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Soho Manufactory
The Soho Manufactory () was an early factory which pioneered mass production on the assembly line principle, in Soho, Birmingham, England, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It operated from 1766–1848 and was demolished in 1853. Beginnings In 1756, Edward Ruston leased land on Handsworth Heath from the Lord of the Manor. He deepened Hockley Brook, and built a rolling mill powered by it. In 1761 (or 1764) the "toy" manufacturer Matthew Boulton and his business partner John Fothergill leased the site including a cottage and the mill. The mill was replaced by a new factory, designed and built by the Wyatt family of Lichfield, and completed in 1766. The cottage was later demolished and Boulton's home (Soho House) was built on the site, also by the Wyatts. Production The Manufactory produced a wide range of goods from buttons, buckles and boxes to japanned ware (collectively called "toys"), and later luxury products such as silverware and ormolu (a type of gilded ...
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Soho Manufactory Ca 1800
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century. The area was developed from farmland by Henry VIII in 1536, when it became a royal park. It became a parish in its own right in the late 17th century, when buildings started to be developed for the upper class, including the laying out of Soho Square in the 1680s. St Anne's Church, Soho, St Anne's Church was established during the late 17th century, and remains a significant local landmark; other churches are the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory and St Patrick's Church, Soho Square, St Patrick's Church in Soho Square. The aristocracy had mostly moved away by the mid-19th century, when Soho was particularly badly hit by an outbreak of cholera in 1854. For much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation as a base for the sex industry in additio ...
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Buckle
The buckle or clasp is a device used for fastening two loose ends, with one end attached to it and the other held by a catch in a secure but adjustable manner. Often taken for granted, the invention of the buckle was indispensable in securing two ends before the invention of the zipper. The basic buckle frame comes in a variety of shapes and sizes depending on the intended use and fashion of the era.Meredith, Alan and Gillian. (2008). ''Buckles''. Oxford: Shire Library. pg. 5. Buckles are as much in use today as they have been in the past: used for much more than just securing ones belt, instead they are one of the most dependable devices in securing a range of items. The word "buckle" enters Middle English via Old French and the Latin ''buccula'' or "cheek-strap," as for a helmet. Some of the earliest buckles known are those used by Roman soldiers to strap their body armor together and prominently on the balteus and cingulum. Made out of bronze and expensive, these buckles wer ...
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Soho Loop
The Soho Loop is a section of the eighteenth-century Old BCN Main Line canal in Birmingham, England, about west of the city centre, which opened to traffic on 6 November 1769, and was bypassed in September 1827 by a straight section of the New BCN Main Line. Much of the of enclosed land is occupied by the of Birmingham's City Hospital, and the canal itself serves private residential moorings at Hockley Port Basin via a branch extending north-eastwards. This is all that remains of the former Soho Branch that once served Matthew Boulton's Soho Manufactory. There is pedestrian access to a tow path for the entire length of the outside of the loop, which skirts the southern boundary of Winson Green Prison and twice passes underneath the Stour Valley Railway. The Centre of the Earth environmental education centre is adjacent to the canal and has a long wharf frontage. See also *Icknield Port Loop The Icknield Port Loop (originally the Rotton Park Loop) is a loop ...
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Birmingham Canal Navigations
Birmingham Canal Navigations (BCN) is a network of canals connecting Birmingham, Wolverhampton, and the eastern part of the Black Country. The BCN is connected to the rest of the English canal system at several junctions. It was owned and operated by the Birmingham Canal Navigations Company from 1767 to 1948. At its working peak, the BCN contained about 160 miles (257 km) of canals; today just over 100 miles (160 km) are navigable, and the majority of traffic is from tourist and residential narrowboats. History The earliest mention of the Birmingham Canal Navigation appears in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette on 11 April 1768 when it was reported that on 25 March 1768 the first general assembly of the Company of Proprietors of the Birmingham Canal Navigation was held at the Swann Inn, Birmingham, to raise funds to submit for an Act of Parliament. The first canal to be built in the area was the Birmingham Canal, authorised by the Birmingham Canal Navigation Act 1768 an ...
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Soho Branch
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century. The area was developed from farmland by Henry VIII in 1536, when it became a royal park. It became a parish in its own right in the late 17th century, when buildings started to be developed for the upper class, including the laying out of Soho Square in the 1680s. St Anne's Church was established during the late 17th century, and remains a significant local landmark; other churches are the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory and St Patrick's Church in Soho Square. The aristocracy had mostly moved away by the mid-19th century, when Soho was particularly badly hit by an outbreak of cholera in 1854. For much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation as a base for the sex industry in addition to its night life and its location for the headquar ...
