Iron Men: How One London Factory Powered the Industrial Revolution and Shaped the Modern World
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Iron Men: How One London Factory Powered the Industrial Revolution and Shaped the Modern World
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783085477 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 230 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Iron Men
How One London Factory Powered the Industrial Revolution and Shaped the Modern World
By David Waller
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2016 David WallerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-547-7
CHAPTER 1
MAKING BLOCKS AND BORING MACHINES – THE PORTSMOUTH BLOCK FACTORY
On the morning of 14 September 1805, at the George Inn, Portsmouth, one celebrated resident rose early, scribbled a note of farewell to his mistress and began preparations for what would be his last voyage. He spent the next few hours dealing with petitions, saying official farewells and making inspections, before being rowed out to join his ship, receiving the acclaim of crowds gathered on the shore to see him off. Thus, Admiral Lord Nelson embarked on his journey to Trafalgar and immortality. The most significant event of Nelson's last morning ashore was a visit to the block-making mill in the heart of the Royal Dockyards.
Pulley blocks are unremarkable objects, but at the time of existential conflict with France, the ability to produce them in great numbers was of vital strategic importance for Great Britain, with each 74-gun warship requiring some fourteen hundred of these devices. They ranged in length from a few inches to several feet and were essential for raising and lowering the sails, masts and yards, ensuring the manoeuvrability of the vessel. 'We will apologise for our entering into so long an account of the manufacture of an article so trifling as a ship's block,' wrote the authors of the 18-page entry on the block mills in the influential Rees's Cyclopedia, a sort of Wikipedia for the early nineteenth century. 'Though [...] this should not be despised, when its importance to naval affairs is considered, and how often the safety of a vessel may be endangered by the failure of a single block, regulating any important action in a ship's working. It is of great consequence that these [...] should be made in a most accurate and substantial manner.' In 1800, the Royal Navy required more than a hundred thousand blocks a year, and they all had to be made by hand by skilled craftsmen. The work was often unreliable and inaccurate: according to one account, the pinholes in the blocks were 'so rough and so uneven that the blocks and shivers often caught fire through the violence of the friction.' At a time of a labour shortage caused by the war, blocks were also expensive to make.
Once completed in 1808, the factory Nelson visited became a tourist attraction. 'It is invariably a source of delight and wonderment for visitors,' noted a newspaper account of a later royal visit. 'The princess witnessed the transformation of a cube of elm into a perfect block [...] in the space of about eight minutes, and almost by magic.' The machines had not reached this peak of perfection at the time of Nelson's visit, but he too would have witnessed the operation of the world's first assembly line used for mass production, an invention arguably as important for the future of the world economy as Boulton and Watt's steam engine.
The block mills were the result of the vision and labour of three remarkable men. The first was General Sir Samuel Bentham (1757–1831), younger brother of Jeremy Bentham, the eminent philosopher and social reformer whose embalmed corpse is preserved to this day in a glass case at University College, London, the literal embodiment of Enlightenment thinking. In March 1796, Samuel was appointed as the first (and only) Inspector General of Naval Works, a role that gave the 38 year old unprecedented power over the administration of the navy, and the opportunity to put Enlightenment ideals into practice. The second was Marc Isambard Brunel (1769–1849), engineering genius and exile from revolutionary France, father of the more famous Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The third was Henry Maudslay, a young man on track to become the most influential mechanical engineer of the early nineteenth century. Together, they represent a combination of Enlightenment thinking, visionary design and practical engineering skills.
