With the improvement in machinery came improvement in millwork and power transmission. We quote in the next chapter Nasmyth’s description of the millwork of his boyhood.[67] Two of the mechanics most influential in the change from these conditions were Sir William Fairbairn and his younger brother, Sir Peter Fairbairn. They were born in Scotland but spent their boyhood in poverty in the neighborhood of Newcastle, in the same village with George Stephenson.

Sir William Fairbairn went to London in 1811 and obtained work with the Rennies. The shop, however, was filled with union men who set their shoulders against all outsiders. After struggling for a foothold for six weeks, he was set adrift, almost penniless, and turned his face northward. He obtained odd jobs in Hertfordshire as a millwright, and returned again to London in a few weeks, where he finally found work and remained for two years, most of the time at Mr. Penn’s engine shop in Greenwich. In the spring of 1813 he worked his way through southern England and Wales to Dublin, where he spent the summer constructing nail-making machinery for a Mr. Robinson, who had determined to introduce the industry into Ireland. The machinery, however, was never set at work owing to the opposition of the workmen, and the trade left Ireland permanently.

Fairbairn went from Dublin to Liverpool and proceeded to Manchester, the city to which Nasmyth, Roberts, Whitworth and Bodmer all gravitated. He found work with an Adam Parkinson, remaining with him for two years as a millwright, at good wages. “In those days,” wrote Fairbairn, “a good millwright was a man of large resources; he was generally well educated, and could draw out his own designs and work at the lathe; he had a knowledge of mill machinery, pumps, and cranes, could turn his hand to the bench or the forge with equal adroitness and facility. If hard pressed, as was frequently the case in country places far from towns, he could devise for himself expedients which enabled him to meet special requirements, and to complete his work without assistance. This was the class of men with whom I associated in early life,—proud of their calling, fertile in resources, and aware of their value in a country where the industrial arts were rapidly developing.”[68]

In 1817 Fairbairn and James Lillie, a shopmate, started out as general millwrights. They hired a small shed for 12 shillings a week and equipped it with a lathe of their own making, to turn shafts, and “a strong Irishman to drive it.” Their first order of importance came from Mr. Adam Murray, a large cotton spinner, who took them over his mill and asked them whether they were competent to renew his main drive. They boldly replied that they were willing and able to execute the work, but were more than apprehensive when Mr. Murray told them he would call the next day and look over their workshop to satisfy himself. He came, pondered over “the nakedness of the land,” “sized up” the young partners and told them to go ahead. Although a rush job, the work was done on time and so well that Murray recommended the new firm to Mr. John Kennedy, the largest cotton spinner in the kingdom. For his firm, MacConnel & Kennedy, Fairbairn & Lillie equipped a large, new mill in 1818, which was an immediate success and at once put the struggling partners in the front rank of engineering millwrights.

“They found the machinery driven by large, square cast-iron shafts on which huge wooden drums, some of them as much as four feet in diameter, revolved at the rate of about forty revolutions a minute; and the couplings were so badly fitted that they might be heard creaking and groaning a long way off.... Another serious defect lay in the construction of the shafts, and in the mode of fixing the couplings, which were constantly giving way, so that a week seldom passed without one or more breaks-down.”[69]

Fairbairn remedied this by the introduction of wrought-iron shafts, driven at double or treble the speed, and by improving and standardizing the design of pulleys, hangers and couplings. In the course of a few years a revolution was effected, and by 1840 the shafting speeds in textile mills had risen to from 300 to 350 revolutions per minute.

William Fairbairn’s influence was felt in many ways. His treatise on “Mills and Millwork” and numerous papers before the learned societies were authoritative for many years. He improved the design of waterwheels, and was one of the first to undertake iron shipbuilding as a special industry. He established a plant at Millwall, on the Thames, “where in the course of some fourteen years he built upwards of a hundred and twenty iron ships, some of them above two thousand tons burden. It was, in fact, the first great iron shipbuilding yard in Britain.”[70] To facilitate the building of his iron ships he invented, about 1839, improved riveting machinery. With Robert Stephenson he built the Conway and Britannia Tubular Bridges. Probably no man in England did so much to extend the use of iron into new fields, and his formulæ for the strength of boilers, tubing, shafting, etc., were standard for years. Like Nasmyth, William Fairbairn has left an autobiography which gives a full account of his career. It is not, however, so well written or so interesting. He died in 1874, at the age of eighty-five, loaded with every honor the nation could bestow.

