James Nasmyth

Scottish inventor

• Born: August 19, 1808
• Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland
• Died: May 7, 1890
• Place of death: London, England

Nasmyth developed and successfully marketed a pioneering class of industrial metalworking machines, principally the steam hammer, contributing to Great Britain’s role as the center of the Industrial Revolution.

Early Life

James Hall Nasmyth (NAY-smihth) was born in Edinburgh, into a family of Scottish artists. He was the youngest of nine children of Alexander Nasmyth, a prominent Edinburgh painter, and Barbara Foulis, a member of the Scottish aristocracy. As a child, James assisted in his father’s studio, mixing paints and working wood and metal on the family’s foot-powered lathe. Together with five of his brothers and sisters, James developed skills as a graphic artist that were to remain with him throughout his working life.

In 1821, Nasmyth entered the Edinburgh School of Arts while receiving more intensive technical training from his father. The fine arts and the applied arts of metallurgy, draftsmanship, and mathematics worked together in Nasmyth’s upbringing. In frequent visits to the forges, foundries, and factories of industrial Edinburgh, Nasmyth sharpened a keen interest in the methods of machine manufacture, building his own stationary steam engine by the age of seventeen.

With his father’s assistance, Nasmyth secured a position in 1829 as personal assistant to Henry Maudslay, one of England’s most noteworthy mechanical engineers. In his London shops, Maudslay built steam engines and many pioneering machines for the working of wood and metal. Several of the country’s most prominent machine-tool builders received their initial exposure to engineering practice in Maudslay’s shops, including Joseph Clement, William Muir, Joseph Whitworth, and Richard Roberts. After three years with Maudslay, Nasmyth returned to Edinburgh to manufacture the machines that he would need to set up practice as an independent manufacturer of metalworking machines. By 1834, he had accumulated sufficient goods and capital to establish himself in Manchester, at the heart of the Lancashire manufacturing industry.

Nasmyth’s shop stood on the first floor of a former cotton mill, where his success in building heavy tools and steam engines for the surrounding mills quickly taxed the limited quarters. In late 1835, Nasmyth undertook a search for a new site to satisfy his growing needs for proper space, for access to better transport, and for greater prominence among Lancashire factory owners in need of new machinery.

Life’s Work

At Patricroft, a short distance west of Manchester, Nasmyth found a site offering all the advantages he sought: a large plot of land at the intersection of the Bridgewater Canal and the main road and railway connecting Manchester with Liverpool. With the financial backing of a Manchester investment firm and various other sources of capital, Nasmyth set about the construction of the Bridgewater Foundry. Unlike his Manchester shop, this new enterprise was to include the entire range of workshops necessary to execute all classes of heavy work from their inception to delivery.

By 1838, Nasmyth was overseeing the operation of a complete machinery-design department, iron and brass foundries, machine and erecting shops, forge shop, pattern shop, and various other lesser shops, the whole connected by a network of rail transport. Aided by the business skills of his brother, George, and his partner Holbrook Gaskell, Nasmyth began a rapid climb to the upper reaches of British industrial enterprise. Between 1838 and his retirement from the firm in 1856, the Bridgewater Foundry produced the full range of heavy machine tools then in use: lathes, planers, shapers, slotters, boring mills, and drilling machines. Many of Nasmyth’s own machinery designs were incorporated into the output. Also produced at Bridgewater were steam locomotives, hydraulic presses, stationary and marine steam engines, and pumps. Although the considerable business success of the Bridgewater Foundry was the key element in Nasmyth’s own prosperity, it was the production of the steam hammer that created his reputation as one of the preeminent British engineers of the Victorian age.

The steam hammer appeared at a time when the hammering or forging of iron had reached the limits of existing technology. By the 1830’s, blacksmiths could not effectively produce such large iron forgings as engine shafts or ships’ anchors without considerable labor and time spent at water-powered trip hammers, frequently reheating the piece and gradually working the iron up into its rough form.

Although the first practical use of the steam hammer occurred in France in 1841, at the Schneider works in Le Creusot, in 1838 Nasmyth had conceived the general form such a machine would take and the needs it could fill. With the addition of controls designed by his works manager, Robert Wilson, the steam hammers that Nasmyth began producing in 1843 became symbolic as well as immensely practical giants of the industrial age, towering structures with ponderous steam-driven hammerheads that would crash down on red-hot iron masses to rough out enormous piston rods, crankshafts, anchors, and cannon. The great force exerted by each blow of the hammer both reduced the forging time dramatically and produced a metallurgically superior product. Nasmyth’s tight control over the patented features of his hammers, along with Bridgewater’s production capacities, ensured a steady demand for steam hammers produced there until well after his departure in 1856.

By the end of the century, steam hammers would give way to hydraulic presses in producing large forgings of greater strength and integrity. Nevertheless, Nasmyth hammers remained in use in factories throughout the world, their quick action and powerful blows rendering them invaluable to the production of many industrial goods.

