Sir Samuel Cleland Davidson, KBE (18 November 1846 – 18 August 1921) was a British inventor and engineer. During his career in the tea import business he invented and patented a number of industrial machines and developed the earliest air conditioning systems. He founded the Sirocco Works in Belfast in 1881.
Early life Davidson was born in County Down on 18 November 1846, the youngest child of a family of Ulster Scots. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (the "Inst") and left at the age of 15 to work at a Belfast civil engineering firm, William Hastings. As a teenager he gained experience as an apprentice to a surveyor in Belfast, and visited his uncle John Davidson's flax mill in Drumaness, probably the first in Ulster to be equipped with power machinery. He also became familiar with John's experimental approach using scientific methods to increase crop yields in flax farming for the linen industry. These early experiences gave Sam a lifelong appreciation for learning through personal hands-on experience, and innovation in commercial agriculture and engineering.
Career
In 1864 Davidson left his job to work for his father, James Davidson who owned a flour mill close to the site of the later Sirocco works. The Indian government had discovered wild tea growing in the Assam region and was determined to initiate a massive tea-growing operation there with the potential to generate huge wealth for the British Empire as it consolidated its hold on the economy of India. The opportunity to have its own tea industry and become less dependent on importing the Empire's favourite drink from China was too important to ignore. Initially the government paid for and organised clearing the forest and the planting and management of tea 'gardens', as the large plantations were called. Once they were established they were sold to private investors to consolidate and expand, and develop a commercially viable industry. Samuel's father and uncle set up a business importing tea and bought a share in a tea estate in Cachar, 300 miles north-east of Calcutta in India. Samuel's cousin James went to India to personally manage the estate and later invited 17-year-old Samuel and some other local young men to join him.
Samuel Davidson quickly gained a reputation as a hard working, trustworthy and successful estate manager. He applied his agricultural and engineering knowledge to significantly improve crop yields, and to begin mechanising every stage of the archaic and very labour-intensive processes involved in turning plucked tea leaves into a marketable product of consistent quality. As a person who had not pursued higher education at home, Samuel's innovations mainly came about through persistent experimentation, and his greatest successes were sometimes counter-intuitive to the assumptions of engineers at the time. Not knowing that what he was trying to achieve with centrifugal fans was considered impossible by more educated mechanical engineers turned out to be a great blessing. When he later travelled to America to prove to sceptical patent authorities that his design actually worked he said "An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory." ('The Sirocco Story: Birth and growth of an industry' by Edward Maguire 1958)He sold the property in India in 1874 and returned to Ireland where he began to manufacture his patented tea machinery with Combe, Barbour and Coombe of Belfast. After a year of manufacturing the first versions of his tea machinery in Belfast, Samuel returned to India in 1878 and toured the major centres of tea production with a portable tea factory which he set up in each remote location to demonstrate to the planters what his products could achieve. The orders started to flood in and his machines became the standard for the whole industry over the following years. His expertise in every aspect of the industry was so respected that tea companies paid him to spend time in each area he took his factory to making assessments of the local estates and recommendations for how they could best raise their productivity. He also paid for the trip by selling hundreds of another invention of his – a simple wheeled hoe which the planters loved. In 1881 he started his own manufacturing operation in Belfast. The success of his innovative use of stoves to move hot air led him to develop a convection heating system for use in human environments, and by the end of the 1880s his Sirocco stoves were in popular use in schools, church halls and workrooms. He developed his invention further with the introduction in 1898 of a forward-bladed centrifugal fan, which was significantly more powerful than conventional fan designs. This innovation, originally designed for drying tea, evolved into the first air conditioning system. The powerful force of moving hot air across a room with one of his centrifugal fans led one of Davidson's planter colleagues to remark that it reminded him of the Sirocco, the hot wind that blows across the North African desert, and Davidson adopted Sirocco as his brand name, applying it to his products and to the firm's Belfast factory, the Sirocco Engineering Works.Davidson & Co grew into one of the largest engineering firms in Ireland, manufacturing and exporting equipment for cooling, drying, dust collecting, heating, ventilating, pneumatic conveyance, and mechanical handling, all invented by Davidson himself. He supplied ventillation fans for the Titanic which was built practically next door to the Sirocco works at the Harland and Wolff shipyard, and have been photographed on the wreck. During World War I the Sirocco works supplied the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy. When the German fleet was scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1919, it was discovered that nearly every German ship was equipped with Sirocco fans manufactured before the war. Desperate to use his inventing skills to aid the war effort in World War 1, he designed and made prototypes of a hand-held grenade-launching pistol or 'Hand Howitzer' for use in the trenches where his son Jim was fighting as a machine gun captain. The American military were close to placing a big order for these when the war ended.
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