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61 Stephenson, Robert
[br]b. 16 October 1803 Willington Quay, Northumberland, Englandd. 12 October 1859 London, England[br]English engineer who built the locomotive Rocket and constructed many important early trunk railways.[br]Robert Stephenson's father was George Stephenson, who ensured that his son was educated to obtain the theoretical knowledge he lacked himself. In 1821 Robert Stephenson assisted his father in his survey of the Stockton \& Darlington Railway and in 1822 he assisted William James in the first survey of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway. He then went to Edinburgh University for six months, and the following year Robert Stephenson \& Co. was named after him as Managing Partner when it was formed by himself, his father and others. The firm was to build stationary engines, locomotives and railway rolling stock; in its early years it also built paper-making machinery and did general engineering.In 1824, however, Robert Stephenson accepted, perhaps in reaction to an excess of parental control, an invitation by a group of London speculators called the Colombian Mining Association to lead an expedition to South America to use steam power to reopen gold and silver mines. He subsequently visited North America before returning to England in 1827 to rejoin his father as an equal and again take charge of Robert Stephenson \& Co. There he set about altering the design of steam locomotives to improve both their riding and their steam-generating capacity. Lancashire Witch, completed in July 1828, was the first locomotive mounted on steel springs and had twin furnace tubes through the boiler to produce a large heating surface. Later that year Robert Stephenson \& Co. supplied the Stockton \& Darlington Railway with a wagon, mounted for the first time on springs and with outside bearings. It was to be the prototype of the standard British railway wagon. Between April and September 1829 Robert Stephenson built, not without difficulty, a multi-tubular boiler, as suggested by Henry Booth to George Stephenson, and incorporated it into the locomotive Rocket which the three men entered in the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway's Rainhill Trials in October. Rocket, was outstandingly successful and demonstrated that the long-distance steam railway was practicable.Robert Stephenson continued to develop the locomotive. Northumbrian, built in 1830, had for the first time, a smokebox at the front of the boiler and also the firebox built integrally with the rear of the boiler. Then in Planet, built later the same year, he adopted a layout for the working parts used earlier by steam road-coach pioneer Goldsworthy Gurney, placing the cylinders, for the first time, in a nearly horizontal position beneath the smokebox, with the connecting rods driving a cranked axle. He had evolved the definitive form for the steam locomotive.Also in 1830, Robert Stephenson surveyed the London \& Birmingham Railway, which was authorized by Act of Parliament in 1833. Stephenson became Engineer for construction of the 112-mile (180 km) railway, probably at that date the greatest task ever undertaken in of civil engineering. In this he was greatly assisted by G.P.Bidder, who as a child prodigy had been known as "The Calculating Boy", and the two men were to be associated in many subsequent projects. On the London \& Birmingham Railway there were long and deep cuttings to be excavated and difficult tunnels to be bored, notoriously at Kilsby. The line was opened in 1838.In 1837 Stephenson provided facilities for W.F. Cooke to make an experimental electrictelegraph installation at London Euston. The directors of the London \& Birmingham Railway company, however, did not accept his recommendation that they should adopt the electric telegraph and it was left to I.K. Brunel to instigate the first permanent installation, alongside the Great Western Railway. After Cooke formed the Electric Telegraph Company, Stephenson became a shareholder and was Chairman during 1857–8.Earlier, in the 1830s, Robert Stephenson assisted his father in advising on railways in Belgium and came to be increasingly in demand as a consultant. In 1840, however, he was almost ruined financially as a result of the collapse of the Stanhope \& Tyne Rail Road; in return for acting as Engineer-in-Chief he had unwisely accepted shares, with unlimited liability, instead of a fee.During the late 1840s Stephenson's greatest achievements were the design and construction of four great bridges, as part of railways for which he was responsible. The High Level Bridge over the Tyne at Newcastle and the Royal Border Bridge over the Tweed at Berwick were the links needed to complete the East Coast Route from London to Scotland. For the Chester \& Holyhead