Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  The following article appeared in The Times on 29 July 1856, in support of a petition to Parliament to provide the family of Henry Cort with a pension:

  ‘Now with reference to the case which we are about to bring under the notice of our readers, and which is the subject of an advertisement in our columns today, we would begin by disclaiming the faintest shadow of responsibility. We have not investigated the truth of the allegations to which we are about to advert, nor, indeed as they refer to scientific matters, and to secret passages of the scandalous history of England 60 years ago, do we esteem ourselves competent to conduct an inquiry of that description. We wish merely that others should know, as we know, the story of Henry Cort, the father of the British Iron Trade: that is, that they should cast a glance over this brief abstract of a petition which his destitute family have presented to the House of Commons. This petition has been forwarded to us, and the allegations it contains are so completely of a national character that, for once, we violate a general and necessary rule, and have determined to give to them all the publicity in our power. Time was, some 70 years ago, that England was dependent upon Sweden and Russia for her supply of wrought iron. Henry Cort, of Gosport in the county of Southampton, an iron manufacturer, invented, and secured by patent, in the years 1783–4, two processes which relieved us from this commercial servitude, and liberated for the use of English manufacturers the supplies of iron which are stored up so profusely under the surface of these islands. “The first process effected the cheap manufacture of wrought iron by the use of pit coal in the puddling furnace; the second process, which was rolling this cheap wrought iron through grooved rollers, enabled the manufacturer to produce 20 tons of bar iron in the same time and with the same labour previously required to manipulate one ton of an inferior quality by the tedious operation of forging under the hammer.”

  ‘This allegation is given in the words of the petition. Before the year 1785, when iron was, comparatively speaking, but slightly used for commercial, maritime, or social purposes, we paid annually to Sweden something like £1,500,000 for wrought iron. Then came the war, came commercial embarrassment, depreciated paper, foreign prohibitions, and an overpowering and increasing demand for more and more iron. The inventions of Henry Cort carried us easily through this period of sharp trial, and, as his descendants allege, were the principal cause of our success. It would indeed be impossible to exaggerate the advantages resulting from an unlimited supply of “the precious metal”. The only points for consideration in this case are whether, first, to Henry Cort, and to him alone, the credit is due of enabling us to draw upon Vulcan at sight; and, secondly, whether he did not obtain all the remuneration to which he was fairly entitled by receipts from his patents, and so forth.

  ‘Now, upon the first point, we are bound to declare that Mr Cort’s son has succeeded in obtaining the signatures of the most eminent engineers and ironmasters in England to the petition in which he sets forth his father’s claims to be considered as the exclusive author of the improvements in the manufacture of iron. The point is one upon which hostile criticism is very desirable, but until such very powerful attestation as we see incorporated in this petition is disproved there is no doubt a very violent presumption that Henry Cort, of Gosport, is entitled to be considered as the Tubal Cain of our century and of our country.

  ‘Let anyone think of our iron fleet, iron gunboats, iron mercantile marine, iron railways, iron engines, iron cotton mills, iron suspension and tubular bridges, iron batteries, iron palaces, etc., and then ask himself what should be the measure of public gratitude to the descendants of a man who endowed his country with such an amount of wealth and power. While others have, upon the strength of Henry Cort’s discoveries, been raised to the position of millionaires, his children are almost starving. We should be ashamed for the honour of England to mention the amount of the pension which has been conceded to them by the Crown and Parliament. It is about equal in amount to the wages of a domestic servant of the humblest description, and even this has been made subject to deductions. For the sake of our national credit, it behoves all persons of influence in the country to give the case of Henry Cort’s children their immediate consideration. In bringing the subject under their notice our duty is discharged.’

  By the time of this article a son, Richard, and a daughter, Louisa, survived. Louisa died in 1859, questions were raised over Richard’s character, and the matter was never satisfactorily resolved.

