The work of the earlier generation of English tool builders may be said to have culminated in that of Sir Joseph Whitworth. For a man of his commanding influence, the information in regard to his life is singularly meager. He left no account of himself as Nasmyth and William Fairbairn did; no biography of him was written by his contemporaries, and the various memoirs which appeared at the time of his death are short and incomplete.

He was born at Stockport in 1803. His father was a minister and schoolmaster. At fourteen he was placed in the office of his uncle, a cotton spinner in Derbyshire, to learn the business. But commercial work did not appeal to him. He slighted the office as much as possible and delved into every nook and corner of the manufacturing and mechanical departments of the establishment. In a few years he had mastered the construction of every machine in the place and acquired the deep-seated conviction that all the machinery about him was imperfect. He ran away to Manchester to escape a routine business life, and found work with Creighton & Company, as a working mechanic. He married in 1825, and shortly afterward went to work with Maudslay & Field in London. Maudslay soon placed him next to John Hampson, a Yorkshireman, who was his best workman. While there, Whitworth developed his method of making accurate plane surfaces by hand scraping them, three at a time. On leaving Maudslay, Whitworth worked for Holtzapffel, and later for Clement. He returned to Manchester in 1833, rented a room with power, and hung out a sign, “Joseph Whitworth, Tool Maker from London.” Here he began his improvements in machine tools—the lathe, planer, drilling, slotting and shaping machines. He improved Nasmyth’s shaper, adding the quick-return motion, which has been known ever since as the Whitworth quick-return motion. His tools became the standard of the world, and in the London Exhibition of 1851 stood in a class by themselves.

Their preëminence lay not so much in novelty of design as in the standard of accuracy and quality of workmanship which they embodied. With unerring judgment, Whitworth had turned his attention first, to use his own words, “to the vast importance of attending to the two great elements in constructive mechanics,—namely, a true plane and power of measurement. The latter cannot be attained without the former, which is, therefore, of primary importance.... All excellence in workmanship depends upon it.”[102]

The first step, the production of true plane surfaces, made while he was at Maudslay’s, was, we are told, a self-imposed task. The method of producing these, three at a time, is generally credited to Whitworth. We have already quoted Nasmyth’s statement that the method was in use at Maudslay’s and that it was “a very old mechanical dodge.” While this is probably true, Whitworth contributed something to the method, which very greatly increased the accuracy of the product. The writer is inclined to believe that that element was the substitution of hand scraping for grinding in the final finishing operations. Whitworth’s paper, read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Glasgow in 1840, indicates this, although it does not say so directly. In this paper he specifically points out the reason why planes should not be finished by grinding them together with abrasive powder in between; namely, that the action of the grinding powder was under no control, that there was no means of securing its equal diffusion or modifying its application and localizing its action to the particular spot which needed it. Holtzapffel confirms this view, saying, in 1847: “The entire process of grinding, although apparently good, is so fraught with uncertainty, that accurate mechanicians have long agreed that the less grinding that is employed on rectilinear works the better, and Mr. Whitworth has recently shown in the most satisfactory manner,[103] that in such works grinding is entirely unnecessary, and may, with the greatest advantage be dispensed with, as the further prosecution of the scraping process is quite sufficient to lead to the limit of attainable accuracy.... The author’s previous experience had so fully prepared him for admission of the soundness of these views, that in his own workshop he immediately adopted the suggestion of accomplishing all accurate rectilinear works by the continuance of scraping, to the entire exclusion of grinding.”[104]

When Whitworth determined to make a better set of planes than any in use at the Maudslay shop, we are told that he was laughed at by Hampson and his other fellow workmen for undertaking an impossible job. He not only succeeded, but the truth of the planes he produced aroused the admiration and wonder of all who saw them. Nasmyth distinctly mentions scraping, but it should be remembered that he worked at Maudslay’s four or five years after Whitworth went there, and scraping may have been introduced into their older methods of making triple surface-plates by Whitworth, and have accounted for the wonderful accuracy of which Nasmyth speaks.