'A man of very considerable attainment and general powers, with a decided genius for mechanical art' is howJohn Stuart Mill described Samuel Bentham. The son of a successful lawyer, Samuel was the youngest of seven children, of whom only he and Jeremy survived. The younger Bentham left Westminster School at the age of 14 to train at the Woolwich shipyard, having abandoned the prospect of an academic career because of his 'uncontrollable desire to become a naval constructor'. He completed his seven-year apprenticeship, but was unenthusiastic about becoming a mere shipwright in the Royal Navy. In 1779, at the age of 23, he set off for St Petersburg and Moscow, armed with a handful of introductions and a lust for travel, excitement and self-advancement, all of which he was to find in abundance. At a time when Russia was hungry to absorb the ideas of the West, Bentham's talents as an inventor and engineer were soon recognized. The anglophile Prince Grigorii Potemkin, the favourite of Empress Catherine the Great, took him on and sanctioned a mission to the Urals to study mines and manufactories. On his return, Bentham embarked on a scandalous love affair with Countess Sophia Matushkina, the beautiful niece and ward of the governor of St Petersburg – Field Marshal Prince Alexander Golitsyn – and heiress to two fortunes. This came to the attention of the empress herself who, rather than frowning on the liaison between a scion of high nobility and a penniless English engineer, at first encouraged it, if only for the amusement of teasing the Golitsyn family. Bentham wanted to marry Sophia and, in any case, was confident that it could do no harm to his career. 'I am fully disposed that a desire Her Majesty has to assist my Match goes a great way in disposing her in my favour,' he wrote to his brother. 'She fully believes it was my love induced her to offer my Services.' Although the love match was in the end subject to an imperial veto, Bentham's path to power and prosperity opened up. Potemkin appointed him a lieutenant colonel in the Russian infantry, complete with a raffish uniform of green coat with scarlet lapels, scarlet waistcoat with gold lace, and white breeches.
In 1784, the prince sent the young Englishman to run his one-thousand-square-mile estate at Krichev in Belorussia, on the border of Poland, from which these lands had recently been annexed. Krichev was bigger than any county in England and home to around forty thousand serfs and their dependents, drawn from 50 different nationalities and living in 145 villages and 5 townships. It was also the location of what we would call a military–industrial complex, comprising mirror factories, a brandy distillery, a tannery, a copperworks, a sailmaking works, greenhouses and a shipyard. 'The estate [...] furnishes all the principal naval stores in the greatest abundance by a navigable river which [...] renders the transport easy to the Black Sea,' Bentham wrote home to England, awed by the scale of his new responsibilities and the opportunity for self-enrichment. He was given carte blanche to develop the industrial operations as he wished, and an unlimited budget. He established a brewery, with the aim of weaning the peasantry off vodka and instead drink wholesome English beer. He cultivated botanical gardens, put all the mills on a profitable basis, sought to set up dairies to make the finest butter and cheeses and even built a prototype of what would become known as the panopticon, first envisaged as a factory where low-skilled workers on the estate, a rabble of Russians, Polish Jews, Cossacks and even Geordies (the latter imported by Bentham), who knew no language in common, were put to work by the thousands under the watchful eye of management. His brother Jeremy came out to Krichev for a year to help with this project, and under his influence the concept would be developed, with far less practical success, as a form of enlightened prison for Regency England. 'I seem to be at liberty to build any kind of ship,' Samuel Bentham wrote, 'whether for War, Trade, or Pleasure.' He constructed gun frigates for the navy and barges for trade, but perhaps his most notable invention was the vermicular, an ingenious form of articulated riverboat, so called because it looked and moved like a worm. This vessel proved extremely comfortable and was used by Empress Catherine herself during her grand tour through the south of the empire. Bentham's spell as de facto satrap of an entire province came to an abrupt conclusion in 1787, when the prince sold the estate. But this was not the end of his glittering Russian career. Appointed brigadier general and heaped with decorations, including the Order of the Cross of St George and a gold-hilted sword, he served as commander of a naval squadron during the Russo-Turkish war of 1787-92, singeing an eyebrow in a victorious encounter on the Dnieper estuary. He was given free rein to travel through the empire, ranging as far as the border with China, with an eye less to exotic scenery than to what he could see of the fur trade with Alaska or of Russian industry.
