John Perry (engineer)

John Perry (born February 14, 1850 in Garvagh , County Londonderry , † August 4, 1920 ) was an Irish physicist and engineer, one of the inventors of the gyrocompass . He was also a teaching reformer in engineering training in England.

Life and work

Perry's father was a painter and glazier and moved his family to Belfast . John Perry had three sisters and an older brother who became a County Surveyor in Galway and the father of Alice Perry , the first woman in Europe to graduate in engineering. Perry attended schools in Garvagh and Belfast and was an apprentice at a foundry (Lagan Foundry) in Belfast from 1864 to 1868. From 1868 to 1870 he studied engineering with James Thomson at Queen's College Belfast while working in the foundry during the summer. The overexertion endangered his eyesight. Nevertheless, in 1870 he earned his engineering diploma ( Bachelor of Engineering ) with top marks (he received a gold medal).

He then taught math and physics at en: Clifton College in Bristol , setting up one of the first physics laboratories in English schools. In 1874 he became an assistant to Lord Kelvin at the University of Glasgow , whom he regarded as his teacher. From 1875 to 1879 he taught at the Imperial Technical College in Tokyo . With his colleague there, William Edward Ayrton, he published numerous articles during this time. Upon his return, he became an engineering examiner at the City and Guilds of London Institute and, in 1882, professor of mechanical engineering and applied mathematics at the City and Guilds of London Technical College , Finsbury . In 1896 Perry became a professor at the Royal College of Science in London.

In 1879 he married Alice Jowitt. The marriage remained childless. He is buried in Wendover , Buckinghamshire , where he had a country house.

Work and honors

Perry soon became known for his practice-oriented textbooks too. In 1899 he achieved that practical mathematics was admitted as an examination subject and campaigned for its teaching in his polemic Englands Neglect of Science of 1901. In particular, he was an opponent of the pedantic theory of Euclidean geometry based on Euclid's elements, which was propagated by classicists .

At the City and Guilds of London Technical College , Perry reformed engineering education in England together with William Ayrton and the chemist Henry Edward Armstrong (1848–1937) (sometimes the " Finsbury method " is used). They attached importance to both mathematical and practical training, introduced graph paper and attached importance to graphic illustrations.

Perry became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1885 . From 1900 to 1901 he was President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and from 1910 to 1911 he was President of the Physical Society of London . He was friends with physicists such as George Francis FitzGerald and Joseph Larmor .

Along with Hermann Anschütz-Kaempfe and Elmer Ambrose Sperry, he was one of the inventors of the gyrocompass . For this he received a US patent with Sidney Brown in 1919. Numerous other inventions and patents originate from him, whereby he worked a lot with Ayrton on electrical measuring devices (until 1889). His invention of a meter for power consumption was a success. For the Telpherage Company he built an electric cable car to transport clay and with his brother he built hydroelectric power stations in Galway .

In 1895 he attacked Lord Kelvin's theory of the age of the earth and pleaded for a higher age due to a partially liquid nature in the earth's interior with corresponding convection . However, the contribution did not have a great influence, even if it partially anticipated later findings. His book on higher analysis for engineers was translated into German by Robert Fricke and Fritz Süchting.

In 1881 he received the silver medal of the Royal Society of Arts for his lecture The future development of electrical appliances .

In 1901 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow (LLD) and he was an honorary doctorate from the Royal University of Ireland (D.Sc.). From 1904 he was treasurer of the British Association for the Advancement of Science .

literature

• Graeme JN Gooday: John Perry (1850-1920) . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . doi : 10.1093 / ref: odnb / 39459 (English, access only with subscription).
• Linde Lunney: John Perry . In: Dictionary of Irish Biography . (English, cambridge.org - access not free).

Fonts

• Practical Mechanics, Cassel / Petter / Galpin 1883, Archives
• Spinning Tops and Gyroscopic Motions, Dover 1957 (first lecture at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Leeds in 1890 )
• On the age of the earth, Nature, Volume 51, 1895, pp. 224-227, 341-342, 582-585 (also as private print 1894).
• The Calculus for Engineers, Edward Arnold 1897, Archives
  • German translation: Higher Analysis for Engineers, Teubner 1902, digitized
• Applied mechanics, 1897
• Steam and practical mathematics, 1899
• The steam engine and gas and oil engines, Macmillan 1902, Archive

Individual evidence

1. ^ William H. Brock: An experiment in technical education . In: New Scientist . November 22, 1979, p. 622 (English, google.de ).
2. ^ P. England, P. Molnar, F. Righter: John Perry's neglected critique of Kelvin's age for the Earth: A missed opportunity in geodynamics . In: GSA Today . tape January 17 , 2007, p. 4-9 (English).