Sir Nigel Gresley - The L.N.E.R.’s First C.M.E.

Again you are making unjustifiable suppositions. Did I even suggest that that was the only reason? My wife continually makes unjustifiable suppositions but she is Russian, so...........

 

Gentlemen, please...

 

Gent, you mean. I've no interest in continuing the back and forth.

 

Gentlemen don't lie, Jim. I have asked for a quote directly linking valve gear and LNER finances. No reply because I made no such link. The only reference I made to LNER finances was here:

"Developed as part of his payed employment. I doubt he was paid for it. If that were true, it might explain why the LNER was so impoverished."

From that, how can anybody who understands English make a direct relationship between valve gear and finances? Wilful misinterpretation is the best spin I can put on it. Instead of that, he repeats the same lie. Little wonder that Steam Sun forced a retraction out of him. Propaganda works though. Take the case of Chapelon - it's still working against him for some, nearly 80 years on.

Of course he doesn't want the back and forth!

 

Whoa, wait a minute, aren't you the person who has repeatedly said he welcomes all and any dialogue.

 

Let's try again. What you have said there is the link. You have suggested by intimation there that there is a possibility, and that if true, "it might explain why the LNER was so impoverished". I was in fact agreeing with your point of principle that it was wrong. How you have interpreted it otherwise is on your part, not mine.

I am quite prepared to report your post to the mods, unless you end that now. The discussion I had with the magazine is private and I have made my peace with it. From the outside, with no knowledge of the conversations that I have had, you of course would speculate.

Were I had engaged in propaganda, that might have some merit, but it does not here.

I have always welcomed discussion provided it doesn't descend into a slanging match. You made things personal - why, I am not sure - and now you are continuing it, again.

 

As above Victor, provided it does not descend into a personal slanging match, as it has above for some unknown reason.

 

I do not wish to get embroiled in this (brief, I hope) unpleasantness, but if HNG invented something and patented it whilst in the employ of the GNR/LNER and one could say, in company time then surely his employer would hold the patent rights? Leastways, that's how it worked with my former employers - they would have held the IP, not me. If other companies then applied to use the patented device, the royalties would have gone to the company, not the inventor.

 

A very good question, but (as I was intimating to earlier), the primary evidence shows a very specific story. I have a full copy of the patent application, complete with drawings of Gresley's specification in front of me (no.15769 of 1915) and it is very clearly Herbert Nigel Gresley, singular, and not on behalf of the G.N.R. (as it would have been at the time).

The patent was due to run out in 1931, and was extended to 31st December 1934.

 

I think you are partly right in that they would be entitled to any financial gain from a patent of an employee regardless of the name on the patent. It’s the same with copyright, Harry Beck, and electrical wiring draughtsman with London Underground, was never rewarded for his diagrammatic map of the Underground recognised throughout the world. I think he got the idea from a signalling circuit he was drawing.
A bit of thread drift but why does every pocket diary have an Underground map inside the back cover?

 

I believe that BR was the patentee on both the ring pull can & a nuclear powered flying saucer as they were both invented by BR employees

 

I didn't suggest any such thing. Read the comment again perhaps. It was about the company paying an employee extra for something he had done as part of his employment.

 

That's something that's changed over time. In the 19th and early 20thC it seems to have been common practice that the individual held the patent, the employer got to use the patent royalty free, and if the employee got rich from the royalties from other users then all well and good. These days the employer grabs all the rights in contracts of employment, and thus income from royalties goes to company coffers and thus bonuses and stock options for senior executives, whilst the person who actually provided the genius gets nothing.

 

Indeed and I suspect that senior officers negotiated that as part of their contracts. In Spink's "Bibliography" of F W Webb, he mentions that Dunn (presumably J M Dunn) tried to access the records of Webb's patent agent but they had been destroyed during the war, and a reference elsewhere stated that Webb did not receive explicit royalties from the LNWR, although his salary was £7,000, rather more than Ramsbottom's, possibly in compensation. That does not mean Webb did not get royalties from third parties and one imagines that the signalling equipment patents through Webb & Thompson were a separate venture.

 

It does seem to be the case that Gresley did not receive individual royalties for use of the patent, but that any payments for the use of the patent were included within his wage packet. That being said, knowing what I know of CMEs wages throughout the 20th century, I don't think Gresley's wage was particularly out of place compared to the other CMEs.

Notably, Thompson when he became CME actually had a decrease, some level of his wage reduced in line with the change of responsibility for electrical engineering to the C.E.E., Richards. His wage in comparison to Gresley's doesn't indicate that much money was paid out for the use of the conjugated gear patent, but there is a problem in assuming this.

Notably, we don't know how it it was applied. Was it per use of the patent to a design or in per use of the patent verbatim (i.e. per locomotive instead). If the latter, Gresley would undoubtedly have ended up wealthier than he did - given it was applied to over half of his locomotives built for the LNER, you'd assume a much higher wage. But Gresley's doesn't appear to be out of the ordinary. So was it per design, effectively a bonus of sorts per use?

There's a lot of secondary evidence which speculates on this, and at least two prolific writers have claimed opposite ends of the patent payment spectrum (!)

As always, we should look to the primary evidence. I am in the process of trying to digitise the 1923-48 board minutes of the LNER for my own purposes, and in doing so I am doing a lot of reading. I haven't found a definitive answer yet - when and if I do, I will of course explain and give the full source. Gresley's patent, however, is pretty specific in how it is to be designed/utilised and notably isn't the final form that we found conjugated gear in, anyway.

 

Reading about responsibilities being hived off from the CME's office rang a bell. Did the LNER have any shipping operations and if so, did these come under the CME?

 

They did but no idea under whose jurisdiction they fell.

 

Assuming you mean who was responsible for the ships from an engineering point of view, the certificate of good working order etc in the LNER's accounts for "Steamboats" and related workshops and plant is signed by the Marine Superintendents and Marine Superintendent Engineers. Gresley signed the certificate re Rolling Stock, locos, plant and machinery etc.

 

Sounds like the post. I had in mind the separating off of LBSCR marine engineering responsibilities following the death of Robert Billinton.