F.W. Lanchester - motor engineer

Born in 1868, Lanchester was at the centre of the transition from steam under pressure working a piston to ignited gas propelling a piston, to ignition of an evaporation of benzine.

Sounds simple.

With an engine bolted on to heavy concrete, vibration didn’t really matter; we are after all talking of an explosion in a confined space. Once that explosion occurred aboard a vehicle on four wheels, vibrations were keenly felt.

Lanchester has seen the experiments in Germany with engines attached to carriages, or, worse, engines coupled with contraptions on fewer than four wheels. He simply could not accept them.

He had attended school with no great distinction but nonetheless gained a place at what would become part of Imperial College, London. He found the course short on practical application and so alongside attended a night class at a technical college. The Lanchester who emerged into the world of road transport was thus well equipped.

He took a job with the Forward Gas Engine Works in Saltley, Birmingham on a pittance of a wage but with the agreement that any inventions should be his. It was a good decision for he secured patents for: a Pendulum Governor, a Pendulum Accelerometer, a self starting device for gas engines. There were many more.

I write in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how Lanchester founded a company and made motor cars with engineering but not financial success..

He was a man who, faced with a problem, would work it through theoretically and then test his solution in practice. He wouldn’t leave it there, for he needed also to create the tools necessary for its manufacture. His competitors were very much trial and error men and in the case of Harry Lawson and the British Daimler company a pedlar of promises.

He was not one to confine himself to a single area of engineering. Whilst he was creating motor cars, he also explored air transport. He eschewed the crude early attempts at flight, committing himself instead to a detailed study of birds finding how they achieved seemingly effortless flight compared to the struggles of the early aviators. Rolt is of the opinion that Lanchester’s writing on flight paved the way to aeronautical engineering. Lanchester created models based on his research, one powered by elastic bands (remember?). Rolt offers a description:

‘When the weather was calm, the models carved their way through the air as if running on invisible rails. When flight was made in a gale wind, the flight path took the form of a sinuous curve without momentary suggestion of loss of equilibrium but rather with the appearance of some set and intelligent purpose.’

He published two seminal works which were received with hostility in England and France, but welcomed in Germany. It wasn’t until after his death that his work was acknowledged by the Royal Aeronautical Society in their obituary of him. He was a man far ahead of his time.

In the First World War he served for two years as President of the Junior Institution of Engineers which had been founded as the Vulcanic Society by a group of Maudsley’s apprentices. Everything is connected.

Rolt compares Lanchester with Trevithick and notes that unlike Watt neither had a Boulton as a business partner. Lanchester did receive professional acclaim towards the end of his life in 1945 but never financial reward. The diverse places from which acclaim came speaks loudly. A Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellowship and Gold medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham and a Guggenheim Gold Medal.

Further reading:

Rolt, L.T.C., Great Engineers (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962)

 

Herbert, Lord Austin

 Herbert Austin's father was an unsuccessful Buckinghamshire farmer who had the good fortune to have as a brother the architect to Earl Fitzwilliam and the Wentworth Estate in Yorkshire. When forced to give up his own farm, Giles Austin secured the appointment as farm bailiff on the Wentworth Estate. Herbert had been born in Buckinghamshire in 1866 but he and his elder brother Ernest moved with his parents to Yorkshire where three brothers and a sister followed. Life on the estate was pleasant and Herbert attended the local school and discovered an aptitude for drawing. He went on to Rotherham Grammar school and thence to commercial college.

With drawing as a gift and an uncle as an architect, Herbert took articles only to find that it was not the career for him. Luck once more intervened for a maternal uncle had gone to Australia and was much taken by the new country. Herbert folllowed excited by the prospects. He spent a while working with his uncle before taken a couple more jobs before Wolseley and a sheep shearing machine beckoned. I wrote of this in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World. Herbert also found a wife of Scottish extraction, Helen Dron

Herbert, his wife and the Wolseley company moved back to Britain where Herbert first wrestled with problems with the production of the sheep shearer. It wasn't long before he and Wolseley progressed to their first vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine. Herbert was in his element and he produced a number of successful designs. Herbert though was destined to be more than a general manager of a company then owned by Vickers and as I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World Herbert left and founded the company that bears his name. It also competed magnificently in the many motor races that were held around the country and indeed the world in those days.

Herbert Austin was a big and determined man. He was known as 'Pa' to those who worked with him. He loved the technical side of his work. He was a great inventor of better ways of doing things.

From 1905 through to the end of the First World War, the Austin Motor Company was successful and produced many fine cars. Herbert was awarded a KBE for his work on munitions. In 1914 the factory had stood idle but by the autumn of 1915 orders from the Ministry began to flow. Austin made eight million shells, thousands of vehicles and much more. In particular the company was asked to produce aircraft. To facilitate this they cleared a large expanse of neighbouring land as a runway; after the war this doubled as a test track. The company also build the Longbridge Estate from American manufactured wooden cabins to house workers who were previously travelling long distances. Some 3,000 Belgian refugees were welcomed, housed and given vital work. At one time the total number of men and women working on site numbered 22,000. Tragically Herbert's only son, Vernon, was shot by a sniper late in the war.

The 1920s saw the company's Longbridge factory, underutilised; it had grown to meet the war effort but without the demands of war was simply too big. Herbert had ploughed what had become considerable wealth into the company and other investments leaving him short of liquidity so much so that the Official Receiver was appointed.

Wealth might have gone, but Herbert was in his prime and launched a 20hp car with a 12hp version which was used by 90% of London taxis. His wife pointed out that the public needed a smaller more affordable family car and the Austin Seven was born to great acclaim. It was produced from 1922 to 1939 outselling both Ford and Morris. It performed well in the many motor races held in Britain and around the world.

Austin and Morris are frequently compared and two particular differences emerge. Austin grew organically whereas Morris grew by acquisitions. Morris sourced car parts from external suppliers whereas Austin was keen to produce everything in house. In 1925 Longbridge covered 62 acres on a 220 acre site with 8,000 employees producing 25,000 cars each year. It had its own foundry, forge and machinery shop; body pressing, assembly and paint plant. There were then shops for engines, gear boxes and rear axles.

In 1926 a winding up order was made on the Wolseley Company which had been making substantial losses. Herbert really wanted to buy it, not least for sentimental reasons. William Morris also wanted it to add to his string of acquisitions. Sadly for Herbert, Morris was better placed financially and secured what remained of the company. Entrepreneur Dudley Docker who was instrumental in creating Metro-Vick had since 1924 been floating the idea of bring not only Wolseley and Morris together but adding Austin to create a company big enough to compete internationally. Herbert was keen, not so Morris and so the suggestion lapsed. Interesting in the foreword to Austin's biography, Miles Thomas, former managing director of Morris, said this of Austin losing out to Morris on the purchase of Wolseley:

"'Pa' did not sulk or moan. He just got on with the job of building the Austin empire until it was big enough, some time after his death, to absorb and digest old rival, the then Nuffield Organisation. Thus was created the British Motor Corporation."

In 1936 he was created Lord Austin. He had died in 1941. In his later years he gave substantially to good causes mainly hospitals and £250,000 to the Rutherford Laboratory in Cambridge.

Further reading:

Z.E. Lambert and R.J. Wyatt, Lord Austin - The Man (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1968)

William Morris - Lord Nuffield

William Richard Morris was born on 10 October 1877 in Worcester where his father, Frederick, was working as a draper. Both Frederick and William's mother, Emily Ann, were of Oxfordshire yeoman stock and both had received a sound education. The indoor life of a draper didn't suit Frederick and so the family returned to Oxford and farming in Cowley. They had seven children of whom William was the eldest. Five died in childhood but William's sister lived a full life in Oxford.

William attended the village school but left at age fifteen when his father had to give up his job through ill health. Frederick returned to bookkeeping which he had learnt at the drapers and he was by all accounts meticulous. The evidence was there to see in the early records of his son's business.

William showed an early aptitude for things mechanical, particularly bicycles. He owned a penny farthing and an early solid-tired safety bicycle. His first job was in the bicycle trade where he learnt his basic skills. These he developed when he set up on his own. As an engineer he was entirely self taught.

William Morris was a remarkable man by any measure. Among my father's books was a biography of Morris by P.W.S. Andrews and Elizabeth Brunner and I drew on this for my book How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World in which I seek to tell the Morris story in the context of British manufacturing more generally. Here I record just four anecdotes which seem to me helpful in summing up the man who did of course found the Morris Motor Company and endow the Nuffield Foundation.