  * * *

  17. Crucible Steel

  THE PRODUCTION OF steel was vital to the industrial economy; its workability, strength and durability made it an essential material. From medieval times steel had been used sparingly for the production of blades for swords, knives and scythes, where the material retained its strength even when made extremely thin. This property later became crucial in the precision engineering of components for instruments, clocks and watches. And in the Industrial Revolution its strength and suppleness were employed in rails, locomotives and wagons for the railway system.

  Steel is essentially iron with around 1.5 per cent carbon and with other additives like nickel giving it particular properties.1 Once the Bessemer process was invented in Britain in the 1850s steel became relatively simple to make, but before then it was an extremely laborious, skilled and time-consuming process. The key component was the controlled introduction of carbon into bar iron, a process known as carburisation; too much carbon would make the steel brittle like cast iron, too little would fail to impart the necessary strength and suppleness. Until the eighteenth century it was thought near-impossible to make steel from English iron, in which the high phosphorus content made the take-up of carbon difficult. Steel was instead imported from Sweden and Russia at a price around three times that of bar or wrought iron.

  The alternative was to produce steel in Britain from imported Swedish iron and it seems this process was first begun in the areas around Newcastle and Sheffield, although we can’t be sure when it started. Sheffield was known for its knife-making from as early as the fourteenth century, but this was a small craft industry. There were small centres of steel-making in other parts of the country, such as Robertsbridge in Sussex. More significantly, a German colony of steelworkers and sword-makers settled at Shotley Bridge in County Durham in the 1690s, probably bringing new techniques with them. By the early eighteenth century, however, Sheffield had become a centre of steel-making when Samuel Shore, for example, is known to have owned several steel furnaces in the city.2

  Making steel was arduous. Bar iron was heated with charcoal for six to seven days to produce high-carbon ‘blister steel’ which was then reworked in specialist forges. But the process tended to give an inconsistent composition because bars could have carbon at the surface but not the centre. To produce high-quality steel for sword blades and the like, a master forger needed to beat and fold the steel over and over to give high strength at the required thinness of blade. Some forgers collected bars of blister steel in bundles and heated and hammered them to produce shear steel. This was used for products like clock parts, razor blades and needles, as well as the knives and swords for which Sheffield became famous.

  The different production processes all involved a huge amount of fuel and skilled labour. Forgers were understandably keen to find a way of making steel directly in a furnace in the same way as cast iron, but here again it proved impossible to reach the required temperature of 1,600ºC with charcoal, and using coke would cause unacceptable impurities. The breakthrough came in Sheffield through the work of Benjamin Huntsman, who devised a way of separating the steel melt from the fuel; the Huntsman process revolutionised the industrial production of steel.

  Like Darby, Benjamin Huntsman was a Quaker, born in Barton on Humber in 1704 to German or Dutch parents. By 1730 he was established as a clockmaker in Doncaster, where he began to experiment with making a more suitable steel for the springs and pendulums. Sometime around 1742, apparently dissatisfied with the steel from his suppliers, Huntsman
moved to the Handsworth district of Sheffield to work on a new process.3 Handsworth was the centre of a glass industry that operated furnaces at high temperatures; glass-makers also used particular clays that could withstand the heat. Huntsman now put pieces of roughly made blister steel and shear steel in a clay crucible and heated them to very high temperatures. The crucibles – each nine to eleven inches high – were an important part of the process. Huntsman searched for a material that would withstand the extraordinary heat, eventually settling on clay from Stourbridge mixed with local Sheffield earth. The fuel was kept separate from the metal so coke could be used instead of charcoal without corrupting the product. The metal was heated for five hours, when a special secret flux (probably ground glass) was added. The intense heat freed the metal from the silicate slag; the crucible was then lifted and the molten steel poured into moulds. High-quality steel was now available to forgers in whatever form they needed.

  This sounds simple but, as with Darby and Cort’s work on iron smelting, the key was to manage the process, the ingredients and the equipment precisely in order to get exactly the right composition of steel. Huntsman used some locally made blister and shear steel as his raw material, but mostly imported iron from Sweden. He did not patent his method, however, preferring to keep it secret. There is an old myth that the Doncaster iron-maker Samuel Walker disguised himself as a beggar and was allowed into the Huntsman works to warm himself, where he proceeded to memorise the process; there is certainly evidence in Walker’s journal that he had a clay crucible for steel-making by November 1749.

