British Standard Whitworth
British Standard Whitworth is an imperial-unit-based screw thread standard. The Whitworth thread was the world's first national screw thread standard and specified by Joseph Whitworth in 1841; until the only standardization was what little had been done by individual people and companies, with some companies' in-house standards spreading a bit within their industries. Whitworth's new standard specified a 55° thread angle and a thread depth of 0.640327p and a radius of 0.137329p, where p is the pitch. The thread pitch increases with diameter in steps specified on a chart; the Whitworth thread system was to be adopted as a British Standard to become British Standard Whitworth. An example of the use of the Whitworth thread are the Royal Navy's Crimean War gunboats; these are the first instance of mass-production techniques being applied to marine engineering, as the following quotation from the obituary from The Times of 24 January 1887 to Sir Joseph Whitworth shows: The Crimean War began, Sir Charles Napier demanded of the Admiralty 120 gunboats, each with engines of 60 horsepower, for the campaign of 1855 in the Baltic.
There were just ninety days in which to meet this requisition, short as the time was, the building of the gunboats presented no difficulty. It was otherwise however with the engines, the Admiralty were in despair. By a flash of the mechanical genius, inherent in him, the late Mr John Penn solved the difficulty, solved it quite easily, he had a pair of engines on hand of the exact size. He took them to pieces and he distributed the parts among the best machine shops in the country, telling each to make ninety sets in all respects to the sample; the orders were executed with unfailing regularity, he completed ninety sets of engines of 60 horsepower in ninety days – a feat which made the great Continental Powers stare with wonder, and, possible only because the Whitworth standards of measurement and of accuracy and finish were by that time recognised and established throughout the country. An original example of the gunboat type engine was raised from the wreck of the SS Xantho by the Western Australian Museum.
On disassembly, all its threads were shown to be of the Whitworth type. With the adoption of BSW by British railway lines, many of which had used their own standard both for threads and for bolt head and nut profiles, improving manufacturing techniques, it came to dominate British manufacturing. In the US, BSW was replaced when steel bolts replaced iron, but was still being used for some aluminium parts as late as the 1960s and 1970s when metric-based standards replaced the Imperial ones. American Unified Coarse was based on the same Imperial fractions; the Unified thread angle has flattened crests. From 1⁄4 in up to 1 1⁄2 in, thread pitch is the same in both systems except that the thread pitch for the 1⁄2 in bolt is 12 threads per inch in BSW versus 13 tpi in the UNC; the form of a Whitworth thread is based on a fundamental triangle with an angle of 55° at each peak and valley. The sides are at a flank angle of Θ = 27.5° perpendicular to the axis. Thus, if the thread pitch is p, the height of the fundamental triangle is H = p/ = 0.96049106 p.
However, the top and bottom 1⁄6 of each of these triangles is cut off, so the actual depth of thread is 2⁄3 of that value, or h = p/ = 0.64032738 p. The peaks are further reduced by rounding them with a 2 × − 55 ° = 125 ° circular arc; this arc has a height of a radius of r = e / = 0.13732908 p. The British Standard Fine standard has the same thread angle as the BSW, but has a finer thread pitch and smaller thread depth; this is more like the modern "mechanical" screw and was used for steel bolts. The British Standard Cycle standard which replaced the Cycle Engineers' Institute standard was used on British bicycles and motorcycles, it uses a thread angle of 60° compared to the Whitworth 55° and fine thread pitches. Whitworth markings refer to the bolt diameter rather than the distance across the flats of the hexagon as in other standards. Confusion arises because BSF hexagon sizes can be one size smaller than the corresponding Whitworth hexagon; this leads to instances where a spanner marked 7⁄16 BSF is the same size as one marked 3⁄8 W.