The first was the occasion of the 1906 General Election, and candidates were perceiving a benefit in having a motor car to carry them round on their electioneering. It seems the Morris’s reputation was spreading far and wide, for he was asked by a candidate in Stirling to find a suitable car. There were none available in Britain, and so Morris set off for Paris where he found a Lacoste & Batman car. This was a highly regarded make, and Morris must have felt thoroughly satisfied. That is, until twenty-five miles from Paris, when the car broke down with a seized gear-box and back-axle. He discovered that despite promises, oil and grease had not been filled before he set off. Morris returned to Paris, and bought the necessary parts, which he then fitted and set off again. Five miles short of Amiens, a broken exhaust valve stopped the car once more. Happily, spare valves had been provided, but they were one eighth of an inch too long. He did what many early motorists did in such circumstances, and spent one and a half hours grinding the valve down on the cobble stones to the required size. He then made it back to Oxford where his staff took over to drive up to Stirling. Late that night, he received a message that the car had broken down again, just short of York, with a broken bevel gear in the back axle. Morris set off for York, and, with the help of a local blacksmith, made and brazed two new teeth to the bevel. This sequence of break down and repair followed him all the way to Stirling, where he arrived two weeks late and much the poorer. He offered to rescind the contract, but the purchaser went ahead and no more was heard. Morris had though learned a great deal, all of which he incorporated into the design of the Morris Oxford. The other thing he learnt was not to make all the car himself, but to seek reliable suppliers of the key parts.

.........................

In the mid thirties, a delegation from the War Office visited Moscow to witness the annual armaments parade and they saw a very basic but very fast tank. On making enquiries they discovered that it was built round a new suspension system developed by a man called Christie in the United States. The system enabled the tank to go fast, but also relatively smoothly, making it much safer for the driver, who previously would often be knocked out should the tank encounter a sharp undulation in the land it was crossing. Lord Nuffield purchased a Christie tank with his company’s own money and then proceeded to develop a new Nuffield tank employing the Christie suspension. The result was the Cruiser. In May 1940 the first few Cruiser tanks arrived in France.

...........................

Another major Nuffield initiative was that of the Civil Repair Organisation. This had begun as an RAF initiative, but, with increasing demands on their manpower, they were content to hand it over to Lord Nuffield as Director General of Maintenance - RAF, with headquarters and one of the six repair depots at Cowley. Throughout the Battle of Britain, RAF planes were being shot down, making forced landings or landing at base with battle damage. It soon became obvious that to carry out repairs to get the planes airborne must make sense. Andrews gives some numbers. The total number of people employed in aircraft production was 664,200; a further 63,600 carried out repairs on some 80,000 aircraft put back into service over the period. Ernest Fairfax, in his closer look at the wartime contribution of the Nuffield companies, Calling All Arms, adds some more detail. There were in effect three strands to the operation: those mobile units who would go round the country retrieving damaged aircraft; the repair factories themselves; but then the foundries where scrap metal would be recycled into new aircraft. He suggests that the metal recovered was enough to build five thousand new planes.

..........................

Lord Nuffield, who had been to see Chilwell, had told the War Minister, Mr Hore Belisha, about all that was happening in the mechanisation of the army. So, when in the summer of 1939 the question of an appointment as Deputy Director of Ordnance Services (Motor Transport) came up, the War Minister asked, ‘why not Williams at Chilwell?’

Williams was my father and Chilwell the Army Centre for Mechanisation which he created. He went on to serve as Controller of Ordnance Services of which I write in War on Wheels.

Further reading:

Andrews, P.W.S. and Brunner, Elizabeth The Life of Lord Nuffield – A Study in Enterprise and Benevolence, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955).

R.E. Crompton - pioneer of electrical engineering

 The Cromptons were a wealthy Yorkshire family with extensive estates and the young Crompton grew up knowing he was destined for career in the army or diplomatic service. It was a visit to the Great Exhibition of 1851 that gave young Crompton then aged six quite different ideas. He had travelled to London on a railway train pulled by six steam engines. To add to this were Daniel Gooch's broad gauge Lord of the Isles and Thomas Crampton's Liverpool. He had caught the steam bug and set about making his own steam road vehicle the Bluebell. As is the way with invention, this first iteration failed.

Crompton was gazetted as an ensign in the 3rd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade was was sent out to India. Steam followed him for he saw how painfully slow transport was in India, but also how good the roads were. The answer was a vehicle called the Primer with rubber tyres. This simply did not have the power and, if it did, the tyres slipped. So back to the drawing board and Ransome, Sims and Head of Orwell Works in Ipswich. The result was the Chenab pulling an omnibus capable of seating 130 people. In the event the payload was Crompton's new wife and an entourage to provide for the every need of the Chenab. The journey was astonishing for the time, being all the way to Wolverhampton. Apart from the length of the journey, it became known for the first recorded instance of car sickness.

As I write in my blog on Chelmsford, it was this East Anglian town that brought Crompton to electricity for which he is best known. The route, though, was circuitous. Two cousin had bough the Stanton Ironworks in the Erewash Valley and were keen to begin production of iron pipes. They engaged R.E. Crompton to manage the project to bring the works into use. The timescale was such that 24 hour working was required and this needed lighting. Crompton had heard of the work of the French Gamme with rudimentary dynamo and arc lamp. This proved effective and Crompton went on to develop it as I tell in the blog.

So much of invention seems to be about collaboration. Crompton was contacted by Joseph Swan of Newcastle and he visited to be met with a bright display of incandescent comprising a filament suspended in a vacuum within a glass globe. The two men went on to collaborate on lighting installations in a number of great houses. An interesting aside was the birth of the trade of wiring contractors said to have taking up the slack from bell hangers. Another collaboration was with the Swiss engineer Sulzer, whose name also appears when British Railways moved away from steam to diesel electric. With Crompton it was in the context of power transmission where Sulzer had used some of Crompton's dynamos to generate electricity to power electric motors.

Crompton secured his first large scale contract in Vienna which had suffered dreadful fires in its opera house and theatres from defective gas lighting. Electricity was the answer and Crompton installed Crompton-Willans generating sets to provide DC power at 400 volts taken down to 100 volts for the swan incandescent bulbs. From this success he provided power for the new Kensington Court Estate, again using DC. At this time, as I wrote in my blog on Edison, AC was becoming increasingly used including by Ferranti at Deptford. Nonetheless for lighting DC remained more reliable to a few decades to come.

A home laboratory is clearly what everyone needs and Crompton one at his Kensington home where he would explore electricity alongside Faraday and Kelvin.

Crompton was not one to be confined to particular areas of engineering. He was a keen cyclist and turned his attention to the improvement of road surfaces.

In his final years he advocated a national electricity grid to allow the population to spread out across the country reducing overcrowding in industrial areas. Surely we can see the need for this now with the north south divide.

Further reading:

L.T.C. Rolt, Great Engineers (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962)

John and Charlotte Guest - GKN

In 1759, in Dowlais near Merthyr Tydfil, an iron works was founded by a group of iron masters. Eight years later, John Guest joined the company as works manager. John was succeeded by his son Thomas and in turn by his grandson also John. The iron works prospered. I tell the story of the iron works in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

In 1848 Dowlais ironworks only just survived disaster when it very nearly failed to renew the lease of the land on which the works were built. The death of Sir John four years later could also have been the end, but for his remarkable wife, Charlotte, some twenty-seven years his junior.

The GKN: Brief History of the Company tells how ‘she knew the business inside out, having immersed herself in it to support and advise her husband. She had drawn up the monthly accounts, been involved in planning, and learned the principles of iron production’.

Exploring further, it is clear that Charlotte was a colourful character. Her grandson, the Earl of Bessborough, published extracts from her diaries from which it can be seen that Charlotte was the daughter of the ninth Earl of Lindsey and had had a troubled childhood. She met Josiah John Best when she was twenty one and married him after a courtship of only three months.

They were shunned by society. Charlotte’s response was to devote her time to supporting her husband in his business, in having ten children and in mastering the Welsh language, to the extent that her translation of The Mabinigiori is lauded to this day. She also was not one to allow society to have its own way. She and her husband bought a fashionable house in London and an estate in Dorset. With her support, Josiah John became MP for Merthyr. Following his death, Charlotte ran the business for three years during difficult times when industrial unrest was rife. She built a strong management team to support he son Lord Wimbourne who would take over the running of the company. She married the family’s tutor Charles Schrieber in 1855.

The Guest family passed the batten when they decided to sell the iron works. In 1834, in Birmingham, John Nettlefold had opened a woodscrew mill. And in 1856, just down the road, Arthur Keen had founded the Patent Nut & Bolt Company (PNB) with his American partner, Francis Watkins, and which had become a major manufacturer of fasteners.’

