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On the Verge of a More Perfect World
All of beauty, all of use
That one fair planet can produce,
Brought from under every star,
Blown from over every main,
And mixt, as life is mixt with pain
The works of peace with works of war.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “ODE SUNG AT THE OPENING OF THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION” (1862)
On the warm and sunny midafternoon of Monday, July 2, 1860, in the then-leafy London village suburb of Wimbledon, Queen Victoria performed a task many of her subjects would have thought unsuited to her dignity, improper for her sex, and inappropriate to her station. She fired a high-powered rifle, and with a single shot over a range of a near–quarter mile, she scored a near-perfect bull’s-eye.
It was all a little more complicated than it sounds. Her Majesty did not simply adjust her crinoline, fling back her veil, hurl herself to the ground, and let loose at a distant target. This was the opening moment of an international contest run by Britain’s National Rifle Association, of which the queen was patron, and she had been asked to inaugurate the event in an appropriate manner. There should be an opening gunshot, it was thought, and the queen should fire it. To the surprise of all, the Palace agreed—subject to certain conditions. Her Majesty was not going to lie on the royal stomach, or prostrate herself whatsoever.
Joseph Whitworth’s name is memorialized today in the standard measurement of screw threads, BSW, for “British Standard Whitworth.” He also designed rifles much used by the Confederate side in the U.S. Civil War.
Accordingly, on a crimson silk–swathed dais built near the pavilion tent where the queen would arrive from Buckingham Palace, there stood a gleaming state-of-the-art Whitworth rifle. It wasn’t just standing propped up on the side; it had been firmly mounted on a stout iron stand and was pointing toward the leftmost of a line of targets that stood before a range of butts four hundred yards away across Wimbledon Common. The gun was set horizontally, at a height commensurate with the queen’s modest stature: mighty she might be to her subjects, but she stood just four feet eleven inches, a height of some significance, though, when someone fires a gun while standing up. A silk string with a tassel was attached firmly to the gun’s trigger. The safety catch was on.
Nothing was going to be left to chance, and in consequence, Joseph Whitworth, the Manchester engineer who three years before had invented and designed this hexagonally barreled, .45-caliber high-powered weapon, was extremely nervous and concerned. Working with a team of assistants, he had spent two harried hours that afternoon adjusting his demonstration gun to bear precisely on its target. His reputation (stellar but, like all reputations, vulnerable) depended absolutely on the success of this firing. If the gun misfired, his hopes for high favor would be forever dashed. If the queen missed the target, he would be socially ostracized. And if, heaven forfend, Her Majesty’s bullet accidentally hit and killed someone . . .
The hundreds in the audience waiting for the arrival of the queen didn’t see it quite that way, and were most amused as Whitworth’s test shots crept closer and closer to the red circle at the center of the target. “Much signalling with flags passed between the tent and the markers at the target,” wrote the reporter from the London Times. “Then more manipulation. Then another shot, till a short time only before Her Majesty’s arrival a satisfactory adjustment was arrived at.”
Whitworth checked that a .45-caliber bullet was in the chamber. Finally, he set the safety catch to off.
Queen Victoria arrived on the scene shortly before the appointed hour of 4:00 p.m. Her entourage included her beloved Albert, naturally; a gaggle of young princes and princesses; and a small battalion of top-hatted court officials and prim ladies-in-waiting. Functionaries of great seniority and solemnity greeted her, then escorted her and Albert to the Rifle Tent and its silk-swathed dais. Joseph Whitworth, nervously arranging and rearranging his tie, waited. The queen waited, too, the polished rifle beside her.
From all around the Common, church bells then began their preludes to pealing the hour. It was 4:00 p.m., on the dot, and Her Majesty, not having even seen the target but fully briefed on what she should do, reached over, grasped the tassel, and tugged gently on the silk string. Nothing happened. Maybe she pulled too lightly, so she tried again. Then she was met with slight resistance, and as briefed, she then tugged harder, a third time. This did the trick.
There was a sudden loud report—a crack!—and then a gust of black smoke from the rifle’s barrel, neither of which seemed to startle the royal personages. A few seconds went by, everyone keeping silent as the royal gunshot echoed and reechoed around the fields. Then, suddenly, in the far distance, a red-and-white flag was jauntily hoisted and could be seen waving in front of the target.