His younger brother, Sir Peter Fairbairn, of Leeds, was apprenticed to a millwright while William was a journeyman mechanic in London. A few years later he became foreman in a machine shop constructing cotton machinery, and for ten years he worked in England, Scotland and on the Continent, wholly on textile machinery. In 1828 he came to Leeds, in the first flush of its manufacturing prosperity. Mr. Marshall, who had helped Matthew Murray, gave him his start and encouraged him to take over the Wellington Foundry, which, under Fairbairn’s management, was for thirty years one of the greatest machine shops in England. To the manufacture of textile machinery he added that of general machinery and large tools for cutting, boring, rifling, planing and slotting. He had a great reputation in his day, but his work seems to have been more that of a builder of standard tools than an originator of new tools and methods.

Charles Holtzapffel, another well-known engineer of that generation, was the son of a German mechanic who came to London in 1787. He received a good education, theoretical as well as practical, and became a skilled mechanician and a tool builder of wide influence. His principal book, “Turning and Mechanical Manipulation,” published in 1843 in three volumes, is an admirable piece of work. Covering a field much wider than its title indicates, it is the fullest and best statement of the art at that time; and scattered through it there is a large amount of very reliable mechanical history.

By 1840 the number of men engaged in tool building was increasing rapidly, and it is impossible to consider many English tool builders who were well known and who did valuable work, such as Lewis of Manchester, B. Hick & Son of Bolton, and others. One noteworthy man, however, ought to be mentioned—John George Bodmer, who was neither an Englishman, nor, primarily, a tool builder.[71] He was a Swiss who worked in Baden and Austria, as well as in England, and his fertile ingenuity covered so many fields that a list of the subjects covered by his patents occupy six pages in the “Transactions of the Institution of Civil Engineers.”

Bodmer was born at Zurich in 1786. After serving his apprenticeship he opened a small shop for millwright work near that city. A year or so later he formed a partnership with Baron d’Eichthal and with workmen brought from St. Etienne, France, he started a factory in an old convent at St. Blaise, in the Black Forest, first for the manufacture of textile machinery and later, in 1806, of small arms.

“Instead of confining himself to the ordinary process of gun-making by manual labour, Mr. Bodmer invented and successfully applied a series of special machines by which the various parts—more especially those of the lock—were shaped and prepared for immediate use, so as to insure perfect uniformity and to economise labour. Amongst these machines there was also a planing machine on a small scale; and Mr. Bodmer has been heard to observe how strange it was that it should not have occurred to him to produce a larger machine of the same kind, with a view to its use for general purposes.”[72] He does not seem to have used the process of milling until much later. Bodmer was thus among the first to discern and to realize many of the possibilities of interchangeable manufacture, Eli Whitney having begun the manufacture of firearms on the interchangeable basis at New Haven, Conn., about 1800, only a few years before. Why Bodmer’s attempt should have failed of the influence which Whitney’s had is not quite clear. A possible explanation may lie in the fact that the use of limit gauges does not seem to have been a part of Bodmer’s plan. This use was recognized by the American gun makers as an essential element in the interchangeable system almost from the start.

Bodmer was appointed, by the Grand Duke of Baden, director of the iron works and military inspector with the rank of captain and for a number of years much of his energy was given to the development of small arms and field artillery. He invented and built a 12-pound breech-loading cannon in 1814, which he had tested by the French artillery officers. It failed to satisfy them, and was sent a few years later to England, where it was decently buried by the Board of Ordnance.

The following year he built a flour-mill at Zurich for his brother. Instead of each set of stones being driven by a small waterwheel, all the machinery connected with the mill was driven by a single large wheel through mill gearing. The millstones were arranged in groups of four. “Each set could be started and stopped separately, and was besides furnished with a contrivance for accurately adjusting the distance between the top and bottom stones. By means of a hoist of simple construction, consisting in fact only of a large and broad-flanged strap-pulley and a rope-drum, both mounted on the same spindle (the latter being hinged at one end, so that it could be raised and lowered by means of a rope), the sacks of grain or flour could be made to ascend and to descend at pleasure, and the operatives themselves could pass from one floor to any other by simply tightening and releasing the rope.[73] The shafting of this mill was made of wrought iron, and the wheels, pulleys, hangers, pedestals, frames, &c., of cast iron, much in accordance with modern practice.”[74] This was several years before Fairbairn and Lillie began their improvements at Manchester.