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Soho Wharf
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century. The area was developed from farmland by Henry VIII in 1536, when it became a royal park. It became a parish in its own right in the late 17th century, when buildings started to be developed for the upper class, including the laying out of Soho Square in the 1680s. St Anne's Church was established during the late 17th century, and remains a significant local landmark; other churches are the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory and St Patrick's Church in Soho Square. The aristocracy had mostly moved away by the mid-19th century, when Soho was particularly badly hit by an outbreak of cholera in 1854. For much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation as a base for the sex industry in addition to its night life and its location for the headquar ...
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Birmingham Mint
The Birmingham Mint was a coining mint and metal-working company based in Birmingham, England. Formerly the world's largest privately-owned mint, the company produced coins for many foreign nations including France, Italy, China, and much of the British Empire during the 19th century. Beginning life in 1817 as a family-run brass fittings maker, the company later purchased equipment from the defunct Soho Mint to begin its own coin production. Over the subsequent decades the mint won contracts to mint national currencies, and built minting facilities worldwide so that at its height the Birmingham Mint's capacity surpassed that of even the Royal Mint. By the early 2000s disagreement with the Royal Mint over foreign contracts led to a slump in sales, cumulating in the mint's eventual closure in 2003 ending its almost 200-year history. According to Companies House, however, as of 2021 a revived mint continues to operate, albeit with little business activity. History 18th-19th c ...
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Mint (coin)
A mint is an industrial facility which manufactures coins that can be used as currency. The history of mints correlates closely with the history of coins. In the beginning, hammered coinage or cast coinage were the chief means of coin minting, with resulting production runs numbering as little as the hundreds or thousands. In modern mints, coin dies are manufactured in large numbers and planchets are made into milled coins by the billions. With the mass production of currency, the production cost is weighed when minting coins. For example, it costs the United States Mint much less than 25 cents to make a quarter (a 25 cent coin), and the difference in production cost and face value (called seigniorage) helps fund the minting body. Conversely, a U.S. penny ($0.01) cost $0.015 to make in 2016. History The first minted coins The earliest metallic money did not consist of coins, but of unminted metal in the form of rings and other ornaments or of weapons, which were used for th ...
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Steam
Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization. Steam that is saturated or superheated is invisible; however, "steam" often refers to wet steam, the visible mist or aerosol of water droplets formed as water vapor condenses. Water increases in volume by 1,700 times at standard temperature and pressure; this change in volume can be converted into mechanical work by steam engines such as reciprocating piston type engines and steam turbines, which are a sub-group of steam engines. Piston type steam engines played a central role in the Industrial Revolution and modern steam turbines are used to generate more than 80% of the world's electricity. If liquid water comes in contact with a very hot surface or depressurizes quickly below its vapor pressure, it can create a steam explosion. ...
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Sun And Planet Gear
The sun and planet gear is a method of converting reciprocating motion to rotary motion and was used in the first rotative beam engines. It was invented by the Scottish engineer William Murdoch, an employee of Boulton and Watt, but was patented by James Watt in October 1781. It was invented to bypass the patent on the crank, already held by James Pickard. It played an important part in the development of devices for rotation in the Industrial Revolution. Operation The sun and planet gear converted the vertical motion of a beam, driven by a steam engine, into circular motion using a 'planet', a cogwheel fixed at the end of the connecting rod (connected to the beam) of the engine. With the motion of the beam, this revolved around, and turned, the 'sun', a second rotating cog fixed to the drive shaft, thus generating rotary motion. An interesting feature of this arrangement, when compared to that of a simple crank, is that when both sun and planet have the same number of t ...
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Watt Steam Engine
The Watt steam engine design became synonymous with steam engines, and it was many years before significantly new designs began to replace the basic Watt design. The first steam engines, introduced by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, were of the "atmospheric" design. At the end of the power stroke, the weight of the object being moved by the engine pulled the piston to the top of the cylinder as steam was introduced. Then the cylinder was cooled by a spray of water, which caused the steam to condense, forming a partial vacuum in the cylinder. Atmospheric pressure on the top of the piston pushed it down, lifting the work object. James Watt noticed that it required significant amounts of heat to warm the cylinder back up to the point where steam could enter the cylinder without immediately condensing. When the cylinder was warm enough that it became filled with steam the next power stroke could commence. Watt realised that the heat needed to warm the cylinder could be saved by adding ...
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Bronze
Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals, such as phosphorus, or metalloids such as arsenic or silicon. These additions produce a range of alloys that may be harder than copper alone, or have other useful properties, such as ultimate tensile strength, strength, ductility, or machinability. The three-age system, archaeological period in which bronze was the hardest metal in widespread use is known as the Bronze Age. The beginning of the Bronze Age in western Eurasia and India is conventionally dated to the mid-4th millennium BCE (~3500 BCE), and to the early 2nd millennium BCE in China; elsewhere it gradually spread across regions. The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age starting from about 1300 BCE and reaching most of Eurasia by about 500 BCE, although bronze continued to be much more widely used than it is in mod ...
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