In both cases the spanner jaw width of 0.710 in, the width across the hexagon flat, is the same. However, in World War II the size of the Whitworth hexagon was reduced to the same size as the equivalent BSF hexagon purely to save metal during the war and they never went back to the old sizes afterwards, thus it is today uncommon to encounter a Whitworth hexagon which takes the nominally correct spanner. Spanners in this case may be marked 7⁄16 BS to indicate that they have a jaw size of 0.710 in and are designed to take either the 7⁄16 BSW or 7⁄16 BSF hexagon. The British Association screw thread standard is sometimes classed with the Whitworth standard fasteners because it is found in the same machinery as the Whitworth standard; however it is a metric based standard that uses a 47.5° thread angle and has its own set of head sizes. BA threads have diameters of 6 mm and smaller, were and still are used in precision machinery; the Whitworth 55° angle remains used today worldwide in form of the 15 British standard pipe threads defined in ISO 7, which are us
World War I
World War I known as the First World War or the Great War, was a global war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918. Contemporaneously described as "the war to end all wars", it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history, it is one of the deadliest conflicts in history, with an estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilian deaths as a direct result of the war, while resulting genocides and the 1918 influenza pandemic caused another 50 to 100 million deaths worldwide. On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb Yugoslav nationalist, assassinated the Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, leading to the July Crisis. In response, on 23 July Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia. Serbia's reply failed to satisfy the Austrians, the two moved to a war footing. A network of interlocking alliances enlarged the crisis from a bilateral issue in the Balkans to one involving most of Europe.
By July 1914, the great powers of Europe were divided into two coalitions: the Triple Entente—consisting of France and Britain—and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Russia felt it necessary to back Serbia and, after Austria-Hungary shelled the Serbian capital of Belgrade on the 28th, partial mobilisation was approved. General Russian mobilisation was announced on the evening of 30 July; when Russia failed to comply, Germany declared war on 1 August in support of Austria-Hungary, with Austria-Hungary following suit on 6th. German strategy for a war on two fronts against France and Russia was to concentrate the bulk of its army in the West to defeat France within four weeks shift forces to the East before Russia could mobilise. On 2 August, Germany demanded free passage through Belgium, an essential element in achieving a quick victory over France; when this was refused, German forces invaded Belgium on 3 August and declared war on France the same day. On 12 August and France declared war on Austria-Hungary.
In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Alliance, opening fronts in the Caucasus and the Sinai Peninsula. The war was fought in and drew upon each power's colonial empire as well, spreading the conflict to Africa and across the globe; the Entente and its allies would become known as the Allied Powers, while the grouping of Austria-Hungary and their allies would become known as the Central Powers. The German advance into France was halted at the Battle of the Marne and by the end of 1914, the Western Front settled into a battle of attrition, marked by a long series of trench lines that changed little until 1917. In 1915, Italy opened a front in the Alps. Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in 1915 and Greece joined the Allies in 1917, expanding the war in the Balkans; the United States remained neutral, although by doing nothing to prevent the Allies from procuring American supplies whilst the Allied blockade prevented the Germans from doing the same the U. S. became an important supplier of war material to the Allies.
After the sinking of American merchant ships by German submarines, the revelation that the Germans were trying to incite Mexico to make war on the United States, the U. S. declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. Trained American forces would not begin arriving at the front in large numbers until mid-1918, but the American Expeditionary Force would reach some two million troops. Though Serbia was defeated in 1915, Romania joined the Allied Powers in 1916 only to be defeated in 1917, none of the great powers were knocked out of the war until 1918; the 1917 February Revolution in Russia replaced the Tsarist autocracy with the Provisional Government, but continuing discontent at the cost of the war led to the October Revolution, the creation of the Soviet Socialist Republic, the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by the new government in March 1918, ending Russia's involvement in the war. This allowed the transfer of large numbers of German troops from the East to the Western Front, resulting in the German March 1918 Offensive.