Keen was not only an engineer, he was a director of the Birmingham and Midland Bank, and it was through this connection that the name Guest re-enters the story. Keen had heard that Lord Wimborne, now head of the Guest family, was looking to sell Dowlais ironworks and, whilst PNB was many times smaller, Keen made an approached and a deal was done for the purchase for £1.5 million. The Press were intrigued. The South Wales Daily News of 20 July 1900 observed the good value to the purchaser adding “As to Guest, Keen & Co, I look on it as a second Consett; repetition of the Nut and Bolt; an industrialist at the top of the list”. Keen had done well, and a year later he added Nettlefold, making the company we now know as Guest, Keen and Nettlefold.8 In 1905, GKN was Britain’s 15th largest company and even now a leading defence contractor.

Further reading

Edgar Jones, A History of GKN, (London: Macmillan).

Ronald Weeks - two world wars, Pilkington and Vickers

 It is chilling to think that many of those men born in the 1890s would serve through two world wars (if they survived) and could also be part of the step change in British manufacturing witnessed in the twentieth century. Ronald Weeks was one such man. He was the first Director-General of Army Equipment in the Second World War and had been and would be an innovative manufacturer.

He was the son of a Durham mining engineer. The family had been farmers in County Durham for many decades. Ronald went from school in Durham down to Charterhouse in Surrey and then to Cambridge, where he was an exceptional student. He was one of the first Cambridge graduates to pursue a career in industry.

In 1914, he was commissioned in the Prince of Wales’s Volunteers and later gained a regular commission in the Rifle Brigade where he gained a reputation for leadership and initiative in battle. He was awarded an MC in January 1917, a DSO in January 1918, a Bar to the MC in July 1918 and the Croix de Guerre as well as being mentioned in despatches. He ended the war as a major in the Rifle Brigade.

He then worked at Pilkingtons becoming the first non-family director. In the 1930s, he was part of Management Research Group No.1 with Seebohm Rowntree, exploring the management issues which were presented by companies growing ever larger.

In the Second World War he rose to have responsibility for army equipment as Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff. I explore this more in Dunkirk to D Day

After the war he joined Vickers as chairman of English Steel where he negotiated first its nationalisation and then its denationalisation. He became executive chairman of Vickers, a massive job. He held the chair through a time of radical change when Vickers had been brave enough to invest in a new plant at Tinsley Park in Sheffield in the period between nationalisations when other steel makers held back. They also grappled with the transition from major arms manufacturer to manufacture of everything from aircraft (the Viscount) to computers (Powers Samas)

J.D. Scott, writing The History of Vickers, recognised in Weeks something quite special. He writes ‘by the end of the Second World War, Weeks’ brilliance as an administrator had become recognised as something of a phenomenon. If his career and his personality had been designed for the chairmanship of Vickers they would have differed very little from the actuality’.

Further reading:

J.D. Scott, Vickers - A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)

Edward, Tom and Albert, and Douglas Vickers - three generations of steel makers

 By the mid eighteenth century members of the Vickers family were in business at Mill Sands, Sheffield as millers. With the growth of steel, William Vickers moved to a rolling mill business nearby and entered into a partnership which would become in 1828 Naylor, Hutchinson, Vickers & Company. William's interests turned towards the Sheffield and Rotherham Railway and its was Edward who moved from the mill business to take the lead at the Mill Sands Engineering Works.

Edward married Ann Naylor and they had four sons two of whom, Tom and Albert, were sent to Germany to receive a technical education. It was not long before the company became, simply, Vickers.

Edward was ambitious for himself and his family, but also for Sheffield, which at that time, ‘as a borough was still young, having been incorporated in 1843. Its centre lacked the dignified buildings, the wealthy shops, the well-laid streets which were even then to be found in the centres of the largest industrial cities as well as in the older communities.’ Edward became a Councillor and then, in 1846, an Alderman. All the time his business was growing and becoming very profitable. Part of the reason for this profitability was the export trade with America, where Vickers had appointed a German, Ernst Benzon, as their agent; he later became a partner.

Vickers had grown out of the Mill Sands Works and had begun work on what would become the River Don Works, with technical innovation introduced by Tom Vickers who was emerging as the technical partner. It was Albert who had the entrepreneurial flair.

I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World of the growth of the company and how the expansion of Britain's railways would consume Vickers production for much the mid nineteenth century, but then the American railways would take over until men like Carnegie began the American steel industry. Demand for armaments succeeded those for railways and it was Albert who drew Vickers towards The Naval Construction and Armaments Company at Barrow, Nordenfelt and submarines and Maxim and machine guns.

The truth is that Vickers, one way or another, formed the backbone to much of our heavy manufacturing. They made steel. They were armourers to the nation. They financed Beardmore's massive shipyard on the Clyde.They built ships, but then aircraft and submarines. They built railways locomotives and a tracked competitor to Caterpillar. But so much else. They were part founders of International Computers, the British answer to IBM. They made concrete making machinery and equipment for breweries. They made printing machinery and office equipment including duplicators.

In terms of the Vickers family, Edward was the miller who grasped opportunity. He married into the Naylor family which was already financially secure. With Ann, he had four sons two of whom I have mentioned and for whom he used international connection to secure technical education in Germany. Tom was the engineer or more probably the metallurgist who pushed the boundaries of steel making. Albert pushed the boundaries of relationships and secured the growth of the company into armaments. Both Tom and Albert were by all accounts good looking and easily adopted an aristocratic grace. Tom sent his son Douglas to Eton from where he entered the business on the technical side at the bottom. He gained expertise and experience but by the time to took the chair, the post First World War world was changing. This Vickers was embraced with open arms by the colourful entrepreneur Dudley Docker from which Metropolitan Vickers emerged. Vickers also embraced arch rivals Armstrong Whitworth.

The chair passed outside the Vickers family but a remarkable institution had been created.

I wrote about them in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World in chapters 5, 7, 12, 13 and 15 and in Vehicles to Vaccines in chapters 3, 6, 12, 14, 15, 16.

Further reading:

J.D. Scott, Vickers – A History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962)

William Armstrong - hydraulics engineer and armament manufacturer

William Armstrong was born on 26 November 1810 in a three storey terrace house in Shiedfield on the edge of Pandon Dene not far from the expanding Newcastle.

William Armstrong was a native of the hills surrounding Newcastle where he had become entranced by the power of water. He was by training a solicitor. His biographer, Henrietta Heald, tells how he followed this, rather than his first love of engineering, to please his father. William attended first Newcastle and then Bishops Aukland Grammar Schools from which he took articles with his father's friend Armorer Donkin and went on to qualify as a solicitor working for a further ten years. Engineering, though, was ever present. Armorer Donkin was an early member of Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society which perhaps encouraged an interest in science in the young William.

Walks on the hills of his native Northumberland had sown seeds of how the power of water may be employed in industry. This led to experiments in hydraulics. James Rendel, a civil engineer who had studied under Thomas Telford, was reputed to be one of the foremost hydraulic engineers of his day, and he encouraged William Armstrong to follow his passion and set up WG Armstrong & Company with a manufactory for the production of hydraulic machines. This he did at Elswick near Newcastle. Heald describes the well-ordered site, the men who worked with Armstrong and the worry the economics of the business placed on him. He had no trouble getting orders for his machines, but worried greatly at the need to raise capital to finance the business.

 Fortunately, associates with the relevant financial expertise and connections were to hand. It seems to be all about connections. James Rendel had been in partnership with Nathaniel Beardmore. I immediately thought of William Beardmore, the Glasgow engineer, but could find no close family connection. Another of Armstrong's associates was Thomas Sopwith, whom, I found, was the grandfather of the pioneering aviation engineer who produced the Sopwith Camel in the First World War. In exploring Armstrong, I looked at hydraulics more generally and encountered Joseph Bramah, the machine tool manufacturer who invented the hydraulic press which took the place of the steam hammer in heavy engineering. Bramah had begun life as a carpenter, but then applied his skills to develop a more secure lock; the company that bears his name is still trading. One of Bramah's associates was Henry Maudslay, who had been a storeman at the Woolwich Arsenal, of whose career as a foremost machine tool maker I tell more elsewhere. Cyril Mausdlay wrote an account of Henry's life; Cyril was one of the founders of the Maudslay Motor Company.  Henry had set up  shipbuilder Maudslay Sons & Field, after he left Bramah. It is all connected.

