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Wilfred Lewis was an American mechanical engineer.
Background
Wilfred Lewis was of the seventh generation in America of a family of master mechanics. He was born on October 16, 1854 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the second of five children of Edward Lewis and Elizabeth Ivins, and a descendant of Henry Lewis of Narberth, Wales, a master carpenter, who was one of a company that received a grant of land from William Penn in 1681 and emigrated to Pennsylvania the following year, settling in Philadelphia and Haverford. Edward Lewis carried on the tradition in the family, beginning as a carpenter. Before the Civil War he was in the hardware business in Philadelphia, and as American representative of an English firm of iron and steel manufacturers, furnished rails for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Education
Wilfred Lewis began his education in the Friends' Central School and the Hastings School, in his native city, and in 1875 received the degree of B. S. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Career
After graduation Lewis entered the shops of William Sellers & Company, Philadelphia, as a mechanic, and three years later became a draftsman for the firm. From 1883 to 1900 he was successively designer, assistant engineer, and director of the plant. In the latter year he became president of the Tabor Manufacturing Company, remaining as its head and animating force until a year before his death.
During the First World War he was induced to serve at Washington in an advisory capacity and aided in the development of the army tank. Lewis was an expert in the mechanics of gears. His interest in the subject extended back to the days when he was employed by William Sellers & Company, and his chief contributions were connected with gears. In 1910, in Birmingham, England, he described to a joint meeting of American and British mechanical engineers the first machine he built to determine the friction-loss of gears under various speeds and pressures, a machine which was set up in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He built a similar machine for the University of Illinois, and one for the special Committee on the Strength of Gear Teeth of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, of which he was chairman. This was built in 1922 and was used by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the investigations that institution conducted to determine the effect of tooth accuracy on the strength of gear teeth at varying velocities.
He wrote many articles and papers on his special researches in the field of mechanics. He became greatly interested in scientific management and "allowed his factory to be used both as a laboratory and an object lesson in the budding science". He died suddenly of apoplexy, on board the steamship President Wilson, while he and his wife were on a round-the-world trip. The trip was not entirely a pleasure cruise, because Lewis was returning from Tokyo, Japan, where he had attended a convention of the World Engineering Congress as delegate from the Franklin Institute and other organizations. He was buried at sea.
Lewis was married on January 16, 1895, to Emily Shaw Sargent, of New York. They had four children--Rupert, who died in infancy, Wilfred Sargent, Millicent, and Leicester Sargent.