OpenLLM-France/wikimedia huggingface dataset:
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bell, Andrew

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​BELL, ANDREW (1753–1832), British divine and educationalist, was born at St Andrews on the 27th of March 1753. He graduated at the university there, and afterwards spent some years as a tutor in Virginia, U.S.A. On his return he took orders, and in 1787 sailed for India, where he held eight army chaplaincies at the same time. In 1789 he became superintendent of the male orphan asylum at Madras, and having been obliged from scarcity of teachers to introduce the system of mutual tuition by the pupils, found the scheme answer so well that he became convinced of its universal applicability. In 1797, after his return to London, he published a small pamphlet explaining his views on education. Little public attention was drawn towards the “monitorial” plan till Joseph Lancaster (q.v.), the Quaker, opened a school in Southwark, conducting it in accordance with Bell’s principles, and improving on his system. The success of the method, and the strong support given to Lancaster by the whole body of Nonconformists gave immense impetus to the movement. Similar schools were established in great numbers; and the members of the Church of England, becoming alarmed at the patronage of such schools resting entirely in the hands of dissenters, resolved to set up similar institutions in which their own principles should be inculcated. In 1807 Bell was called from his rectory of Swanage in Dorset to organize a system of schools in accordance with these views, and in 1811 became superintendent of the newly formed “National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church.” For his valuable services he was in some degree recompensed by his preferment to a prebend of Westminster, and to the mastership of Sherburn hospital, Durham. He tried, but without success, to plant his system in Scotland and on the continent. He died on the 27th of January 1832, at Cheltenham, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His great fortune was bequeathed almost entirely for educational purposes. Of the £120,000 given in trust to the provost of St Andrews, two city ministers and the professor of Greek in the university, half was devoted to the founding of the important school, called the Madras College, at St Andrews; £10,000 was left to each of the large cities, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leith, Inverness and Aberdeen, for school purposes; and £10,000 was also given to the Royal Naval School.
Southey’s Life of Dr Bell (3 vols.) is very tedious; J. D. Meiklejohn’s An Old Educational Reformer is concise and accurate.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bell, Henry Glassford

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​BELL, HENRY GLASSFORD (1803–1874), a Scottish lawyer and man of letters, was born at Glasgow on the 8th of November 1803. He received his education at the Glasgow high school and at Edinburgh University. He became intimate with “Delta” Moir, James Hogg, John Wilson (Christopher North), and others of the brilliant staff of Blackwood’s Magazine, to which he was drawn by his political sympathies. In 1828 he became editor of the Edinburgh Literary Journal, which was eventually incorporated in the Edinburgh Weekly Chronicle. He was admitted ​to the bar in 1832. In 1839 he was appointed sheriff-substitute of Lanarkshire, and in 1867 he succeeded Sir Archibald Alison in the post of sheriff-principal of the county, an office which he filled with distinguished success. In 1831 he published Summer and Winter Hours, a volume of poems, of which the best known is that on Mary, queen of Scots. He further defended the cause of the unfortunate queen in a prose Life (2 vols., 1828–1831). Among his other works may be mentioned a preface which he wrote to Bell and Bains’s edition (1865) of the works of Shakespeare, and Romances and Minor Poems (1866). He figures in the society of the Noctes Ambrosianae as “Tallboys.” He died on the 7th of January 1874.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bell, Henry

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​BELL, HENRY (1767–1830), Scottish engineer, was born at Torphichen, Linlithgowshire, in 1767. Having received the ordinary education of a parish school, he was apprenticed to his uncle, a millwright, and, after qualifying himself as a ship-modeller at Bo’ness, went to London, where he found employment under John Rennie, the celebrated engineer. Returning to Scotland in 1790, he first settled as a carpenter at Glasgow and afterwards removed to Helensburgh, on the Firth of Clyde where he pursued his mechanical projects, and also found occasional employment as an engineer. In January 1812 he placed on the Clyde a steamboat (which he named the “Comet”) of about 25 tons, propelled by an engine of three horse power, at a speed of 7 m. an hour. Although the honour of priority is admitted to belong to the American engineer Robert Fulton, there appears to be no doubt that Fulton had received very material assistance in the construction of his vessel from Bell and others in Great Britain. A handsome sum was raised for Bell by subscription among the citizens of Glasgow; and he also received from the trustees of the river Clyde a pension of £100 a year. He died at Helensburgh on the 14th of November 1830. A monument to his memory stands on the banks of the Clyde, at Dunglass, near Bowling.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bell, Jacob