This offensive was successful, but the Allies rallied and drove the Germans back in their Hundred Days Offensive. Bulgaria was the first Central Power to sign an armistice—the Armistice of Salonica on 29 September 1918. On 30 October, the Ottoman Empire capitulated. On 4 November, the Austro-Hungarian empire agreed to the Armistice of Villa Giusti after being decisively defeated by Italy in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. With its allies defeated, revolution at home, the military no longer willing to fight, Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated on 9 November and Germany signed an armistice on 11 November 1918. World War I was a significant turning point in the political, cultural and social climate of the world; the war and its immediate aftermath sparked numerous uprisings. The Big Four (Britain, the United States, It
R. E. B. Crompton
Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, CB, FRS was a British electrical engineer and inventor. He was a pioneer of electric lighting and public electricity supply systems; the company he formed, Crompton & Co. was one of the world's first large-scale manufactures of electrical equipment. He was an early campaigner for an international standard for electrical systems, he was involved with both the practical and academic sides of his discipline, being a founder member of the International Electrotechnical Commission and twice president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. He was a founder member of the Royal Automobile Club. Evelyn Crompton was born at Sion Hill, near Thirsk, one of five children. From an early age he was interested in machines and engineering, his autobiography tells how a trip to the Great Exhibition aged 6 had a profound impact on him: "For me, the unforgettable part and focus of the whole exhibition was the Machinery Hall...neither Koh-I-Noor diamond, nor Osler's crystal fountain...had any attractions for me to compare with those of the locomotives, with their brilliantly polished piston rods and brasses burnished like gold."
His schooling started at Sharow, near Ripon in Yorkshire, along with 19 other boys, aged between 7 and 15. In 1856 he went to school at Elstree, on to Harrow. Crompton's education was interrupted by the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 and he was keen to see action, despite his young age. In mid-1856, after the conclusion of the war, he travelled to the Crimea on HMS Dragon and visited his brother in what had been the front line. Thereafter, he asserted his claim to the award of the British Crimean War Medal with the clasp for Sebastopol - but was, in fact, entitled to neither. Crompton was never enrolled in the Royal Navy. After the Crimea, Crompton went to Harrow School, he eschewed the school's classical education, decided to study extra mathematics. He performed experiments with Leyden Jars. During a summer holiday, he built a road-going steam tractor called Bluebell. From Harrow Crompton obtained a placement at the Doncaster Works of the Great Northern Railway where he received theoretical education and practical experience in engineering.
However Crompton still favoured the military life and in 1864 joined the British Army and served in the Rifle Brigade in India. Whilst there, he witnessed the work of the Royal Engineers building narrow gauge railways and developed a deep interest in steam traction, he had Bluebell shipped to him from Britain and convinced his superiors to adopt traction engines and steam lorries for transporting cargo instead of bullock-drawn carts. He designed some of the military steam wagons himself. Crompton decided to pursue his interest in engineering, he became a partner and manager at T. H. P. Dennis & Co. an engineering company building agricultural mills and heating plant in Chelmsford. In this capacity, as a family favour, he designed a new mechanical foundry for an iron and steel business owned by his brother. To maximise efficiency, the mill was to run night, requiring the best possible lighting. Crompton designed and oversaw the installation of an arc lamp system designing his own improvements to the Swiss-built dynamo.
Crompton became convinced of the future of electric lighting, at the same time saw several faults in the French-developed arc lamps in use. He developed his own design which gave steadier light than existing types, his faith in his design was such that he bought out T. H. P. Dennis and in 1878 Crompton & Co. was formed to manufacture and install Crompton's lamp. His reputation spread, to the extent that when Joseph Swan was developing his incandescent light bulb, he consulted Crompton over its design. Soon Crompton was building Swan's light bulb under license and the company dominated the British lighting market. By 1881, the company's range had included to cover complete electrical systems. Crompton designed and manufactured dynamos, circuit breakers and electric meters, as well as lamps. Crompton gave demonstrations of his lamps at public events such as the Henley Regatta and at the Alexandra Palace, he installed lights at Windsor Castle and King's Cross station as well numerous country houses, tram networks, railway yards and docks.
Foreign jobs included lighting the Vienna State Opera, which became the world's first theatre to be lit by electricity. In 1887 Crompton designed and installed one of the world's first public electricity supplies using a centralised power station. Installed on the Kensington Gardens estate in London, 7 steam engines coupled to Crompton dynamos supplied power from an underground cavern; the success of this installation led to numerous orders for similar systems worldwide. Crompton supplied equipment throughout the British Empire, with power stations being built as far aways as Australia, which received its first Crompton lighting plant in 1887. In 1899, the company installed a generator set in a Calcutta hotel, producing India's first electricity supply. India became a significant market for Crompton & Co. and he appointed an agent in Calcutta to manage his business in the subcontinent. Similar subsidiaries were founded worldwide. Crompton was keen for electricity to be used for domestic as well as industrial purposes.
