Oxford manufacturing history

 Oxford is home to one of our ancient universities, until a century or so ago committed to the teaching of the classics and theology. The university stood up against any suggestions that railways may come to the city, indeed although passed by the House of Commons, the university used its influence in the House of Lords to kill the first railway bill. In time of course the railways came and began to link the city to London and other industrial centres.

The Corporation of the city had been enthusiastic when GWR suggested that they might locate their workshops in the city. Once again the university protested that they didn’t want mere mechanics. It seems they were content to accept the population of tradespeople and servants who enabled the university to run. These people were faced with poverty when the colleges broke for their annual long vacation. No wonder the city wanted to attract other employment.

Employment did come in the wake of the First World War when William Morris set up Morris Motors. I drew on the biography of Lord Nuffield to write about Morris motors in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

In her book, A History of the City of Oxford, Ruth Fasnacht offers some insightful asides. Before Morris set up his garage in 1908, the population of the City was 50,000. By 1921 it had risen to 67,000 and by 1951, 97,000.

Morris began by sourcing components largely from other companies. He obtained the axle from E.G. Wrigley and pressed steel wheels from Sankey. White & Poppe of Coventry supplied carburettors and would have built engines except that those from America were cheaper. When that supply ceased Morris turned to Hotchkiss in Coventry. Other components were obtained from two small companies, Smiths of London and Lucas of Birmingham. In time Morris made their own engines but continued with Smiths and Lucas.

In 1939 Morris employed 3,700 people and its subsidiary Morris radiators 1,000. The Pressed Steel Company, which set up alongside Morris to provide all steel bodies for the cars, employed 5,000. Morris also had operations in Coventry where the heart of motor industry was. They undertook work that required skilled labour in Coventry, leaving less skilled assembly to Oxford. In 1938/39 Morris was making one quarter of all British made cars and employed 40% of Oxford’s workforce.

Villages surrounding the city were transformed as workers migrated to the area for work with Morris. Interestingly, the people of Oxford didn’t suffer unemployment in the depression years because Morris’s performance kept pace with the availability of labour. It therefore came as a shock when production ceased on the declaration of war and didn’t resume with war work until a year later. In 1945, the transition to peacetime conditions was relatively smooth until raw material shortages hit in the early fifties. Pressed Steel diversified into refrigeration with PressCold and Morris merged with Austin to become BMC in (1951). In 1950, Morris had manufactured 150,000 cars compared with Austin at 166,000. Ford was the UK leader at 185,000 vehicles.

Of course Morris (and Pressed Steel) weren’t alone. There was the Eagle Iron Works and the Oxford University Press.

BMW now manufacture Mini in Cowley. I write of the story in Vehicles to Vaccines.

The University has spun out many successful companies from its research. Oxford University is a valued collaborator in manufacturing most recently with Astra Zeneca in vaccines but further back with Oxford Instruments which was the first commercial spin out from Oxford University in 1959.

Further reading:

Ruth Fasnacht, A History of the City of Oxford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954)

Cambridge manufacturing history

Cambridge is of course the other of our ancient universities and the offspring of Oxford whose students fled there to escape death at the command of a vengeful king.

I am grateful to F.A. Reeve for the particular angle he took in the university’s and city’s brush with manufacturing in his book entitled Cambridge.

He takes his reader back through the history of the fenland town and the emergence of the university. Later, he says this: “until 1867, no college gave a Fellowship to a scientist.” In all my researches into British manufacturing this is a constant complaint that we were at a disadvantage compared to Germany which took scientific education seriously.

The first chemical laboratory was equipped at the expense of G.D. Liveing, the Professor of Chemistry and this was replaced at the expense of St John's; the replacements continued to be used until 1914. A new chemical laboratory was added in 1889.

The Cavendish Laboratory for experimental physics was built at the expense of the Duke of Devonshire in 1872 and James Clark Maxwell had become Professor in 1871. Later, J.J. Thomson became professor at the age of 28 and in his 34 years discovered the electron. He was succeeded in 1918 by Ernest Rutherford who opened up the field of nuclear physics.

For mechanical and applied mechanics, it fell to the Professor, James Stuart, in 1875 to equip the building at his expense although the university later bought the equipment from him.

Most of the instruments needed for medical science were imported from Germany until the Professor of Physiology Sir Michael Foster and two of his pupils, Dew-Smith and Francis Balfour. began to design and manufacture them. This led to Dew-Smith and Horace Darwin founding Cambridge Scientific Instruments with W.T. Pye as their mechanic.