Largely on the strength of his steam hammer sales, Nasmyth had amassed a considerable fortune by the age of forty-eight, when he chose to leave the firm and devote himself to private scientific pursuits. Astronomical studies became one of his chief interests, and he coauthored an account of his observations of the Moon in 1874. As with many other men of his age who left behind a life of busy industrial pursuits, Nasmyth began to seek answers to some of the ancient riddles of the day: the origin of the pyramids, early alphabets, and various astrological speculations. He also traveled widely, took up photography, and resumed his interest in painting.

A portion of Nasmyth’s retirement was spent defending his claim to the invention of the steam hammer, a campaign that had developed into a nationalistic debate between advocates of French and British engineering practice. Although most popular accounts of the hammer’s appearance still credit Nasmyth as its originator, contemporary records do indicate that French engineers independently conceived, built, and used a steam hammer prior to its construction by Nasmyth. The autobiography that Nasmyth completed in 1883 established his reputation among his countrymen, a reputation he rightly deserves as the steam hammer’s chief advocate and one of Great Britain’s most successful machine-tool innovators.

Significance

Mirroring the careers of many self-taught British engineers before the professionalization of the field, James Nasmyth had early been trained in the handicrafts that were an essential foundation of all engineering. His skills as a machinist and his knowledge of machine design and steam engineering are well documented. Of his forty-three mechanical innovations, he patented nineteen, including a safety foundry ladle, cotton press, rolling mill, pile driver, and iron-making process.

As the head of a major industrial works, Nasmyth sought to retain shop-floor control of his workforce of several hundred men, to resist union demands, and to introduce machinery that would limit the degree of skill needed to operate it. A principal feature of the machine tools Nasmyth developed and used at the Bridgewater Foundry was the automatic motion, or feed, of their cutting tools, reducing the need for experienced machinists. Less knowledgeable machine tenders, often young boys, could operate such machines with ease.

Nasmyth’s opposition to organized labor, including its system of apprenticeship, resulted in several labor actions against his firm and may have played a role in his early retirement. His view of skill as a marketable product subject to agreement solely between employer and employee did not fare well in the early period of the industrial workers’ rights movement but did allow Nasmyth to compile a highly successful record as a builder of revolutionary industrial machinery.

Bibliography

Briggs, Asa. Iron Bridge to Crystal Palace: Impact and Images of the Industrial Revolution. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979. A richly illustrated treatment of the sweeping influences of industrialization in Great Britain from 1779 to 1851, this thin volume depends less on authoritative research than it does on more than two hundred visual impressions of industry selected from popular literature, technical publications, and art galleries.

Cantrell, John A. James Nasmyth and the Bridgewater Foundry. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1985. This thorough study of the economic and technical history of Nasmyth’s Bridgewater years dispels many of the excessively heroic notions associated with the man and his principal product, the steam hammer. The author uses business records and correspondence to unravel the actual roles played by Nasmyth and his contemporaries in the success of the business.

Clayre, Alasdair, ed. Nature and Industrialization. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1977. In his later years, Nasmyth was saddened by the damaged landscapes wrought by industry. This anthology of British prose and poetry confronts many of industry’s social side effects—good and evil. The words of Charles Dickens, William Wordsworth, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Carlyle are used extensively.

Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technical Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. 2d ed. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003. The broad sweep of European industrialization from 1750 to the late twentieth century is examined in this textbook study. Landes attempts to explain why Europe was industrialized first by studying the processes of industrial growth in Great Britain, France, and Germany.

Mayr, Otto, and Robert C. Post, eds. Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981. The proceedings of a symposium held at the Smithsonian, this collection of essays from distinguished historians of technology examines the reasons that industrialization emerged so rapidly and successfully in the United States, specifically in the manufacture of interchangeable parts.

Nasmyth, James Hall. James Nasmyth, Engineer: An Autobiography. London: John Murray. Reprint. Edited by Samuel Smiles. Baton Rouge, La.: B of A Communications, 1985. Written in part to refute allegations that there was French precedent to Nasmyth’s invention of the steam hammer, this self-appraisal edited by Samuel Smiles glorifies Nasmyth’s personal attributes in explaining his engineering and business success. Many statements are clarified by Cantrell, above.

Rolt, Lionel Thomas Caswell. Tools for the Job. London: B. T. Batsford, 1965. Reprint. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1986. A technical history of the five major machine-tool groups (turning, drilling, planing, milling, and grinding), this study places Nasmyth’s metal-cutting innovations in their British and American contexts.

Smiles, Samuel. Industrial Biography: Iron Workers and Tool Makers. London: John Murray, 1863. Reprint. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967. Smiles uses the biographies of several commercially successful British engineers, including Nasmyth, to highlight the benefits of self-reliance and hard work in improving one’s economic welfare. His romantic accounts of engineering enterprise found large audiences in Victorian England and helped establish the popular image of Nasmyth as the sole inventor of the steam hammer.