Railway to cross the Menai Strait, a bridge with spans as long-as 460 ft (140 m) was needed: Stephenson designed them as wrought-iron tubes of rectangular cross-section, through which the trains would pass, and eventually joined the spans together into a tube 1,511 ft (460 m) long from shore to shore. Extensive testing was done beforehand by shipbuilder William Fairbairn to prove the method, and as a preliminary it was first used for a 400 ft (122 m) span bridge at Conway.In 1847 Robert Stephenson was elected MP for Whitby, a position he held until his death, and he was one of the exhibition commissioners for the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the early 1850s he was Engineer-in-Chief for the Norwegian Trunk Railway, the first railway in Norway, and he also built the Alexandria \& Cairo Railway, the first railway in Africa. This included two tubular bridges with the railway running on top of the tubes. The railway was extended to Suez in 1858 and for several years provided a link in the route from Britain to India, until superseded by the Suez Canal, which Stephenson had opposed in Parliament. The greatest of all his tubular bridges was the Victoria Bridge across the River St Lawrence at Montreal: after inspecting the site in 1852 he was appointed Engineer-in-Chief for the bridge, which was 1 1/2 miles (2 km) long and was designed in his London offices. Sadly he, like Brunel, died young from self-imposed overwork, before the bridge was completed in 1859.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsFRS 1849. President, Institution of Mechanical Engineers 1849. President, Institution of Civil Engineers 1856. Order of St Olaf (Norway). Order of Leopold (Belgium). Like his father, Robert Stephenson refused a knighthood.Further ReadingL.T.C.Rolt, 1960, George and Robert Stephenson, London: Longman (a good modern biography).J.C.Jeaffreson, 1864, The Life of Robert Stephenson, London: Longman (the standard nine-teenth-century biography).M.R.Bailey, 1979, "Robert Stephenson \& Co. 1823–1829", Transactions of the Newcomen Society 50 (provides details of the early products of that company).J.Kieve, 1973, The Electric Telegraph, Newton Abbot: David \& Charles.PJGR -
62 Williams, Thomas
[br]b. 13 May 1737 Cefn Coch, Anglesey, Walesd. 29 November 1802 Bath, England[br]Welsh lawyer, mine-owner and industrialist.[br]Williams was articled by his father, Owen Williams of Treffos in Anglesey, to the prominent Flintshire lawyer John Lloyd, whose daughter Catherine he is believed to have married. By 1769 Williams, lessee of the mansion and estate of Llanidan, was an able lawyer with excellent connections in Anglesey. His life changed dramatically when he agreed to act on behalf of the Lewis and Hughes families of Llysdulas, who had begun a lawsuit against Sir Nicholas Bayly of Plas Newydd concerning the ownership and mineral rights of copper mines on the western side of Parys mountain. During a prolonged period of litigation, Williams managed these mines for Margaret Lewis on behalf of Edward Hughes, who was established after a judgement in Chancery in 1776 as one of two legal proprietors, the other being Nicholas Bayly. The latter then decided to lease his portion to the London banker John Dawes, who in 1778 joined Hughes and Thomas Williams when they founded the Parys Mine Company.As the active partner in this enterprise, Williams began to establish his own smelting and fabricating works in South Wales, Lancashire and Flintshire, where coal was cheap. He soon broke the power of Associated Smelters, a combine holding the Anglesey mine owners to ransom. The low production cost of Anglesey ore gave him a great advantage over the Cornish mines and he secured very profitable contracts for the copper sheathing of naval and other vessels. After several British and French copper-bottomed ships were lost because of corrosion failure of the iron nails and bolts used to secure the sheathing, Williams introduced a process for manufacturing heavily work-hardened copper bolts and spikes which could be substituted directly for iron fixings, avoiding the corrosion difficulty. His new product was adopted by the Admiralty in 1784 and was soon used extensively in British and European dockyards.In 1785 Williams entered into partnership with Lord Uxbridge, son and heir of Nicholas Bayly, to run the Mona Mine Company at the Eastern end of Parys Mountain. This move ended much enmity and litigation and put Williams in effective control of all Anglesey copper. In the same year, Williams, with Matthew Boulton and John Wilkinson, persuaded the Cornish miners to establish a trade cooperative, the Cornish Metal Company, to market their ores. When this began to fall in 1787, Williams took over its administration, assets and stocks and until 1792 controlled the output and sale of all British copper. He became known as the "Copper King" and the output of his many producers was sold by the Copper Offices he established in London, Liverpool and Birmingham. In 1790 he became Member of Parliament for the borough of Great Marlow, and in 1792 he and Edward Hughes established the Chester and North Wales Bank, which in 1900 was absorbed by the Lloyds group.After 1792 the output of the Anglesey mines started to decline and Williams began to buy copper from all available sources. The price of copper rose and he was accused of abusing his monopoly. By this time, however, his health had begun to deteriorate and he retreated to Bath.