Pye's son W.G. Pye had worked with Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory and in 1896 set up to make scientific instruments. Some twenty five years later, his company moved into wireless but continued with scientific instruments and by 1976 employed 7,000 people in Cambridge. I write more about Pye Wireless in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World and Vehicles to Vaccines.

In the Second World War, Pye’s then owner, C O Stanley, argued strongly against setting up a shadow factory to manufacture sets, and instead set up a whole string of small production units in Cambridgeshire villages and ended up employing 14,000 people. Pye designed and made both an infantry set and tank set.

After the war, design was becoming more important, and Pye took on designer, Robin Day, moving away from ‘high-gloss finishes, radiused corners and gilt trims' that were then general in radiogram and television cabinet design. He moved Pye to an over-all geometry and eventually to a house style recognisable of the best 1950s design evident at the Festival of Britain.

Cambridge Scientific Instruments [Founded by Horace Darwin with A. G. Dew-Smith in 1881 after earlier partnership Fulcher/Drew-Smith partnership in 1878] under the guidance of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation joined with instrument makers George Kent 1968 to form Cambridge Instruments, the largest independent British manufacturer of industrial instruments. A logical progression was into minicomputers which brought the power of computing out of the mainframe room onto the factory floor. 1974 saw the company combine with the international Brown Boveri and then in 1988 it became part of ASEA Brown Boveri (ABB). ABB UK is now a major player in CADCAM.'

Cambridge is home to Life Sciences including Astra-Zeneca R&D. The University produces and nurtures wonderfully innovative manufacturers. ARM probably comes top of the list having emerged from Acorn famous for their BBC computer. With the wartime presence of so many airfields, aircraft manufacturers abounded. Marshall Aerospace has been providing services to aviation since before the First World War. Sustainable packaging Pulpex has set up here. Bayer Crop Science is based here.

Further reading:

• Cattermole, M. J. G. & Wolfe, A. F., 'Horace Darwin's shop: a history of the Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company, 1878–1968' (Adam Hilger, 1987)
• F.A. Reeve, Cambridge (London: B.T. Batsford 1976)

Rugby manufacturing history

 Home to Rugby Portland Cement, a famous school and a wonderful game.

The London Birmingham railway arrived in 1838 and set up goods yards and workshops around which grew small engineering works.

Willans & Robinson (later part of English Electric and then GEC) an engineering company which moved from Thames Ditton was attracted by the skills of Rugby’s railway engineers. The company used their steam turbine engines for electricity generation at the Coventry Ordnance Works.

More importantly it was the place British Thomson-Houston (BTH) chose for their first UK factory. Thomson Houston was one of the major American electrical engineers which had merged with the pioneering Thomas Edison in 1892 and became General Electric (GE). I write of them in my blog on the American Electricity Industry. They viewed the British market as attractive and set up in 1900 to compete with their major rival Westinghouse which had set up in Trafford Park in Manchester in 1897. The Rugby site began with the manufacture of incandescent light bulbs but to this was added heavy electrical engineering as more and more areas of the UK sought electrical generation.

BTH was later part of AEI and then GEC which had a major presence in the town. GEC Turbine Generators, GEC Machines and parts of GEC-Elliott instruments were all in Rugby.

The Rugby railway story continued in 1937 when Sir Nigel Gresley proposed a Railway Locomotive Testing Station funded jointly by LNER and LMS. The war delayed its opening until 1948 and then it supported the development of the railways until the final test in 1965. The building was then used for railway research until demolition in 1984. Rail research continued in Derby.

One of Britvic main manufacturing plants is here.

Continuing the engineering legacy, Technoset precision engineering is but one example of what Britain is doing so well.

In 1824, a Leeds stonemason, Joseph Aspdin, invented a method of making from limestone and clay a cement which he called Portland Cement given the similarity in colour between it and Portland stone. The Rugby Portland company was founded in 1862 and continues to produce in Rugby. It is now owned by the Mexican Cemex. It is one of the British companies to have been sold to foreign owners.

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World 

Chiddingfold and British glass making

 Glass makers in the area of Sussex surrounding Chiddingfofd took advantage of the wood available in the Weald, the sand under foot and the bracken growing each spring to borrow making skills from France and produced the glass needed for the great English cathedrals in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They were not alone for there is evidence of glass making in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Staffordshire and Essex.