A gale of wild applause and cheering immediately swept out from the loyal crowd. The queen, without either intention or challenge, had not just hit the target but had done so dead center. A small smile wafted across her face, as if she were faintly amused.
She had scored a bull’s-eye. Close forensic examination showed that over the four hundred yards of travel, her bullet had deviated only an inch and three quarters in elevation and four-fifths of an inch from the direct line. She had been, or was believed to have been, both precise in her aim and accurate in her intended result.
And with that single shot, the 1860 Grand Rifle Match of Britain’s National Rifle Association formally got under way, with all concerned, Joseph Whitworth most especially, happy and mightily relieved.
QUEEN VICTORIA, PRINCE Albert, and Joseph Whitworth had met once before, nine years prior to this encounter in Wimbledon. (Victoria and Whitworth would then meet one further time, nine years later, when she conferred on him the honor of a baronetcy, a hereditary knighthood, for services to engineering. By then, the queen wore black; her adored Albert had died in 1861.)
IN MIDCENTURY BRITAIN, there was a very real sense that the Western world was changing, and changing fast. The social revolution that had been begun by James Watt and his steam engine had by the middle of the century properly taken hold, and industrialization was affecting everyone’s life, for good or for ill. Cities were swelling, villages were wilting, factories were being thrown up, mines were being sunk, railways were snaking across the landscape, docks were busy with trade, chimneys were belching smoke into previously unspoiled air, wages were being earned, trade unions were being formed, and an extraordinary popular appetite for science and technology was discernible. Progress was the word on everybody’s lips, and the feats and possibilities of machinery were inspiring awe and apprehension.
Halfway through the nineteenth century, humankind, Western and industrializing humankind most particularly, had somehow reached a hinge point, a time for some to stop and take stock. And in London, capital of the country that, at the time, was near-universally seen as the intellectual, spiritual, and scientific center of the Western world, it was decided, and decided essentially by royal command, that it would be meet and proper to savor the moment, to show off what had been achieved in the world thus far, and to offer some thoughts on what might be coming next.
A Great Exhibition was proposed and conceived, a celebration of achievement to be entitled in full the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations of 1851. The French had been holding modest but fairly regular displays along these lines in Paris since the end of the century; Berlin similarly staged a small celebration of achievement a few years later; and in London, the Society of Arts* held a competition, with prizes, dedicated to industrial design in 1845. What was planned for 1851, however, was a spectacle intended to blow all its predecessors memorably out of the water. And Joseph Whitworth, though little known beyond his particular calling, was to be one of those invited.
The Great Exhibition of 1851, staged in London’s Hyde Park, allowed the Western world to consolidate under the enormous roof of the Crystal Palace the inventions of the Industrial Revolution to an enthralled public.
It was Queen Victoria’s imaginative consort, Prince Albert, who remains most publicly associated with the idea of staging a Great Exhibition. With a degree of foresight still admired two centuries on,† he came to recognize the time’s extraordinary zeitgeist, and he wished to capture its uniqueness for one shining summertime, and present it, in a grand and spectacular manner, to his public. He wished the world to hold up a mirror to itself and see just how memorable was its history, then so busily unfolding. Moreover, so confident was he of the popular fascination with what so enthralled him that he was sure such an exhibition would in time pay for itself. Accordingly, as he painstakingly selected the members of the commission that would plan it, and as he meticulously planned who should be invited and what kind of creations should be on show, he made a single stipulation: that the exhibition be financed privately, and not from the public purse.
“We are living,” Albert declared at the banquet that inaugurated the fund-raising effort, “at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end—to which all history points—the realization of the unity of all mankind. Gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions!”
By way of making such stirring addresses, Albert soon managed to find all his money in double-quick time, and he then had a polymathic gardener named Joseph Paxton design and then throw up on the southern side of Hyde Park an enormous structure built almost entirely of glass and iron, 1,851 feet long to celebrate the year of the exhibition and 108 feet tall at its highest point such that it could accommodate three of the park’s ancient and best-loved elm trees, which now needed not be felled. The Crystal Palace, as it came to be called, took only six months to build. With nearly a million square feet of glass panels, it looked like a truly fantastic greenhouse, a greater version of the hothouse that Paxton, as gardener, had built for the Duke of Devonshire’s collection of lilies.
