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ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL (1806-1859)

One of the greatest British engineers of the 19th century was the marvellously named Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He was the son of Marc Isambard Brunel, a French engineer who fled the French revolution firstly to the USA and then to England. Marc designed the machines built by Henry Maudslay to manufacture blocks for the Royal Navy and also designed the first tunnel under the Thames river.

At fourteen, young Isambard was sent to France for his education and returned when he was sixteen to help his father’s business. He was just 20 when he took over the supervision of the 400 metre long Thames tunnel construction. The tunnel was a difficult job as it was close to the river bed above. Workers had to put up with both foul water seeping into the tunnel and the danger of collapse. To protect the workers, a steel shield covered the area being worked on but despite this the river broke through twice. During the second collapse six workers died and Isambard was badly injured while saving others.

While recuperating he won a competition for the designing a suspension bridge over the Avon gorge which helped start his own business. Brunel secured the contract for the design and building of the Great Western Railway where he constructed more than 1600 km of lines, bridges, tunnels and stations throughout England and Wales including the Paddington railway terminus. His designs were daring and groundbreaking for the time. He developed new construction methods to achieve structures that were previously thought impossible.

Brunel was a workaholic, sleeping as little as four hours a night and smoking up to 40 cigars a day. He constructed two railways in Italy and was an advisor for railways in India and Australia. He designed a prefabricated field hospital for use in the Crimean War and was involved in ambitious ship building projects. His first, the wooden 78 metre SS Great Western paddle steamer completed the return Atlantic crossing in 28 days compared to almost two months for a sailing ship. He followed this with the iron hulled 98 metre propeller driven SS Great Britain and finally the gigantic 213 metre SS Great Eastern. Each was the largest ship to be launched at the time.

During the construction of the SS Great Eastern, Brunel’s health had been failing. He suffered a stroke on the deck only a few days after launching and died shortly after at the age of 53.

Daniel Gooch, chairman and former engineer of the Great Western railway said of Brunel. “The commercial world thought him extravagant; but although he was so, great things are not done by those who sit down and count the cost of every thought and act.”

Ambitious, innovative and driven, Brunel was responsible for huge advances in engineering techniques. Some of his methods are still used today and many of his bridges, tunnels and viaducts are still standing. So a well deserved engineering salute goes to Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Sir Joseph Whitworth 1803 - 1887

Sir Joseph Whitworth must be considered one of the great Victorian engineers for not just inventing the thread form that bears his name but for bringing high precision to industrial England.

Whitworth was born in Stockport, Cheshire in 1803.
At the age of fourteen he was indentured as an apprentice at his uncle's cotton spinning mill in Derbyshire. At eighteen he left the mill to join Crighton and Co. a leading machine making company in Manchester. In 1825, in order to further his career he secured a job at Henry Maudslay's works in London.

In 1833 he returned to Manchester and began his own company. There was a great demand for machine tools in the 1830's, due to the rapid expansion of the railways. Manchester was the terminal point for the first major public railway and the centre of the textile industry. In 1834 his workforce totalled fifteen, by 1854 this had increased to 368. In 1880 the company had moved to larger premises and was employing over a thousand workers.

His most important contribution to engineering was in developing machine tools to speed up production and improve accuracy. He was the first to drive both longitudinal and cross feeds automatically on one lathe using a single lead screw. He also patented the half nut used in connection with the lead screw to provide a fast carriage return.

Whitworth realised that machines must be made to a very high standard if they were to produce parts of consistent size. To achieve this he constructed a measuring machine accurate to 0.0001" and another that could detect differences of less than one millionth of an inch. He was also one of the first to point out the advantages of decimalisation as the fractional system of 1/16ths 1/32nds etc. was too crude for precision work.

Whitworth used his measuring machines to develop his own system of standard gauges and standardisation of screw threads, for which he is probably best known. The Whitworth thread was first introduced in his own factory and was in universal use by 1858. Whitworth died in 1887 having made his fortune and an immense contribution to the field of engineering.

So a big engineering salute to Sir Joseph Whitworth.

