Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/152

 and 'Laws of Wealth' (1883); both were adopted in government schools.

On leaving India he established himself as a consulting engineer in London, and under his guidance were carried out the Southern Punjab railway (5 feet 6 inches gauge), 1897, and the Nilgiri mountain railway, a rack railway of metre gauge opened in 1899 (Minutes of Proceedings Inst. Civ. Eng. cxlv. 1). He was elected an associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers 5 March 1867, and a member 30 Jan. 1892. In 1897 he was elected to the council, on which he served until his death. He died at 114 Lexham Gardens, W., on 10 April 1903, and was buried in Brompton cemetery. By his wife Marcia Napier Ogilvy he had issue four sons and five daughters. One son and three daughters survived him.



BELL, ISAAC LOWTHIAN, first baronet (1816–1904), metallurgical chemist and pioneer in industrial enterprise, born at Newcastle-on-Tyne on 15 Feb. 1816, was eldest son (in a family of four sons and three daughters) of Thomas Bell (1774-1845), a native of Lowhurst, Cumberland, by his wife Catherine (d. 1875), daughter of Isaac Lowthian of Newbiggin near Carlisle. Of his brothers, Thomas (1817-1894), who followed him in the management of the Walker works, took an active part in the early development of the Cleveland salt deposits, whilst John (1818-1888), a practical geologist, gave valuable advice to Lowthian in connection with mining properties. His sister Mary Grace (d. 1898) married [q. v.], the publisher, and Katherine (d. 1905) married William Henry Porter (d. 1895), to whom the original idea of the patent anchor is due.

His father removed to Newcastle in 1808 to enter the service of Messrs. Losh & Co., merchants, who were then launching out into the manufacture of both alkali and iron. In after years he joined the firm, which became known as Messrs. Losh, Wilson & Bell, of the Walker Ironworks, Tyneside. The family of Bell's mother had long been tenants of the Loshes of Woodside, near Carlisle. To his parents' association with the Losh family (one of whose members in conjunction with Lord Dundonald had pioneered the Leblanc soda process in this country) Lowthian Bell owed his early introduction to chemical and metallurgical technology, then on the eve of a period of remarkable development and advance. His father, who early discerned the important bearing of physical science upon industrial problems, gave his son an adequate training in physics and chemistry. After completing his school education at Bruce's Academy, Newcastle, Bell spent some time in Germany, in Denmark, at Edinburgh University, and at the Sorbonne in Paris; finally he went to Marseilles to study a new process for the manufacture of alkali.

In 1835, at the age of nineteen, Lowthian Bell entered, under his father, the office of Messrs. Losh, Wilson & Bell, in Newcastle, and a year later joined his father at the firm's ironworks at Walker. In 1827 there had been erected at these works what was considered then to be a very powerful rolling mill capable of turning out 100 tons per week of bar iron; the puddling process was installed in 1833, and five years later there was added a second mill for rolling rails. John Vaughan, the superintendent of this mill, by virtue of his character and practical knowledge about iron, exercised on the young man a powerful directing influence. In 1842, owing to a shortage of pig iron, the firm decided to put down a blast furnace plant, the erection of which was carried out under Bell's superintendence. The first furnace was designed for smelting mill cinder, but on the addition of a second furnace in 1844 experiments were made, extending over twelve months, with Cleveland ironstone from the neighbourhood of Grosmont. The use of Cleveland ore was for the tune abandoned, but these initial experiments at Walker prepared the way for the opening-up of the Cleveland iron industry some six years later.

In 1842 Bell married Margaret, second daughter of [q. v.], the chemical manufacturer. In 1850, in partnership with his father-in-law, he started chemical works at Washington near Gateshead, where he built a house and resided for nearly twenty years.

About 1866 a single blast furnace adjoining the chemical works was built by Bell in partnership with others, and the exhaust steam from the blowing engines was utilised for heating water to be used in Pattinson's white lead process. The furnace was blown out in 1875. There was also established about 1860, at Washington, a manufactory of aluminium under a very ingenious process discovered by the distinguished French chemist St. Claire Deville. This was the earliest and for many years the only source of aluminium in