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​BELL, JACOB (1810–1859), British pharmaceutical chemist, was born in London on the 5th of March 1810. On the completion of his education, he joined his father in business as a chemist in Oxford Street, and at the same time attended the chemistry lectures at the Royal Institution, and those on medicine at King’s College. Always keenly alive to the interests of chemists in general, Bell conceived the idea of a society which should at once protect the interests of the trade, and improve its status, and at a public meeting held on the 15th of April 1841, it was resolved to found the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. Bell carried his scheme through in the face of many difficulties, and further advanced the cause of pharmacy by establishing the Pharmaceutical Journal, and superintending its publication for eighteen years. The Pharmaceutical Society was incorporated by royal charter in 1843. One of the first abuses to engage the attention of the new body was the practice of pharmacy by unqualified persons, and in 1845 Bell drew up the draft of a bill to deal with the matter, one of the provisions of which was the recognition of the Pharmaceutical Society as the governing body in all questions connected with pharmacy. For some time after this the question of pharmaceutical legislation was widely discussed. In 1850 Bell successfully contested the borough of St Albans in order that he might be able to advocate his proposals for reform more effectually in parliament. In 1851 he brought forward a bill embodying these proposals. It passed its second reading, but was considerably whittled down in committee, and when eventually it became law it only partially represented its sponsor’s intentions. Bell was the author of an Historical Sketch of the Progress of Pharmacy in Great Britain. He died on the 12th of June 1859.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Belknap, William Worth

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​BELKNAP, WILLIAM WORTH (1820–1890), American soldier and politician, was born at Newburgh, N.Y., on the 22nd of September 1829. Entering the Union army in 1861, he took part in the battles of Shiloh, Corinth and Vicksburg, as major of the 15th Iowa volunteers. In the Atlanta campaign under Sherman he gained considerable distinction, rising successively to the rank of brigadier-general in 1864 and major-general in 1865. During the four years that followed he was collector of internal revenue for Iowa, leaving that post in 1869 to become secretary of war. In 1876, in consequence of unproved accusations of corruption, he resigned. He died at Washington, D.C., on the 13th of October 1890.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bell, Alexander Melville

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​BELL, ALEXANDER MELVILLE (1819–1905), American educationalist, was born at Edinburgh, Scotland, on the 1st of March 1819. He studied under and became the principal assistant of his father, Alexander Bell, an authority on phonetics and defective speech. From 1843 to 1865 he lectured on elocution at the university of Edinburgh, and from 1865 to 1870 at the university of London. In 1868, and again in 1870 and 1871, he lectured in the Lowell Institute course in Boston. In 1870 he became a lecturer on philology at Queen’s College, Kingston, Ontario; and in 1881 he removed to Washington, D.C., where he devoted himself to the education of deaf mutes by the “visible speech” method of orthoepy, in which the alphabetical characters of his own invention were graphic diagrams of positions and motions of the organs of speech. He held high rank as an authority on physiological phonetics (q.v.) and was the author of numerous works on orthoepy, elocution and education, including Steno-Phonography (1852); Letters and Sounds (1858); The Standard Elocutionist (1860); Principles of Speech and Dictionary of Sounds (1863); Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics (1867); Sounds and their Relations (1881); Lectures on Phonetics (1885); A Popular Manual of Visible Speech and Vocal Physiology (1889); World English: the Universal Language (1888); The Science of Speech (1897); The Fundamentals of Elocution (1899).
See John Hitz, Alexander Melville Bell (Washington, 1906).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Convex

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​CONVEX (Lat. convexus, carried round, rounded, from con-, with, and vehere, to carry), a term for the exterior side of a curved or rounded surface, as opposed to “concave” (Lat. con-, and cavus, hollow), the inner surface.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Conundrum

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​CONUNDRUM (a word of unknown origin, probably coined in burlesque imitation of scholastic Latin, as “hocus-pocus” or “panjandrum”), originally a term meaning whim, fancy or ridiculous idea; later applied to a pun or play upon words, and thus, in its usual sense, to a particular form of riddle in which the answer depends on a pun. In a transferred sense the word is also used of any puzzling question or difficulty.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Convention

