Thomas Fowler (inventor)
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Thomas Fowler (born 1777 in Great Torrington,
Devon Devon ( , historically known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South West England. The most populous settlement in Devon is the city of Plymouth, followed by Devon's county town, the city of Exeter. Devon is ...
,
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– died 31 March 1843) was an
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...
inventor An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...
whose most notable invention was the thermosiphon which formed the basis of early hot water
central heating A central heating system provides warmth to a number of spaces within a building from one main source of heat. It is a component of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (short: HVAC) systems, which can both cool and warm interior spaces. ...
systems. He also designed and built an early
mechanical calculator A mechanical calculator, or calculating machine, is a mechanical device used to perform the basic operations of arithmetic automatically, or (historically) a simulation such as an analog computer or a slide rule. Most mechanical calculators wer ...
.


Life

Much of the knowledge of Fowler comes from his son, the Reverend Hugh Fowler, who produced a biography of his father which was published in the Transactions of the
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in 1875. He was born in 1777 in Great Torrington, Devon and lived his whole life there. His father was a
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and he received a basic education at a local school. At about the age of 13 he was apprenticed to a fellmonger. He was largely self-taught, with a particular interest in
mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
, teaching himself from such works as John Ward's ''Young Mathematician's Guide'' and Nicholas Saunderson's work on
fluxion A fluxion is the instantaneous rate of change, or gradient, of a fluent (a time-varying quantity, or function) at a given point. Fluxions were introduced by Isaac Newton to describe his form of a time derivative (a derivative with respect to ti ...
s: ''The Method of Fluxions''. He established himself as printer and bookseller, later becoming a partner in and manager of the local bank. He was also the treasurer of the Torrington
Poor Law In English and British history, poor relief refers to government and ecclesiastical action to relieve poverty. Over the centuries, various authorities have needed to decide whose poverty deserves relief and also who should bear the cost of hel ...
Union. He married Mary Copp in 1813 and they had eleven children, many of whom died before reaching adulthood. He died on 31 March 1843 of '' Dropsy of the Chest''. Fowler has a memorial window in the Chapel of St James in the Church of St Michael and All Angels in his native Great Torrington. The window was commissioned by his son Hugh around 1864. The border shows two of his inventions: the thermosiphon and a calculating machine.


Inventions


Thermosiphon

Fowler patented the thermosiphon in 1828 (British patent number 5711). It was the first convective heating system. A system based on his design was installed at Bicton, part of the Rolle Estate and received great acclaim in the ''Gardener's Magazine'' of 1829. Unfortunately due to innate flaws in the patent system of the time (under which a new version of a design with minimal changes was not covered by the original patent), the thermosiphon was copied by numerous other manufacturers and Fowler did not have sufficient funds to conduct legal proceedings.


Binary and Ternary Tables

As treasurer of the Poor Law Union, Fowler had to calculate poor law rates for each of the parishes. To do this he needed to know the value of each parish relative to the Union as a whole, and then knowing the overall fees to be collected by the entire Union, calculate the fraction that each parish owes. These calculations were made much more complicated due to the pre-decimal currency system in use the time meaning that all values had to be converted to farthings before doing any calculations and then converted back into pounds, shillings and pence afterwards. To assist with these calculations he devised a system using lower bases to simplify the calculations and in 1838 he published ''Tables for Facilitating Arithmetical Calculations''. This contained a table of
binary number A binary number is a number expressed in the base-2 numeral system or binary numeral system, a method of mathematical expression which uses only two symbols: typically "0" (zero) and "1" ( one). The base-2 numeral system is a positional notatio ...
s for values from 1 to 130048, and a table of
balanced ternary Balanced ternary is a ternary numeral system (i.e. base 3 with three digits) that uses a balanced signed-digit representation of the integers in which the digits have the values −1, 0, and 1. This stands in contrast to the standard (unbalance ...
numbers from 1 to 3985807 along with instructions on how to use the tables to simplify the types of calculations he needed to perform.


Calculating machine

In 1840 Fowler produced a mechanical calculating machine which operated using balanced ternary arithmetic. This machine was designed to give mechanical form to the techniques described in his book, ''Tables for Facilitating Arithmetical Calculations''. The choice of balanced ternary allowed the mechanisms to be simple, though the values had to be converted to balanced ternary before processing and the results converted back to decimal at the end of the calculation. Apprehensive in case his ideas should again be stolen, he designed and built the machine single-handed from wood in the workshop attached to his printing business. To compensate for the limited precision achievable using wooden components, he constructed the machine on a large scale; it was 6 feet long by 3 feet deep and 1 foot high (1800 x 900 x 300 mm). The use of balanced ternary meant that the machine was not suitable for performing addition and subtraction because of the overhead of the conversion to and from base 10. It was more useful for problems (like those Thomas Fowler needed to solve as Treasurer of the Poor Law union) where there are a large number of intermediate calculations in between the conversions to and from ternary. It could perform both multiplication and division. An improved model, created in 1842 was exhibited in the museum of
King's College London King's College London (informally King's or KCL) is a public research university located in London, England. King's was established by royal charter in 1829 under the patronage of King George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In 1836, King's ...
for a time. Fowler was advised that he should construct a new machine in metal but he was not able to afford it and the government refused to provide any support. The machine was dismantled and returned to his son some time after Fowler's death. Though the machine did not survive to the present day, a replica has been constructed from a two-page description of it made in the 1840s by the prominent mathematician Augustus DeMorgan. Starting in 1999 a team of Mark Glusker, Pamela Vass and David Hogan created a concept model of the most simple machine that satisfies the description written by Augustus DeMorgan. The completed model was presented to the Great Torrington Museum in August 2000. This replica now resides at the
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in
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. The team are looking for funding to find more evidence about the machine's operation and appearance, and then to build the entire 55-digit machine that Fowler envisioned using techniques and materials more appropriate to the 19th century.


Publications

1829. ''A Description of the Patent Thermosiphon''. 1838. ''Tables for Facilitating Arithmetical Calculations in Poor Law Unions.''


References


Sources

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Fowler, Thomas 1777 births 1843 deaths English inventors English engineers Mechanical calculators People from Great Torrington