By the early nineteenth century the local aristocratic families had mostly left the region, with the Mosleys of Manchester Manor selling up and moving to Staffordshire. This left Manchester as a town with virtually no aristocratic involvement in its governance, or indeed its political, social or cultural life. The Tory Anglican establishment was instead made up of middle-class merchants and mill-owners like Robert Peel and the three Birley brothers, John, Hugh Hornby and Joseph, who all became Lord-Lieutenants of Lancashire. They were generally ex-pupils of Manchester Grammar School and sat on the Court Leet.
However, many of the early Manchester mill-owners were Nonconformists and therefore barred from the traditional roles in government; so instead this liberal faction built an impressive social and commercial and eventually political network. The Unitarian community, centred on the Cross Street and Mosley Street chapels and including families such as the Heywoods, Hibberts, Gregs, Percivals, Philipses and Potters, was particularly powerful. And as well as developing networks in industry and commerce Lancashire’s Nonconformists fostered a culture of technical training and education that sustained the region for several generations. Most famous of these was the Warrington Academy, founded in 1756, which was maintained by public subscription and which educated some of the most important Lancashire industrialists. Founders of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society – set up in 1781 and, besides the Royal Society, England’s oldest scientific society – were predominantly from the Warrington Academy, and provided informal education through lectures, discussion groups, libraries and the like.
Tensions between the two political and religious traditions grew more intense after the French Revolution of 1789, with the radicals under Thomas Walker forming the Manchester Constitutional Society and the Manchester Herald beginning to press for reform. The Tories responded by organising riots in which the paper’s offices were attacked and, once war with France was declared, they had Walker jailed for sedition. This bitter divide was the background to the infamous Peterloo massacre in 1819, when a public open-air meeting in favour of parliamentary reform was brutally suppressed. Fifteen people were killed and several hundred injured by troops wielding sabres.
Nevertheless the Manchester men had much in common. In the 1780s more than 64 per cent of Lancashire mill-owners were middle-class men, most of whom had previously run textile workshops of different kinds.11 They were small-scale businessmen, technically and commercially astute, and powered mechanisation gave them the chance to go up in scale. James McConnel and John Kennedy, founders of one of the biggest mills, were both sons of farmers from the south of Scotland, and James Halliwell began as a porter in the Peel family warehouse before becoming a mill-owner on his own account. More common were those like Peter Drinkwater who opened a steam-driven factory in 1789, after owning a fustian business complete with warehouse. And Samuel Oldknow was already a maker of muslins when he opened his two huge mills at Stockport and Mellor in the early 1790s.
The Lancashire cotton industry had shown itself eager to take on innovation, to adopt new ways of working that built on its existing expertise and structures. But once the first jennies, frames, mules and improved looms had been installed the demand for more machines became insatiable. The men who built the mills needed men who could build machines and they often went into partnership with them. Engineering began to migrate from the Warrington area into Manchester itself, and while trade directories from 1772 and 1773 show no engineers in the city, by 1781 there were ironmongers, brass-founders, and wire- and pin-makers, as well as two loom-makers, two shuttle-makers and a dozen makers of reeds.12 Later in the 1780s a plethora of specialist makers of spinning equipment appear – and in the 1790s they began to call themselves engineers. Aikin noted that:
To the ironmongers shops, which are greatly increased of late, are generally annexed smithies, where many articles are made . . . The tin-plate workers have found additional employment in furnishing many articles for spinning machines; as have also braziers in casting wheels for the motion-work of the rollers used in them; and the clock-makers in cutting them. Harness-makers have been much employed in making bands for carding engines, and large wheels for the first operation of drawing out the cardings, whereby the consumption of strong curried leather has been much increased.13
Of water-frames, Aikin wrote: ‘These machines exhibit in their construction an aggregate of clockmaker’s work and machinery most wonderful to behold.’14 The demand for these skills soon outstripped the capacity of Lancashire; metalworkers of all kinds came from across the country, earning high wages in the new boom town of Manchester.