  By 1774 three steel refiners are mentioned in the Sheffield Directory: Huntsman, Bolsover and Marshall; by 1787 there were twenty firms listed as Steel Convertors and Refiners, with at least seven using the crucible process. Though these firms were copying his process, Huntsman’s steel was for a long time regarded as the best, and the company supplied not only steel but also tools and cutlery. At first Sheffield cutlers did not like the new Huntsman steel, considering it too hard to forge and work, but Huntsman built up an impressive order book of foreign customers, supplying cutlers in Paris, Berlin, Geneva and St Petersburg, and the Sheffield cutlers learned how to use it too. Its uses spread well beyond the cutlery trade: by 1794 Jedediah Strutt had an account with the firm, using Huntsman steel in his spinning machines; John Wilkinson’s Low Moor Ironworks bought small amounts and may well have used the steel for cutting tools for the boring of engine cylinders; and Matthew Boulton too was buying cast steel from Huntsman from 1793, sometimes as blanks for the dies he used in his mint at Soho. Huntsman was partly paid in coins struck in the mint – on 14 August 1798 Boulton sent him £100 in pennies.

  Sheffield had been a centre of steel-making before Huntsman, but afterwards it became a world powerhouse, with Charles Cammell and James Marsh building forges and rolling mills on Brightside and across the city.4 It was the coming of the railways in the 1840s that brought the greatest boom: Sheffield’s steel output rose from 200 tons per year in 1840 to 20,000 tons in 1860, by which time the city was producing 40 per cent of Europe’s total. Then in 1861 John Brown & Co. brought to Sheffield the Bessemer process, which uses a blast of hot air to burn away impurities, enabling the mass production of low-priced steel. Steel-making spread out from Sheffield to other iron districts but the city remained the centre of the cutlery trade; at one point in the nineteenth century it was estimated that 80 per cent of the world’s cutlery was made in Sheffield. By that time steel was also an essential component of powered industrialisation – without a cheap and efficient process for making steel the pace of early industrialisation would have been severely curtailed.

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  Industrial Dynasties: The Walker Family

  The Walkers were iron-makers in South Yorkshire; the progress of this family firm of Congregationalists echoes the technological innovations of the eighteenth century.5

  1730 Joseph Walker is a small farmer with a profitable sideline in nail-making and cutlery, including knives, sickles and scythes. He is helped by his three sons Jonathan, Samuel and Aaron.

  1740 Following Joseph’s death Jonathan takes on the farm, Aaron the forge and Samuel becomes master of the village school while making sundials.

  1741 Aaron builds a small foundry behind the forge in which he casts iron goods.

  1746 The three brothers move their forge and buy a farm on the banks of the Don, Samuel writing in his diary ‘I thought myself so well settled [but] I began to see the disadvantage of being so far from a navigable river.’

  1762 The works are being driven by four waterwheels, which attracts a writ from the owners of water rights on the Don.

  1764 They build four new houses at the works together with one large and three small extra workshops. They are now employing clerks, masons, carpenters and wheelwrights.

  1767 The Walkers install a blast furnace fuelled, for the first time, by coke. They also install a tinplate shed and enlarge the boring house.

  1768 Traveller and chronicler Arthur Young visits the Walker plant and the surrounding area:

  Rotherham is famous for its ironworks . . . Near the town are two collieries out of which iron is dug, as well as coals to work it with: these collieries and works employ together near 500 hands. The ore here is worked into metal and then into bar iron, and the bars sent into Sheffield to be worked and to all parts of the country: this is one branch of their business. Another is the foundry, in which they run the ore into metal pigs and then cast it into all sorts of boilers, pans, ploughshares etc.6

  1775 The American War of Independence brings demand for cannon made from cast iron. The Walkers install a Newcomen engine to pump water to keep their waterwheels turning.

