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