William Armstrong's first order had been for the Newcastle Chronicle to power its printing press. Another, much larger, early order was from the Albert Dock in Liverpool, first for warehouse lifts and then for cranes. Isambard Kingdom Brunel ordered hydraulic turntables for his new GWR Paddington Station. Armstrong made hydraulic lock gates for the docks at Great Grimsby, and also provided hydraulic power to sluices and cranes on the docks from a 300ft water tower ‘built in the style of Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy’. Other major orders followed. The use of the power of water was of massive benefit to these operations which need to move heavy bulk with ease. Another of Armstrong’s early orders was from the Manchester machine tool maker, Joseph Whitworth & Co. 

I write about Whitworth in this link. There is little evidence of close contact between the two men or their companies. Their clash came in relation to rifled artillery. The Crimea had shown how woefully inadequate British artillery was. If sufficiently powerful it was too big; in any event if was grossly inaccurate and this was the case for both the army and navy. The same was true of the enemy's armaments but men like Krupp were working hard. A shell spinning from the rifled barrel of a gun proved more accurate. Whitworth devised a gun firing an hexagonal shell which had the draw back of having to use particular ammunition. Both Armstrong and Whitworth were faced with the problem of achieving a perfectly straight barrel, albeit with a rifled surface, and gun metal strong enough to withstand ever more powerful explosions.

For Armstrong, Hydraulics gave way to armaments and I tell in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World how his rifled big gun was adopted by the War Office in preference to designs by both Whitworth and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. This paved the way to an influential role in Britain's armaments industry. He was regarded as one of the 'deadly triumvirate' alongside Krupp of Germany and Schneider of France. Heald quotes quotes William Manchester's biography of Krupp. 'Over the next eighty years they were to be celebrated first as shields of national honour and later, after their slaughtering machines were hopelessly out of control, as merchants of death.'

Lord Armstrong, as he became, was President of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society from 1860 to 1900. He created a fascinating house at Cragside just outside Newcastle which boasted all manner of gadgets run by hydraulic power. On a grander scale he restored Bamburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast.

Further reading:

Henrietta Heald: William Armstrong - Magician of the North (Northumbria Press)

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

 Isambard, born in 1806, was the only son of Marc Brunel the celebrated engineer of the Thames Tunnel. Marc was French and as a royalist fled France after the Revolution spending six years in the USA where he built a reputation which would carry him safe through Francophobe London. He had brought with him the design for a machine to manufacture pulley blocks for sail ships. He eventually found an engineer, Henry Maudsley, capable and willing to put plans into practice. I tell elsewhere of the success of the project and how it was followed by a successful venture into sawmills in Battersea.

All the while Isambard was undergoing his education in France and receiving a technical education in part under the eye of the the eminent French watchmaker, Louis Breguet. and in part from regular visits to Maudsley's workshop. He inherited his father's skills at drawing and grew into a determined young man.

His first test came from the Thames Tunnel, a pioneering project to create a tunnel under the tidal Thames. The project was beset with challenges not least the lack of reliable information about the geology nor the extent of dredging of the river. It was a project that attracted some of the great engineers of the age. The Rennies tried and failed; Richard Trevithick took over but also without success. Marc Brunel, with the twenty year old Isambard at his side, brought a new approach to the tunnelling with a machine built by Maudsley. He was joined by William Armstrong and others. Progress was followed by disaster, regrouping and further progress and further disaster. Eventually the project was placed on hold for seven years.

There is a record of Isambard experimenting with the use of Portland cement in repairing the tunnel in 1829. Recent excavations by the University of Bristol in Bristol docks reveal that Brunel again used Portland Cement in his works on the house built for the construction of the engine of his SS Great Britain in 1839, still some five years before the full commercial exploitation of the new cement. This was a man at the forefront of technology.

This jumps ahead a little for Isambard was first occupied in early stages of building the Clifton suspension bridge and then work on Bristol docks both of which lead to the opportunity to pitch for the London to Bristol railway, named by Brunel The Great Western Railway. I write about this in the context of Swindon where the GWR workshops were based. It was a gargantuan task.

1841 was a good year for the Brunels. The Thames Tunnel was completed much to Marc's relief, and Isambard's phenominal work in digging the Box tunnel finally connected London to Bristol. These were both ground breaking projects and demanded not only skill but incredible determination.

The Great Western Railway made its way southwest of Bristol as the South Devon Railway. Here we come to an aspect of Brunel that perhaps marks him out as a visionary. He could appreciate the drawbacks of locomotives even on the broad gauge which he favoured. They were too heavy and insufficiently powerful. Elsewhere engineers were exploring what became known as the atmospheric engine which relied on a central pipe running between the rails evacuated of air by steam pump stations as intervals along the line. A piston attached to the underside of the rolling stock would run inside the pipe pushed by atmospheric pressure against the vacuum. In a few test installations it was seen to work, but not without serious drawbacks. The Stephensons were not convinced but Brunel tried the arrangement on a stretch of the line around Totnes. The systems proved impractical and conventional locomotives were used. The concept is perhaps now employed on monorails using electricity rather than air.

Brunel had other fish to fry. As those of us who know the train line into Cornwall will vouch, there are many valleys to cross. The GWR company knew there wasn't the likely income to justify stone viaducts and so Brunel used Baltic pine capable of lasting thirty years or more to build astonishing geometrical structures. Sadly all have now been replaced by stone or steel.

In May 1859 the most revered of Brunel's work, the bridge over the Tamar at Saltash was opened. It followed the principles espoused by Robert Stephenson at Menai, but over the Tamar the tubes were oval (measuring 12ft 3 in high and 16ft 9 in across) and carried the weight of the track hanging underneath. Whenever our young family drove across the much later road suspension bridge I would ask my children who it was who built the rail bridge: Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

I mentioned the SS Great Britain which was possibly the pinnacle of Brunel's shipbuilding prowess. He had built the Great Western Railway; a logical extension was to go further west across the Atlantic to New York. The answer was the SS Great Western built of timber in Bristol powered by engines fitted by Maudsley Son and Field in Blackwall. The largest ship built to date, embraced the technology that Brunel had learnt from his work on bridges. A problem remained: conventional wisdom was that the amount of coal needed for an Atlantic crossing would be too great for a ship to carry. If the ship were to be increased in size, its hull would have too great a drag. Brunel disagreed and proved his point magnificently. The SS Great Britain of which I wrote in this link about Bristol was the logical extension in strength, speed and luxury.

It was probably inevitable that the pinnacle would be followed by disappointment. The Atlantic had been conquered. Now trade was growing between Britain and Australia, but how might a steam ship travel that far let alone return? Brunel had the answer in what became known as the Great Eastern which was big enough to carry sufficient coal for both the outward and return journeys, incidentally supplied by William Cory whose name appeared elsewhere in my researches. He drew on his experience with the Great Britain and Saltash Bridge to design a robust hull. He looked to James Watt & Sons for the engine to power the screw. This alone was insufficient and so paddles were added with engines by Scott Russell. The whole structure was so vast that it took the whole of the Napier Yard at Millwall with the Scott Russell yard used for fabrication. Iron came from Beale & Co of Parkgate Ironworks, Rotherham. The Naysmith steam hammer was brought to bear on the massive castings. The Tangye Brothers of Cornwall Works, Birmingham came in the nick of time with their powerful and effective hydraulic presses which proved vital in the final launch. As with everything Brunel touched, detailed planning was present throughout. He had at his side trusted lieutenants: Captain Claxton who had masterminded the erection of the Menai bridge and Daniel Gooch who had built so many locomotives.

Reading Rolt's account of the build all was well except for the main contractor Scott Russell who did what contractors so often do, play a blame game. The problem with this was that the project was at the very forefront of shipbuilding technology where collaboration rather than exhausting confrontation is vital. The last straw was the monumental task of the launch which Brunel had planned but was denied sufficient time to for testing by lenders whose patience had come to an end. To add to this were a hostile press and crowds of onlookers hungry to see failure. All of this took an awful toll on Brunel's health and he died before the ship was successfully launched. To me one bright star was the presence of Robert Stephenson at his side; they may have been business rivals but their personal friendship endured.

Further reading

L.T.C. Rolt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (London: Longmans, 1957)

Joseph Whitworth - the world's best mechanician

 In his biography, Norman Atkinson makes the point that it is sometimes difficult to trace the early days of people who later became famous. With Joseph Whitworth, whom Atkinson describes as the 'World's Best Mechanician', the problem was that contemporary writers were keen to give the great man as great a pedigree, so early biographers paint a relatively comfortable childhood accompanied by a good education. Atkinson's and others' later research reveal something rather different.

All agree that Joseph was born in Stockport in 1803 and that he had a younger brother John and a much younger sister Susan after whose birth their mother died. Their father, Charles, was a reed maker, that is a man who repaired machinery used in the cotton industry. This was not a well paid job and the family lived in a back to back. The family's position became more precarious when steam power came in, to the sometimes violent opposition of traditional weavers. For a man who repaired steam powered machinery, daily life was dangerous with the ever present angry mob.

