1. To be read after Units 7 – 8

Text 1. Joseph Monier (1823 – 1906)

Joseph Monier, born 1823 was a French gardener and one of the principal inventors of reinforced concrete. Joseph was one of ten children born to a family of horticulturists. All hands being needed in the fields, Joseph was not sent to school. By the age of 17 he had proved his worth as a gardener, and the duke offered him a post at his mansion in Paris. Joseph took the opportunity to attend evening classes and learned to read and write.

As a gardener, Monier was not satisfied with the materials available for making flowerpots. He began making cement pots and tubs, but these were not stable enough. In order to strengthen the cement containers, he experimented with embedded iron mesh. He was not the first to experiment with reinforced concrete, but he saw some of the possibilities in the technique, and promoted it extensively.

Monier exhibited his invention at the Paris Exposition of 1867. He obtained his first patent on July 16, 1867, on iron-reinforced troughs for horticulture. He continued to find new uses for the material, and obtained more patents – iron-reinforced cement pipes and basins, iron-reinforced cement panels for building façades, bridges made of iron-reinforced cement, reinforced concrete beams. In 1875 the first iron-reinforced cement bridge ever built was constructed at the Castle of Chazelet. Monier was the designer.

Another application in 1878 covered reinforced concrete railway sleepers. When granted, this became the basis for a series of further additions. It contained a clear statement that the cement protected the iron against rusting.

As municipalities expanded their water supply and sewerage networks, there was a growing need for pipes, but a diminishing need for reservoir tanks. Monier was obliged to go further from urban areas in search of clients. In 1886 he was granted Patent for a system applicable to housing. Monier described the house as proof against earthquakes, ice, humidity, heat, and fire and received a commission to build such a house in Nice, possibly as a result of a recent earthquake. Monier’s second son Paul asked to work on this project.

On 24 November 1887, Paul was killed when he fell from the scaffol-ding. As Monier’s eldest son, Pierre, had severed his relationship with his father over a family argument, Joseph found himself with no sons of working age to help him in the business.

In June 1888, the firm of J Monier constructeur was declared bankrupt, and in April 1889 went into liquidation. However, in 1890 he formed a new firm.

Monier took out patents in many countries, throughout Europe and overseas. Some of these were registered in the name of the patent agent, in accordance with local law, the British patent of 1883 being in the name of John Imray. Typically, patents were valid for 15 years, but it was necessary to pay a significant yearly fee to maintain them. Monier opted to sell his rights outside France to local businessmen and engineers.

Reinforced concrete is one the most important inventions of the mankind.

Text 2. Nicolaus Otto (1832 – 1891)

One of the most important landmarks in engine design comes from Nicolaus Otto who in 1876 invented an effective gasoline motor engine which offered the first practical alternative to the steam engine as a power source.

Nikolaus Otto was born in Holzhausen, in a small village on the Rhine River in Germany. Although his father, the village postmaster, died soon after Otto was born, his mother raised him well. Young Otto excelled in school, and his mother planned for him to continue with a technical education, but the failed German revolution in 1848 and declining economic conditions made his mother believe that he would be better off as a merchant.

Otto left high school and got a job as a clerk in a grocery store. He soon was working as a clerk in the nearby city of Frankfurt. His older brother Wilhelm owned a textile business in Cologne, and he helped Otto get a job as a sales representative. Otto sold tea, sugar, and kitchenware to grocery stores along the western border of Germany.

He soon developed an interest in the new technologies of the day and began experimenting with building four-stroke engines (inspired by Lenoir’s two-stroke gas-driven internal combustion engine). After meeting Eugen Langen, a technician and owner of a sugar factory, Otto quitted his job, and in 1864, the duo started the world's first engine manufacturing company N.A. Otto & Cie (now DEUTZ AG, Köln). In 1867, the pair were awarded a Gold Medal at the Paris World Exhibition for their atmospheric gas engine built a year earlier.

In May 1876, Nicolaus Otto built the first practical four-stroke piston cycle internal combustion engine. He continued to develop his four-stroke engine after 1876 and he considered his work finished after his invention of the first magneto ignition system for low voltage ignition in 1884. Otto's patent was overturned in 1886 in favor of the patent granted to Alphonse Beau de Roaches for his four-stroke engine. However, Otto built a working engine while Roaches' design stayed on paper. On October 23, 1877, another patent for a gas-motor engine was issued to Nicolaus Otto, and Francis and William Crossley.

Nicolaus Otto died at age 59, on January 26, 1891, in Cologne.

Text 3. Alexander Popov (1859 – 1906)

Alexander Stepanovich Popov, born 1859, was a Russian physicist who was the first person to demonstrate the practical application of electromagnetic radio waves.

Born in the town Krasnoturinsk, Sverdlovsk Oblast in the Urals as the son of a priest, he became interested in natural sciences when he was a child. Alexander received a good education at the seminary at Perm, and later studied physics at the St. Petersburg university. After graduation in 1882 he started to work as a laboratory assistant at the university. Ho-wever, due to the poor funding of the university he changed to a teaching job at the Russian Navy's Torpedo School in Kronstadt on Kotlin Island.

Beginning in the early 1890s he conducted experiments along the lines of Heinrich Hertz's research. In 1894 he built his first radio receiver, which contained a coherer. It was presented to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society on May 7, 1895-the day has been celebrated in the Russian Federation as Radio Day. The paper on his findings was published the same year (December 15, 1895). He did not apply for a patent for his invention. In 1896, the article depicting Popov's invention was reprinted in the Journal of the Russian Physical and Chemical Society. In March 1896, he effected transmission of radio waves between different campus buil-dings in St. Petersburg. In November 1897, the French entrepreneur Eugene Ducretet made a transmitter and receiver based on wireless telegraphy in his own laboratory. According to Ducretet, he built his devices using Popov's lightning detector as a model. By 1898 Ducretet was manufacturing equipment of wireless telegraphy based on Popov's instructions. At the same time Popov effected ship-to-shore communication over a distance of 6 miles in 1898 and 30 miles in 1899. On December 18, 1897, Popov sent the telegram with the words Heinrich Hertz.

In 1900 a radio station was established under Popov's instructions on Hogland Island to provide two-way communication by wireless telegraphy between the Russian naval base and the crew of the battleship General-Admiral Apraksin. The battleship ran aground on Hogland Island in the Gulf of Finland in November, 1899. The crew of the Apraksin were not in immediate danger, but the water in the Gulf began to freeze.

Due to bad weather and bureaucratic red tape, the crew of Apraksin did not arrive until January 1900 to establish a wireless station on Hogland Island. By February 5, however, messages were being received reliably. The wireless messages were relayed to Hogland Island by a station some 25 miles away at Kymi (nowadays Kotka) on the Finnish coast. Kotka was selected as the location for the wireless relay station because it was the point closest to Hogland Island served by telegraph wires connected to Russian naval headquarters.

By the time the Apraksin was freed from the rocks by the icebreaker Yermak at the end of April, 440 official telegraph messages had been handled by the Hogland Island wireless station. Besides the rescue of the Apraksin's crew, more than 50 Finnish fishermen, who were stranded on a piece of drift ice in the Gulf of Finland, were saved by the icebreaker Yermak following distress telegrams sent by wireless telegraphy. In 1900, Popov stated (in front of the Congress of Russian Electrical Engineers) the emission and reception of signals by means of electric oscillations.

In 1901 Alexander Popov was appointed as professor at the Electrotechnical Institute, which now bears his name. In 1905 he was elected a director of the institute.

In 1905 he became seriously ill, after being very stressed about the suppression of a student movement. He died of a brain hemorrhage on January 13, 1906.