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​CONVENTION (Lat. conventio, an assembly or agreement, from convenire, to come together), a meeting or assembly; an agreement between parties; a general agreement on which is based some custom, institution, rule of behaviour or taste, or canon of art; hence extended to the abuse of such an agreement, whereby the rules based upon it become lifeless and artificial. The word is of some interest historically and politically. It is used of an assembly of the representatives of a nation, state or party, and is particularly contrasted with the formal meetings of a legislature. It is thus applied to those parliaments in English history which, owing to the abeyance of the crown, have assembled without the formal summons of the sovereign; in 1660 a convention parliament restored Charles II. to the throne, and in 1689 the Houses of Commons and Lords were summoned informally to a convention by William, prince of Orange, as were the Estates of Scotland, and declared the throne abdicated by James II. and settled the disposition of the realm. Similarly, the assembly which ruled France from September 1792 to October 1795 was known as the National Convention (see below); the statutory assembly of delegates which framed the constitution of the United States of America in 1787 was called the Constitutional Convention; and the various American state constitutions have been drafted and sometimes revised by constitutional ​conventions. In the party system of the United States the nomination of party candidates for office or election is in the hands of delegates, chosen by the primaries, meeting in the convention of the party; the convention system is universal, from the national conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties, which nominate the candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency, down to a ward convention, which nominates the candidate for a town-councillorship. In diplomacy, “convention” is a general name given to international agreements other than treaties, but not necessarily differing either in form or subject-matter from a treaty, and sometimes used quite widely of all forms of such agreements. Many conventions have been made for the formation of international “unions” to regulate and protect various economic, industrial and other non-political interests, such as postal and telegraphic services, trade-marks, patents, copyright, quarantine, &c. Thus the Latin Monetary Union was created in 1865 by the Convention of Paris, and the abolition of bounties on the production and exportation of sugar by the Convention of Brussels in 1902 (see Treaties).
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Convent

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​CONVENT (Lat. conventus, from convenire, to come together), a term applied to an association of persons secluded from the world and devoted to a religious life, and hence to the building in which they live, a monastery or (more particularly) nunnery. The diminution “conventicle” (conventiculum), generally used in a contemptuous sense as implying sectarianism, secrecy or illegality, is applied to the meetings or meeting-places of religious or other dissenting bodies.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Conversano

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​CONVERSANO, a town and episcopal see of Apulia, Italy, in the province of Bari, 17 m. S.E. by rail from the town of Bari. Pop. (1901) 13,685. It has a fine southern Romanesque cathedral of the end of the 11th century, with a modernized interior, and a castle which from 1456 belonged to the Acquaviva family, dukes of Atri and counts of Conversano. The convent of S. Benedetto is one of the earliest offshoots of Montecassino. (See S. Simone, Il Duomo di Conversano, Trani, 1896). Here, or in the vicinity, is the site of the unimportant ancient town of Norba.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Conveyance

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​CONVEYANCE, primarily the act or process of conveying anything. The verb “to convey,” now used in the senses of carrying, transporting, transmitting, communicating or handing over, originally had the same meaning as “convoy” (q.v.), i.e. to accompany, a meaning which still survived in the 18th century. Like “convoy” it is ultimately derived from the Late Lat. conviare (not from convehere), but through the old Norman French form conveier, which in central France passed into the form convoier, mod. Fr. convoyer, whence “convoy.” Apart from the general sense given above the word conveyance is now used in three special senses: (1) a carriage or other means of transport, (2) in law, the transference of property by deed or writing between living persons, and (3) the written instrument by which such transference is effected. (See Conveyancing.)
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Cubitt, Sir William