Once Watt’s steam-engine patent expired in 1800 the demand for engine-builders also increased. The firm of Bateman and Sherrard was an early manufacturer in Salford; Aikin described their foundry ‘in which are cast most of the articles wanted in Manchester and its neighbourhood, consisting largely of large cast wheels for the cotton machines; cylinders, boilers, and pipes for steam engines; cast ovens and grates of all sizes’.15 The company had already begun building steam engines before 1800, and afterwards was able to expand.
More readily available iron meant that the early machinery made of wood and brass was replaced with cast and worked components. This was a difficult process – everything, we must remember, was being done for the first time in human history – but was well under way by 1820, by which time Manchester had replaced Birmingham as the centre of British engineering. Here there was continual demand for engineering skills and here there was money to be made – wages in some trades were double in Manchester compared to the Midlands.
The rapid growth of cotton and its industrial spin-offs made Manchester a magnet for engineers, inventors, entrepreneurs, artisans and labourers. The towns of Lancashire and north Cheshire grew steadily in population: the market towns of Wigan, Warrington, Preston, Stockport, Blackburn, Bolton and Rochdale reached around 5,000 by 1770, Liverpool 34,000 and Manchester combined with Salford 30,000. By 1800 the population of Manchester and Salford had more than trebled to 100,000 and by 1830 had doubled again. While this inevitably put strains on the provision of housing, sanitation, and health care, Manchester was at the forefront of dealing with these problems (see Chapters 23 and 24).
Manchester’s subsequent history has also reflected a key element of the Industrial Revolution, for the city has retained a culture of continuous innovation; far from being a museum piece, Manchester has entered the so-called post-industrial age with its spirit of practical ingenuity intact. It has remained a commercial city with manufacturing the servant rather than the master of its industrial power.16
V. Iron
‘We had a visit today from a Mr Cort of Gosport who says he has a forge there and has found some grand secret in the making of Iron.’
JAMES WATT TO MATTHEW BOULTON, 14 DECEMBER 1782
15. Abraham Darby’s Blast Furnace
THE ABILITY TO produce cheap and plentiful iron was a key component of the industrial economy. The earliest powered machinery, including steam engines, was made of iron and soon iron was needed for girders and rail tracks, rivets and ships’ hulls, tappets and locomotives. It is for this reason that Ironbridge in Shropshire has acquired world fame as a birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. It was at Ironbridge, then called Coalbrookdale, that Abraham Darby first managed to produce cast iron in a blast furnace using coal rather than charcoal. This breakthrough occurred in 1709, some sixty years before the classic period of the Industrial Revolution began, and sixty-seven years before his grandson built the bridge, made entirely of cast-iron girders, that now gives the town its name. Abraham Darby and Coalbrookdale deserve their place in history, for the production of cast iron was a vital step in the conversion to a productive economy based on coal. The effects were to be profound.
Iron is the most useful of all metals. Ever since people first learned how to smelt iron around 3,500 years ago it has provided the tools and weapons with which human society has developed. Smelted iron is k
nown from Asia Minor from around 2000 BC and by the eighth century BC large-scale production was evidently possible: 160 tons of iron bars were found in the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II at Khorsabad in modern Iraq. From the eighth to the sixth centuries BC an iron-based culture known as Hallstatt became the dominant culture of central Europe with smelting and metalworking techniques spreading north and west, reaching Britain by 500 BC.1 Useful though it is, iron does present difficulties to the would-be tool-maker. The melting point of pure iron is around 1,540ºC, an impossible temperature to reach in any pre-industrial furnace. This forced iron-makers to adopt a range of strategies to induce the metal to separate from its ore and form a useful compound that could be worked at a lower temperature. Being an ironmaster was therefore not unlike being a master chef, knowing from skill and experience how to manage a complex process to achieve the right result. The most common iron ore is haematite, which is essentially the chemical compound ferric oxide; the task of the smelter is to separate the haematite from its surrounding rock, and to remove the oxygen from haematite while replacing it with a small amount of carbon.