Shortly after his return to England in 1791, he visited the principal manufacturing districts, finding to his surprise that during his absence overseas 'little advance had been made towards substituting the invariable accuracy of machinery for the uncertain dexterity of the hand of man'. Steam engines were extensively employed for giving motion to pumps for raising water from mines, to machinery for working cotton, and to mills for rolling and for some other work in metal. It intrigued him that steam power was not used to propel woodworking machines, 'beyond a common turning-lathe and some saws'. He had designed a machine to manufacture window sashes and was curious as to why steam technology could not be more broadly applied. It was a paradox that the practical application of steam power was still quite limited three quarters of a century after Newcomen devised his 'atmospheric' engines (so called because they were driven by atmospheric pressure) and more than a decade after Boulton and Watt's more powerful engines became generally available.
The Benthams' father died, leaving a house in the heart of Westminster, where the younger brother established a workshop. The brothers built a scale model of their hub-and-spoke panopticon, attracting a frenzy of attention when put on display. The invention never found practical application as a prison, although a century and a half later it would delight Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, who found in it a metaphor for the oppressive power of the modern state. Samuel Bentham postponed plans to return to Russia and, instead, sought at home a position commensurate with his experience and powers. In 1796, three years into the war with revolutionary France, his badgering of the Admiralty paid off, and the post of inspector general was created for him. This would not be on the same grandiose scale of his appointments in Russia, but he was given unprecedented executive power to pursue reforms on an efficient and economic basis. It was an opportunity to remake the British Navy, as vital a job as any at a time when Britain was locked in mortal combat with its ancient foe. His contract gave him explicit individual responsibility for his actions and required him to write down the basis for all his recommendations, in justified anticipation of perpetual conflict with the naval establishment. He was encouraged by the Admiralty to ride roughshod over the Naval Board, the body entrusted with naval administration, but which in the words of one contemporary observer served to 'enlarge patronage, decrease responsibility and multiply the links in the official drag-chain of the naval service.' Bentham worked from first principles, beginning 'by classing the several operations requisite in the shaping and working up of materials of whatever kind, wholly disregarding the customary artificial arrangement according to trades.' If machines could do the job of men, so much the better.
Just as in Russia, Bentham bustled with energy and invention, crediting himself in due course with 20 categories of innovation, from new tools to shallow docks, floating dams and mud barges. Among his more significant reforms was the introduction of steam machinery into naval arsenals and dockyards. The navy had long resisted the use of steam power ashore, and would hold out against steam power afloat for years after the first engine-driven commercial boats plied the waters of the Clyde and the Thames. 'To the introduction of steam engines [...] a variety of objections were started, such as apprehensions of the derangement of established practice; doubts of the efficacy or economy of machinery as applied to naval purposes; dread of danger of fire from the use of steam engines, and of risings of the artificers at the introduction of machinery to diminish the need of their skill as well as of their labour: of these objections, and a variety of others equally groundless that were at the same time started, subsequent experience has proved the futility'. Bentham saw to it that a steam engine was erected in the Portsmouth dockyard, on the pretext that it would be used to pump water rather than power machines. 'By degrees the advantages of this primum mobile, in pumping up water, were seen and acknowledged; by degrees other and larger steam engines have been introduced, and their use has been by my means extended gradually to other purposes, as prejudices could be removed, till now at length I have the satisfaction of seeing the objection to the use of steam engines and machinery in [H]is Majesty's naval arsenals entirely done away.'
