dratsea
Well-Known Member
Was invented by Prof Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, b 7/3/86 d 27/6/75, mathematician, scientist, and expert on fluid dynamics. His Alma Mater was Trinity College, Cambridge. According to Wiki his last publication was in 1969 age 83 but Wiki is wrong. I have his paper in edition 84, October 1971, of Eureka, the journal of the Archimedians, the Cambridge University Mathematical Society of which I was an undergraduate member in 1971. If I may quote three, non-mathematical, paragraphs and the final couple of sentences of his paper:
Archimedes was not only a mathematician who expressed his thoughts by means of numbers written on the sand but, as your name "Eureka" reminds us solved some essentially mathematical problems without using figures or symbols. When your editor asked me to make a contribution to "Eureka" to commemorate the publication of the last volume of my collected papers it seemed a good opportunity to describe the history of one of them which contains no symbols.
In 1923 I bought the 48 foot yacht "Frolic" which weighed 20 tons and drew 8ft 3ins of water. Her big anchor weighed 120lbs. While winding up the anchor the sails were not capable of controlling the boat and when anchored in 10 fathoms or more closer inshore with an onshore wind the effort involved in winding up the anchor to get under control before drifting ashore were too much for me. This and some problems connected with seaplanes provided the incentive to think about the design of lighter anchors.
After inventing the anchor I, together with my friends George McKerrow and W.S. Farren set up a small company to make them for our sailing friends. We called the company "The Security Patent Anchor Co" and would like to have put the word "secure" on the anchor but it is not allowable to register a common word in that way so we compromised and called our product "CQR". For a long time afterwards people asked me what the Q stood for.
...and all of us had other things to do, so we sold the company with the grant included in its finances to a firm which could use the grant for development. It still makes CQR anchors.
Archimedes was not only a mathematician who expressed his thoughts by means of numbers written on the sand but, as your name "Eureka" reminds us solved some essentially mathematical problems without using figures or symbols. When your editor asked me to make a contribution to "Eureka" to commemorate the publication of the last volume of my collected papers it seemed a good opportunity to describe the history of one of them which contains no symbols.
In 1923 I bought the 48 foot yacht "Frolic" which weighed 20 tons and drew 8ft 3ins of water. Her big anchor weighed 120lbs. While winding up the anchor the sails were not capable of controlling the boat and when anchored in 10 fathoms or more closer inshore with an onshore wind the effort involved in winding up the anchor to get under control before drifting ashore were too much for me. This and some problems connected with seaplanes provided the incentive to think about the design of lighter anchors.
After inventing the anchor I, together with my friends George McKerrow and W.S. Farren set up a small company to make them for our sailing friends. We called the company "The Security Patent Anchor Co" and would like to have put the word "secure" on the anchor but it is not allowable to register a common word in that way so we compromised and called our product "CQR". For a long time afterwards people asked me what the Q stood for.
...and all of us had other things to do, so we sold the company with the grant included in its finances to a firm which could use the grant for development. It still makes CQR anchors.
