 Cooke, Troughton & Simms Theodolite | |
| Type | Subsidiary of Vickers |
|---|---|
| Industry | Scientific instruments |
| Predecessors | T. Cooke & Sons Troughton & Simms |
| Founded | 1922 in York, England, United Kingdom |
| Defunct | 1988 |
| Fate | Ceased trading in 1988 as part of Vickers Instruments |
| Products | Microscopes, theodolites |
Number of employees | 3300 (during World War II) |
Cooke, Troughton & Simms was a British instrument-making firm formed in York in 1922 by the merger of T. Cooke & Sons and Troughton & Simms.
Thomas Cooke set up a business in York in 1837 making astronomical telescopes. One early notable instrument was a 4.5 inch equatorial refractor which would have been exceptional at the time. In 1851 Cooke built a 7.25 inch equatorial telescope. Cooke made the optical elements himself for both these instruments. Thomas Cooke built a reputation for high quality optics and, as well as smaller instruments, supplied large instruments to observatories around the world. [1]
From the outset in 1826 and earlier Troughton and Simms of London excelled in the high precision work of dividing circles and so provided many observatories with large transit instruments and supplied national surveys such as the Ordnance Survey, with large transit theodolites. [2]
In 1922 with business in a depressed state Cooke and Troughton & Simms merged with head offices at York. However foreign competition was strong. In particular the Swiss firm of Wild was making theodolites which were lighter, smaller and more accurate than CTS products. [3]
In 1924 the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Vickers. In 1926 a meeting was held in Tavistock, Devon with representatives from the Admiralty, the War Office and the Ordnance Survey and Cooke, Troughton & Simms, E. R. Watts and C. F. Casella & Co. On Dartmoor a comparison was made between the products of UK companies and their European competition, especially the Wild T2 theodolite which pioneered enclosed glass circles rather than exposed brass ones. Results were depressing for the British firms.
One result of this event was the Vickers CTS "Tavistock" theodolite which appeared in 1930. The unusual circle reading eyepieces which projected out from each side arose from a wish to avoid infringing the Wild patents. [4] Work began in the autumn of 1931 on the Geodetic Tavistock. [5] where the increased accuracy made it suitable for primary surveys of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the East African Arc and the retriangulation of Great Britain. [6] [7] In response to user requests a second, lighter version the Geodetic Tavistock appeared in 1937 [8]
By 1932 the depressed state of trade had reached a point where the York factory was working at only 40% capacity but was kept going making optical components for Vickers Armstrong and also building the Vickers Projection Microscope. By 1933 only 30% of the factory was in use. [9] In 1938, the telescope manufacturing part of the business was sold to Grubb Parsons. [10] [11]
In 1936 a list of military requirements was issued by the minister for co-ordination of defence, Sir Thomas Inskip. One result was the building of a new factory in 1938 in Haxby Road, York. The firm's telescope-making business was acquired by Sir Howard Grubb, Parsons and Co. Ltd. [12] [13] [14] At the outbreak of war in 1939 the UK government placed large orders for military sighting telescopes and theodolites. By 1940 output was only limited by the supply of raw materials and orders exceeded £1,000,000. [15]
During the Second World War many Tavistock theodolites were used in artillery observation and many other applications by survey regiments. [16] During this period 3,300 people were employed by the company. [17] Anticipating post war trading conditions several new products such as medical microscopes suited to a civilian role were developed using tooling created for wartime production. [15]
At the end of the Second World War, a film entitled Cooke Troughton & Simms in Wartime 1939-1945 was released which documented the manufacturing processes used to produce many of the optical instruments which were used in tanks, aeroplanes and on ships. The Haxby Road factory was re-designated "Kingsway North" with a workforce of 900 in 1939, rising to 2000 in 1941 and peaking in 1943. [18]
In 1963 CTS became a part of the new Vickers Instruments Ltd. During this period it made the Vickers V.11 and V.22 theodolites. [15]
The company produced a range of precision microscopes [19] and survey equipment including theodolites [20] and it manufactured one of the first usable interference microscopes. [21] A 1950 catalogue listed the following range of microscopes:
Cooke, Troughton & Simms ceased trading in 1988. [19] Upon closure all buildings on the site were demolished, leaving only the concrete foundations and as of October 2018, the site is still waiting to be redeveloped.
A theodolite is a precision optical instrument for measuring angles between designated visible points in the horizontal and vertical planes. The traditional use has been for land surveying, but it is also used extensively for building and infrastructure construction, and some specialized applications such as meteorology and rocket launching.
Edward Troughton FRS FRSE FAS was a British instrument maker who was notable for making telescopes and other astronomical instruments.
William Simms was a British scientific instrument maker.
Thomas Cooke was a British scientific instrument maker based in York. He founded T. Cooke & Sons, the scientific instrument company.