Charles found solace in the Congregationalist Chapel and eventually gave up his mill job for the even less well paid role of a junior minister. It was perhaps a lack of income that prompted Charles to place Susan in an orphanage and to find foster homes for John and Joseph.

Joseph ran away from his foster home to Manchester and found work with a textile machinery manufacturer.

At age 21, he set off to London hitching lifts by canal boat. The story goes that on one such boat he fell in love with the bargee's daughter. They married in Ilkeston and together made their way to London.

His destination was the workshop of Maudsley which had become the go-to place for up and coming engineers. In 1825, Whitworth took the job of an ordinary bench fitter and turner. For Whitworth this was not enough and he took a succession of posts with different engineers to broaden his experience: Holtzapffel, Wright & Sons, and then Joseph Clement. He worked briefly for Charles Babbage on his calculating machine.

In 1832 Joseph and Fanny moved to Manchester arriving at a time when locomotive engineers were pioneering their craft, so Stephenson of Newcastle and Tayleur of Liverpool plus the local Fairbairn and Sharp Roberts. Into the mix came two young German engineers, Charles Beyer who would later join with Peacock and John Bodmer, plus Scottish engineer Naysmith. These three had an academic education and fitted well with the growing scientific community in Manchester born more of chemistry. Joseph joined in hungry to learn, and succeeded. Railway locomotives were becoming more sophisticated and demanded quality machine tools.

Joseph and Naysmith both set up in the Piccadilly area of Manchester, with Naysmith on a rather more substantial scale. He gained repair work from the growing number of mechanised cotton mills and was soon employing a number of men. Joseph was more intent on developing better machine tools. He is sometimes criticised for copying, but this misunderstands the process. Joseph would take a machine tool and see its shortcomings; he would then devise an often small modification which would significantly improve performance. The problem that faced Joseph was that mill owners would only invest in machinery if employee numbers could be reduced. Joseph's improvement would enhance efficiency and improve the lot of the worker but only seldom replace people. His ventures into textile machine came to little avail.

Joseph gained the respect and friendship of Fairbairn who was by then the doyen of Manchester engineers and with Fairbairn’s encouragement he focused on machine tools and gained a glowing reputation, This led to his greatest achievement: a standard measurement.

A standard yard had been adopted by Elizabeth I but the iterations of this yard varied as did its subdivision into inches, so much so that the north of England used the 'short inch' and the south the long one. The establishment were content for standard measurement to be achieved by lines engraved on a metal bar. The first bench micrometer had been made by Maudsley building on the early work of James Watt. Whitworth was convinced that for a standard the distance between the ends of a bar offered greater accuracy.

It took argument of forty years for Whitworth's method to be adopted, but thereafter it became possible to produce interchangeable parts accurate to one thousandths of an inch. Whitworth's aim was to achieve on millionth but this was only attained in the 20th century. Standard measurement was followed by standard screws, and, again, this demanded years of arguments.

Whitworth was keen to be accepted by the Institution of Civil Engineers, for at that time Mechanical Engineering had yet to achieve that status. Whitworth was grudgingly admitted as an associate. When the Institution of Mechanical Engineers was formed in 1847 with George Stephenson as president and Charles Beyer as Vice-President. Joseph was granted full membership of both institutions in 11 January 1847.

Joseph's great claim to fame was as a maker of machine tools and I write of this in my post on Manchester's 19th century tool makers since he wasn't alone. He did stand for the advanced design of his workshop, build by William Fairbairn. A glass roof which formed the basis of the design for the roof of St Pancras Station spanned the whole workshop providing excellent natural light. It had a overhead crane and a power shaft driven by steam from which power tools would run from belt drives. He did attempt a clutch drive but this would have to wait a number of decades until a full solution was provided. He did make very large machine tools and the workshop had rails and a turntable for them to be manoeuvred. Among his successful projects were the screw cutting machine, but also a machine for the production of pottery of standard sizes and a massive brass cast screw of a steam ship.

Joseph Whitworth's legacy was in the machine tools he made, his contribution to gun manufacture but more so universal measurement and universal screw thread. To this he added a personal fortune £1 million he gave to trustees in the knowledge that they would apply it to the advancement of technical education for men and women at all grades of engineering employment in the cities of Manchester and Salford.

After Joseph's death in 1887, William Armstrong feared that Vickers may seek to purchase in particular the Openshaw armour plating works and so bid first and successfully, The machine tool business was sold to Craven Brothers in 1928.

Further reading:

Norman Atkinson: Sir Joseph Whitworth - the World's Best Mechanician (Stroud: Sutton, 1996)

300,000 blog hits - the story of manufacturing places is resonating around the world

Manufacturing had a huge impact on Britain as is clear from what some might refer to as its aftermath seen all too vividly in current political conversations.  

A timeline of Lincoln engineering produced for the spark festival 

I have been exploring its history for some five years and have seen its relevance as a reflection in modern Britain itself and the social consequences of economic change across generations. I saw the need to dig geographically as well as chronologically, my current project is the result of that geographical quest.

Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been buried and became rich seams of coal. Tiny seaside communities surviving on fishing witnessed the building of ever larger ships carrying cargoes of coal or wool and returning with exotic goods from the east. Waring barons found their swords replaced by guns cast from ore left in the earth’s crust. Disperate communities were linked first by sea then by turnpike, canal, railway, road and air.

Manufacturing places emerged close to raw materials and sources of energy. Climate and topography gathered manufacturing which thrived in local conditions. In time as centres of population emerged, manufacturing followed to meet their every need. Inventions were pursued where skills had been nurtured.

None of this was planned, least of all two world wars which energised manufacturers across the land to war effort, leaving vast factories in their wake crying out for new uses.

In truth it is hard to say why Britain moved ahead of its great trading rivals: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. But it did, only to be overtaken by America, Germany and France and replaced by developing countries.

This left manufacturers stranded with factories and workforces no longer needed, leaving populations without work, steelworks replaced by supermarkets, factories by warehouses.

Education for manufacturing

 Oxford and Cambridge Universities, unlike the Scots, French and Germans, rather looked down on manufacturing preferring to teach the classics and didn't offer science degrees until after 1870. Cambridge had offered lectures on pure mathematics, but not on anything applied.

Eric Hobsbawm in his book, The Age of Revolution makes the point that none of the inventions which enabled the early industrial revolution was really high tech. He is then scathing on the subject of the English education system, which in his view was only saved by the presence of Scots from their schools and universities, and he lists James Watt, Thomas Telford, Loudon McAdam and James Mill as some of their success stories. The French had their Ecole Polytechnique and the Germans Bergakademie, but the English stuck fast to classical education at Oxford and Cambridge, fearing, he suggests, the genie of science.

Yet, the British middle classes had developed an appetite for science and there sprung up around the country series of lectures on new and not so new discoveries which would attract good audiences. In the nineteenth century, and earlier in some places, voluntary Literary and Philosophical Societies were formed where interested people could meet to discuss matters of arts and sciences; the modern divide between arts and sciences hadn't yet fossilised. During the period often referred to as ‘the long 19th century’ (c.1780-1914), Lit & Phils could be found all over England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Speakers would attract large audiences on a whole range of subjects.

There was a genuine concern for the education of manual workers and, for these, Mechanics Institutes began to emerge to offer teaching in science. There seems to have been no overall pattern with credit being given to George Birkbeck for the London institute, to John Anderson for Glasgow and for a Birmingham establishment also staking a claim. Whilst the avowed purpose was to give relevant education to manual workers, it is suggested that the outcome was to support clerical and more highly skilled manual workers.

Colleges also began to appear with curricula aimed at vocations.

This was far from the whole story. The string upon which Charlotte Bronte's story of Shirley hangs was the revolution taking place in industry, where machinery was massively increasing the productivity of men and also removing low-skilled jobs and replacing them with those demanding of higher skills. The workers in Shirley didn’t see it that way; they believed that machines were robbing them of their jobs.

The Mechanics Institutes and equivalent bodies around the country had, for twenty years or so, been giving working men the opportunity to learn the skills that they would need in the new industrial world. The Working Men’s College was different. It didn’t lecture; it taught. FD Maurice believed that if ‘knowledge and culture, science and literature are any good, that good is apart from any trace of utility’.

In 1854 F.D. Maurice, who was then the Chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn and Dean of King’s College, conceived the idea of The Working Men’s College, first at Red Lion Square and then in Great Ormond Street, largely through the means of evening classes, which would bring education within the reach of working men.