Having realized what he considered the first element in good workmanship, Whitworth began on the second,—improved methods in measurement. He introduced the system of “end measurements,” relying ordinarily on the sense of touch rather than eyesight; and, for extreme accuracy, on the falling of a tumbler held by friction between two parallel planes. At the presentation of the address before the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, in 1856, he exhibited a measuring machine built on this principle which detected differences of length as small as one-millionth of an inch. The address was largely devoted to the advantages of end measurement. Referring to the machine before him, he said: “We have in this mode of measurement all the accuracy we can desire; and we find in practice in the workshop that it is easier to work to the ten-thousandth of an inch from standards of end measurements, than to one-hundredth of an inch from lines on a two-foot rule. In all cases of fitting, end measure of length should be used, instead of lines.” This principle has become almost universal for commercial work, although for extremely accurate work upon final standards line measurements, aided by the microscope, are used.

It was Whitworth who brought about the standardization of screw thread practice in England. He had come into contact with the best thread practice at Maudslay’s and at Clement’s, but in the other shops throughout the country there was chaos, so far as any recognized standard was concerned. Using their work as a basis, and collecting and comparing all the screws obtainable, Whitworth arrived at a pitch for all sizes and a thread contour, which he proposed in a paper before the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1841.[105] It was received with favor, and by 1860 the “Whitworth thread” had been generally adopted throughout the country.

In 1853 Whitworth visited the United States, and in conjunction with George Wallis of the South Kensington Museum, reported on the enterprises and manufactures of the United States.[106] Nearly all the memoirs of Whitworth refer to the profound effect of this report. As one reads it today, it seems difficult to see why it should have had so much influence. It is probable that Whitworth’s own personal report to the influential men about him contained much which does not appear in the formal report. In it he takes up steam engines, railway supplies, woodworking tools, electric telegraph, textile mills, and gives brief accounts of some of the factories and methods which he found at various places in New England and the Middle States. The longest description is given to the Springfield Armory, but even this is a mere fragment, and the only detailed information is of the time necessary to finish a gun-stock. We know, however, that this armory and the various private armories they saw, made an impression upon Whitworth and the whole Commission which led to the remodeling of the British gun-making plant at Enfield. Nasmyth was also concerned in this and a fuller account of it will be given later.

The conclusion of Whitworth’s report shows clearly that he was deeply impressed with the extent to which the automatic principle was being applied to machine tools in America. “The labouring classes,” he says, “are comparatively few in number, but this is counterbalanced by, and indeed, may be regarded as one of the chief causes of, the eagerness with which they call in the aid of machinery in almost every department of industry. Wherever it can be introduced as a substitute for manual labour, it is universally and willingly resorted to.... It is this condition of the labour market, and this eager resort to machinery wherever it can be applied, to which, under the guidance of superior education and intelligence, the remarkable prosperity of the United States is mainly due.” Another characteristic of American manufacture attracted his attention,—the tendency toward standardization. In his address in 1856 he condemns the overmultiplication of sizes prevalent in every branch of English industry.

Shortly after his return from America, Whitworth was requested by the government to design a complete plant for the manufacture of muskets. He disapproved of the Enfield rifle and declined to undertake the work until exhaustive tests were made to determine the best type of rifle. The government, therefore, equipped a testing plant and range near Manchester, and Whitworth began a series of tests which showed the Enfield rifle to be inferior in almost every respect. He then submitted a new rifle, designed on the basis of his experiments, which embodied the small bore, an elongated projectile and a rapid rifle-twist and great accuracy of manufacture. Although this rifle excelled all others in accuracy, penetration and range, it was rejected by the war office. Some thirty years later, the Lee-Metford rifle, which embodied Whitworth’s improvements, was adopted, but only after these principles had been recognized and used by every other government in Europe. His contributions to the manufacture of heavy ordnance were even greater, but they met with the same reception from the war office. In 1862 he completed a high-powered rifle cannon with a range of six miles, the proportions of which were substantially those in use today. He developed the manufacture of fluid compressed steel, about 1870, to supply a stronger and more reliable material for ordnance use. Few men in any country have had a greater influence on the design and development of ordnance and armor. His partnership with Sir William Armstrong resulted in one of the greatest gun factories in the world.