From the earliest times there were two distinct processes – bloomeries and blast furnaces – that produced two different types of iron. Bloomeries used a bed of hot charcoal in a pit or dome of clay or stone, with pipes laid in the bottom to allow air to circulate or be pumped in by bellows. Once the furnace is fired, pieces of iron ore and more charcoal are added in through the top. This induces a chemical process that frees the iron from its ore without reaching the melting point of pure iron. In bloomeries the temperatures reached around 1,200ºC with clods or ‘blooms’ of iron containing solid iron, slag and unburnt charcoal coalescing inside the furnace. The ironworkers then pulled out the blooms using tongs or rakes and hammered them to separate the iron from the slag. The main product of the bloomery was workable wrought iron, though some ironmasters made small amounts of cast iron and even steel through the bloomery process. All the iron produced in Europe in the pre-Roman Iron Age was made using bloomeries.
The alternative method of producing iron was the blast furnace, which has today replaced the bloomery in almost all cultures. Here again a chemical process is used to get round the difficulty of attaining a high enough temperature to melt the iron. Blast furnaces are sophisticated devices; they are known to have existed in China as early as the fifth century BC but reached Europe only after AD 1000; the Sussex Weald was probably the first area in Britain to adopt the blast furnace, sometime around 1500. Blast furnaces produce cast iron or pig iron which is high in carbon and strong but brittle; it is ideal for use in cannons, and the development of artillery may have been the main incentive for the development of blast furnaces in Europe.
Blast furnace: Iron ore, coke and lime are fed into the top of the furnace, which burns continually. Air is ‘blasted’ into the bottom and, when the conditions are right, the tap at the foot of the furnace is opened to allow iron to flow out into moulds.
Unlike the bloomery, which has a definite cycle of production, the blast furnace works continuously. Fuel and iron ore are tipped into the top of the tall furnace, while air is introduced by blowing in from the bottom. Gases escape through the top and phases of slag and iron are tapped out from the bottom. Ironmakers found that iron ores with high lime content produced slag that flowed more easily, so rather than rely on the natural content, they began to add lime powder to the furnace. In order to make cast iron a blast furnace needed to reach 1,300ºC, a temperature that was achievable with charcoal. Making the furnace taller saved fuel, as did leaving the mix to cook longer. With a constant water supply to operate the bellows, once the furnace had been ‘blown in’ its ‘campaign’ could continue until the fuel ran out or the furnace lining wore out. In practice, until the late eighteenth century, most European blast furnaces ran through the winter and were refurbished in the summer.
Cast iron or pig iron produced by blast furnaces contains around 3 to 4 per cent carbon, 1 to 2 per cent silicon and manganese, 0.5 per cent phosphorous and less than 0.1 per cent sulphur. The relatively high carbon content gives structural strength but cast iron is unsuitable for working in a forge; this requires bar iron or wrought iron which has a carbon content of less than 0.5 per cent, as well as reduced silicon. The conversion from cast iron to bar iron was achieved through a separate smelting process known as a finery. The forges themselves (sometimes known as chaferies) could use coal for heat, but the blast furnace and the finery required charcoal in order to avoid contaminating the iron.
As blast furnaces got bigger, making bar iron by this two-stage process became much more economical than using bloomeries; the output from a blast furnace reached around four tons of cast iron per six days (known as a founday) by the late seventeenth century. As almost every county in Britain has some source of iron ore, ironmaking was therefore widespread, although there were areas of special significance: the River Severn became an important artery for the iron trade linking the iron- and coal-rich areas of Shropshire and Staffordshire with the Forest of Dean coal mines and the trading and manufacturing centre of Bristol. By the late seventeenth century a huge variety of iron goods was being sold at fairs across England. As Thomas Baskerville reported from Stourbridge fair near Cambridge in 1677–8: ‘For here you shall see large streets and shops full of all the variety of wares that are to be sold in London, and great quantities of iron brought from several parts of the nation and elsewhere.’2
The fuel to ore ratio in a blast furnace was 1:1, so while the iron content of good ore was around 20 per cent, five tons of charcoal were needed to produce one ton of cast iron; bar iron needed almost as much fuel again. As both the capacity of blast furnaces and the demand for iron increased during the seventeenth century, people tried to substitute coal for charcoal as the furnace fuel. However, because the coal had to be mixed with the ore and therefore became part of the chemical reaction, it introduced impurities, particularly sulphur, which rendered the iron useless. But there was a pressing need to replace charcoal; and while there were concerns over the consumption of wood, coal was available and cheap. The solution of the problem was Abraham Darby’s smelting method, the first great technological breakthrough of the eighteenth century.