The next push came in sixteenth century with the arrival of Huguenots from Lorraine and Normandy fleeing persecution. The key entrepreneur was Jean Carre from Antwerp, which was then a major glass producer nearly on a par with Venice. In the petition to protect his patent, the evidence was that English glass making had fallen into bad ways with no window glass and only rough objects being made. Although there were 'glasses', drinking vessels continued to be made of wood, horn or leather well into the eighteenth century. British glass was facing stiff competition from Venice where clearer and more finely designed pieces were being made. Carre's assistant, who took over the business when his master died, and further refugees from Lorraine succeeded in rejuvenating Wealden glass making.

S.E. Winbolt in his book on Wealden Glass offers a helpful description of the making of window glass. Glass on a blow iron would be spun in a pit into a large disc which would then be cut into diamond shaped panes around a central circle 'bull's eye' with the pontil mark in the centre. The diamond shaped panes would be held in place by leaded strips to created a window (as in the image). English glass makers also made muff glass whereby a cylinder of glass is blown and then cut and spread flat in the furnace to create a sheet.

The denuding of the forests in the reign of Elizabeth I was causing shortages of timber for shipbuilders and glass making had to take second place to iron smelting. The glass makers of Surrey and Sussex were predominantly of French dissent and their use of English wood to make glass, instead of forging iron caused anti-immigrant feeling. The result was that glass makers moved west and settled first in Hampshire before moving on to find fresh supplies of wood and new customers in Gloucestershire.

At this point a story I refer to in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World kicks in, as Sir Robert Mansell worked at finding ways of using coal to melt glass as Dud Dudley was seeking the same for smelting iron ore. When eventual trial and error resulted in success, the glass makers sought coal rather than wood and moved first to Stourbridge and then to Newcastle on Tyne and Sunderland.

The British Cast Plate Glass Company was founded in St Helens in the eighteenth century taking advantage of the availability of raw materials and the skills of immigrant makers. George Ravenscroft had made a number of inventions including the use of lead which resulted in clearer glass. Pilkington at St Helens would become the major British glass producer, alongside Chance Brothers in Birmingham and London makers including Whitefriars. At the same time fine glass was made in Stourbridge with Webb Corbett and Stuart Crystal, and Royal Brierley and Dartington. Today the studio glass movement has taken up the mantle with makers all round the country.

The story of glass making is now celebrated in both Stourbridge and Sunderland.

Further reading:

S.E. Winbolt, Wealden Glass - The Surrey-Sussex Glass Industry

I am grateful also to my glass designer maker wife, Maggie Williams, for her input,

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World 

Ripley manufacturing history

 In Derbyshire's Amber Valley in the 1790s, three Derbyshire men came together to create what would become the world's first industrial complex: a young surveyor from Alfreton, Benjamin Outran, Francis Beresford a land owned from Ashbourne, William Jessop a canal engineer and John Wright, a Nottingham banker.

With the benefit of local coal and iron, the Butterley company produced substantial iron structures; wrought iron made at their Codnor Park works was used on Telford’s Menai Straights Bridge and on Brunel’s SS. Great Britain steam ship. As well as exports of coal and pig iron, the company produced steam engines which were used in the drainage schemes for the Fens.

William Jessop was responsible for one of the most intriguing features, an underground wharf. Jessop and Outran built the Cromford canal from Arkwright's textile factory in Cromford down to the Erewash canal and onto the River Trent and the canal network. The wharf was used by the Butterley company whose first blast furnace was close by. The canal would carry Arkwright's manufactures as well as coal, pig iron and Butterley manufactures.

In 1861 Sir John Alleyne, employed as chief engineer, began the mechanisation of steel rolling mills enabling heavy pieces to be made. This process produced the massive beams supporting the roof of St Pancras station. He conceived but did not perfect the reversing mill; this was left to John Ramsbottom at the Crewe railway works.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Butterley employed 10,000 people leading to the prosperity of Ripley. Towards the end of its life the company they produced the Falkirk Wheel and the Spinnaker Tower at Portsmouth (in the image).

Brick making was a natural partner to coal mining and the company produced bricks to meet their own needs. They built accommodation for their employees in neighbouring villages. In the twentieth century, brick making became more serious and new works were built at Kirkby and Ollerton. Brick production reached 28 million in 1936. Further plants were added in Derbyshire and Leicestershire allowing a wider range of bricks to be offered. The company was bought by Hanson in 1968.

