Technikatörténeti szemle 11. (1979)
TANULMÁNYOK - Petik Ferenc: The development of material testing machines
testing laboratories came into existence. In England D. Kirkaldy’s laboratory was well known, whidh performed various tests for industry and state. They tested also the steels of Krupp of Essen in the 1850s. Kirkaldy was the first material tester who published the results of .hrs experiments periodically. One of his early testing machines is shown in Fig. 9. A testing laboratory of building materials was founded also in St. Peters- bourgh in 1853, within the Institute of Road and Railway Building Engineers. Material testing institutes started their functioning in the 1860s in Berlin, in 1871 in Munich, later in other German cities as well. The establishment of institutes indicated that methods of testing materials had changed basically. Until that tl'me the only aim was to accumulate knowledge on certain materials destined for specific uses. Later, by means of planned scientific work, a systematization of the characteristics of existing structural materials was aimed at, and on this basis the development of new materials. In Hungary, the first mateiial testing laboratory was founded by Prof. I. Pálóci Horváth (1843—1881) in 1871, at the Institute of Engineering Mechanics of the Joseph Polytechnical University, Budapest [9], His first, economically significant experimental series was carried out in 1875—77 for the Metropolitan Council of Budapest. He examined Hungarian stones to replace pavement stones imported from foreign countries until that time. Strength tests were performed on the most important machine of the laboratory, on Werder’s universal testing machine (Fig. 10). Werder’s machine was a significant step in the development of material testing machines. It was first designed for the Bavarian State Railways in 1852 by L. Werder (1808—1885). This was the first universal material testing machine, suited equally for tensile, compression, bending and torsion tests. Between the years 1852 and 1906 21 pieces had been produced, of which four had been still in use ten years ago [11, 12]. From machine elements and assemblies available at that time Werder employed the knife-edge supported weigh-beam and the manually operated oil pump. The principle of the machine is shown in Fig. 11. Loads acting on the specimen were generated by 10. Werder’s universal testing machine 224
