Science and technology in Manchester
A group of astronomers from the north of England, which included William Gascoigne, formed around them and were Britain's first followers of the astronomy of Johannes Kepler.
"Nos Keplari" as the group called themselves, were distinguished as being the first people to gain a realistic notion of the solar system's size.
The two correspondents both recorded the event in their own homes and it is not known whether they ever met in person, but Crabtree's calculations were crucial in allowing Horrocks to estimate the size of Venus and the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
Crabtree made his will on 19 July 1644, and was buried within the precincts of the Manchester Collegiate Church on 1 August 1644, close to where he had received his education.
[17] The L&MR station was the terminus of the world's first inter-city passenger railway in which all services were hauled by timetabled steam locomotives.
[18][19] The station closed to passenger services on 4 May 1844 [20] when the line was extended to join the Manchester and Leeds Railway at Hunt's Bank.
In the American Civil War Confederate troops equipped with barrel-length three power scopes mounted on the exceptionally accurate Whitworth rifle had been known to kill Union officers at ranges of about 800 yards (731.5m), an unheard-of distance at that time.
This was rejected in favour of John Frederick Bateman's proposal to build a supply chain of six reservoirs in the Longdendale Valley to the east of Manchester.
The idea was championed by Manchester manufacturer Daniel Adamson, who arranged a meeting at his home, The Towers in Didsbury, on 27 June 1882.
He invited the representatives of several Lancashire towns, local businessmen and politicians, and two civil engineers: Hamilton Fulton and Edward Leader Williams.
Williams' plan was to dredge a channel between a set of retaining walls, and build a series of locks and sluices to lift incoming vessels up to Manchester.
Two years after the opening of the ship canal, financier Ernest Terah Hooley bought the 1,183-acre (4,790,000 m2)[33] country estate belonging to Sir Humphrey Francis de Trafford for £360,000 (equivalent to £52.6 million in 2023).
Westinghouse's American architect Charles Heathcote was responsible for much of the planning and design of their factory, which built steam turbines and turbo generators.
[39] During World War II, Trafford Park became an important centre for the manufacture and development in engineering in the aim of giving Britain a technological advantage over its enemies.
Ford’s investment in machinery and the redesign resulted in the 10,000 man-hours needed to produce a Merlin dropping to 2,727 in three years, while unit cost fell from £6,540 in June 1941 to £1,180 by the war’s end.
In his autobiography Not much of an Engineer, Sir Stanley Hooker states: "... once the great Ford factory at Manchester started production, Merlins came out like shelling peas.
Its importance highlighted by the engineering achievement that was the Manchester Ship Canal, the only ship canal in Britain and growth of the first industrial estate in the world in Trafford Park.In the late 19th and early 20th century, Manchester gained a pioneering reputation for a city at the centre of physics, namely in the field of nuclear physics.
'Family' highlights the consistent development through the generations in nuclear physics, beginning with Thomson in the late 18th century and ending with James Chadwick in the 1930s who discovered the neutron.
[46] Rutherford would later have a great influence on students such as Niels Bohr, Hans Geiger, Ernest Marsden and James Chadwick.
It was during this period that Alcock met the Frenchman Maurice Ducrocq who was both a demonstration pilot and UK sales representative for aero engines made by Spirito Mario Viale in Italy.
Alcock became an experienced military pilot and instructor during World War I with the Royal Naval Air Service, although he was shot down during a bombing raid and taken prisoner in Turkey.
The flight had been much affected by bad weather, making accurate navigation difficult; the intrepid duo also had to cope with turbulence, instrument failure and ice on the wings.
In 1910, Eccles-born Alliott Verdon Roe founded Avro on at Brownsfield Mill on Great Ancoats Street in Manchester city centre.
He decided to push for funding for a large radio telescope which would be based away from the city on the Cheshire Plain south of Manchester at the Jodrell Bank Observatory.
Funding was granted from the Nuffield Foundation with some contribution from the government, and soon an 89-metre height structure, which was the largest telescope in the world at the time of construction, was operational in 1957.
[53] Jodrell Bank continued tracking new artificial satellites in the following years, and also doubled up as a long range ballistic missile radar system, a beneficial trait which helped the telescope gain funding from the British government.
[56] In 1978, after a decade of research by Manchester-born Robert G. Edwards and his colleague, Patrick Steptoe, Louise Brown, the world's first baby conceived by in vitro fertilisation.
[57] Louise Brown, was born at 11:47 pm on 25 July 1978 at the Oldham General Hospital and made medical history: in vitro fertilization meant a new way to help infertile couples who formerly had no possibility of having a baby.
Refinements in technology have increased pregnancy rates and it is estimated that in 2010 about 4 million children have been born by IVF[58] with approximately 170,000 coming from donated oocyte and embryos[59][60][61] In 2010, Robert G. Edwards was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of in vitro fertilization".
[58] In 2010, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, physicists at the University of Manchester won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on graphene.