[br]Further ReadingJ.R.Harris, 1964, The "Copper King", Liverpool University Press.ASD -
63 Wyatt, John
[br]b. April 1700 Thickbroom, Weeford, near Lichfield, Englandd. 29 November 1766 Birmingham, England[br]English inventor of machines for making files and rolling lead, and co-constructor of a cotton-spinning machine.[br]John Wyatt was the eldest son of John and Jane Wyatt, who lived in the small village of Thickbroom in the parish of Weeford, near Lichfield. John the younger was educated at Lichfield school and then worked as a carpenter at Thickbroom till 1730. In 1732 he was in Birmingham, engaged by a man named Heely, a gunbarrel forger, who became bankrupt in 1734. Wyatt had invented a machine for making files and sought the help of Lewis Paul to manufacture this commercially.The surviving papers of Paul and Wyatt in Birmingham are mostly undated and show a variety of machines with which they were involved. There was a machine for "making lead hard" which had rollers, and "a Gymcrak of some consequence" probably refers to a machine for boring barrels or the file-making machine. Wyatt is said to have been one of the unsuccessful competitors for the erection of London Bridge in 1736. He invented and perfected the compound-lever weighing machine. He had more success with this: after 1744, machines for weighing up to five tons were set up at Birmingham, Chester, Gloucester, Hereford, Lichfield and Liverpool. Road construction, bridge building, hydrostatics, canals, water-powered engines and many other schemes received his attention and it is said that he was employed for a time after 1744 by Matthew Boulton.It is certain that in April 1735 Paul and Wyatt were working on their spinning machine and Wyatt was making a model of it in London in 1736, giving up his work in Birmingham. The first patent, in 1738, was taken out in the name of Lewis Paul. It is impossible to know which of these two invented what. This first patent covers a wide variety of descriptions of the vital roller drafting to draw out the fibres, and it is unknown which system was actually used. Paul's carding patent of 1748 and his second spinning patent of 1758 show that he moved away from the system and principles upon which Arkwright built his success. Wyatt and Paul's spinning machines were sufficiently promising for a mill to be set up in 1741 at the Upper Priory, Birmingham, that was powered by two asses. Wyatt was the person responsible for constructing the machinery. Edward Cave established another at Northampton powered by water while later Daniel Bourn built yet another at Leominster. Many others were interested too. The Birmingham mill did not work for long and seems to have been given up in 1743. Wyatt was imprisoned for debt in The Fleet in 1742, and when released in 1743 he tried for a time to run the Birmingham mill and possibly the Northampton one. The one at Leominster burned down in 1754, while the Northampton mill was advertised for sale in 1756. This last mill may have been used again in conjunction with the 1758 patent. It was Wyatt whom Daniel Bourn contacted about a grant for spindles for his Leominster mill in 1748, but this seems to have been Wyatt's last association with the spinning venture.[br]Further ReadingG.J.French, 1859, The Life and Times of Samuel Crompton, London (French collected many of the Paul and Wyatt papers; these should be read in conjunction with Hills 1970).R.L.Hills, 1970, Power in the Industrial Revolution, Manchester (Hills shows that the rollerdrafting system on this spinning machine worked on the wrong principles). A.P.Wadsworth and J.de L.Mann, 1931, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600–1780, Manchester (provides good coverage of the partnership of Paul and Wyatt and of the early mills).E.Baines, 1835, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, London (this publication must be mentioned, although it is now out of date).W.English, 1969, The Textile Industry, London (a more recent account).W.A.Benton, "John Wyatt and the weighing of heavy loads", Transactions of the Newcomen Society 9 (for a description of Wyatt's weighing machine).RLH
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