And here, for only a modest price—“The World for a Shilling” was the slogan that attracted visitors by the tens of thousands—were gathered, among myriad marvels, a collection of enormous, heavy, impressive, fully working, and frequently roaring-hot ironbound inventions that were the most up to date, the most important, and among the most visited items on show. They were machines, great big British iron machines; machines that showed, and with a certain sense of disdain, that however obsessed America might be with the cleverness of her precisely made interchangeable parts, however pleased with the consequent beginnings of mass production and, if yet some way ahead, with the makings of the assembly line, this was a moment in British history when mechanical brute power and might were the things to be displayed and deployed. For America, such display would come later. For now, this was Britain’s time, and presentations of national endeavor built on a grand scale would mark the moment.
Patriotism, together with a pervasive sense of jingoism, had naturally much to do with the local popularity of these British machines. While British people of the time certainly liked to be titillated by the trivial and the amusing, of which the exhibition had plenty, it was clear also that it was through the making and use of these monumental inventions that Britain, soon to be at her imperial apogee, at her proudest and most powerful, would continue to prosper, dominate, and rule.
For a time, at least. If there was a faint drumbeat of doubt, Britons of the day were quite deaf to it. They were happily fascinated by the steady march of their constructions—the huge ships, the great guns, the soaring iron bridges, the canals, the aqueducts. The still very new sight of steam locomotives, the best of them gleaming in their green and red and black enamel paint and with highly polished brass, could be guaranteed to draw crowds at any railway terminus, and the swelling number of water pumping stations and printing presses, and the solemnly rocking iron beam engines that powered them, never failed to capture the popular imagination.
Yet that same imagination could barely conceive of the diverging paths on which America and Britain had now accidentally set themselves. Nor could any see that the British path might well lead into a technological cul-de-sac, while America’s would lead, at least for a while, toward a more open road of development and progress. In 1851 there seemed no stopping the British Isles, and the inventions she had on display were indeed illustrations of what was widely believed to be her unchallengeable power, on the move and for always.
For the benefit of the visitors, the exhibits were arranged in broad classes—Class 1: Mining and Mineral Products; Class 2: Chemical and Pharmaceutical Products; Class 3: Substances Used as Food; Class 4: Vegetable and Animal Substances Used in Manufactures; Class 5: Machines for Direct Use including Carriages, Railway, and Marine Mechanisms; Class 6: Manufacturing Machines and Tools; Class 7: Civil Engineering and Building Contrivances; Class 8: Naval Architecture, Military Engineering, Guns, Weapons, Etc.; Class 9: Agricultural and Horticultural Machines and Implements; and so on—thirty classes in total, all rich in their variety and technological achievement.
To drill down into any one of these and to explore would be to confirm Prince Albert’s view that the mid-nineteenth century was a moment of “wonderful transition.” To drill down particularly into Class 6, Manufacturing Machines and Tools, is to explore, quite literally, that same transition’s cutting edge,* most especially where it related to items that had been made with the utmost care and precision.
Here were the machines of the future, and the mechanicians who would make them. Messrs. Waterlow and Sons, for example, had invented an automatic envelope-making machine, which drew long queues of the curious. People would feed in a sheet of paper that, in a blink of an eye, would be cut, folded, and gummed, ready for its letter and a stamp. A company in Ipswich had come up with a steam-powered excavator for cutting through low hills to allow passage for railway lines—such a monster had never been seen before, nor ever imagined. Another company, based in Oldham in Lancashire, had brought down some fifteen cotton-spinning machines, each one of them, like all the moving devices in Class 6, being sited close to the boilers that had been built in a separate structure outside the Crystal Palace and that piped steam in to make the machinery work.
Robert Hunt, a Victorian science writer who undertook a two-volume, 948-page labor of love, Hunt’s Hand-Book to the Official Catalogues, in which he described and critiqued every last object in the Crystal Palace, was particularly impressed by the Oldham exhibit. The “fingers of the spinners . . . with the aid of that classical instrument the domestic spinning wheel,” he wrote, have at last and for all time been superseded by this machine, which has “several thousand spindles . . . in a single room, revolving with inconceivable rapidity, with no hand to urge their progress or to guide their operations, drawing out, twisting and winding up as many [as a] thousand threads with unfailing precision, indefatigable patience and strength—a scene as magical to the eye that is not familiarized to it, as the effects have been marvellous in augmenting wealth and population.”