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​CUBITT, SIR WILLIAM (1785–1861), English engineer, was born in 1785 at Dilham in Norfolk, where his father was a miller. After serving an apprenticeship of four years (1800–1804) as a joiner and cabinetmaker at Stalham, he became associated with an agricultural-machine maker, named Cook, who resided at Swanton. In 1807 he patented self-regulating sails for windmills, and in 1812 he entered the works of Messrs Ransome of Ipswich, where he soon became chief engineer, and ultimately a partner. Meanwhile, the subject of the employment of criminals had been much in his thoughts; and the result was his introduction of the treadmill about 1818. In 1826 he removed to London, where he gained a very large practice as a civil engineer. Among his works were the Oxford canal, the Birmingham & Liverpool Junction Canal, the improvement of the river Severn, the Bute docks at Cardiff, the Black Sluice drainage and its outfall sluice at Boston harbour, the Middlesborough docks and coal drops in the Tees, and the South-Eastern railway, of which he was chief engineer. The Hanoverian government consulted him about the harbour and docks at Harburg; the water-works of the city of Berlin were constructed under his immediate superintendence; he was asked to report on the construction of the Paris & Lyons railway; and he was consulting engineer for the line from Boulogne to Amiens. Among his later works were two floating landing stages at Liverpool, and the bridge for carrying the London turnpike across the Medway at Rochester. In 1851, when he was president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, he was knighted for his services in connexion with the buildings erected in Hyde Park for the exhibition of that year. ​He retired from active work in 1858, and died on the 13th of October 1861 at his house on Clapham Common, London. His son, Joseph Cubitt (1811–1872), was trained under him, and was engineer of various railways, including the Great Northern, London, Chatham & Dover, and part of the London & South-Western.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Cuddalore

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​CUDDALORE, a town of British India, in the South Arcot district of Madras, on the coast 125 m. S. of Madras by rail. Pop. (1901) 52,216, showing an increase of 10% in the decade. It lies low, but is regarded as exceptionally healthy, and serves as a kind of sanatorium for the surrounding district. The principal exports are sugar, oil-seeds and indigo. There are two colleges and two high schools. In the neighbourhood are the ruins of Fort St David situated on the river Gadilam, which has ​as stirring a history as any spot in the Presidency. As a small fort built by a Hindu merchant it fell into the hands of the Mahrattas after the capture of Gingi by Sivaji in 1677. From them it was purchased by the English in 1690, the purchase including not only the fort but the adjacent towns and villages “within ye randome shott of a piece of ordnance.” A great gun was fired to different points of the compass and all the country within its range, including the town of Cuddalore, passed into the possession of the English. The villages thus obtained are still spoken of as “cannon ball villages.” From 1725 onwards the fortifications were greatly strengthened. In 1746 Fort St David became the British headquarters for the south of India, and Dupleix’ attack was successfully repulsed. Clive was appointed its governor in 1756; in 1758 the French captured it, but abandoned it two years later to Sir Eyre Coote. In 1782 they again took it and restored it sufficiently to withstand a British attack in 1783. In 1785 it finally passed into British possession.
# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Cubitt, Thomas

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​CUBITT, THOMAS (1788–1855), English builder, was born at Buxton, near Norwich, on the 25th of February 1788. Few men have exhibited greater self-reliance in early life in the pursuit of a successful career. In his nineteenth year, when he was working as a journeyman carpenter, his father died, and he tried to better his position by going on a voyage to India, as captain’s joiner. He returned to London, two years after, in the possession of a small capital, and began business as a carpenter. The growth of his establishment was steady and rapid. He was one of the first to combine several trades in a “builder’s” business; and this very much increased his success. One of the earlier works which gave him reputation was the London Institution in Finsbury Circus; but it is from 1824 that the vast building operations date which identify his name with many splendid ranges of London houses, such as Tavistock, Gordon, Belgrave and Lowndes Squares, and the district of South Belgravia. While these and similar extensive operations were in progress, a financial panic, which proved ruinous to many, was surmounted in his case by a determined spirit and his integrity of character. He took great interest in sanitary measures, and published, for private circulation, a pamphlet on the general drainage of London, the substance of which was afterwards embodied in a letter to The Times; the plan he advocated was subsequently adopted by the conveyance of the sewage matter some distance below London. He advocated the provision of open spaces in the environs of London as places of public recreation, and was one of the originators of Battersea Park, the first of the people’s parks. At a late period he received professionally the recognition of royalty, the palace at Osborne being erected after his designs, and under his superintendence; and in the Life of the Prince Consort he is described by Queen Victoria as one “than whom a better and kinder man did not exist.” In 1851, although he was not identified with the management of the Great Exhibition, he showed the warmest sympathy with its objects, and aided its projectors in many ways, especially in the profitable investment of their surplus funds. Cubitt, when he rose to be a capitalist, never forgot the interests and well-being of his workpeople. He was elected president of the Builders’ Society some time before his death, which took place at his seat Denbies, near Dorking, on the 20th of December 1855.
His son, George Cubitt (1828– ), who had a long and useful parliamentary career, as Conservative member for West Surrey (1860–1865) and Mid-Surrey (1885–1892), was in 1892 raised to the peerage as Baron Ashcombe.