Further reading

• https://www.rdht.org.uk/
• Stuart Fisher, Canals of Britain (London: Adlard Coles Nautical, 2009)
• W.K.V. Gale, Iron and Steel (London: Longmans, 1969)

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World 

Long Eaton manufacturing history

This midlands town was home to my mother's family who had been builders in the town since 1883. The company was called F.Perks & Son and played a large role in the main industry of the town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century - lace making. I wrote of the industry in my blog on Nottingham which was the major area of manufacture. Long Eaton though had three large lace mills:

Bridge Mill built by my great grandfather's building firm, F. Perks & Son, in 1902 for the Long Eaton Bridge Mills Company of which members of the Attenborough family were directors.

Springfield Mills in Sandiacre built by the notorious financier Terah Hooley in 1888 designed by John Sheldon. I write of Hooley elsewhere in the context of Dunlop, Coventry and Trafford Park, Manchester. I noted in the Derbyshire archive that F. Perks & Son, had carried out a major improvement project on his house in the town.

Harrington Mill built in 1885-7 designed by John Sheldon

These were tenement mills occupied by a number of businesses and at the turn of the century some 4,000 people worked in them. The lace industry declined after the First World War.

Another Long Eaton industry was furniture and Wades stand out as the survivor

F. Perks & Son carried out much of the building work for the Army Centre of Mechanisation at the former shell filling factory at Chilwell.

Carters Gold Medal Soft Drinks were are nearby Sawley.

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World  

Aberdeen manufacturing history

 Granite City, and any visitor will know immediately why Aberdeen is so called. Yet at the start of the nineteenth century this was not the case. Aberdeen like so many towns was built largely of wood. It had enjoyed a degree of prosperity since the twelfth century thanks to its agricultural hinterland. It was ready to move forward.

Communications were not good. In the city the roads were narrow, steep and poor, outside the city they were if anything worse. The saviour came in the shape of the turnpikes which transformed access to the city and inspired the city fathers to take action within the city boundaries. This they did with a revolutionary thrust. Union Street with its 135 ft bridge carved a route right through the decaying wooden dwellings; King Street too. The old and new towns were connected. Thomas Telford was at hand to advise.

These better routes for raw materials and finished goods made the way clear for growth in both woollens and linen; jute was tried but Dundee had bagged that one. The mid nineteenth century saw the cotton areas of Lancashire, the wool of Yorkshire and the linen of Belfast move ahead of the pack largely because of the economies of scale which they could enjoy. Aberdeen slipped back to concentrate on low volume and high quality.

Aberdeen had three paper mills and I wrote of Stoneywood paper mill in my book MacRobert's Reply. It was in the late nineteenth century one of the highest regarded paper mills in the world. It belonged to the Pirie family whose company became part of Wiggins Teape.

Communication improved further with massive work on the harbour which encouraged the building of fine clippers ideal for the long journey to the far east around the cape. The railways followed with a direct route to London in 1849. The city's buildings were replaced with fine granite brought in from the hinterland and cut and polished using an Aberdonian's own invention. The fine streets became lined with fine granite buildings. Even housing for the poor was granite and so much better than the brick back to backs in so many of England's industrial towns. Granite was exported as far as the USA.

Aberdeen's improved harbour proved ideal for trawlers catching herring and, later, white fish. The railways could have a catch in Billingsgate market by the following day. Cattle raised in that hinterland could be sent by rail down to Smithfield. The city began to feed the hungry nation.

The close of the nineteenth century saw further granite building not least the Marichal College

Marichal College

Aberdeen played its part in both world wars and in the second suffered from enemy bombing especially the Aberdeen Blitz of 1943.

In the 1970s Aberdeen became the onshore focus of much north sea oil production. I recall spending time on the audit of American oil drilling companies. One of my friends was designing oil rigs, Kelvin Bray, of whom I write in Vehicles to Vaccines, ran the company manufacturing the gas turbines necessary for the rigs. I explored the story further in Vehicles to Vaccines and found to my disappointment that British manufacturing had not fully exploited the opportunity oil offered. Aberdeen though was a busy and prosperous place.

Visiting recently, the granite city is looking tired with the problems facing so many high streets. However it is now home to British Energy and the move to net zero. It is a city well capable of reinvention and so the opportunity of the green revolution is likely to be grasped with accustomed energy.