ROBERT HUNT DID fret, somewhat. At the close of one particularly lyrical passage about a new power loom, he wrote, “Wonderful mechanical result! What are the moral results?” and repeated his concerns in a similar manner throughout his writings. But few other visitors or critics seemed to share his sentiments, or worried about the social implications. Not in Britain, anyway. The French were perhaps most aware that there might be a downside to all that “unfailing precision”: the ennobled mathematician and politician Charles Dupin warned that “by superseding the labour, the country is depopulated and filled with machines,” and it would be up to the politicians of the future to decide if that was progress. Clearly the good baron thought it was not progress at all—a view shared famously some twenty years later, when his fellow countryman, Gustave Doré, produced his book of engravings of London slum land, which many saw as an indictment of the New World, an amply deserved reminder of the lack of social progress that precision had somehow conspired to create.
The great majority of the thousands who came were happy to see as many examples of steam-powered mechanical perfection as were on offer. To them, the machines were just magical things—the looms, the printing presses, the railway locomotives, the trams, the marine engines (the most impressive of them made by the firm of Maudslay, Sons and Field, which forty years before had designed and created the block-making machinery for the Royal Navy, and was still going strong), and the early and the more refined Watt steam engines themselves. Some other sources of power were on show, waterwheels and windmills most especially, and there were early horse-drawn omnibuses, one with two floors and a spiral staircase mounted aft, an early version of the London double-decker bus. Yet it was steam-powered engines, with their glare of radiant fire, their thunderous sounds, the smell of hot oil, the sheer vision of power they seemed to force on those who gathered awestruck in front of them, that remained most indelibly in the mind’s eye. The audience for them was obliged to stand behind protective railings, for these were dangerous engines, hurling fast-moving, highly polished bars of iron and spinning two-ton gearwheels through space, and capable of easily smashing skulls and catching limbs and sweeping whole children into their maws. These were machines that people would love, but of which they were rightly fearful, and from which they would keep their distance.
Amid all the rousing chaos was a quieter side to Class 6, a display of more static British-made machinery, the long-term importance of which was, if anything, even greater than the mesmerizing whirligigs that drew the largest crowds. And presiding over this quieter byway of the exhibition, at Stall No. 201, was the Manchester based firm founded by the man universally then known, and still today most widely regarded, as perhaps the greatest mechanician in the world, the man who, nine years later, would bite his nails with nerves while watching Queen Victoria fire one of his rifles. “Whitworth, J & Co,” the catalog reads. “Self-acting lathes, planing, slotting, drilling and boring, screwing, cutting and dividing, punching and shearing machines. Patent knitting machine. Patent screw stocks, with dies and taps. Measuring machine, and standard yard &c.”
A rather unprepossessing description, to be sure. It hardly improved when Joseph Whitworth himself put in an appearance on those days when, from time to time, he came down from Manchester. He was large and bearded and oyster-eyed, rather frightening-looking—he had a face “not unlike that of baboon,” according to Jane Carlyle, the wife of Scottish social commentator Thomas Carlyle—and, besides his fearsome looks, was also known for his irascibility, his unwillingness to suffer fools gladly, his domineering manner, and (on a personal level) his relentless infidelity. But the twenty-three instruments and tools he had on show during those six months in London, though they may have lacked the luster and swash of big steam engines and thousand-spindle looms, provided a road map to what would become engineering’s future (and won their maker more medals than any other of the Crystal Palace exhibitors). Joseph Whitworth was an absolute champion of accuracy, an uncompromising devotee of precision, and the creator of a device, unprecedented at the time, that could truly measure to an unimaginable one-millionth of an inch. Before him there was precision; afterward, there was Whitworth-standard precision, and the Great Exhibition was where he made his reputation for it.
The big-name turn-of-the century engineers all seemed to know one another, to train one another, to be apprenticed to one another. Whitworth was very much part of this picture. His profound interest in mechanical perfection began when he was a very young man—he had been effectively orphaned after his mother died and his father took off to train as a priest—and was apprenticed to Henry Maudslay. It was during his time with Maudslay that Whitworth first became fascinated by the very particular idea of the flatness of surface plates.