In 1893, Scotsman Alan MacMasters approached Crompton with the prototype for a device that heated bread by running electricity through a metal element. The design went into production as the Eclipse, the world's first electric toaster and the world's first sold electric oven. Crompton k
International Electrotechnical Commission
The International Electrotechnical Commission is an international standards organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical and related technologies – collectively known as "electrotechnology". IEC standards cover a vast range of technologies from power generation and distribution to home appliances and office equipment, fibre optics, solar energy and marine energy as well as many others; the IEC manages three global conformity assessment systems that certify whether equipment, system or components conform to its International Standards. The IEC charter embraces all electrotechnologies including energy production and distribution, electronics and electromagnetics, multimedia, telecommunication and medical technology, as well as associated general disciplines such as terminology and symbols, electromagnetic compatibility and performance, dependability and development, safety and the environment; the first International Electrical Congress took place in 1881 at the International Exposition of Electricity, held in Paris.
At that time the International System of Electrical and Magnetic Units was agreed to. The International Electrotechnical Commission held its inaugural meeting on 26 June 1906, following discussions among the British Institution of Electrical Engineers, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, others, which began at the 1900 Paris International Electrical Congress, continued with Colonel R. E. B. Crompton playing a key role. In 1906, Lord Kelvin was elected as the first President of the International Electrotechnical Commission; the IEC was instrumental in developing and distributing standards for units of measurement the gauss and weber. It first proposed a system of standards, the Giorgi System, which became the SI, or Système International d’unités. In 1938, it published a multilingual international vocabulary to unify terminology relating to electrical and related technologies; this effort continues, the International Electrotechnical Vocabulary remains an important work in the electrical and electronic industries.
The CISPR – in English, the International Special Committee on Radio Interference – is one of the groups founded by the IEC. 82 countries are members while another 82 participate in the Affiliate Country Programme, not a form of membership but is designed to help industrializing countries get involved with the IEC. Located in London, the commission moved to its current headquarters in Geneva in 1948, it has regional centres in Latin America and North America. Today, the IEC is the world's leading international organization in its field, its standards are adopted as national standards by its members; the work is done by some 10,000 electrical and electronics experts from industry, academia, test labs and others with an interest in the subject. IEC standards have numbers in the range 60000–79999 and their titles take a form such as IEC 60417: Graphical symbols for use on equipment. Following the Dresden Agreement with CENELEC the numbers of older IEC standards were converted in 1997 by adding 60000, for example IEC 27 became IEC 60027.
Standards of the 60000 series are found preceded by EN to indicate that the IEC standard is adopted by CENELEC as a European standard. The IEC cooperates with the International Organization for Standardization and the International Telecommunication Union. In addition, it works with several major standards development organizations, including the IEEE with which it signed a cooperation agreement in 2002, amended in 2008 to include joint development work. Standards developed jointly with ISO such as ISO/IEC 26300, ISO/IEC 27001, CASCO ISO/IEC 17000 series, carry the acronym of both organizations; the use of the ISO/IEC prefix covers publications from ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 - Information Technology, as well as conformity assessment standards developed by ISO CASCO and IEC CAB. Other standards developed in cooperation between IEC and ISO are assigned numbers in the 80000 series, such as IEC 82045-1. IEC standards are being adopted by other certifying bodies such as BSI, CSA, UL & ANSI/INCITS, SABS, SAI, SPC/GB and DIN.
