{"id":27406,"date":"2021-11-07T16:53:48","date_gmt":"2021-11-07T15:53:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=27406"},"modified":"2021-11-07T16:53:50","modified_gmt":"2021-11-07T15:53:50","slug":"i-bet-youve-never-visited-a-materials-testing-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=27406","title":{"rendered":"I bet you&#8217;ve never visited a materials testing house"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It&#8217;s a (very) little known fact that, when I left school in Manchester, I thought I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. Indeed I obtained a place on a university degree course to study mechanical engineering, but deferred my entry by a year to go into industry for some practical training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I learned very quickly that I was far more interested in people that machines and I managed to change my degree course to Management Sciences. The rest is history &#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But, over half a century later, this weekend I visited a homage to mechanical engineering in the form of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.testingmuseum.org.uk\/introduction.html\">Kirkaldy Testing Museum<\/a> because it is located very close to where I now live on London&#8217;s South Bank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On 1 January 1874, Scottish engineer David Kirkaldy opened the world\u2019s first purpose-built, independent commercial materials testing house at 99 Southwark Street London. Inside, his patented 116-ton hydraulic-powered Universal Testing Machine could exert a force of up to 1,000,000 lb, bringing rigorous new understanding to the strength of construction materials. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Outside, he declared his independence over the door, \u2018Facts Not Opinions\u2019. The machine, and his challenge, are still here today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a (very) little known fact that, when I left school in Manchester, I thought I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. Indeed I obtained a place on a university degree course to study mechanical engineering, but deferred my entry by a year to go into industry for some practical training. I learned very quickly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27406"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27419,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27406\/revisions\/27419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}