John C. Taylor | |
---|---|
Born | 25 November 1936 |
Nationality | English |
Citizenship | British |
Alma mater | Corpus Christi College, Cambridge |
Occupation(s) | British inventor, entrepreneur, horologist and philanthropist |
Known for | Development of thermostatic controls Construction of the Corpus Clock |
Website | johnctaylor |
John Crawshaw Taylor [1] OBE FREng (born 25 November 1936) is an English inventor, entrepreneur, horologist and philanthropist best known for his extensive research into electric kettles.
John C Taylor was born on 25 November 1936 in Buxton, Derbyshire to Eric Hardman Taylor (1904-1972) and Gwendolen Marjorie Jones (1904-1975). John had one older sister, Judith Sian Taylor (1934-2011).
When the Second World War commenced on 3 September 1939 it was decided that John would be sent to Canada along with his mother and sister. On 30 May 1940 they travelled to Montréal, Canada and settled in Belleville, Ontario until 28 January 1945 when they returned to England.
John was educated firstly at Belleville Kindergarten, then at Queen Alexandra School. Upon returning to England John studied at the Combs Village School. Following this John attended Holme Leigh Preparatory School before moving to the Isle of Man to attend King William's College. John was then accepted into Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 1956 to 1959, where he graduated with a degree in Natural Sciences.
After graduating in 1959 Taylor had planned to continue his studies further, however at the last moment the funding was pulled and reluctantly he joined his father Eric's company Otter Controls as a Graduate Trainee. [2] It is said that he "soon revealed himself to have inherited his father's inventive genius". [3]
When Eric Taylor died in 1971, his son took over as Chairman of Otter Controls. [3] He focused on the business of Castletown Thermostats, a subsidiary of Otter Controls, and in 1979 he split Castletown Thermostats and Otter Controls into two independent companies, with John Taylor becoming Chairman of Castletown. [4] Two years later, Castletown Thermostats changed its name to Strix Ltd, and in 1984, Eddie Davies was appointed as Chief Executive, with Taylor remaining Chairman.
Castletown Thermostats had started by making bimetallic thermostats for use in various industries. In the 1960s, the market for electric kettles was growing, and Castletown extended its manufacturing plant to produce and test a new device for controlling kettles. [3] During the 20 years from 1979 until 1999 in which Taylor and Davies led Strix, the company developed several successful product series, expanded worldwide, [5] sold over 200 million thermostat controls for electric kettles, and received several Queen's Awards and other awards. [4]
In 2001 Taylor received an Honorary Doctorate at UMIST and was made Visiting Professor of Innovation in recognition of over 150 patents in his own name. [2] [3] He was also elected Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. [1]
In 2000, in a bid to expand into the new growth market of coffee makers, Strix raised £50m of capital from HSBC Private Equity by selling 40% of its shares, valuing the company at £125m. This investment diluted Taylor's shareholding in Strix to 24%. [3] [6] In 2005, ABN AMRO Capital led a leveraged buyout of Strix; [7] the value of the transaction was not disclosed. Today[ when? ], Strix employs 1000 people, holds over 600 patents, and turns over more than £100 million per year. Strix controls are incorporated into electric kettles from many leading manufacturers, and it is estimated that they are used over one billion times per day worldwide, by over 20% of the world's population. [4]
On 29 May 2018 Taylor was the subject of the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific . [8]
Since his retirement in 1999, [5] Taylor focussed on using his wealth to support educational institutions in the UK. His 'generous donation' enabled the creation of the STRIX Centre for Manufacturing at UMIST which opened in 2003. [4] He has also been a very active benefactor of his former Cambridge college, Corpus Christi, by contributing £2.5m [9] towards the construction of a new student library, the Taylor Library [10] as well as funding numerous undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships and bursaries. [11] [12] [13] In 2017, the Royal Academy of Engineering named their newly refurbished Enterprise Hub after Taylor, in recognition of his donation that enabled the project. [14]
He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to business and horology. [15]
Taylor attracted public attention in September 2008 when the Corpus Clock, also known as the Chronophage, was installed on the outer wall of the Taylor Library of Corpus Christi College and unveiled by Stephen Hawking. [16] John Taylor spent £1m of his own money in the construction of the Corpus Clock and gave it as a gift to the college. [9]
The second in the series, the Midsummer Chronophage, depicts a science-fiction fly and was exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, the Science Museum, London [17] and the National Museum of Scotland. [18] Like the Corpus Chronophage, its face is made from 24-carat gold plate on stainless steel.
The third is the Dragon Chronophage, exhibited in Shanghai on 27–30 March 2015 as part of Design Shanghai, China's premier design event. It features a Chinese dragon which appears to swallow a pearl every hour. [19]
The fourth Chronophage is a private commission, and its details are currently[ when? ] being kept secret at the customer's request.[ citation needed ]
There are features that are common to all of the Chronophage clocks. They are all designed to show the grasshopper escapement, part of a conventional clock mechanism that was invented by John Harrison. The grasshopper escapement, which is usually internal, is externalised and appears to drag the escape wheel around the rim of the clock.
When building the Corpus Chronophage, Taylor found that the inertia issues presented by such a large grasshopper escapement made the mechanism unworkable. With reference to this problem, he has said, "We had to turn a disaster into an advantage. Our efforts to prevent the amplitude of the pendulum from increasing led us to the idea of running both fast and slow and correcting them." The final outcome was a mechanical clock that is assisted by mechanical controls and a periodic signal from the atomic clock at the UK's National Physical Laboratory. [20] All of the Chronophage clocks use this method of telling time, which allows Taylor to explore the concept of relative time as theorised by Albert Einstein.
