Inventions
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1821 for mathematical achievements, he had by that time invented a logometer (an early slide rule), and went on to design and patent a friction wheel and a clock escapement. These achievements led him into friendship with George Stephenson, and he played a role in the survey and engineering of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, particularly the crossing of Chat Moss. However, he resigned as a director of the line shortly before its completion.
In the early days of railroading, it was by no means clear that the steam locomotive would come to be the principal form of propulsion for trains. Brandreth invented a machine which used a horse galloping on a treadmill as its source of motive power. A prototype, the Cycloped, participated in the Rainhill Trials in 1829, but it had to be withdrawn when the horse broke through the floor of the machine. In any case, the trials proved the superiority of steam motive power in all but exceptional circumstances.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Shaw Brandreth
Famous quotes containing the word inventions:
“I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“New inventions can and will be made; however, nothing new can be thought of that concerns moral man. Everything has already been thought and said which at best we can express in different forms and give new expressions to.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.”
—Kenneth MacKenzie Clark, Baron of Saltwood (1903–1983)