IEC standards adopted by other certifying bodies may have some noted differences from the original IEC standard. The IEC is made up of members, called national committees, each NC represents its nation's electrotechnical interests in the IEC; this includes manufacturers, providers and vendors, consumers and users, all levels of governmental agencies, professional societies and trade associations as well as standards developers from national standards bodies. National committees are constituted in different ways; some NCs are public sector only, some are a combination of public and private sector, some are private sector only. About 90% of those who prepare IEC standards work in industry. IEC Member countries include: Source: In 2001 and in response to calls from t
Henry Maudslay
Henry Maudslay was an English machine tool innovator and die maker, inventor. He is considered a founding father of machine tool technology, his inventions were an important foundation for the Industrial Revolution. Maudslay's invention of a metal lathe to cut metal, circa 1800, enabled the manufacture of standard screw thread sizes. Standard screw thread sizes allowed the development of mass production. Henry Maudslay was the fifth of seven children of Henry Maudslay, a wheelwright in the Royal Engineers, Margaret, the young widow of Joseph Laundy, his father was wounded in action and so in 1756 became an'artificer' at the Royal Arsenal, where he remained until 1776 and died in 1780. The family lived in an alley that no longer exists, off Beresford Square, between Powis Street and Beresford Street. Maudslay began work at the age of 12 as a "powder monkey", one of the boys employed in filling cartridges at the Arsenal. After two years, he was transferred to a carpenter's shop followed by a blacksmith's forge, where at the age of fifteen he began training as a blacksmith.
He seems to have specialised in the lighter, more complex kind of forge work. During his time at the Arsenal, Maudslay worked at the Royal Foundry, where Jan Verbruggen had installed an innovative horizontal boring machine in 1772. Maudslay acquired such a good reputation that Joseph Bramah called for his services on the recommendation of one of his employees. Bramah was surprised that he was only eighteen, but Maudslay demonstrated his ability and started work at Bramah's workshop in Denmark Street, St Giles. Bramah designed and patented an improved type of lock based on the tumbler principle, but had difficulty manufacturing at an economic price. Maudslay built the lock, displayed in Bramah's shop window with a notice offering a reward of 200 guineas to anyone who could pick it, it resisted all efforts for forty-seven years. Maudslay designed and made a set of special tools and machines that allowed the lock to be made at an economic price. Bramah had designed a hydraulic press, but was having problems sealing both the piston and the piston rod where it fitted into the cylinder.
The usual method was hemp packing but the pressures were too high for this to work. Maudslay came up with the idea of a leather cup washer, which gave a perfect seal but offered no resistance to movement when the pressure was released; the new hydraulic press worked thereafter. But Maudslay, who had made a major contribution to its success, received little credit for it. Maudslay developed the first industrially practical screw-cutting lathe in 1800, allowing standardisation of screw thread sizes for the first time; this allowed the concept of interchangeable parts to be applied to nuts and bolts. When Maudslay began working for Bramah, the typical lathe was worked by a treadle and the workman held the cutting tool against the work; this did not allow for precision in cutting iron, so screw threads were made by chipping and filing. Nuts were rare. Metal bolts passing through wood framing to a metal fastening on the other side were fastened in non-threaded ways. Maudslay designed a tool holder into which the cutting tool would be clamped, which would slide on planed surfaces to allow the cutting tool to move in either direction.
The slide rest was positioned by a leadscrew to which power was transmitted through a pair of changeable gears so that it traveled in proportion to the turning of the work. This allowed screw threads to be cut. Changing the gears gave various pitches; the ability of the slide-rest lathe to produce precision parts revolutionised the production of machine components. He standardized the screw threads used in his workshop and produced sets of taps and dies that would make nuts and bolts to those standards, so that any bolt of the appropriate size would fit any nut of the same size; this was a major advance in workshop technology. Maudslay did not invent the slide-rest, may not have been the first to combine a lead screw, slide-rest, set of change gears all on one lathe, but he did introduce the three-part combination of lead screw, slide rest, change gears, sparking a great advance in machine tools and in the engineering use of screw threads. Maudslay's original screw-cutting lathe is at the Science Museum in London.