The booklet produced on the foundation of the college notes that the Reform Act of 1832 had done nothing for working men and it was only the subsequent reform in 1867 that broadened the suffrage to include householders who rented rather than owned their property. There had been a great deal of agitation for a clear voice for the working man.

Those offering education at the college included John Ruskin but also Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burn Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lowes Dickinson, who, the booklet states, taught there for some sixteen years. One of Dickinson’s many portraits was of Maurice. Of Ruskin’s involvement, the author of the booklet writes, ‘It helped the enterprise as a whole by letting the world know that one of the greatest Englishmen of the time was in active sympathy with it’. It is clear that Ruskin was thoroughly active in the project. He taught sketching and mentored a number of his students, one of whom (George Allen) would, much later, become his publisher. A further name that appears in the Working Men’s College is that of Charles Kingsley, then a clergyman, he who would go on to write Alton Locke and also The Water Babies with all its Darwinian imagery.

I explore below some of the towns which had institutions and societies tracing something of a history.

Aberdeen

Marischal College (the page image) was founded in 1593 as Aberdeen's second university; Kings College having been founded in 1495. The merchant, Robert Gordon, was educated at Marischal and in 1729 founded Robert Gordon's hospital for sons and grandsons of burgesses who were too poor to maintain them at school.

In 1824, a Mechanics Institute opened and in 1884 this transferred to what was then Robert Gordon's College. In the twentieth century, Robert Gordon's became a technical college and then much later a university. I write in this blog of how Alexander MacRobert was both educated there and later taught.

Birmingham

Osborne in his book Iron, Steam and Money in is full of praise for the English inventors who discovered their advances through years of practical experience. In the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s the new patents in cotton spinning numbered fifty-one, eighty-six and 156 respectively.

A further aspect can be seen in groupings such as the Lunar Society in Birmingham. Here, manufacturers like Wedgwood, Boulton and Watt came together with scientists including Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and, on occasions, Benjamin Franklin and Richard Arkwright to explore new ideas.

A Lit & Phil Society was formed in the 1790s which spawned the Brotherly Society which became a Mechanics Institute.

Josiah Mason's Science College was founded in Birmingham in 1875. It became part of the University of Birmingham which had a specialism of Metalurgy.

Yet even the University of Birmingham was resistant to embrace manufacturing. There is the story of the University of Birmingham being offered £120,000 to set up a production engineering degree. The University powers-that-be couldn’t quite stomach something so close to the shop floor that they eventually accepted the money but for a chair of Engineering Production.

Bristol

A Lit & Phil was formed in the 1790s

Edinburgh

A Lit & Phil was formed in the 1790s and the first -real' Mechanics Institute in 1821 as the Edinburgh School of Arts.

Glasgow

Professor John Anderson made a bequest in 1796 which enabled the founding of an institution aimed at natural philosophy and its applications in industry with Dr Thomas Garnett as its first professor. It became the Glasgow Royal Technical College. The Glasgow Mechanics Institute was formed in 1823.

Leeds

University textiles and dyeing chemistry"…………

Leicester

A Literary and Philosophical Society was established in 1835 and still offers annual public lectures. A Mechanics Institute functioned in the city for about forty years from the 1830s.

The School of Textiles in Leicester celebrated its centenary in 1983-84 with the publication of a short history. The focus was on knitting, and the founding of the college was initiated by yarn merchants witnessing the quality of continental competitors which benefitted from formal technical education. In the second half of the twentieth century the focus moved to artificial fibres, machinery capable of producing whole garments, and textile and knitwear design.

Liverpool

A Mechanics and Apprentices Library and Reading Room was formed in 1823.

London

The Royal Institution, still loved for its Christmas lectures, was founded by Count Rumford in 1799 and later appointed Dr Thomas Garnett from Glasgow as its professor. A London Mechanics Institute was formed in 1824 in Chancery Lane and attracted Dr Birkbeck as a lecturer; it did later take his name and moved to its present site.

Manchester

A Literary and Philosophical Society was established in 1781.

A Mechanics Institute was formed in 1824 with founders including machine tools inventor Richard Roberts, engineer William Fairbairn and John Dalton later known for Atomic Theory.

Owen's College for the teaching of engineering science was founded by a group of Manchester engineers including William Fairbairn and Joseph Whitworth who were both strongly committed to making education widely available.

Newcastle

The Lit & Phil had been meeting since 1793 in various locations around Newcastle to discuss and debate the matters of the day, the collection of books grew and artefacts and curiosities gathered. By the early 19th century it had become a home for inventors, pioneers and visionaries and a focal point for the industrial revolution.

It officially opened its handsome neoclassical home in 1825. George Stephenson demonstrated his ‘miners safety lamp’ to the Society in 1815 and Joseph Swan lit a public room with electric light for the first time here in 1881.

Past presidents include 1855–1859: Robert Stephenson and 1860–1900: William, Lord Armstrong

In the late nineteenth century John Hancock became secretary of the society and, with his brother Albany a celebrated naturalist, arranged for the purchase of land at Barras Bridge to house the society’s growing natural history collection. This is now known as the Great North Museum.

Sheffield

A Mechanics and Apprentices Library was formed in 1823.

York

It was not a great hub of manufacturing like Sheffield or Birmingham, yet it was chosen as the venue for the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at the invitation of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. York then had little industry, but it did have a community passionate about discovery, whether of the city’s history or the world around.

Further reading

• https://www-historytoday-com.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/archive/feature/extraordinary-rise-and-inexplicable-decline-lit-phils
• Kelly, Thomas. “The Origin of Mechanics’ Institutes.” British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1952, pp. 17–27. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3119430. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.

William Fairbairn - the doyen of Manchester engineers

 William Fairbairn was a Scot, born in Kelso in 1789.

At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to Percy Main Colliery, near Newcastle-on-Tyne. In 1811, he moved to London, where he worked for Rennie and Penn.

In 1817, he launched a mill-machinery business in Manchester with a former shop-mate, James Lillie. The business was successful and in the 1830s he expanded into locomotive building. In 1836, fearing that London yards were getting all the work for iron steam ships, he borrowed heavily to set up the Millwall Yard. This survived until 1847 when it was taken over by IK Brunel and John Scott Russell where Brunel built his famous but financially unsuccessful Great Eastern.

Fairbairn had long been interested in education for working men and championed the Mechanics Institute movement; he had been party to setting up the Manchester Institute in 1824. He was frustrated by the lack of national co-ordination; there were eventually some 1,200 such institutes. In 1835 he decided that a magazine would help drawn the movement together and launched The Workshop with Naysmith who, whilst talented and a good communicator, did not have feel for the working man.

The magazine failed and this drew Fairbairn to the self educated Joseph Whitworth and the two became close friends and collaborators, both becoming part of the Manchester Lit & Phil. Fairbairn would become president from 1855-1860.

Henry Maudslay would become, in the eyes of William Fairburn, 'one of the six engineers who completely dominated the profession between 1790 and 1830, the year before he died. The other five were John Rennie, Thomas Telford, James Watt, Joseph Bramah and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I write of Maudslay in the context of London machine tool makers.

At this time the Institute of Mechanical Engineers was a thing of the future and William was a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and indeed some of the work for which he is renowned is what we would now know as civil engineering. Fairbairn worked with Robert Stephenson on the Britannia and bridge over the Menai Strait and the nearby Conway bridge. He went on to work on cotton mills and then steam engines. He made a huge contribution to the design and construction of Salts Mill, which is widely regarded as his mill-building masterwork

William Fairbairn was much concerned with the lot of the working man, his eduction and his safety in the workplace. William served as President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1854.

Further reading

https://rchs.org.uk/product/william-fairbairn-the-experimental-engineer/

James Watt and Matthew Boulton - steam powered manufactories

 James Watt was a Scot, born in Greenock in January 1736. His father was a skilled carpenter employing quite a number of people working mainly on ships. He was successful and respected; he owned shares in some of the ships he worked on. He married an equally respectable woman. The family story was tragic with three of five children dying in childhood with a further child losing his life on one of his father's ships. This left James as the surviving child.

James was not a strong child and lived his life with extended periods of ill-health. His mother and father taught him at home. When he eventually went to school he did not excel and suffered because of his delicate nature. However he was a wonderful story teller and mastered mathematics. He had played with wood and tools from early childhood and had excellent craft skills.

With this background a career as a mathematical instrument maker beckoned.

I tell of Watt's crucial role in the development of steam power in the context of three places: Glasgow where he started, Falkirk where he nearly succeeded, Birmingham where he found the right partner in Matthew Boulton

Matthew Boulton was born in 1728 son Matthew Boulton (senior) a silver stamper and piercer based in Birmingham. Matthew (junior) was educated in Deritend until he needed to join his father in the business. In spite of a rudimentary education, Matthew developed a passion for classics and through his work an interest in mechanics and science. In reaching the age of majority, his father took him into partnership and its wasn't long before Matthew was running the business.

