 | Science and invention in Birmingham: Encyclopedia II - Science and invention in Birmingham - 19th century
Science and invention in Birmingham - 19th century
1828: Josiah Mason improved a cheap, efficient slip-in nib which could be added to a fountain pen.
1830. With the invention of a new machine, William Joseph Gillott, William Mitchell and James Stephen Perry devise a way to mass manufacture robust, cheap steel pen nibs.
1837: custard powder was invented by pharmacist Alfred Bird.
George Elkington and Henry Elkington founded the English electroplating industry in the early 1800s. In 1840, they aided John Wright, who discovered that potassium cyanide was a suitable electrolyte for gold and silver electroplating.
Birmingham glassworks were among the early mass-producers of uranium glass. Manufacturers included Bacchus, Green & Green (later George Bacchus & Sons), Union Glassworks, in the 1840s, and Lloyd & Summerfield in the 1850s who were the first to use uranium in glass commercially.
1849: William Tranter takes out the first of many patents for his improvements in manufacture of the firearm.
The first celluloid as a bulk material for forming objects was made in 1856 by Alexander Parkes, many years later and with the recognition of celluloid as a format for making film for camera's an American court declared Parkes as the true inventor of celluloid.
1862: the thermoplastic Parkesine was showcased at the Great International Exhibition in London. Invented by Alexander Parkes, this celluloid is credited by the London Science Museum to be "generally accepted as the first plastic". (This presumably refers to synthetic plastic formed into objects: it is predated by the 1848 collodion, a nitrocellulose-based solution that dried to a celluloid-like film but was useless for industrial purposes, as well as several natural plastics).
1876: William Bown patented a design for the wheels of roller skates which embodied his effort to keep the two bearing surfaces of an axle, fixed and moving, apart. Bown worked closely with Joseph Henry Hughes who drew up the patent for a ball or roller bearing race for bicycle and carriage wheels which includes all the elements of an adjustable system in 1877.
Sir Francis Galton, who formulated (and later coined the term for) eugenics as well as questionnaires and many important tools in statistics, was born in Birmingham. Galton avidly supported the theories of his cousin Charles Darwin, and also furthered the most important advances in fingerprinting.
1895: Frederick William Lanchester and his brother built the first petrol driven four-wheeled car in Britain. Lanchester also experimented with the wick carburetor, fuel injection, turbochargers and invented the accelerator pedal and the Pendulum Governor for controlling the speed of an engine. In 1893 he designed and built his first engine (a vertical single cylinder) which was fitted to the first British motorboat.
1891: the Dunlop Rubber Company co-founded by John Boyd Dunlop established its Birmingham factory Fort Dunlop, later to become the focus of Dunlop as one of the largest multinational manufacturers of automotive and aeronautical tyres.
1896: the first radiograph used to assist in surgery was taken in Birmingham by the British pioneer of medical X-Rays, Major John Hall-Edwards.
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 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "19th century", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