Bodmer went to England for the first time in 1816 and visited all the principal machine shops, textile mills and iron works. He returned in 1824 and again in 1833, this time remaining many years. On his second trip he established a small factory for the manufacture of textile machinery at Bolton, in which was one of the first, if not the first, traveling crane.[75] At the beginning of his last and long residence in England, Bodmer appointed Sharp, Roberts & Company makers of his improved cotton machinery, which they also undertook to recommend and introduce. This arrangement was not successful, and a few years later, in partnership with Mr. H. H. Birley, Bodmer started a machine shop and foundry in Manchester for building machinery.

Nearly all of the machinery for the Manchester plant was designed and built by Bodmer himself and it forms the subject of two remarkable patents, granted, one in 1839 and the other in 1841.[76] The two patents cover in reality nearly forty distinct inventions in machinery and tools “for cutting, planing, turning, drilling, and rolling metal,” and “screwing stocks, taps and dies, and certain other tools.” “Gradually, nearly the whole of these tools were actually constructed and set to work. The small lathes, the large lathes, and the planing, drilling, and slotting machines were systematically arranged in rows, according to a carefully-prepared plan; the large lathes being provided, overhead, with small traveling cranes, fitted with pulley-blocks, for the purpose of enabling the workmen more economically and conveniently to set the articles to be operated upon in the lathes, and to remove them after being finished. Small cranes were also erected in sufficient numbers within easy reach of the planing machines, &c., besides which several lines of rails traversed the shop from end to end for the easy conveyance on trucks of the parts of machinery to be operated upon.”[77] There were, in addition to these, however, “a large radial boring machine and a wheel-cutting machine capable of taking in wheels of 15 feet in diameter, and of splendid workmanship, especially in regard to the dividing wheel, and a number of useful break or gap-lathes, were also constructed and used with advantage. It is especially necessary to mention a number of small, 6-inch, screwing lathes, which, by means of a treadle acting upon the driving gear overhead, and a double slide-rest—one of the tools moving into cut as the other was withdrawn,—screw cutting could uninterruptedly proceed both in the forward and in the backward motion of the toolslide, and therefore a given amount of work accomplished in half the time which it would occupy by the use of the ordinary means. Some of the slide-lathes were also arranged for taking simultaneously a roughing and finishing cut.”[78]

The latter part of Bodmer’s life was spent in and near Vienna, working on engines and boilers, beet sugar machinery and ordnance; and at Zurich, where he died in 1864, in his seventy-ninth year.

Bodmer does not seem to have originated any new types of machine tools, with the exception of the vertical boring-mill, which he clearly describes, terming it a “circular planer.” It was little used in England, and has been considered an American development.

It is hard now to determine how far Bodmer has influenced tool design. It was much, anyway. Speaking of the patent just referred to, John Richards, who has himself done so much for tool design, says, “Here was the beginning of the practice that endured.” He has described some of Bodmer’s tools in a series of articles which show a standard of design greatly in advance of the practice of his time.[79] Another writer says of Bodmer, “He seems always to have thoroughly understood the problems he undertook to solve.” “One is lost in admiration at the versatility of the inventive genius which could at any one time—and that so early in the history of machine design—evolve such excellent conceptions of what was needed in so many branches of the mechanics’ art.”[80]

Bodmer was elected a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1835, and his standing among his contemporaries is shown by the fact that thirty-five pages in the “Transactions” of the Institution for 1868 are given to his memoir. For a foreigner to have won respect and distinction in the fields of textile machinery, machine tools and steam engines in England, where all three originated, was surely “carrying coals to Newcastle.” Not only did he succeed in these fields, but he invented the traveling crane, the chain grate for boilers, the Meyer type of cut-off valve gear, the rolling of locomotive tires, and introduced the system of diametral pitch, which was long known as the “Manchester pitch,” from its having originated in his plant at Manchester.

Though Bodmer was never regularly engaged in the building of machine tools, his contribution to that field is far too great to be forgotten.