Birmingham had many craftsmen like Matthew (senior) making 'toys' objects of delight for the middle classes. Over the years these objects had become increasingly gaudy and Matthew set his sights on producing well made objects of good taste. He invented the inlaid buckle. He worked with Huntsman of Sheffield on steel objects. He explored the work being produced by the French and copied it. He borrowed fine objects and had his craftsmen copy them. He went into clock making achieving success with both design and taste. He was selling to royalty and the aristocracy not only in England but across Europe. The death of his father provided a fine inheritance and a good marriage to Ann Robinson added to this. Samuel Smiles suggests he could have retired.

Matthew Boulton had other ideas; his passion was for business and he needed more space and built the iconic Soho Manufactory (page image with thanks to the Wellcome Collection). In this fine building, getting on for 1,000 craftsmen worked on buttons, clasps, watch chains and metal wares; candle sticks, urns and brackets; clocks and silver plate. It was the workshop of the world. He was a good employer keen to offer opportunity to young men of poor backgrounds. As I tell in my blog on London, he opened an outlet in Inner London as did his friend Josiah Wedgwood who produced in ceramics beautiful objects which would sit well alongside the Soho production. We do of course not remember Boulton for any of this. It was his championing of James Watt that transformed manufacturing.

The site of the Soho Manufactory had running water sufficient to power two water mills used largely for polishing. However in summer the water levels dropped and alternative horse power had to be found and was never really satisfactory. Boulton explored the inventions of Savery and Newcomen to pump water up to fill ponds to power the mills. The cost proved prohibitive. He then corresponded with Benjamin Franklin and his friend Erasmus Darwin on the design of steam engines. Good fortune led to Dr Roebuck in Falkirk inviting Boulton to invest in the Carron Iron works and this lead to Boulton eventually meeting Watt. They took an instant liking to one another.

I tell of their developing relationship in my blog on Birmingham but more so St Austell and Camborne where Watt struggled for acceptance of his inventions by the stuck in the mud Cornish. Watt also faced endless legal arguments over patents, but with Matthew's support won through. It wasn't only Watt's inventions, the addition of steam power to manufacturing enabled Matthew to take on the Royal Mint in mechanised coin production. Once again the struggle was not technical but for acceptance. Like so many entrepreneurs Matthew struggled as his demand for capital for ever exceeded its supply. His tenacity time and again won the day.

The original partnership of Boulton and Watt was dissolved in 1800 on the expiration of the reciprocating engine patent. James Watt was sixty four and exhausted; Matthew Boulton was eight years older and with ideas still occupying his brain, not least the Soho Mint which was his pride and joy. James Watt enjoyed nearly twenty years of retirement, dying in 1819. Matthew Boulton had died ten years earlier.

James Watt is commemorated through a statue in Westminster Abbey, a seated figure in Glasgow's George Square, and the Watt Memorial Engineering & Navigational School in Greenock. He is buried at St Mary’s Church, Handsworth, Birmingham.

Further reading:

Samuel Smiles, Lives of Boulton and Watt (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2007, first published 1865)

Thomas Telford and John Smeaton - fathers of civil engineering, and John and George Rennie - civil and mechanical engineers

The Rennies were a Scots family that epitomises the connectivity of civil and mechanical engineering. 

I begin, though, with the father of civil engineering, John Smeaton, who is best known for rebuilding the Eddystone Lighthouse during which he discovered that the property of hardening whilst submerged in water was linked to the clay content of the cement. In 1824, a Leeds stonemason, Joseph Aspdin, took this a stage further and 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.

Smeaton, born in 1724 in Austhorpe near Leeds, began as a mathematical instrument maker, as did James Watt. Smeaton then went on to design some sixty water and wind mills. He pioneered the use of cast iron pipes. His civil engineering projects included canals and bridges. He founded the engineering society which became the Institution of Civil Engineers.

Thomas Telford was younger born in 1757 near Lockerbie. He began as a stone mason working on Somerset House in London and then a number of restoration projects. He is know for many civil engineering masterpieces.

The Menai suspension bridge

The Caledonian canal

He built some 1,200 miles of well drained roads in Scotland. He built the Ellesmere canal and worked on many harbours and bridges. He championed the use of Roman cement, the forerunner to Portland.

John Rennie senior was born in East Lothian in 1761 and was soon fascinated by all things mechanical. He worked for Andrew Meikle a millwright who invented the mechanical thresher. He attended the University of Edinburgh and then set off to explore canals. He was introduced by his university professor to James Watt and went to work for Boulton & Watt, his first project being the installation of steam engines at the Albion flour mills in Southwark. From there he set up his own business making food manufacturing machinery.

Canal mania caught up with him and he produced magnificent civil engineering structures including the Caen Hill flight of locks on the Kennet and Avon canal. He went on to design docks including the East and West India docks and bridges including Waterloo and Southwark bridge.

His son George took over the mechanical engineering side of the business eventually becoming fascinated by the mechanics of the screw propellor and he built a number of ships so powered for the navy

The civil engineering business was left to his son John who completed his father’s projects including London Bridge. He went on to design major drainage projects and was involved with railway building. He became president of the ICE in 1845 and received a knighthood for his services.

Both sons were part of the G and J Rennie shipbuilding yard at Greenwich.

John senior’s youngest son was named Matthew Boulton Rennie perhaps underlining the connections.

Further reading:

https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/meet-the-engineers/

Abraham Darby - iron master

 Iron ore was smelted by burning charcoal in the Weald and as forests were denuded, smelting spread to other forested areas. Eventually it became clear that an alternative to charcoal was needed. The Earl of Dudley's son 'Dud' claimed to have smelted iron ore with coal but there is no evidence of this. Dud was born in 1599 and Abraham Darby in 1678 both close to Dudley Castle. Abraham's father was a nail-maker and locksmith and so it is almost certain that Abraham would have been aware of Dud's experiments. He was certainly aware that an alternative to charcoal had to be found.

Abraham was apprenticed to Jonathan Freeth, a maker of malt mills in Birmingham. Of great significance the fuel used to make malt mills was coke which provided the heat of coal but without the impurities. Once free, Abraham made his way to Bristol where he set up as a malt mill maker where he soon joined forces with a fellow Quaker to form the Bristol Brass Wire Company where he further advanced his metal casting skills.

Possibly because of his Quaker upbringing, Abraham had a strong social conscience and he would see possibly most of the population of Bristol too poor to buy the pot bellied cooking vessels he cast from brass. Something cheeper was needed. There started his experiments smelting iron ore with coke. I tell more in my piece on Coalbrookdale where he established his business. His cooking vessels became very popular as did his much larger vessel for heating quantities of water, known as coppers after the material from which they were first made.

Why is that the English struggle so to embrace change? It was clear to Abraham that one reason for Dud's failure was the resistance of smiths to pig iron smelted with coal. Abraham found that pig iron smelted with coke was met by the same resistance. He was blessed with wisdom and decided not to fight the smiths, but rather to focus on casting, where his skills lay. The core business was the casting of cooking pots of all sizes for which he made a variety of moulds. In time the more adventurous smith would take his pig iron and find that it was entirely suitable. It would not be until Henry Cort at Fareham and his puddling process that production of wrought iron really took off.

Abraham Darby died at the age of thirty-nine in 1717. There followed a succession of Darbys for the next one hundred and fifty years. Abraham Darby had unlocked the industrial revolution now that large quantities of iron could be produced. In time wrought iron would be perfected and in due course be super-ceded by steel. Iron enabled the building of steam power, railways, bridges and so much more.

A Newcomen engine was erected near Dudley in 1712 and by 1716 'fire engines' as they were known were at work in Warwick, Stafford and Flint. Coalbrookdale cast their first iron pipes in 1718 and their first cylinder four years later. Iron cylinders were cheaper than those made of brass and could be much bigger. A large cylinder was cast for Killingworth High Pit where George Stephenson worked. James Watt used Coalbrook cylinders as did Trevithick who also benefitted from cast iron rails. Thomas Telford was inspired by Coalbrook casting and Dr Roebuck at Carron modelled his works on the Coalbrookdale example.

Further reading

L.T.C. Rolt, Great Engineers (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962)

The railway men - George and Robert Stephenson

George Stephenson was born in 1781 into a mining community just inland of Newcastle near Wylam on the Tyne where his father worked as a fireman at the colliery. They lived with George's mother, Mabel the daughter of a dyer, and two younger brothers and sisters in Street House only yards from the wagon way which transported coal from the pit. He was thus attuned to the unremitting life of mining families. The family moved from place to place as was the life of coal as mines were sunk, exploited and exhausted.

