(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
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Albert Kingsbury was born on December 23, 1862 in Illinois, United States, the third of four children and only son of Lester Wayne and Eliza Emeline (Fosdick) Kingsbury. His father, a descendant of Joseph Kingsbury who emigrated from England around 1630 and settled at Dedham, Massachusetts, was superintendent of a stoneware factory. The family later moved to Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.
Albert completed high school in 1880 in Ohio. Thereafter he attended Buchtel College (later the University of Akron) for a year, then left to become an apprentice machinist. After three years of work on heavy machinery, Kingsbury enrolled in 1884 in the freshman class of the mechanical engineering course at Ohio State University. Forced by lack of funds to withdraw near the end of his sophomore year, he worked two more years as a machinist (one of them at the Warner and Swasey shops in Cleveland) and then in 1887 entered Cornell University. There, under the direction of Robert H. Thurston, he conducted a series of tests on Pennsylvania Railroad bearings which marked the beginning of his career in lubrication and bearing design. The tests revealed anomalies that accepted theories of friction could not explain, and Kingsbury was not then acquainted with the empirical and analytical work in lubrication which had been done in England, culminating in 1886 in the fundamental theoretical paper of Osborne Reynolds. In 1889 he graduated with the degree of Mechanical Engineer.
In 1889 Kingsbury accepted appointment as instructor in mechanical engineering and physics at New Hampshire College (later the University of New Hampshire). He spent the year 1890-1891 in Cleveland as superintendent of a cousin's machine shop but then returned as professor of mechanical engineering to New Hampshire, where he remained until 1899.
For several years Kingsbury did experimental work on friction in screw threads, particularly threads used in an action similar to that of a jack screw, which exerts a large end thrust. While testing screw threads with a torsion-compression machine, he noticed quite by accident the phenomenon of air as a lubricant, but except for a minor paper in the Journal of the American Society of Naval Engineers (May 1897), he did not pursue this subject further. When he presented the paper, however, before the navy's Bureau of Steam Engineering in Washington, D. C. , in 1896, a listener called his attention to Osborne Reynolds's work.
Reynolds's observation that the most effective lubricant for a flat bearing surface was a thin wedge of oil maintained between the fixed and moving surfaces led Kingsbury directly to the invention of his segmental end-thrust bearing. In his college laboratory in 1898 he made the initial trials of a bearing consisting of a series of flat polygonal metal tilting pads, pivoted on radial supports and arranged symmetrically about the bearing axis. They proved entirely successful: his bearing maintained full lubrication under thrust pressure from ten to a hundred times greater than those in conventional thrust bearings.
Before a patent for the Kingsbury bearing was applied for in 1907, the English engineer A. G. M. Michell had independently developed a similar bearing, also based upon Reynolds's observation, but the chronological priority of Kingsbury's early work was established (and later acknowledged by Michell) and a United States patent was issued in 1910. The names Kingsbury and Michell in America and Europe, respectively, have become generic terms for tilting-pad thrust bearings.
In 1899 Kingsbury was appointed professor of applied mechanics at Worcester (Massachussets) Polytechnic Institute. Four years later he accepted a position with the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh. He stayed with Westinghouse until 1914, after 1910 as a consultant. In 1912, at Kingsbury's expense, the company built the first large commercial Kingsbury bearing for the Pennsylvania Water and Power Company's hydroelectric plant at McCall's Ferry (Holtwood) on the Susquehanna River. The success of that installation led to general acceptance of the bearing for stationary hydroelectric turbines and generators.
By 1914 Kingsbury had opened an independent consulting office in Pittsburgh. The United States Navy adopted his bearing for use on propeller shafts in 1917, and it quickly superseded other types in naval applications. Kingsbury opened a shop in Philadelphia to produce the bearing, which was also manufactured to his order at ten or twelve other machine shops. After the war he expanded the Philadelphia shop and in 1924 incorporated the Kingsbury Machine Works, of which he was president until his death. In his last years he made his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Alber Kingsbury was well-known for his invention of tilting pad thrust bearing which now known as the Kingsbury bearing. During his career, he obtained over fifty patents. For his thrust bearing and his experimental work in lubrication, Kingsbury was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute (1923), the John Scott Medal (1931) of the City of Philadelphia, and the gold medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1931). He was also inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Kingsbury regularly attended the Presbyterian Church.
Kingsbury was fluent in more than seven different languages and was an expert on the interpretation of the poet Mallarme. Like his father before him, he was a gifted musician.
On July 25, 1893, at Stamford, Connecticut, Kingsbury married Alison Mason, by whom he had five daughters: Margaretta Mason, Alison Mason, Elisabeth Brewster, Katharine Knox, and Theodora.