As Henry Maudslay had already demonstrated, perfect flatness is a thing of the utmost importance. Its elemental significance is quite simple, is central to what one might call the philosophy of precision. A perfectly flat plate does not derive its perfection from anything else—it isn’t something to be measured in relation to something else. Its dimensions are unimportant. Its shape is of no note. It is either flat or it isn’t. And by being exactly flat, it can give precision to those other things that are measured against it. A ruler, a square, a gauge block—all can be set against a flat plane and declared to be true, or not; precisely made, or not.
So, perhaps not unreasonably for the two men for whom this concept was of such paramountcy, there was a small squabble over who had in fact come up first with the means of achieving it. For a while, the dispute flared. But time has now taken care of the argument. Maudslay is given his due as the originator of the notion, the discoverer of the principle: what Whitworth did was to improve and then expatiate upon this notion and give it teeth, as it were—and by doing so, he immodestly gave the world the impression that at the base of all measurement, the starting point for all that was precise, were the finished metal tools and instruments made by Joseph Whitworth. The truth is, Maudslay made the first great machines, and then Whitworth made the tools and the instruments and took the measurements that made it possible to make the great machines that followed. The perfectly flat plane was one of them, arguably the essential one.
Two later inventions above all else define Whitworth’s legacy. The standardized screw on the one hand, and the measuring machine on the other. Both these creations were linked together, literally and mechanically, and both were connected to the sudden new enthusiasm (around the world, not just in Britain and America) for the newly named science of metrology, the study of accurate measurement. In the years following Whitworth, immense amounts of treasure would be expended all around the world, and still are being spent today, in the pursuit of this new calling, of making officially sure that the measurements of everything around us are all accurate to something, measured to a standard agreed upon by all.
Whitworth’s own measuring device was phenomenal for its time, a small thing of the greatest elegance and beauty. It is the sort of beauteous mechanical creation that even a nonmechanical person would wish to own, to look at fondly, occasionally to touch. It can be seen in the portrait of its maker that hangs in the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. He stands in a formal dress coat, with an expression that somehow combines solemnity, pride, and slight surprise. The fingers of his left hand are brushing the brass adjusting wheel, as if to display it, modestly. Beneath, the painter has captured the gleam of obsidian-smooth iron, the instrument’s heavy base; other brass wheels glint yellow in the gaslight.
The basic principle of his device is disarmingly simple. Most earlier measuring machines used lines, such as are found on a ruler or a straightedge—one compares the length of something by holding it next to the rule and seeing where, according to the lines, it begins and ends. But this technique requires the use of sight to make judgments, and it raises questions. By how much is the end of the item to the left or right of the line? How thick is the line itself? How powerful is the magnifying glass needed to answer these questions? And even if a vernier scale is brought to bear on the problem—Pierre Vernier made this scale in the seventeenth century to allow one to peer between the lines of the main scale, as it were, and to make ever-more-exact decisions—the answer is still subjective, requiring good eyesight and fine judgment.
Standardized screws of differing pitches and thread types, used for fastening, for measuring, and for the advancing and retarding of cutting heads of machine tools.
Photograph courtesy of Christoph Roser at AllAboutLean.com.
Whitworth thought line measurement fraught with problems, as clumsy and liable to error. Instead, he favored what is called end measurement, which relied not on sight, but on the simple feel of the tightening of the measuring instrument against the two flat end surfaces of the item to be measured. The device he created basically employs two plane steel plates that can be moved toward and away from each other by the turning of a long brass screw. Place an item between these surfaces and tighten the planes until they hold the object securely. Then slowly move the planes away from each other until—the crucial moment!—the item is loose enough to fall under gravity. The distance between wherever the planes are then sited is the dimension of the item.
Measuring that dimension then depends on the screw, on the wheel that is used to turn it, and on the application of simple arithmetic. Consider a screw that has twenty threads to the inch and is moved by a wheel that has, say, five hundred divisions marked around its circumference. Turn the wheel once completely around and the screw, and the plane plate attached to it, advances by 1/20 of an inch. Turn the wheel through one of the wheel divisions only, and the screw advances by 1/500 of 1/20—that is, 1/10,000 of an inch.
