John Roebuck

English chemist and industrialist

• Born: September 17, 1718 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Sheffield, Yorkshire, England
• Died: July 17, 1794
• Place of death: Kenneil House, Scotland

After learning chemistry as a medical student, Roebuck introduced a new method for manufacturing sulfuric acid on a large scale and a new method of smelting iron.

Early Life

John Roebuck was the third son of John Roebuck, a prosperous local cutler, and the former Sarah Roe. After receiving his early education at the Sheffield Grammar School, Roebuck attended Dr. Doddridge’s Academy in Northampton. He became a good classical scholar and retained an interest in the classics throughout his life.

Although his father wanted him to carry on the family business, Roebuck was more interested in becoming a physician. Thus, with his father’s assent, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. There, Roebuck made the acquaintance of the prominent chemists William Cullen and Joseph Black and the philosophical circle of David Hume.

Roebuck completed his medical education at Leiden, where the most renowned chemistry professor on the Continent, Hermann Boerhaave, taught. Obtaining a medical degree on March 5, 1742, Roebuck seized upon a promising opening in Birmingham, settled there, and set up a practice, which soon prospered. Roebuck, however, had developed a love for chemistry during his university days at Edinburgh and Leiden. He was especially interested in finding ways to apply chemistry to the improvement of Birmingham’s many industries.

Among his inventions for industry was a better method of stripping gold and silver from copper plate and collecting the precious metals. Birmingham had a number of companies that coated copper objects with silver and gold. The coating usually wore thin, however, and the object lost its value. Roebuck’s process enabled manufacturers to recover and reuse the costly plating metals and thereby save money. He utilized a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids. The copper was recovered by dropping in pieces of iron.

In 1746, Roebuck established a plant employing his process on Steelhouse Lane, Birmingham. His partner was Samuel Garbett, a local merchant. The Steelhouse Lane works continued to operate for more than a century, becoming the sole property of Garbett in 1773. Stimulated by his early successes, Roebuck built a large chemical laboratory alongside the plant. Local manufacturers asked him for scientific advice to help improve their industrial operations, and Roebuck carried out experiments for them. He had become, in fact, what eventually would be called a consulting chemist.

Life’s Work

Of the many improvements in chemical manufacturing processes in the eighteenth century, the most important was in the production of sulfuric acid. There were several methods for making it which were centuries old. Earlier in the eighteenth century, Joshua Ward began manufacturing sulfuric acid by burning niter and sulfur over water and condensing the gas that formed in large glass globes. He chose glass because it was immune to the corrosive acid. These glass globes were very expensive, however, and their size (and the amount of sulfuric acid produced) was limited by glassblowing technology.

Roebuck was already familiar with chemical reactions from his medical training. He also had an interest in bringing down the cost of sulfuric acid because his Steelhouse Lane plant consumed large quantities of it. At Leiden, while attending the lectures of Hermann Boerhaave, Roebuck learned that lead and sulfuric acid do not react and replaced Ward’s glass globes with lead chambers. In 1746, Roebuck and Garbett built their first lead chambers in Birmingham.

Roebuck’s process reduced manufacturing costs and increased the amount of each production run. The result was no less than a revolution in the manufacture of sulfuric acid, which was reduced to a fourth of its former cost. Inexpensive sulfuric acid affected all those industries using it. For example, hatters, paper makers, japanners, and gilders used it for cleaning metal. Linen had been bleached by soaking it in an alkali, then in sour milk, and then exposing it to the sun, repeating the process until the desired degree of whiteness was obtained. Cheaper sulfuric acid meant that the stench of sour milk would be gone from the countryside and that the land used for bleaching cloth could be cultivated.

It was for this last purpose that Roebuck and Garbett established a sulfuric acid works at Prestonpans, East Lothian, 8 miles east of Edinburgh, in 1749. There, salt, pottery, and glass manufacturing already existed. The partners hoped to sell their sulfuric acid locally for bleaching linen, but the lead chamber process produced quantities too large for only the local linen industry. They therefore exported most of their production to the Low Countries. The Prestonpans operation was highly profitable.

Roebuck and Garbett hoped to protect the lead chamber process by keeping it secret and neglected to patent it in either England or Scotland. Rivals tried to bribe employees away and get the secret. Samuel Falconbridge, an employee hired in 1749, returned to his hometown after his dismissal from the works. Unable to find work, he was confined in the bridewell at Warwick, where a Mr. Rhodes paid for his liberty. About 1756, with the help of Falconbridge, Rhodes began making sulfuric acid using the Roebuck process. Later, Falconbridge introduced the process to another rival firm and the method spread.

In 1771, Roebuck applied for a Scottish patent to stave off competition. The patent office rejected the application because the process was already in use in England. Roebuck and Garbett then petitioned against the decision, but the House of Lords rejected it because the substitution of lead for glass was not a discovery, only a variation; the variation itself was not new, since Roebuck already had used the process for twenty years; and the lead chamber process was known to various people in England and Scotland.

Meanwhile, Roebuck had begun to diversify his business interests and turned his attention to the manufacture of iron. The extraction of iron from its ore consumed considerable amounts of charcoal and so required handy timberlands. Timber, however, was in short supply. The smelting of iron ore by coke made from coal was probably rediscovered by Abraham Darby at Colebrookdale in about 1734. In 1759, Roebuck decided to establish an ironworks in Scotland using coal instead of charcoal.

