Abstract
THE fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the firm of Messrs. Taylor, Taylor and Hobson, Ltd., manufacturing opticians and engineers, was celebrated on Monday, April 6, by a dinner given by the directors to all employees and a few guests. The brothers Mr. Thomas Smithies Taylor and Mr. William Taylor, F.R.S., were the founders of the business in 1886. The first lenses produced by the firm were known as Rapid Rectilinear lenses. These were followed by single achromatic ‘View’ lenses and wide angle lenses. Mr. William Taylor at this time devoted a great deal of attention to establishing the manufacture of lenses and lens parts on an interchangeable basis, and providing means of cutting screw threads accurately. The abruptly started thread was devised and patented, and he started the practice of measuring screw threads trigonometrically with a micrometer, and with little cylinders, or wires, put between the threads, and of measuring threading tools and the amount by which they were shortened from a theoretically perfect point, by means of a notched bar. The methods were gradually developed and led to the manufacture of the engraving machine which is now well-known as the ‘Taylor-Hobson Engraver’. Mr. W. Taylor has served on many standardisation committees and was responsible for establishing the principle that in gauging screw threads, the ‘go’ gauge must include all the elements and the ‘no-go’ gauges deal with them separately, except that pitch and effective diameter must be gauged concurrently. The election of Mr. W. Taylor as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1934 was a mark of recognition by British men of science of his pioneer work in the application of mechanical engineering to the manufacture of optical instruments, and the improvements of photographic lenses.
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Messrs. Taylor, Taylor and Hobson, Ltd. Nature 137, 608 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137608b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137608b0