A cathedral city second only to Canterbury, York had a university only from 1963, but as I tell below it was a centre of learning. It’s early prosperity was built on the cloth trade, but this declined by the end of the fifteenth century.
It was the home of Rowntree and Terry confectionery and also railway workshops as evidenced by the National Railway Museum. The impact of these industries took off in the 1880s. Terrys were first, being well established by 1851 producing candied peel, jujubes, lozenges and sweets. Rowntree really began in 1879 taking a French invention of crystallised gums, but the business was transformed by Dutch equipment for the processing of cocoa beans which had been taken up first by Frys in Bristol and then by Cadbury in Birmingham. I write about the development of Rowntree in Vehicles to Vaccines.
Railway activity grew alongside that of confectionary with workshops for the repair of locomotives and rolling stock. The locomotive manufacturing work was first undertaken by third parties but then moved to workshops first in York and then in Darlington. York did however take full responsibility for carriages, building state of the art works in the early twentieth century.
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. These societies were springing up in towns around the country, often alongside industry, exploring science for its advancement. York then had little industry, but it did have a community passionate about discovery, whether of the city’s history or the world around.
In a volume of papers to mark the 150th anniversary of that first meeting, there is a chapter exploring the path of science and technology in York over that century and a half and it highlights some of the key individuals.
Sir George Cayley (1773-1857) was the inventor of the aeroplane in the first half of the nineteenth century. I wrote about the early days of flight in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.
Thomas Cooke (1807-1868) was a maker of fine telescopes applying the skills of mechanical engineering to the work on lenses carried out in his workshops.
Dennis Taylor (1861-1943) was a lens designer taking forward the work of Thomas Cooke whose business diversified into clocks, machine tools, pneumatic pumps, engraving machines and optical instruments.
Henry Hunnings invented a micro-telephone, like many amateurs building on the invention by Alexander Graham Bell. After much legal wrangling, the rights to his transmitter were sold to the United Telephone Company (UK) and the American Bell Telephone Company and the design remained in use for over a century.
Further reading:
York 1831-1981, Charles Feinstein Ed. (York: William Sessions, 1981)
.jpg)