T. Cooke & Sons was an English instrument-making firm, headquartered in York. It was founded by Thomas Cooke by 1837.
Troughton & Simms was a British scientific instrument firm. It was formed when Edward Troughton in his old age took on William Simms as a partner in 1826. It became a limited company in 1915 and in 1922 it merged with T. Cooke & Sons to form Cooke, Troughton & Simms.
Jesse Ramsden FRS FRSE was a British mathematician, astronomical and scientific instrument maker. His reputation was built on the engraving and design of dividing engines which allowed high accuracy measurements of angles and lengths in instruments. He produced instruments for astronomy that were especially well known for maritime use where they were needed for the measurement of latitudes and for his surveying instruments which were widely used for cartography and land survey both across the British Empire and outside. An achromatic eyepiece that he invented for telescopes and microscopes continues to be known as the Ramsden eyepiece.
The Retriangulation of Great Britain was a triangulation project carried out between 1935 and 1962 that sought to improve the accuracy of maps of Great Britain. Data gathered from the retriangulation replaced data gathered during the Principal Triangulation of Great Britain, which had been performed between 1783 and 1851.
The Ramsden surveying instruments are those constructed by Jesse Ramsden and used in high precision geodetic surveys carried out in the period 1784 to 1853. This includes the five great theodolites—great in name, great in size and great in accuracy—used in surveys of Britain and other parts of the world. Ramsden also provided the equipment used in the measurement of the many base lines of these surveys and also the zenith telescope used in latitude determinations.
The Principal Triangulation of Britain was the first high-precision triangulation survey of the whole of Great Britain and Ireland, carried out between 1791 and 1853 under the auspices of the Board of Ordnance. The aim of the survey was to establish precise geographical coordinates of almost 300 significant landmarks which could be used as the fixed points of local topographic surveys from which maps could be drawn. In addition there was a purely scientific aim in providing precise data for geodetic calculations such as the determination of the length of meridian arcs and the figure of the Earth. Such a survey had been proposed by William Roy (1726–1790) on his completion of the Anglo-French Survey but it was only after his death that the Board of Ordnance initiated the trigonometric survey, motivated by military considerations in a time of a threatened French invasion. Most of the work was carried out under the direction of Isaac Dalby, William Mudge and Thomas Frederick Colby, but the final synthesis and report (1858) was the work of Alexander Ross Clarke. The survey stood the test of time for a century, until the Retriangulation of Great Britain between 1935 and 1962.
Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. is an American developer and manufacturer of specialized technological products for the life science research and clinical diagnostics markets. The company was founded in 1952 in Berkeley, California, by husband and wife team David and Alice Schwartz, both graduates of the University of California, Berkeley. Bio-Rad is based in Hercules, California, and has operations worldwide.
Grubb Parsons was a historic manufacturer of telescopes, active in the 19th and 20th centuries. They built numerous large research telescopes, including several that were the largest in the world of their type.
Developed from the reflecting circle, the repeating circle is an instrument for geodetic surveying, invented by Etienne Lenoir in 1784, while an assistant of Jean-Charles de Borda, who later improved the instrument. It was notable as being the equal of the great theodolite created by the renowned instrument maker, Jesse Ramsden. It was used to measure the meridian arc from Dunkirk to Barcelona by Jean Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain.
The Shuckburgh telescope or Shuckburgh equatorial refracting telescope was a 4.1 inches (10.4 cm) diameter aperture telescope on an equatorial mount completed in 1791 for Sir George Shuckburgh (1751–1804) in Warwickshire, England, and built by British instrument maker Jesse Ramsden (1735–1800). It was transferred to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in 1811 and the London Science Museum in 1929. Even though it has sometimes not been regarded as particularly successful, its design was influential. It was one of the larger achromatic doublet telescopes at the time, and one of the largest to have an equatorial mount. It was also known as the eastern equatorial for its location.
Jonathan Sisson was a prominent English instrument maker, the inventor of the modern theodolite with a sighting telescope for surveying, and a leading maker of astronomical instruments.
Jeremiah Sisson (1720-1783) was an English instrument maker who became one of the leaders of his profession in London. Jeremiah Sisson was the son of Jonathan Sisson, also a respected instrument maker, who trained him in the craft.
Anita McConnell (1936–2016) PhD, JP, was a writer on the history of science and a curator of oceanography and geophysics at the Science Museum, London. She is most widely known for her popular Shire book on barometers but also wrote many books on the history of oceanography and British scientific instrument makers of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Simms Rock is the rock off the north coast of Livingston Island in the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica 134 m long in southeast–northwest direction and 65 m wide, with a surface area of 0.42 ha. The vicinity was visited by early 19th century sealers.
Edward Wilfred Taylor was a British manufacturer of optical instruments.
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