reviews – Philip Hamlyn Williams

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This Time No Mistakes – how to remake Britain

May 25, 2024 — 1 Comment

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Isambard, born in 1806, was the only son of Marc Brunel the celebrated engineer of the Thames Tunnel. Marc was French and as a royalist fled France after the Revolution spending six years in the USA where he built a reputation which would carry him safe through Francophobe London. He had brought with him the […]

Joseph Whitworth – the world’s best mechanician

In his biography, Norman Atkinson makes the point that it is sometimes difficult to trace the early days of people who later became famous. With Joseph Whitworth, whom Atkinson describes as the ‘World’s Best Mechanician’, the problem was that contemporary writers were keen to give the great man as great a pedigree, so early biographers […]

History of Education for manufacturing

Oxford and Cambridge Universities, unlike the Scots, French and Germans, rather looked down on manufacturing preferring to teach the classics and didn’t offer science degrees until after 1870. Cambridge had offered lectures on pure mathematics, but not on anything applied. Eric Hobsbawm in his book, The Age of Revolution makes the point that none of […]

Sir Alexander (Mac) and Lady Rachel MacRobert

Alexander MacRobert was born in Aberdeen in 1854. Papermaking took place in many parts of the country where there was a plentiful supply of water, but also of waste cotton. One such was Aberdeen. There were also many textile mills there: the Crombie Mills which exported fine tweeds and overcoats and Hadden & Co who […]

William Fairbairn – the doyen of Manchester engineers

William Fairbairn was a Scot, born in Kelso in 1789. At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to Percy Main Colliery, near Newcastle-on-Tyne. In 1811, he moved to London, where he worked for Rennie and Penn. In 1817, he launched a mill-machinery business in Manchester with a former shop-mate, James Lillie. The business was […]

James Watt and Matthew Boulton

James Watt was a Scot, born in Greenock in January 1736. His father was a skilled carpenter employing quite a number of people working mainly on ships. He was successful and respected; he owned shares in some of the ships he worked on. He married an equally respectable woman. The family story was tragic with […]

Thomas Telford and John Smeaton – fathers of civil engineering, and John and George Rennie – civil and mechanical engineers

The Rennies were a Scots family that epitomises the connectivity of civil and mechanical engineering. I begin, though, with the father of civil engineering, John Smeaton, who is best known for rebuilding the Eddystone Lighthouse during which he discovered that the property of hardening whilst submerged in water was linked to the clay content of […]

Abraham Darby – iron master

Iron ore was smelted by burning charcoal in the Weald and as forests were denuded, smelting spread to other forested areas. Eventually it became clear that an alternative to charcoal was needed. The Earl of Dudley’s son ‘Dud’ claimed to have smelted iron ore with coal but there is no evidence of this. Dud was […]

George and Robert Stephenson – the railway men

George Stephenson was born in 1781 into a mining community just inland of Newcastle near Wylam on the Tyne where his father worked as a fireman at the colliery. They lived with George’s mother, Mabel the daughter of a dyer, and two younger brothers and sisters in Street House only yards from the wagon way […]

West Country engine builders – Newcomen and Trevithick

The West Country, Cornwall in particular, was where deep mines were first sunk, in search of metals rather than coal. The problem with depth was the water table which meant that mines would flood. To begin with, pumps were powered by animals or water and windmills. Something more powerful was needed and in stepped first […]