rotated by water-power in horizontal machines, in which the cutters were advanced through gearing by hand wheels. In the early 1750s Verbruggen was appointed Master Founder at the state-owned foundry at The

was born into a farming family in Ayrshire, south-west Scotland. As a boy he was apprenticed to a hand-loom weaver at Kilbarchan, west of Glasgow. This introduced him to methods of bleaching and the limits

printed designs. He bought fabric from weavers in Augsburg and had it printed in Hamburg and then hand-coloured in Augsburg. In 1759 he opened his own printing works but continued to put out the work of [...] and from a growing textile sector in Augsburg that benefitted from his skilled workforce. Schüle handed management to his sons in 1792 and then returned ten years later but the business closed in 1808

Corbeil-Essonnes, he became interested in the potential for modernisation. He was frustrated by the hand-method of making paper, one sheet at a time, with numerous workers. In 1797 he devised a machine to [...] with a stream of pulp and then passed through rollers to squeeze out the water. The paper was laid by hand across a series of bars to dry. Robert patented his machine in 1799 with Didot’s support. The French

The mechanisation of the laborious process of making paper by hand was developed by several inventors around 1800. In France, Nicholas-Louis Robert developed a method for pouring paper pulp onto a continuous

and it still exists there, exporting its products globally. Files and rasps of different kinds are hand tools used since prehistoric times to work metals, wood and stone and essential in a wide variety [...] jewellery, locksmithing and watchmaking. Until the nineteenth century, files were manufactured by hand. Steel blanks were forged, ground on a wheel and annealed before the lines in the surface were cut [...] location for the industry as the exploitation of the huge pine forest of Pinhal de Leiria required hand tools and provided fuel for forges. Products could be taken from Vieira to the two great trading ports

1828 the brothers had a workshop at Pafendal, on the east side of the city. Apparently, this had only hand-looms for weaving woollen cloth, but in 1835 they established a woollen factory nearby at Schläifmille

the method of sowing seeds at suitable depth and in equally spaced rows instead of throwing them by hand over the soil. His seed-drill machine had several parallel plough blades with boxes and spouts to

near Hattingen and acquired iron ore and coal mines. She continued working into her seventies and handed ownership of the company to her son Karl in 1912, three years before she died. The company later

loom by springs. It ran on a board between boxes at each end, controlled by a chord in the weaver’s hand. The invention doubled the speed of weaving. It also made it possible to weave broad cloth with one

‘engine’ and its shorter form ‘gin’. Hargreaves could not read and write and worked as a domestic hand-loom weaver with his own spinning wheel and loom in his cottage. At this time, demand for thread was

et vous aurez bonne table et bon gîte’. (‘Your journey will be enchanting. You will be led by the hand. Your yearning for the picturesque will be satisfied and you will have good cuisine and good lodging

of cards recorded a particular pattern and they could be changed to make a different one. This made hand-weaving much faster and more accurate. In 1805 Napoleon declared Jacquard’s invention the property

that it was likely to grow even faster when Arkwright’s patent expired. As cotton weaving was with hand-operated looms they believed there would not be enough weavers for the yarn produced. Cartwright applied [...] problems with his machines. Their action often failed, and they were not much more productive than hand looms – they were not fast and operators could only manage a single loom. He set up a cotton factory

Derwent. Their business became highly successful, producing far more silk threat than the English hand spinners. It employed around 300 people. John Lombe died only a year later. He may have been poisoned

at Elberfeld, now a district of Wuppertal. Elberfeld was an important area for making textiles by hand, with production controlled by a yarn guild. In 1774, Brügelmann married Anna Christina Ochsen (neé

most profitable early invention, in 1843, was to make bronze powder by machine more cheaply than the hand-made product from Germany. He bought a fine house and offices in London and created a large laboratory

Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Rhineland, the Ottoman Empire and India. Bradshaw’s Descriptive Railway Hand-Book of Great Britain and Ireland , was published in four parts in 1863, and in recent years has been

rubber company before the end of 1934. André Citroën died the following year but the firm, in new hands, continued to prosper. The Traction Avant was assembled abroad in factories at Vorst (Belgium), Cologne

it was publicly unveiled in 1909. Bakelite was used in radio housings, distributor caps, telephone hand pieces, electric plugs, jewellery, cameras, ash trays, fountain pens and many other characteristic