Charles May (industrialist)

Charles May (1801 to 1860) was an English engineer and manufacturer born at Alton in Hampshire. He trained as a chemist and set up in business at Ampthill in Bedfordshire, where he added the manufacture of drugs, machinery for grinding them and a millwright shop. He built an engine for a saw mill at Luton that used high-pressure steam expansively, and he promoted the steam jacket at a time when other manufacturing engineers opposed it. In 1836 he became a partner in the Ipswich firm of Ransomes and May, and there he invented a method of compressing the wooden treenails used to fasten railway chairs, which was widely adopted. Working under the Astronomer Royal, Professor Airy, he also built the great transit circle and the altazimuth at the Greenwich Observatory. He became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1836 and died in August 1860.