Such was the principle. Whitworth, using his superb mechanical skills, created in 1859 a micrometer that followed this idea but that allowed for one complete turn of the micrometer wheel to advance the screw not by 1/20 of an inch, but by 1/4,000 of an inch, a truly tiny amount. Whitworth then incised 250 divisions on the turning wheel’s circumference, which meant that the operator of the machine, by turning the wheel by just one division, could advance or retard the screw and its attached plane plate by 1/250 of 1/4,000 of an inch. In other words, by 1/1,000,000 of an inch. And provided the ends of the item being measured are as plane as the plates on the micrometer, opening the gap by that 1/1,000,000 of an inch would make the difference between the item being held firmly, or falling, under the influence of gravity. Thus did Whitworth describe the method, some years later, in a paper entitled simply “Iron,” and published in New York to a fascinated engineering readership.
The revelation, and the beautiful little machine that could perform the task so sweetly, astounded the engineering world. Less than eighty years before this, John Wilkinson had given birth to the concept of precision with a machine that could bore a hole to a tolerance of one-tenth of an inch. Now metal pieces could be made and measured to a tolerance of one-millionth of an inch. The rate of change was quite incredible. The possibilities, even if their specifics went then unrecognized, seemed suddenly to be without limit.
All this work was performed in England, most of it in Manchester. Once American machine toolmakers had absorbed all Whitworth’s ideas and principles and standards, it seemed probable—and Whitworth, who had been on a fact-finding mission to New York in 1853, was only too well aware of this—that the engineers of the United States would eventually sweep into pole position and propel their country into world leadership. “The labouring classes [in America] are comparatively few in number,” Whitworth reported on his arrival back home, “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.”
And there were the screws—not just the screws that advanced or retarded measuring instruments or microscopes or telescopes, or that elevated naval cannon, but also the screws that held together the parts of all the manufactured goods then made.
Until Whitworth, each screw and nut and bolt was unique to itself, and the chance that any one-tenth-inch screw, say, might fit any randomly chosen one-tenth-inch nut was slender at best. Whitworth championed the idea of standardizing all screws: the threads of all should have the same angle (fifty-five degrees), and a pitch that should likewise be in a fixed relationship to the radius of the screw and the depth of the thread. It took some long while for the individual makers of screws to fall into line, but by midcentury, the standard had been accepted throughout Britain and her empire, and the screw-measuring notation BSW, for “British Standard Whitworth,” memorializes him still, as it remains a crucial standard in engineering workshops from Carlisle to Calcutta.
In later years, Whitworth turned his attention somewhat away from the metallic delicacies of high precision and more to the brutish world of weaponry, even though he was vexed that the hexagonally barreled Whitworth rifle that Queen Victoria had fired on that summer Monday in Wimbledon was never accepted for use by the British Army; its .45-caliber size was initially thought too small. He derived some pleasure, though, from hearing that the weapon, branded the Whitworth Sharpshooter in the United States, was much favored by Confederate troops during the American Civil War. (The Union army found his high-velocity guns ideal, but too costly.) His gun was most famously employed with lethal effect at the 1864 Battle of Spottsylvania. The Union general John Sedgwick, seeing the rebel troops in the far-off distance, famously rode in front of his men and loudly declared that “they couldn’t kill an elephant at this distance.” A single shot from a Whitworth gun then promptly rang out and the bullet hit him square in the head, killing him instantly.
Whitworth may have found his excursion into the military world distasteful, but it proved highly profitable. He designed armor plating and exploding artillery shells and came up with a variety of a ductile steel alloy that he deemed wholly suitable for manufacturing guns—and Whitworth steel, as it was called, became popular among weapons foundries in the United States. In his final years, now with a slew of fine houses at his disposal, and schemes for scholarships and endowments that would keep his name and his legacy familiar today, he designed a billiard table for use in his mansion outside Manchester. It was made of solid iron, and though history does not offer details as to Joseph Whitworth’s competence or otherwise at the game, what is recalled is that the surface of the table was renowned for its unique flatness; it was perfectly true. When anyone today bleats about the need for a “level playing field,” it is worth remembering that Joseph Whitworth was in all probability the first engineer to give us one.
Joseph Bramah’s “challenge lock” remained unpicked for sixty-one years after first being displayed in a window in London’s Piccadilly. An American named Alfred Hobbs eventually beat the challenge, after fifty-one hours of delicate work, allowing the Bramah lock company to declare its invention essentially burglar-proof.