George grew up wiry and muscular and worked on a farm before becoming assistant fireman to his father. There is no evidence of much formal education, but George was gifted with things mechanical. At age seventeen he was given charge of a pumping engine erected by Robert Hawthorne, later a famous railway engineer. Here George became friendly with William Locke whose famous engineer son Joseph would be one of George's later apprentices.

George married Frances Henderson in 1802 and a year later their only child Robert was born. George was now a brakesman at Willington on Hawthorn's recommendation. Here he met William Fairbairn and took on clock repairs in his spare time. Tragedy stuck when Fanny died soon after childbirth in 1805.

George was intent on improvement and took arithmetic at night classes. His chance came when the pumping engine at Killingworth was failing to clear the pit. George quickly identified the problem and his offer to try to rectify it was accepted. Success built George's reputation and he was appointed engineer at Killingworth and he gained ad hoc worked from many nearby pits. He was earning well and invested in Robert's education.

We now come to the inventions attributed to both father and son. The story is though the same as elsewhere in the history I have tried to write, no single person can claim or indeed should claim the whole credit. This is not the picture of a scientist in a laboratory crying eureka, but of engineers working day in day out on the machinery used in daily work. It is natural that the more inventive will come up with ideas for ways to 'do things better'. We can think of spinners and weavers of wool. With George Stephenson, one such was the practical challenge of having light underground that did not ignite escaping gas. The eminent scientists Humphrey Davy had been sent off to his laboratory to work out a solution. George took a candle and something that looked like a table lamp down into the most dangerous part of the most dangerous mine and by trial and error eventually found a lamp that seemed to work safely. To cut a long story short, they both emerged with a solution at about the same time; Davy's became the better known. The term Geordie, is attributed to George and his lamp.

I have written elsewhere of the challenge of pumping mines clear of water, with the names Newcomen and Watt; indeed I have also described one of George's successes with such machinery. Now George Stephenson had his sights set on locomotion powered by steam. It was hardly surprising that others were exploring the same challenge which all mine owners faced and it was the mine owners who would pay but only if they saw a clear benefit.

In 1804, Richard Trevithick attempted locomotion on the Merthyr Tydfil railway in the South Wales coalfield. He used a single piston and flywheel, but found that the power produced was insufficient to cope with the weight of the engine.

Problems remained to be solved. Locomotives were too heavy for the existing oak rails and did not promise enough benefit for them to be replaced. So yet more power was needed and weight needed to be reduced or at least more widely distributed. Bogies were added with some success.

In 1811, John Blenkinsop patented a mechanism something akin to a rack and pinion. He engaged the engineering firm of Fenton, Murray and Wood, and used steam engines with two cylinders working cranks at right angles to each other. It was a success. Blenkinsop wrote that, ‘an engine with two eight-inch cylinders weighing five tons, drew twenty-seven waggons, weighing ninety-four tons, up an ascent of two inches in the yard; when lightly loaded, it travelled at ten miles an hour, did the work of sixteen horses in twelve hours, and cost £400’.

Blenkinsop was followed by other inventors exploring variations on his theme, and Blenkinsop himself installed his engines at a number of collieries including at Wylam, the 'Dilly'.

George was working with the installation of static engines and had been experimenting with differing boiler set ups. The problem remained a lack of power. Where Stephenson advanced on the work of Blenkinsop was that the railway was laid with cast iron edge rails and the locomotive, the Bulcher, had flanged wheels with power direct to them rather than for example to a rack and pinion.

The Northumberland coalfield was well served by the Tyne and the pit railways running to it. Not so the Durham field and so attention turned to a possible canal, iron plated tram route or railway from Darlington through to Stockton. The pit owners favoured the latter, after all the fuel would be free. They approached George Overton who had worked with Trevithick at Merthyr Tydfil. He in turn sought to work with the Newcastle Iron masters who had build Stephenson's locomotives. The project stalled and Stephenson was approached by the Middlesborough businessman Edward Pease. They, together with George’s son Robert, still onlt twenty, put forward a scheme to Parliament which received approval. Work began. The project lacked an iron master to build locomotives and this gave birth to Robert Stephenson & Co which produced the four vehicles needed. In addition there were two static engines to pull the trains up two steep inclines; there was also to be a section where horsepower was used.

The line was opened to huge crowds and much anxiety on 27 September 1825. Thereafter it did its job but not without challenges.

A name comes into the story, now, which is perhaps lesser known, that of Timothy Hackworth ‘an ingenious mechanic’. He was manager of the works department of the new line and was thus in the perfect position to see problems as they arose and then fix them. Railways were always going to progress by learning on the job. In due course Hackworth persuaded the directors to allow him to develop an engine ‘after his own design’, which was, inevitably, a variation on the existing themes.

The new engine soon made those of Blenkinsop and Stephenson redundant, but still did not satisfy demands. The final twist in the early story of steam railways came with the Liverpool and Manchester railway, and it was the demands of cotton traders, led by corn merchant Joseph Sandars, that brought George Stephenson back into the picture. Manchester mills were transporting tons of cotton goods to the port of Liverpool by canal which took some thirty-six hours and which was expensive. What was needed was a steam railway.

Robert Stephenson left England for Columbia perhaps following in the footsteps of Richard Trevithic who spent some years in Peru working for mining companies because the English had banned his his pressure boiler as being too dangerous. Robert's absence left his father without his right hand man and when a Manchester to Liverpool railway was mooted, the directors turned to the Scot Rennie. Rennie was not a team player and his proposal fell apart. Other engineers were tried and eventually George was appointed.

George Stephenson planned the rail route to Liverpool, which included sixty-four bridges and viaducts along thirty-five miles of track. Without Robert by his side, the project faltered. Eventually, Robert returned but with his focus on his locomotive building company. George struggled especially with money where his lenders expressed their dissatisfaction by withholding funds. They apppointed Thomas Telford to report to them on the state of the project. George, for ever a proud man, reluctantly accepted the recommendations of Britain's top civil engineer and the project continued until it came to the choice of power.

The directors were far from convinced by locomotives and favoured static engines and ropes. This was where George's character came into play. He was convinced that the railway locomotive was the answer on many grounds which he argued patiently. Even when the directors eventually relented, they insisted on three alternative locomotives including one by Hackworth. The three competed over a tough test and George’s Rocket won easily.

It was thought more likely that his son, Robert, designed and built his “Rocket”, ‘by the happy combination of the multi-tubular boiler and the steam-blast, Mr Robert Stephenson succeeded in producing an engine far superior to any previously built in point of speed and efficiency.’ Heavy rails were laid at considerable cost and, with heavier locomotives, ‘the superiority of the railway system to every other mode of conveyance was placed beyond question’.

Following the ground breaking Manchester to Liverpool railway, a number of smaller lines were built, some by the Stephensons. Robert Stephenson & Co were busy building locomotives for use on the growing number of railways across the world. It was far from plain sailing as landowners, coach operators, road builders and canal operators all opposed the iron beast. It was though here to stay.

The London Birmingham railway was the next major project and there were differences between the London committee and that of Birmingham, in addition to the opposition ranks already mentioned. The route also had challenging geology. What it didn't have was poor project management. George had lobbied hard for his son to be appointed and Robert had learnt from Thomas Telford and Locke, and from his father's mistakes, the importance of planning and clear delegation. The line was divided into four each with its own engineer reporting to Robert. The grand entrance to Euston Station was an appropriate monument to northern grit as displayed by the Stephensons.

Robert did have a further legacy in mind. As is apparent, railways are about much more than locomotives. Bridges are not only vital components but works of genius in their own right. Robert’s bridge over the Menai straits is a classic example. There were to be two bridges one at Conway and one rather longer a mile from Telford's suspension bridge. Robert had learnt a painful lesson from the Dee Bridge disaster after which he abandoned cast iron in favour of wrought iron sheets brought together to make long rectangular tubes through which the trains would run. These were both cumbersome and heavy and had to be fabricated on site and then floated adjacent to the pillars on which they would sit and then lifted into place by hydraulic presses. Sounds easy. Add currents and wind and the task becomes monumental.

The stone structure of Stephenson’s bridge is still in use

Following a substantial fire in 1970, the tubular girders were removed as they were deemed to have become structurally instable due to the heat of the blaze. The bridge was reconstructed and now features two decks, the lower one still allowing trains to cross the Menai Strait, while the top carries the A55 road.

Further reading:

L.T.C. Rolt, George and Robert Stephenson - the Railway Revolution (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1960)