Everything about Thomas Fowler totally explained
» Disambiguation: Another Thomas Fowler was a Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford (1899–1901). Thomas W. Fowler (1921–1944) was a United States Army officer and recipient of America's highest military decoration—the Medal of Honor—for his actions in World War II.Thomas Fowler (born 1777 in Great Torrington, Devon, England – died March 31 1843) was an English inventor whose most notable invention was the thermosiphon which forms the basis of most modern central heating systems.
Much of the knowledge of Fowler comes from his son, the Reverend Hugh Fowler, who produced a biography of his father.
Inventions
Thermosiphon
Fowler patented the thermosiphon in
1828 (British patent number 5711). It was the first convective heating system. A 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 wasn't covered by the original patent), the thermosiphon was pirated by numerous other manufacturers and Fowler didn't have sufficient funds to conduct legal proceedings.
Calculating machine
In
1840 Fowler produced a mechanical
calculating machine which operated using
ternary arithmetic. 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).
Fowler had previously developed methods using balanced ternary arithmetic to simplify the complex monetary calculations he was obliged to perform on behalf of the Torrington
Poor Law Union in his capacity as its treasurer, which he later published in his book
Tables for Facilitating Arithmetical Calculations. His machine was designed to give mechanical form to these techniques, the choice of balanced ternary allowing 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.
Though the machine didn't survive to the present day, a replica has been constructed from a two-page description of it made in 1840 by the prominent mathematician
Augustus DeMorgan.
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Medical
Fowler developed a solution of
arsenic trioxide in potassium bicarbonate (1% w/v) that was used empirically for the treatment of a variety of diseases including
asthma,
chorea,
eczema,
pemphigus, and
psoriasis,
anemia,
Hodgkin's disease, and
leukemia. This supposed medication, called
Fowler's solution, is now known to be more dangerous than it's efficacious.
Further Information
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