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Joseph Whitworth and the Great Exhibition
From: Science Museum
| By:
Michael Wright |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Joseph Whitworth was one of the most important machine tool-makers of his time. A member of the first generation of manufacturers to pioneer machine-tool building as a distinct profession, a combination of technical expertise and driving personal ambition brought him great success. His impressive achievements were shown to the world at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Michael Wright, curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum, London, presented a paper on Joseph Whitworth and Victorian machine-tool manufacture at the Locating the Victorians conference in London in July 2001. Here, he recounts the remarkable story of the life and work of the man who mounted the biggest display at the Great Exhibition. |
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| Sir Joseph Whitworth (1803-87). | |
he Great Exhibition of 1851 displayed to the world a cross-section of the innovation and progress that characterised British industry at the time. That cross-section was necessarily warped by the fact that some manufacturers were prepared to put on a much bigger show of their products than were others. Joseph Whitworth (1803-87), a manufacturer of machine tools and other workshop equipment, put on the biggest show of all.
Whitworth was one of the first generation of manufacturers who pioneered machine-tool building as a distinct profession. Previously, a manufacturer requiring a piece of machinery would have had it custom-made. If large, it would usually be made on site, and built into the walls of the building to give it stiffness and solidity. Before 1800 it would be largely built of wood, with just as few metal parts as it was possible to get away with. |
Around the beginning of the nineteenth century, a change took place in the machine-building industry. At this time iron foundries started to proliferate, and iron castings became more widely available. The manufacturing world started to realise iron's potential--to appreciate that although building a machine of iron took a lot more time and trouble, the finished product would be much more durable, would allow more precise movement and would maintain its geometric truth far better than machines constructed of wood. Machine-tool builders started setting up their own businesses; instead of responding to commissions, they produced standard machines and then found markets for them. Joseph Whitworth was one of the first to do this, and his business became one of the biggest. |
The early years
Whitworth was born in 1803 at Stockport, near Manchester. His mother died when he was 10, and his father placed him with foster parents. As a teenager he began work in Manchester, first with a succession of machinists and then as a millwright at a cotton mill. However, the centre of mechanical excellence at that time was London. Whitworth moved there and went to work for Henry Maudslay, a major pioneer of the emerging machine-tool industry, responsible for training a new generation of tool-makers. While working there, Whitworth learned to build top-quality machinery using the very latest ideas. He went on to work for several other London mechanics, lastly Joseph Clement who had been commissioned to build Charles Babbage's Difference Engine--the most advanced machinery of the time. Eventually, in 1833, government funding for Babbage's Difference Engine dried up. Whitworth lost his job and returned to Manchester. |
Whitworth sets up business
Back in Manchester, he set up business as 'Joseph Whitworth, toolmaker from London'. 'From London' meant 'the very best'. Manchester was a growing industrial centre, with a booming cotton industry. 
Whitworth started off as a one-man operation, but grew with remarkable rapidity to be fairly substantial in size. His progress can be charted through the patents he took out. Acquiring patents involved both a complicated application process and great expense. Whitworth could only have done this with great faith in his products and financial backing--to pay for the patent and to sue anyone who tried to infringe it. Whitworth took out a surprising number of patents in the early years, suggesting that he had ambitious schemes and had cultivated wealthy contacts who invested in his company. |
The Great Exhibition
The volume of tools he produced over the first 15 years of business is not known, but by the year of the Great Exhibition such was his success that he was able to put on an astonishing display of tools--a bigger show than anyone else there. Whitworth was so successful primarily because his ideas were very advanced for the time and his tools were of exceptional quality. The second reason was that he marketed them vigorously--he was extremely ambitious and unashamedly self-promoting. By 1851 he had become a leader in the machinetool trade in Britain and, by the same token, the world. He manufactured a great variety of machines in a great range of sizes, including screwing machines, planing machines, shaping machines, slotting machines, drilling machines and lathes. |
Whitworth's display was received with enthusiasm at the Exhibition and it was around this time that his position as one of the foremost designers of machine tools and great authorities on manufacturing was consolidated. In 1857 Prince Albert made a point of visiting the Whitworth works several times, and consulted Whitworth on manufacturing issues. |
America, armaments and a missed opportunity
Other displays that amazed the public at the Great Exhibition were the American exhibits of rifles and handguns. The military realised that American manufacturers were much more advanced than the British at making this sort of small arms and this was a source of concern. The Americans held their own Great Exhibition in New York in 1853, and Whitworth was sent over as a British Commissioner. He travelled to the US before the start of the exhibition with the intention of looking at American outfits manufacturing small arms, assessing whether Britain should be setting up its own plant. Eventually in 1856 Britain imported American expertise, personnel and tools, to re-equip The Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, north east of London. |
Whitworth had probably hoped to win the commission to make the machines for the gun factory himself, but failed to achieve this despite being so well placed. This may in part have been due to his abrasive personality and uncultivated manners; in one of her famous letters (to her husband, the writer Thomas Carlyle), Jane Carlyle described him like this: 'Whitworth, the inventor of the besom-cart and many other wonderful machines, has a face not unlike that of a baboon; talks the broadest Lancashire; could not invent an epigram to save his life; but has nevertheless "a talent that would drive the Genii to despair". And when one talks with him, one feels to be talking with a real man, to my mind worth any number of the Wits ''that go about"'. The besom-cart was a street sweeping machine, invented in the 1840s. Whitworth took out a patent for the design and established a company to operate them. He and his friends in local government creamed off substantial profits from the scheme, but it is doubtful that the machines did as good a job as men with brooms and they tended to wreck the road surface. |
The later years
Having given a great deal of money for educational foundations, Whitworth was created a baronet in 1869. By then his attention was very largely absorbed in experiments connected with the improvement of small arms and artillery, and in trying to persuade the government to accept his schemes. Sadly, the machine-tool business became neglected and was allowed to 'run on its reputation'. |
Whitworth did not, as Maudslay had done, train many people who would go on to become high-class mechanics themselves, but his designs were widely studied and imitated. His work from the 1830s through to the 1850s was at the forefront of technology, but later he refused to innovate, and egotistically ignored what his competitors were doing. Charles Porter, an American associate of the 1860s, reported that Whitworth 'divided all other toolmakers into two classes, one class who copied him without giving him any credit, and the other class who had the presumption to imagine that they could improve on him'. Porter concluded: 'His feelings toward both these classes evidently did not tend to make him happy'. By the end of his career he had certainly been overtaken by other manufacturers; the machines that his firm produced were still very good, but they were old fashioned and could no longer compete with the more efficient, more technically advanced and ergonomically designed machines on the market. |
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