti. A mechanical microtome, was 

 constructed by the instrument maker Cummings 

 in 1770 and described by the notorious Sir John 

 Hill. 



Physical Society, November 24. — Dr. Alexander 

 Russell, president, in the chair. — E. G. Richardson : 

 The theory of the singing flame. Lord Rayleigh's 

 theory of the action of the singing flame fits the 

 results most closely, in that (1) heat is given by the 

 flame to the air in the tube at each condensation, 

 and (2) stationary waves are formed in the gas as 

 well as in the air-tube. But the lengths of gas-tube 

 unfavourable to the " singing " cover a more restricted 

 range than Lord Rayleigh surmised. — Miss Alice 

 Everett : Unit surfaces of Cooke and Tessar photo- 

 graphic lenses. A number of rays in an axial plane 

 (and a few general rays) are traced through the lens 

 systems by exact methods, and on each ray the 

 positions of the conjugate points for unit magnifica- 

 tion are found by Mr. T. Smith's formulae. For 

 general rays the loci of these " unit points " are 

 three-dimensional. They are surfaces only when 

 the chief rays are bound by some condition such as 

 passing through a fixed point of the object. Within 

 the region for which the lenses are designed, the 

 curvature of both object and image unit-point loci 

 is positive (convex to the fight source) and the image 

 locus is more curved than the object locus. — R. LI. 

 Jones : Vibration galvanometers with asymmetric 

 moving systems. The theory of vibrations of a 

 system with two degrees of freedom is given, ex- 

 pressions for the amplitudes of the forced vibrations 

 are deduced, and the conditions for resonance 

 ascertained. The results are applied to a galvano- 

 meter in which the moving system is asymmetrically 

 hung on a laterally yielding axis, and it is found 

 that the formula for the amplitude is capable of 

 reproducing with fair accuracy the sensitivity curve 

 of the galvanometer, which shows multiple resonance. 

 Asymmetry always lowers the sensitivity of the 

 resonance. — Paul Schilowsky : Some applications of 

 the gyroscope. To stabilise a system in unstable 

 equilibrium a reaction must be set up between the 

 system and the gyrostat of such a character as to 

 help the precession of the gyrostat during the return 

 of the system to normal. To check the oscillations 

 of a stable system, the reaction must be such as 

 to oppose such precession. The gyrostat must be 

 power-driven to neutralise friction. A collection of 

 apparatus for teaching purposes, comprising, inter 

 alia, models illustrating the precession of the earth, 

 a method of optically projecting an image of a 

 spinning top, and small mono-rail models, was ex- 

 hibited. To prevent rocking in a model ship a 