IN THE CLOSING weeks of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, in the hall reserved for displays from the United States, an unexpected new exhibit was placed on view: on the floor of a secure glass case was a black velvet cloth, and laid on it, arranged in neat rows, were two hundred newly minted solid gold one-guinea coins. Their unanticipated appearance tells one final story of midcentury precision engineering, one related to the solving of a problem that had been created nearly sixty years before.
A man had managed to pick Joseph Bramah’s lock, the very lock that had sat patiently in the front window of the firm’s showroom at 124 Piccadilly since 1790. He was a fellow exhibitor at the Great Exhibition, he was a locksmith, he was a competitor, and he was an American. He had come across the Atlantic with the specific intention of picking every unpickable lock that British engineers could place before him.
His name was Alfred C. Hobbs, and he was born in Boston in 1812, of English parents. Maybe that had something to do with his burning passion to demonstrate that American locks were vastly superior to their British-made counterparts.
Upon his arrival at the Great Exhibition, he took up his position at Stall Number 298, at the eastern end of the main hall, as representative of the New York firm of Day and Newell, makers of the so-called parautoptic permutating lock, which Hobbs was convinced would remain unpickable for all eternity.
Not so with the Bramah lock. Once Hobbs had set out his stall in the Crystal Palace, he wrote a formal letter to the Bramah company, requesting an appointment in Piccadilly “in relation to the offer you make on the sign in the window for picking your lock.” Joseph Bramah himself had died forty years before, presumably smugly content that his lock challenge had never been met. It was his sons who now ran the firm, and they received—with some trepidation, as Hobbs’s reputation preceded him—the fateful letter. They had no choice but to agree to meet, and a committee of experts was promptly set up to ensure that any attempt on the lock, as precise a mechanism as eighteenth-century England could produce, would be made fairly, and without totally destroying the lock’s internal mechanisms.
And Hobbs picked it. It took him fifty-one hours, spread over sixteen days, to raise the lock’s hasp and declare it open, and thus successfully broken. He used a variety of tiny and specially contrived instruments to work on the lock’s innards—one of them a tiny micrometer screw he was able to attach to the wooden base on which old Joseph Bramah had first mounted the challenge lock. (Had it been mounted on an impenetrable iron base, this instrument could not have worked. It screwed into the wood, thus freeing Hobbs to use both his hands to work inside the two-inch-long lock barrel, while his instrument kept various of the eighteen tiny sliders inside the lock depressed.) He also used magnifying lenses, with brilliant lights whose minuscule beams were reflected inside the lock by means of special mirrors. He used minute brass measuring scales to see how far depressed was each slider. He used tiny hooks to pull back any slider that had been depressed too far. He had laid out beside him what resembled the contents of a surgeon’s instrument tray, minus scalpels, for the sole purpose of breaking the Bramah lock and, by doing so, asserting the superiority of American precision.
Bramah paid up, but they grumbled as they did so that what the American had done, with his trunkful of instruments and his fifty-one hours of work, was simply not cricket. He hadn’t abided by the implied rules of engagement. He had brought to bear on the sorry lock more time and energy than any self-respecting burglar would ever spend.
The team of arbitrators agreed. They pointed out the unfairness of Hobbs’s approach, and concluded, ringingly—though well aware that the two hundred guineas had most sportingly been handed over—that “Hobbs has done nothing calculated in the last degree to affect the reputation of Messrs Bramah’s lock; but his exertions have, on the contrary, greatly confirmed the opinion that, for all practical purposes, it is impregnable.”
The two hundred guineas then glowed impertinently under the lights of the Crystal Palace for many weeks to come, as Alfred Hobbs basked in his victory by insisting they remain in situ as testament to his triumph. It was short-lived triumph, and the consequences indicate the eventual outcome. As the arbitrators suggested, the breaking of the Bramah lock did the firm no harm at all: customers lined up to buy a lock that had taken an expert sixteen days to pick. The firm still exists in London today, and sells its locks worldwide, all of them based upon the original design of Joseph Bramah of 1797.
Meanwhile, the firm of Day and Newell of New York went out of business soon after the Great Exhibition. Its parautoptic permutating lock had been successfully picked soon thereafter, and easily, with the use, it was said, of only one wooden stick. And the man who picked it was the scion of a new firm of precise locksmiths, and founder of the firm that is now part of the biggest lock maker in the world, Linus Yale.