Maudslay had shown himself to be so talented that after one year the nineteen-year-old was made manager of Bramah's workshop. In 1797, after having worked for Bramah for eight years, Maudslay was refused a wage increase to 30s a week so he decided to set up his own business. In 1798 he obtained a small shop and smithy in Wells Street, off Oxford Street but in 1800 he moved to larger premises in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square. By 1810 Maudslay was employing eighty workers and running out of room at his workshop, so he moved to larger premises in Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth. Maudslay recruited a promising young Admiralty draughtsman, Joshua Field, who proved to be so talented that Maudslay took him into partnership; the company became Maudslay and Field when Maudslay's sons became partners. Following earlier work by Samuel Bentham, his first major commission was to build a series of 42 woodworking machines to produce wooden rigging blocks for the Navy under Sir Marc Isambard Brunel; the m
Standards organization
A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization, or standards setting organization is an organization whose primary activities are developing, promulgating, amending, interpreting, or otherwise producing technical standards that are intended to address the needs of a group of affected adopters. Most standards are voluntary in the sense that they are offered for adoption by people or industry without being mandated in law; some standards become mandatory when they are adopted by regulators as legal requirements in particular domains. The term formal standard refers to a specification, approved by a standards setting organization; the term de jure standard refers to a standard mandated by legal requirements or refers to any formal standard. In contrast, the term de facto standard refers to a specification that has achieved widespread use and acceptance – without being approved by any standards organization. Examples of de facto standards that were not approved by any standards organizations include the Hayes command set developed by Hayes, Apple's TrueType font design and the PCL protocol used by Hewlett-Packard in the computer printers they produced.
The term standards organization is not used to refer to the individual parties participating within the standards developing organization in the capacity of founders, stakeholders, members or contributors, who themselves may function as the standards organizations. The implementation of standards in industry and commerce became important with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the need for high-precision machine tools and interchangeable parts. Henry Maudslay developed the first industrially practical screw-cutting lathe in 1800, which allowed for the standardisation of screw thread sizes for the first time. Maudslay's work, as well as the contributions of other engineers, accomplished a modest amount of industry standardization. Joseph Whitworth's screw thread measurements were adopted as the first national standard by companies around the country in 1841, it came to be known as the British Standard Whitworth, was adopted in other countries. By the end of the 19th century differences in standards between companies was making trade difficult and strained.
For instance, an iron and steel dealer recorded his displeasure in The Times: "Architects and engineers specify such unnecessarily diverse types of sectional material or given work that anything like economical and continuous manufacture becomes impossible. In this country no two professional men are agreed upon the size and weight of a girder to employ for given work"; the Engineering Standards Committee was established in London in 1901 as the world's first national standards body. It subsequently extended its standardization work and became the British Engineering Standards Association in 1918, adopting the name British Standards Institution in 1931 after receiving its Royal Charter in 1929; the national standards were adopted universally throughout the country, enabled the markets to act more rationally and efficiently, with an increased level of cooperation. After the First World War, similar national bodies were established in other countries; the Deutsches Institut für Normung was set up in Germany in 1917, followed by its counterparts, the American National Standard Institute and the French Commission Permanente de Standardisation, both in 1918.
By the mid to late 19th century, efforts were being made to standardize electrical measurement. An important figure was R. E. B. Crompton, who became concerned by the large range of different standards and systems used by electrical engineering companies and scientists in the early 20th century. Many companies had entered the market in the 1890s and all chose their own settings for voltage, frequency and the symbols used on circuit diagrams. Adjacent buildings would have incompatible electrical systems because they had been fitted out by different companies. Crompton could see the lack of efficiency in this system and began to consider proposals for an international standard for electric engineering. In 1904, Crompton represented Britain at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, as part of a delegation by the Institute of Electrical Engineers, he presented a paper on standardisation, so well received that he was asked to look into the formation of a commission to oversee the process.
By 1906 his work was complete and he drew up a permanent constitution for the first international standards organization, the International Electrotechnical Commission. The body held its first meeting that year with representatives from 14 countries. In honour of his contribution to electrical standardisation, Lord Kelvin was elected as the body's first President; the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations was founded in 1926 with a broader remit to enhance international cooperation for all technical standards and specifications. The body was suspended in 1942 during World War II. After the war, ISA was approached by the formed United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee with a proposal to form a new global standards body. In October 1946, ISA and UNSCC delegates from 25 countries met in London and agreed to join forces to create the new International Organization for Standardization. Standards organizations can b