John "Iron Mad" Wilkinson (1728 - 1808)

Wilkinson was an English industrialist who pioneered the use of cast iron.

Wilkinson was born in Clifton, Cumberland. His father Isaac was a part-time ironworker and inventor. By 1748 Wilkinson had saved enough money to build his first blast furnace in Bradley, near Wolverhampton. He was so successful that in 1772 he bought the manor and estate of Bradley, adding to the works there.

In the early 1760s, John and his brother William inherited their father's ironworks in Bersham, north Wales and founded the New Bersham Company. Bersham soon led the world in the field of iron technology. Later John joined up with James Watt in the manufacture of steam engines. For some twenty years they enjoyed a near-monopoly, with Boulton & Watt insisting that customers bought parts from the Wilkinson foundry. This cosy relationship ended when in the late 1780s, when William and John fell out. William supplied Boulton & Watt with details of the pirate engines John had been building on the side. They sued, and established the Soho works in Stoke-on-Trent as a means of independent production.

Wilkinson was also influential in the design of cannon. The traditional method involved casting a one-piece cannon with a core. Since the hole was cast, it often introduced imperfections into the cannon which have catastrophic consequences for those using it. In 1774-5, Wilkinson invented a cannon-boring machine which produced safer and more accurate cannons. He later patented a method to make spiral groves in cannons that would project the ball further and straighter.

Wilkinson was a major force behind the construction in 1779 of an iron bridge, the world's first, across the River Severn at Coalbrookdale. In 1787 Wilkinson launched the first iron barge. His iron obsession reached its peak in the late 1790s, when he paid to have iron windows, a pulpit and other fittings installed into a Methodist chapel in Bradley. He became known as 'Iron-Mad Wilkinson'.

Wilkinson died in 1808 a wealthy man. He was buried in an iron coffin.

(Source www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_ figures )

The Forgotten Engineer - Henry Maudslay 1771 – 1831

One of the most important engineers of the industrial revolution was Henry Maudslay. He is credited with inventing the screw cutting lathe which allowed the manufacture of consistent threads. Maudslay was the first man able to make, and exploit very accurate screw threads. His masterpiece was a screw 5 feet long and 2 inches in diameter with 50 threads per inch (TPI) on which ran a nut 12 inches long. The apparatus was designed to average out pitch errors over small distances and was a vital element in engraving the scale markings on astronomical and other very accurate measuring devices.
Known as “The Engineer’s Engineer” Maudslay also improved the accuracy of the micrometer by a factor of 10 to enable measurements as small as 0.0001 of an inch. He was even able to observe the thermal growth of a lead screw when sunlight fell on one end of it.
One of his first contracts was to build 42 woodworking machines to make rope blocks for the Royal Navy. A single ship required around 1,400 blocks of various sizes and the annual requirement of the navy was around 160,000 blocks. His machines were powered by a 32 Hp steam engine and reduced the staff required from 110 men to just 10. Maudslay’s machine building extended to minting presses, flour mills, saw mills and a device for desalinating water for marine boilers but his work on screw cutting lathes brought accuracy to nuts and bolts that had previously had to be individually matched. One of his apprentices was Joseph Whitworth who later standardized thread design and gave his name to the BSW range of nuts and bolts.
So a big engineering salute to the engineer’s engineer, Henry Maudslay

To kick this off I'll suggest someone who inspired generations of kids to become engineers. Frank Hornby - the inventor of Meccano. Meccano was invented by him in 1901 as a passtime for his children. He patented it and put it on sale where it became an almost instant success. It gave kids the experience of working with nuts, bolts wheels and pulleys. It was used in many science and physics labs to construct test equipment and demonstrations. Boys would gaze for hours at the steam engines, ferris wheels and earthmoving equipment constructed for shop demonstrations and dream of being able to afford the enormous "Number 10" kit. Meccano went through troubled times in the 1960's and 1970's with competition from cheaper plastic toys but is still made today in France and China. So although not an engineer by trade, a big engineering salute goes to Frank Hornby.