  1776 Production of iron cannon increases from forty tons to 450 tons; over the next five years the total cannon produced per year at the works reaches 1,220 tons. A third blast furnace is built along with a new boring house.

  1781 The Walkers install a new Boulton & Watt engine and another waterwheel.

  1793 War with France brings more demand for cannon; the Walkers are now producing 26,000 tons of cannon per year.

  1820 The end of the French wars brings a slump in the iron market and, with supplies of ore around Rotherham depleted, the Walkers move their operation to Staffordshire.

  * * *

  VI. Transport

  ‘We are credibly informed that there is a Steam Engine now preparing to run against any mare, horse or gelding that may now be produced at the next October meeting at Newmarket.’

  THE TIMES, 8 JULY 1808

  18. Rivers and Roads

  THE INDUSTRIALISATION OF Britain was marked by a series of symbiotic relationships between different industries, between agriculture and manufacturing, between innovation and economic expansion, all feeding off each other. There is, though, another important element: an effective transport system was essential to all the processes we have looked at. Moving coal and iron ore, corn and copper, cotton and salt and myriad other goods through the manufacturing process and into the hands of the end user was crucially important.

  Coal was arguably the most important cargo. As early as the 1670s around 2 million tons a year were being moved in Britain: 1 million tons by sea, around a quarter of a million tons by inland rivers, and the remainder by road. Land transport was the most difficult as roads were easily turned into rutted bogs by wheeled vehicles and quickly became impassable. Before 1700 hauliers came to collieries with horses and carts to collect coal, some as long-haul merchants, some as regional distributors, others as local householders. It would take around ten pack-horses or a substantial cart to carry a ton of coal, so even a modest colliery producing a few thousand tons a year would create a huge amount of traffic, often along unmade tracks. When bad weather made these tracks impassable coal was left piled at collieries.1

  Colliery owners began to get round the problem by building tramways or trackways using wooden rails to take coal from the pithead to the nearest navigable water. They found that r
unning horse-drawn wagons along the rails made them faster and kept the roadways in good condition; although the rails needed frequent repair, this was easier to manage than the upkeep of roads. The wooden rails were sometimes topped with a strip of iron, with full cast-iron rails first used at Coalbrookdale in 1767.

  The earliest documented English railway tracks were built in 1603–4 on Sir Francis Willoughby’s estate at Wollaton running to the River Trent; another running from Broseley to the Severn was opened in 1605. The crossings, points, inclines, loading methods and wagons that were developed for trackways provided a template for the powered railways that followed 200 years later. Trackways required a good deal of upfront investment – in 1700 the tracks cost around £200 per mile, with rolling stock, equipment and horses on top. Maintenance could be expensive too, but the increase in capacity made it worthwhile: a wagon could take double the load of a cart and a haulier with a wagon could shift between five and eight times as much freight on a tramway as on an average road. At Gibside colliery near Gateshead a new track built to Dunston staithe on the Tyne in 1701 enabled annual production to increase from 20,000 to over 70,000 tons in just two years.2

  Before the nineteenth century roads remained poor and travel a hazardous, time-consuming and exhausting business. While materials could be moved by trackway, barge and ship, roads were the essential medium of most passenger transport. The wealthy could go by carriage or ride their own horse; for those with moderate means it was possible to hire a horse for a long journey, or buy one in one place and sell it in another; the poor simply walked. From Tudor times parish authorities had been made responsible for the upkeep of roads but by the late seventeenth century increased traffic made local arrangements inadequate for major routes. In 1663 Parliament permitted the parishes along the Great North Road to collect tolls in return for maintaining the road, and in 1696 the first formal Turnpike Trust was set up in Surrey, which allowed a group of trustees to erect toll gates on public roads at which they could collect money to be used for maintenance. Parliament dictated a maximum toll for each kind of vehicle passing along the road and a toll-keeper sat in an isolated spot, perhaps with a physical barrier, perhaps with a blunderbuss: William Pitt the Elder was once shot at by a toll-keeper when his party went through a gate without paying. By the 1780s there were 15,000 miles of turnpike roads in Britain.3