Further reading:

Aberdeen in the Nineteenth Century - the Making of a Modern City John S. Smith and David Stevenson (eds.) (Aberdeen University Press, 1988)

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World 

Edinburgh manufacturing history

 The capital city of Scotland, with access to the sea at the port of Leith, had for centuries a closer relationship with the continent of Europe than with its land neighbour, England. This was particularly evident in Edinburgh’s principal manufacturing activity - the making of books. The first printing press came from France in 1507 when the Scottish king instructed his friend Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar, who had learnt the technique of printing in Rouen, to print the laws of Scotland. Previously Scots writers had been published and printed in Europe. Printing brought paper making and book binding as well as publishing.

The industrialisation of printing created a number of Edinburgh businesses. Oliver & Boyd were the first to combine publishing, printing and book binding in one building. T & A Constable also combined publishing and printing as did James Ballantyne which had a close relationship with Sir Walter Scott. Thomas Nelson at their Parkside Works both made paper and printed. They are now part of Harper-Collins based at Walton on Thames. R & R Clark at Brandon Street printed Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. They are now part of William Thyne whose principal business is packaging.

The Port of Leith was busy and had shipbuilders including Henry Robb, but, in contrast to the Clyde, focussed more on smaller vessels for trawling and whaling. Robbs became part of British Shipbuilders and closed in 1984. Robb became a shareholder in Ringsend Dockyard of Dublin which made similar vessels.

In the mid nineteenth century Lachlan Rose, a ships chandler from Leith, discovered a way to preserve lime juice. He bought a former sugar plantation in Dominica to grow limes and Rose’s Lime Juice reached the world, not least India. Factories were built in St Albans and on Merseyside and further estates were acquired in the Gold Coast. The company was bought by Schweppes in 1955.

Paper making from linen waste picks up Scotland’s largest export much of which was produced in Edinburgh but a good deal more further north in Dundee. Penicuik near Edinburgh was known as the paper making town with its first mill founded in the eighteenth century. An Edinburgh engineer, Bertrams of Sciennes, manufactured paper making machinery. Other engineering companies supported shipbuilding focused on Leith and more general engineering.

Cotton, which had started in the country with Scotland's first mill also at Penicuik, was important for Edinburgh but it spread throughout Scotland so to Dumfriesshire, Stirlingshire, Aberdeenshire and Perthshire using water power. The steam engine changed all this, with a migration to the coal rich areas around Glasgow and Paisley.

The wool industry in Scotland was truly a cottage industry with knitters, spinners and weavers in many counties. Edinburgh played a large part in fine cloth and also carpets. New Mills at nearby Haddington was formed in the late seventeenth century to boost Scotland's cloth production. At one time it employed 700 people carry on all the constituent tasks in woollen cloth manufacture, but all were done by hand except for fulling where a mill was driven by the local river. Gradually the mechanised industry spread to the the towns and villages to the south, so Galashiels and Hawick whose framework knitting production accounted for one eighth of British knitted hosiery. Edinburgh does lay claim to the first Paisley shawls.

The production of tartan became a serious industry following the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822 when Sir Walter Scott made much of Highland tradition. A number of Edinburgh mills joined in production but now the main producers of tartan cloth are Lochcarron Mills and Harris Tweed Hebrides. Marton Mills of Wharfdale in Yorkshire also include tartan in their range. For the other famous Scots cloth, tweed, it is necessary to visit the isles of Harris and Lewis.

Edinburgh was also near to coal reserves and so coal mines were sunk near to the city. Coal was used to produce glass which became another Edinburgh industry. It began with green bottle glass, but then advanced into crown glass for windows and fine glass for cutting - the famous Edinburgh Crystal. The company, Edinburgh and Leith Flint Glass was bought by Webb Corbett of Stourbridge in 1921. The company turned its production to the war effort in both world wars, and in the Second produced cathode ray tubes for radar.

Coal was also used to smelt iron ore, for example at the Cramond Iron works run by the Cadell family which had been joint founders the Carron works in Falkirk. Thomas Edington became manager of the Cramond works in 1765 and married Christian Cadell seven years later. Edington and the Cadells then looked to Glasgow for supplies of pig iron to replaced the existing imported supplies.