John Harrison was an English carpenter and clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought-after device for solving the problem of calculating longitude while at sea.
A pendulum clock is a clock that uses a pendulum, a swinging weight, as its timekeeping element. The advantage of a pendulum for timekeeping is that it is an approximate harmonic oscillator: It swings back and forth in a precise time interval dependent on its length, and resists swinging at other rates. From its invention in 1656 by Christiaan Huygens, inspired by Galileo Galilei, until the 1930s, the pendulum clock was the world's most precise timekeeper, accounting for its widespread use. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, pendulum clocks in homes, factories, offices, and railroad stations served as primary time standards for scheduling daily life, work shifts, and public transportation. Their greater accuracy allowed for the faster pace of life which was necessary for the Industrial Revolution. The home pendulum clock was replaced by less-expensive synchronous electric clocks in the 1930s and '40s. Pendulum clocks are now kept mostly for their decorative and antique value.
The University of Manchester is a public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester City Centre on Oxford Road. The university owns and operates major cultural assets such as the Manchester Museum, The Whitworth art gallery, the John Rylands Library, the Tabley House Collection and the Jodrell Bank Observatory – a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The University of Manchester is considered a red brick university, a product of the civic university movement of the late 19th century. The current University of Manchester was formed in 2004 following the merger of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and the Victoria University of Manchester. This followed a century of the two institutions working closely with one another.
Corpus Christi College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1517, it is the 12th oldest college in Oxford.
Corpus Christi College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. From the late 14th century to the early 19th century it was also commonly known as St Benet's College.
George Graham, FRS was an English clockmaker, inventor, and geophysicist, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The grasshopper escapement is a low-friction escapement for pendulum clocks invented by British clockmaker John Harrison around 1722. An escapement, part of every mechanical clock, is the mechanism that gives the clock's pendulum periodic pushes to keep it swinging, and each swing releases the clock's gears to move forward by a fixed amount, thus moving the hands forward at a steady rate. The grasshopper escapement was used in a few regulator clocks built during Harrison's time, and a few others over the years, but has never seen wide use. The term "grasshopper" in this connection, apparently from the kicking action of the pallets, first appears in the Horological Journal in the late 19th century.
An escapement is a mechanical linkage in mechanical watches and clocks that gives impulses to the timekeeping element and periodically releases the gear train to move forward, advancing the clock's hands. The impulse action transfers energy to the clock's timekeeping element to replace the energy lost to friction during its cycle and keep the timekeeper oscillating. The escapement is driven by force from a coiled spring or a suspended weight, transmitted through the timepiece's gear train. Each swing of the pendulum or balance wheel releases a tooth of the escapement's escape wheel, allowing the clock's gear train to advance or "escape" by a fixed amount. This regular periodic advancement moves the clock's hands forward at a steady rate. At the same time, the tooth gives the timekeeping element a push, before another tooth catches on the escapement's pallet, returning the escapement to its "locked" state. The sudden stopping of the escapement's tooth is what generates the characteristic "ticking" sound heard in operating mechanical clocks and watches.
A kettle, sometimes called a tea kettle or teakettle, is a device specialized for boiling water, commonly with a lid, spout, and handle. There are two main types: the stovetop kettle, which uses heat from a hob, and the electric kettle, which is a small kitchen appliance with an internal heating element.
In horology, the anchor escapement is a type of escapement used in pendulum clocks. The escapement is a mechanism in a mechanical clock that maintains the swing of the pendulum by giving it a small push each swing, and allows the clock's wheels to advance a fixed amount with each swing, moving the clock's hands forward. The anchor escapement was so named because one of its principal parts is shaped vaguely like a ship's anchor.
Sir Martin John Taylor, FRS is a British mathematician and academic. He was Professor of Pure Mathematics at the School of Mathematics, University of Manchester and, prior to its formation and merger, UMIST where he was appointed to a chair after moving from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1986. He was elected Warden of Merton College, Oxford on 5 November 2009, took office on 2 October 2010 and retired in September 2018.
Strix may refer to:
The Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE) is one of the three faculties that comprise the University of Manchester in northern England. Established in October 2004, the faculty was originally called the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences. It was renamed in 2016, following the abolition of the Faculty of Life Science and the incorporation of some aspects of life sciences into the departments of Chemistry and Earth and Environmental Sciences. It is organised into 2 schools and 9 departments: Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science; Chemistry; Computer Science; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Physics and Astronomy; Electrical & Electronic Engineering; Materials; Mathematics; and Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering.
The Corpus Clock, also known as the Grasshopper clock, is a large sculptural clock at street level on the outside of the Taylor Library at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, at the junction of Bene't Street and Trumpington Street, looking out over King's Parade. It was conceived and funded by John C. Taylor, an old member of the college.
Michael David Cobham was a British film and TV producer and director, best known for the film Tarka the Otter. He was also a first-class cricketer.
Robert Townley Caldwell was the Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 1906 to 1914.
John Green was an English clergyman and academic. He became the chaplain of Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
Gail Trimble is a British academic specialising in Latin poetry and literary form. She was captain of the Corpus Christi College team for the BBC television programme University Challenge in 2009 and scored a high proportion of the team's points. While her team won the challenge, they were subsequently disqualified after it was found that one of her teammates had finished his studies while the show was being recorded. Trimble has continued to appear on quiz programmes. She is now a fellow and tutor in Classics at Trinity College, Oxford.
John Copcot, DD was an English cleric and academic, becoming Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
John Lamb, was an academic and Anglican priest in the first half of the nineteenth century.