HALL, ROBERT (1817–1882), vice-admiral, was born at Kingston in Upper Canada in 1817, and entered the navy in 1833. In November 1843 he was made lieutenant, and, after serving in the Pacific and on the west coast of Africa, was promoted to be commander on 6 Sept. 1852. In 1853 he served as commander of the Agamemnon, one of the earliest of the screw line-of-battle ships; in 1854 he commanded the paddle sloop Stromboli in the Baltic, going out in her, at the end of the season, to the Mediterranean and Black Sea; in May and June 1855 he took part in the expedition to Kertch and the Sea of Azof, under the command of Captain Lyons [q. v.], and on Lyons's death was promoted to be captain of the Miranda, which he brought home and paid off in 1857. From 1859 to 1863 he commanded the Termagant in the Pacific, and on his return to England was appointed private secretary to the Duke of Somerset, then first lord of the admiralty. In 1866 he was appointed superintendent of Pembroke dockyard, and in 1872 became naval secretary to the admiralty. This appointment he held till the spring of 1882, when he resigned; but a few weeks afterwards, his successor being sent to Ireland as under-secretary, Hall was requested to resume his old post. He had barely done so when he died suddenly of heart disease, on 11 June 1882.
[Times, 14 June 1882; O'Byrne's Nav. Biog. Dict.; Navy Lists.]
HALL, SAMUEL (1769?–1852), known as the ‘Sherwood Forest Patriarch,’ born about 1769, worked as a cobbler at Brookside Cottage, Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire. He joined the quakers at an early age, and wore the dress, though by marrying out of the pale he ceased to belong to the society. He died on 20 Aug. 1852, in his eighty-fourth year (Gent. Mag. 1852, pt. ii. 435). By his wife Eleanor Spencer, a Derbyshire shepherdess and dairymaid, he had, with other issue, a son, Spencer Timothy Hall [q. v.] Hall was author of ‘A Few Remarks offered to the consideration of the professors of the Christian name; among which are some reasons why the people called Quakers chuse to suffer loss in their property rather than actively comply with requisitions to serve in the Army or Militia, or to pay or hire others for serving in their stead,’ 8vo [Nottingham], 1797 (Joseph Smith, Cat. of Friends' Books, i. 907). He also penned a treatise on the advantages of pressure upon light soils to the growth of grain and bulbous roots, and invented a machine for sowing, manuring, and pressing turnip seed in one operation. At the age of sixty-five he wrote his ‘Will,’ in which he set forth his religious opinions.
[Authorities as above.]
HALL, SAMUEL (1781–1863), engineer and inventor, was second son of Robert Hall, cotton manufacturer and bleacher, of Basford, Nottingham, where he was born in 1781. He was an elder brother of Marshall Hall [q. v.] the physiologist. He took out patents in 1817 and 1823 for ‘gassing’ lace and net, which consisted in passing the fabric rapidly through a row of gas flames, all the loose fibres being thus removed without injury to the lace. The process exercised a most important influence upon the lace trade of Nottingham, and is still used universally. It brought much wealth to the inventor, but he unfortunately dissipated his fortune in bringing out other inventions. In 1838 Hall patented his ‘surface condenser,’ in which the steam is condensed by passing it through a number of small tubes cooled on the outside. It was chiefly intended for use at sea, and it was hoped that the evils attending the presence of salt in boilers would be obviated by charging them with fresh water at the commencement of a voyage and using it over and over again. The invention was extensively though unsuccessfully tried during 1839–41, but the principle of tubular condensers is now largely used for cooling purposes. His other patents, which number twenty in all, relate chiefly to steam engines and boilers. He died 21 Nov. 1863 in very reduced circumstances, in Morgan Street, Tredegar Square, Bow.
[Mechanic's Mag. vols. xxviii–xxxiii. xxxvii.; Nottingham Journal, 4 Dec. 1863.]
HALL, SAMUEL CARTER (1800–1889), author and editor, was born in the Geneva barracks, near Waterford, on 9 May 1800. His father, Robert Hall (1753–1836), was born at Exeter on 20 June 1753, entered the army as an ensign in the 72nd regiment in 1780, and served at Gibraltar during the siege. In 1794, while at Topsham, he raised a regiment known as the Devon and Cornwall Fencibles, which he accompanied to Ireland in the following year, and there served with it until 1802, when it was disbanded. While