The navy's sawmills had always been run along hidebound lines, sawyers entitled to traditional perquisites such as the taking of chippings, offcuts from the main operations, in the same way that ships' cooks were allowed to take the slush, a mixture of fat and salt, from the meat that they cooked (hence the expression 'slush fund'). Such practices were the enemy of efficiency. Bentham put a stop to this and made sure that every piece of timber was properly accounted for. He developed machines to help with the process of sawing logs to make planks. He also recognized the need to make pulley blocks more efficiently, and took out a patent for a machine to manufacture the sheave, the wheel that runs inside the block. To go further than this and manufacture the entire block would require the replication of two dozen carpentry tasks traditionally carried out by skilled craftsmen, from mortising, strapping and spindling to boring, scoring and broaching. The carpenter would start off with a lump of solid elm, through which he cut as many as four oblong mortises, into each of which he would fit circular pulleys (called sheaves or shivers) made out of lignum vitae, a harder wood, which in turn rotated on a pin made of iron. The outer form of the pulley was rounded off into a smooth oval shape and then was grooved so a rope could fit round it. It was not until Bentham was introduced to the émigré engineer Marc Isambard Brunel that he began to see the outlines of a solution.
* * *
Like Bentham, Brunel made his name and career away from home. Born into a family that had farmed near Rouen for centuries, he was originally intended for the Church, but the priests entrusted with his education recognized his gift for mathematics and his intensely practical bent. He drew his tutors perfectly from life and, at the age of 11, made a barrel organ, conclusive proof that he had no religious vocation. His education was put in the hands of Franpois Carpentier, an old friend of the family who was American Consul at Rouen and a retired sea captain, a fateful connection with the United States, which later saved Brunel's life and made his career. He was encouraged to study trigonometry and hydrography as a prelude to a career in the navy. He served from 1786 to 1792 aboard the corvette Le Maréchal de Castries. He impressed all with a perfectly working quadrant he fashioned out of ebony and which required a precocious knowledge of geometry, trigonometry and mathematics.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Iron Men by David Waller. Copyright © 2016 David Waller. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface: The Queen and the Machines; 1. Building Blocks and Boring Machines – The Portsmouth Block Factory; 2. Maudslays – The Most Complete Factory in the Kingdom; 3. The Maudslay Men; 4. A Wonderful Undertaking – The Thames Tunnel; 5. Richard Roberts and the Iron Man of Manchester; 6. Charles Babbage, Joseph Clement, and the Mechanization of Thought; 7. The True Birth of the Railways; 8. James Hall Nasmyth – The Steam-Hammer and Entrepreneurial Triumph in Manchester; 9. The Maudslay Men and the Transport Revolution; 10.The Turn of the Screws – Sir Joseph Whitworth and the Quest for Mechanical Perfection; 11. The Great Lock Controversy of 1851; 12. Capital vs Labour: The Great Lock-Out of 1852; 13. Instruments of Destruction; 14. Endings and LegaciesWhat People are Saying About This
'[David Waller] concentrates on London’s role in the industrial revolution and machine tool inventor Henry Maudslay, one of its linchpins. … He shows how Maudslay’s factory in Lambeth, established in 1810, inspired and informed a generation of engineers and enabled the industrial revolution by standardising parts and creating reliable machines to make them.' —The Financial Times
One of the best books on engineering history to be published in many a moon'. —Nick Smith, Engineering & Technology Magazine
Our image of the industrial revolution is dominated by the North and the Midlands. … But as … David Waller argues, the really pioneering work was done in London. Waller describes the work of Henry Maudslay, who opened a factory in Lambeth in 1810.' —The Telegraph
‘With wit, assurance and dexterity, Iron Men captures the ingenuity, determination and defiance of a small group of Britons whose inventions made their country the epicentre of technology. The early nineteenth-century inventors, who created the automatic spinning mule, devised the micrometer, standardized the manufacturing of screws and bolts and concocted the steam engine, had an influence as widespread as that enjoyed today by companies in Silicon Valley and China. David Waller has composed an absorbing tale of man's ability to create a lot from a little.’ —Sir Michael Moritz, Chairman, Sequoia Capital
'David Waller has done us a great favour in highlighting Maudslay’s boundless creativity and energy and reveals him as the mentor and inspiration to a generation of talented engineers who changed the world.'—Lord Norman Foster