Birthdays
Jon Smith
Jon Smith (born 19 December 1975) is a British writer of fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and musical theatre.
Joseph Bramah
Joseph Bramah (13 April 1748 – 9 December 1814), born Stainborough Lane Farm, Stainborough, Barnsley Yorkshire, England, was an inventor and locksmith. He is best known for having invented the hydraulic press. Along with William George Armstrong, he can be considered one of the two fathers of hydraulic engineering.
Jon Smith worked for a number of Internet companies including Amazon.co.uk and Kitbag.com before launching his own online toy business called Toytopia in 2002. It was whilst working in the shop that Smith wrote first drafts of Toytopia, and The Blokes Guide To Pregnancy which were both published in 2004. Smarter Business Start Ups and Web Sites That Work followed, shortly after. Jon married long-term partner Lisa Grant in 2003, they have two children; Alia and Ronin. Smith and Grant separated in 2008. He currently lives in Barcelona, Spain. Jon continues to work in the internet industry and is Vice President, Marketing at Whisbi.
ReplyDeleteSir Philip Antony Fyson Buck, QC (19 December 1928 – 6 October 2003) was a British Conservative politician.He was elected MP for Colchester in a 1961 by-election. A strong supporter of the modernising Conservatism championed by Edward Heath, Buck served as the Under-Secretary for Defence from 1972 to 1974 with responsibility for the Royal Navy,[2] but his fortunes declined when Heath lost the election in 1974, and he managed the unsuccessful leadership campaign for his old friend Geoffrey Howe. Buck then lost his place on the executive of the 1922 Committee, although he later regained it. Nevertheless, he remained a perceptive observer of defence policy, opposing the closure of Colchester's military hospital and other cuts. He was also chairman of the Parliamentary Ombudsman Committee. He was held in high regard by his constituency party and continued to serve as the MP for Colchester until 1983 when he became MP for Colchester North after boundary changes. He retired from parliament in 1992.
ReplyDeleteBramah was a very prolific inventor, though not all of his inventions were as important as his hydraulic press. They included: a beer engine (1797), a planing machine (1802), a paper-making machine (1805), a machine for automatically printing bank notes with sequential serial numbers (1806), and a fountain pen (1809). He also patented the first extrusion process for making lead pipes and also machinery for making gun stocks (Patent No. 2652).[3] His greatest contribution to engineering was his insistence on quality control. He realised that for engines to succeed, they would have to be machined to a much better standard than was the practice. He taught Arthur Woolf to machine engines to a close tolerance. This enabled Cornish engines to run with high-pressure steam, vastly increasing their output. Woolf became the leading Cornish steam engineer and his designs were adopted by all the engine designers of the day. The 15-HP engines of Watt and others of circa 1800 gave way to 450-HP engines by 1835. Bramah can be viewed as a founding father in industrial quality control.
ReplyDelete