Whitworth married twice but had no children. He acquired a great fortune. During his lifetime he established the famous Whitworth scholarships. At his death, large sums were distributed by friends, to whom he had willed them for the execution of his wishes, and they devoted nearly £600,000 ($3,000,000) to the foundation or endowment of the Whitworth Institute, Owens College, and the Manchester Technical Schools, and other public institutions. In 1874 he converted his Manchester business into a stock company, giving the majority of the stock to his foremen and making provision for the acquiring of further stock by his clerks and workmen. While he was slow in receiving recognition from his own government, he became universally recognized as one of the greatest engineering authorities in the world, and was honored as few engineers have been, being elected to the Royal Society, chosen president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, given degrees by Dublin and Oxford, the Cross of the Legion of Honor; and, in 1869, made a baronet.

As he grew older he became irritable and exceedingly dogmatic, possibly because of his long contests with slow-moving government officials. Charles T. Porter, in his autobiography, brings out this side of his nature and shows that the initiative of subordinates in his shop was practically killed. Perhaps this limited his service somewhat in his later years, but when all is taken into account, he was, without question, one of the greatest of mechanical engineers. He was a master experimenter. Tests which he made were thorough, conclusive, and always led somewhere. His experiments, whether in machine tools, screw threads, or ordnance, always resulted in a design or process which sooner or later became standard.

Whitworth’s position as a tool builder is not weakened by the fact that most of the general tools had been invented by the time he began his independent work. He raised the whole art of tool building by getting at the fundamental conditions. He led the way in the change from the weak, architectural style of framing; introduced the box design or hollow frame for machinery, taking his suggestion from the human body, and very greatly increased the weight of metal used.

In 1850 Whitworth was, without doubt, the foremost tool builder in the world. He had introduced a standard of accuracy in machine tools unknown before, and so improved their design and workmanship that he dominated English tool practice for several generations. In fact, the very ascendency of Whitworth’s methods seems to have been an element in the loss of England’s leadership in tool building. Most of the progressive work for the next fifty years was done in America.

In the foregoing chapters we have traced briefly the work of the great English mechanics from 1800 to 1850. Their services to engineering, and, in fact, to mankind, cannot be measured. When they began, machine tools in any modern sense did not exist. Under their leadership nearly all of the great metal-working tools were given forms which have remained essentially unchanged. England had the unquestioned leadership in the field of machine tools. Machine-tool building in Germany and France was one or two generations behind that of England, and nearly all their machinery was imported from that country. With the exception of the early and incomplete work of the ingenious French mechanics, which we have referred to from time to time, practically all of the pioneer work was done by Englishmen.

In glancing back at these early tool builders, it will be seen that few of them were men of education. All were men of powerful minds, many of them with broad intellectual interests. It is suggestive to note one thing, whatever may be its bearing. Only three of all these men, Matthew Murray and the two Fairbairns, served a regular apprenticeship. Bentham and Brunel were naval officers; Bramah, a farmer’s boy and cabinetmaker; Maudslay, a blacksmith; Clement, a slater; Roberts, a quarry laborer; Nasmyth, a clever school boy; and Whitworth, an office clerk.

Whatever may have been the reason, the rapid advance of the English machine-tool builders ceased about the middle of the last century, and they have made but few radical changes or improvements since that time. At about the same time the American engineers introduced a number of improvements of very great importance.

The great distance of America from England forced it into a situation of more or less commercial and mechanical independence. While France and Germany were importing machine tools from England, America began making them and soon developed independence of design. The interchangeable system of manufactures and the general use of accurate working gauges, which were hardly known in England, developed rapidly in America. These, with the introduction of the turret, the protean cam, and precision grinding machinery, and the great extension of the process of milling, served in the next fifty years to transfer the leadership in machine-tool design from England to America. A visit to any one of the great machine shops in England, Germany or France will convince one that the leadership now rests with the American tool builders.

The remaining chapters will take up the lives and work of those who have contributed to this great change.