The mid nineteenth century saw the foundation of the Scottish Vulcanite Company. Vulcanite was a hard form of rubber invented by Charles Goodyear in 1839 but patented in England in 1844 by Thomas Hancock of Charles Mackintosh of Manchester. Goodyear obtained his Scottish patent in 1843 and a licence was taken by the American Norris & Co to begin manufacture in Edinburgh. This started with four Norris employees from New York coming to Edinburgh to teach the necessary skills to the local workforce. They went on to boot and shoe production and then tyres for steam traction engines. The company became the North British Rubber Company and went on to produce car tyres (renamed Uniroyal) and boots (renamed Hunter Boots). The original Fountainbridge plant closed in the sixties with the opening of a Uniroyal plant at Newbridge. Boot and shoe manufacture moved to Dumfries and production was transferred abroad in 2008.

During the Second World War, Ferranti viewed their manufacturing base in Manchester as vulnerable to air attack and so moved some activities to Scotland. Ferranti made military electronic systems at Crewe Toll, inertial systems and cockpit displays at Silverknowes and Electro-optic systems at Robertson Avenue. The company was employing 5,000 people in Edinburgh by 1963 as the city's largest employer. Electronics probably transformed Edinburgh; other electronics companies followed Ferranti's lead. Much later, Amazon set up their only software development centre outside the USA and Rock Star computer games are created here. I write about Ferranti's latter days in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Glaxo had a presence in the city through their purchase of Edinburgh Pharmaceutical Industries.

Further reading:

• Christopher A. Whatley, The Industrial Revolution in Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
• Albert Mackie, An Industrial History of Edinburgh (Glasgow: McKenzie, Vincent & Co, 1963)

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World 

Falkirk manufacturing history

 In 1759, William Cadell in partnership with Dr John Roebuck and Samuel Garbett founded the Falkirk Iron Works with his son also William as general manager until 1769. A year later, the business changed its name to the Carron Company and the Cadells swapped their holding in Carron for the Cramond Works in Edinburgh. (I continue this aspect of the story in my blog on Edinburgh).

The first blast furnace at Carron came into production on the day following Christmas in 1760 and a second a year later. Dr Roebuck, who seems to have been the driving force, won from the Board of Ordnance a contract to cast cannon for the Royal Navy. Hitherto guns had been cast in the iron works of the Weald but the advances made by the introduction of the blast furnace and then Abraham Darby's invention of the use of coal to smelt iron ore opened the field to newcomers. Darby himself as a Quaker would not bid and the contract came to Scotland. It seems that the guns turned out to be of insufficient quality and the contract was lost, I suspect to foundries at Moorfields in London, where guns were cast before the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich took over in the nineteenth century. Roebuck was a distinguished engineer and had developed a process for the production of sulphuric acid. This, I suspect, had brought him into contact with the Board of Ordnance.

Carron were an integrated business with both iron and coal. They had a deep coal mine that was flooded and so needed a steam engine capable of pumping water from a greater depth than the Newcomen engine could achieve. Dr Roebuck heard of James Watt's experiments with steam engines and provided financial backing with a view to having his mine pumped free of water. Watt struggled with his health, but also with the design of the better engine, finding time and again that practice simply did not match theory. Eventually Roebuck's money ran out and Watt was left with his idea and a prototype that didn't yet work. The story then moves to Birmingham, the Soho Works and Matthew Boulton. The very brief account is taken from the very engaging book Lives of Boulton & Watt by the nineteenth century author Samuel Smiles.

The Carron iron works became something of a hot bed of invention. Henry Cort visited, as did John Seaton the civil engineer. The business of gun casting continued in spite of the lack of orders from the Board of Ordnance and a new gun effective at close range, the Carronade, was invented and eventually supplied to the Royal Navy.

The Carron business continued to develop into steel and remained a producer until receivership in 1982. At one time it cast pillar boxes for the Post Office. The name though continues in a number of related products.

Falkirk was also home to bus builder Alexander Dennis. The company now building buses for the net zero world may move all production to England (Guildford)

To mark the millennium a remarkable lifting bridge (shown in the image) was built to connect the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal.

Further reading:

• https://falkirklocalhistory.club/around-the-area/industry/ironfounding/carron-ironworks/carron-company/
• Samuel Smiles, the Lives of Boulton and Watt (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2007 first published 1865)
• J.C. Carr and W. Taplin, History of the British Steel Industry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962)

You can read more in Vehicles to Vaccines and in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World