Darby was born in 1678 on a farm near Dudley in the West Midlands. Forty years later Daniel Defoe described the area: ‘Every Farm has one Forge or more; so that the Farmers carry on two very different Businesses, working at their Forges as Smiths, when they are not employed in the Fields as Farmers. And all their work they bring to market, where the great Tradesmen buy it up and send to London . . . We cannot travel far in any direction out of the sound of the hammer.’3
Even in Darby’s childhood ironmaking was a well-developed business. Some cast iron was produced locally in blast furnaces but most was brought from furnaces in the Forest of Dean up to forges in the upper Severn and West Midlands, where there were good supplies of charcoal and water power. Large-scale finery forges made bar iron and rods which they sold on to farmers who ran small forges as a sideline. Farmer-smiths made everything from nails to firebacks which they sold to merchants with warehouses along the Severn in Stourport, Welshpool and Bridgnorth. From there the finished products would be shipped on to Bristol and London.
Abraham Darby gained first-hand knowledge of metalworking in his father’s forge. The family were Quakers and John Darby sent his son away to Birmingham – a free, non-corporate town with a large established Society of Friends – for his apprenticeship. He was apprenticed to Jonathan Freeth, described as a ‘weighty Friend’ (i.e. one who spoke with authority at meetings), who was a maker of malt mills for the brewing trade and therefore a skilled pre-industrial engineer. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1699 Darby moved to Bristol and set up in the same business.4 Bristol was then the second city in England with many Quaker families engaged in the metal trades. From the beginning Darby showed an interest in innovation. In 1702 he founded the Bristol brass-wire company with a group of Quaker
partners; in 1704 he travelled to Holland to discover how to cast brass pots in sand, and with his assistant John Thomas (another Quaker) invented the technique, patented in 1707, of using a similar method to cast pots in iron.
Soon afterwards, Darby made the move that was to give him and his family immortal fame. It seems his business partners did not want to expand the Brass Works in Bristol so Darby sold them his share and used the money to buy the lease on an old blast furnace at Coalbrookdale on the River Severn in Shropshire. On the face of it this is a strange move, but it seems likely that Darby bought the site with a very clear purpose in mind.
His achievement becomes clearer if we look briefly at previous attempts to replace charcoal with coal in blast furnaces. Patents for using coal to smelt iron granted to Sturtevant (1611), Ravenson (1613) and Dud Dudley (1622) had all been unsuccessful. In 1665 Dudley published Metallum Martis in which he claimed to have perfected the method, but later examinations of the slag from his furnaces revealed this to be untrue. While Dudley had made some progress, his patent was not extended and it seems that his ideas were not taken up elsewhere. Abraham Darby was related to Dudley through his mother’s side of the family and is likely to have known his work, but just as important for his breakthrough were two other developments.
The first was the technique of making coke from coal, suggested in 1603 by Hugh Plat as a process similar to making charcoal from wood. Coke is produced by baking coal in sealed ovens to drive off water, volatile liquids in the form of tar, and coal gas; the solid remnant is high in carbon. From the 1640s coke was used in roasting malt, to get round the problem of fumes from coal affecting the taste, a process described by Robert Plot in his 1686 work The Natural History of Staffordshire: ‘they have a way of charring it [coal] in all particulars as they do wood, whence the coal is freed from the noxious steams that would give malt an ill odour. The coal thus prepared they call coke which conceives a heat almost as strong as charcoal itself, and is as fair for most uses, but for melting, fineing and refining of iron, which it cannot be brought to do, though attempted by the most skilful and curious artists.’5
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