Iron smelting in Scotland was carried out in very small establishments scattered about the countryside. Roebuck’s was the first to operate on any sizable scale. The amount of capital required for such an enormous undertaking was more than Roebuck and Garbett alone could furnish, so a company was formed early in 1760 with seven partners. Roebuck and Garbett each owned a quarter of the shares. Roebuck’s three brothers, Benjamin, Thomas, and Ebenezer, equally divided another quarter. The last quarter was owned by William Cadell, Sr., and William Cadell, Jr., Scottish shipowners and traders in timber and iron who already had tried unsuccessfully to produce iron in Scotland on a large scale.

The establishment and organization of the company’s works were largely under Roebuck’s direction. He chose as the site a place on the banks of the Carron River near Falkirk, Stirling, 3 miles above the river’s juncture with the Firth of Forth. The Carron River provided waterpower, the Forth a water transportation route, and the surrounding land held abundant supplies of coal, iron ore, and limestone (used as the flux in iron smelting). The first furnace was blown at Carron on January 1, 1760. During that same year, the Carron works turned out fifteen hundred tons of iron, at that time the entire annual production of Scotland. The site’s main business became casting cannon, for which there was a large demand during the war-filled 1760’s and 1770’s.

At first, the Carron works used large quantities of charcoal, but Roebuck soon switched to coal, a much cheaper fuel. In 1762, he obtained a patent, number 780, for converting cast iron into malleable iron by means of a coal fire. Roebuck’s plan to burn coal on a large scale nevertheless required a far more powerful blast than that used with a charcoal fire. Roebuck therefore consulted John Smeaton, a famous engineer familiar with ironworking, who erected the first blowing cylinders of any substantial size for working iron at Carron.

Once the Carron works was solidly established and prosperous, Roebuck began a new enterprise. He leased some large coal mines and saltworks at Borrowstounness (Bo’ness) in Linlithgowshire from the duke of Hamilton. About 1764, he moved his family to Kenneil House, a ducal mansion which came with the lease and overlooked the Firth of Forth.

Although the coal mines and saltworks had yielded little or no profit, Roebuck was determined to make them pay. He hoped to supply his own coal to the Carron ironworks, thereby selling both coal and iron. The slag from the Carron smelting operation could then be used to make sulfuric acid at Prestonpans. Finally, he hoped to manufacture alkali from the Bo’ness saltworks. Joseph Black, Roebuck’s acquaintance from the University of Edinburgh, had suggested to him the possibility of making alkali by decomposing salt. Alkalies were important in eighteenth century industry: in making glass and soap, bleaching, manufacturing alum and saltpeter, and for fertilizing in agriculture. As natural resources became scarce and the use of alkalies increased, the need for a manufactured substitute grew more acute.

Roebuck invested all of his own capital in the venture and borrowed from Garbett, who refused to join the enterprise. Roebuck also drew on the capital of the Prestonpans and Carron operations. By 1765, he and Black were experimenting on the decomposition of salt. They soon enlisted the aid of a mutual acquaintance, James Watt, who made mathematical instruments.

It was then that water began flooding Roebuck’s coal pits at Bo’ness. A Newcomen steam engine failed to keep pace with the water. Black told Roebuck about Watt’s new engine. Roebuck invited Watt to Kenneil House, where Watt assembled a working model of his engine. Roebuck did not appreciate the difficulties of turning a working model into a large-scale machine; hoping that Watt’s engine might keep his coal mines dry enough to work, Roebuck began providing Watt with substantial financial backing.

Roebuck agreed to carry the cost of developing Watt’s engine, repay Black’s loan of œ1,200 to Watt, purchase the patent, and handle the business of manufacturing and selling the engine. For this, Roebuck would receive two-thirds of the profits. Watt, however, had a family to support and, in the summer of 1766, he opened an office in Glasgow as a surveyor.

While this enterprise left little time for experimenting on the new engine, with Roebuck’s encouragement Watt managed to advance his invention to the point at which it was patentable. The inventor later admitted that he would have given up if he had not been supported by Roebuck. In 1769, Watt obtained his first steam engine patent.

New investors became interested in Watt’s invention. On November 28, 1769, Roebuck, Matthew Boulton, and William Small agreed to the purchase of a third of the patent rights. Boulton was an old friend of Garbett; Small was a former professor of natural philosophy at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, and had a medical practice in Birmingham.

Despite Roebuck’s financial support and Watt’s ingenuity, the steam engine was not capable of keeping the water out of Roebuck’s mines. The attempt to manufacture alkali from salt also failed. As a result, Roebuck incurred heavier and heavier losses. He lost his own money, his wife’s fortune, the profits from his other enterprises, and large sums borrowed from friends. Roebuck withdrew his capital from the Carron ironworks, from the Steelhouse Lane works in Birmingham, and the sulfuric acid plant at Prestonpans to satisfy his creditors. By 1773, he was bankrupt.

On March 29, 1773, Roebuck’s creditors called a meeting to review the management of his affairs. Boulton appointed Watt as his representative at the meeting. Among Roebuck’s debts was œ1,200 owed to Boulton. Rather than asking for a monetary settlement, Boulton offered to cancel the debt in return for Roebuck’s remaining two-thirds share in Watt’s steam engine patent. This was the beginning of the well-known and successful firm of Boulton and Watt.

Roebuck’s creditors retained him as manager of the Bo’ness coal and saltworks and paid him an annual allowance sufficient for the support of himself and his family. Meanwhile, Roebuck began farming at Kenneil House on a large scale. He carried out agricultural experiments and was a successful farmer. When he died on July 17, 1794, however, he left his wife without provision.

Roebuck was a member of the Royal Society of Arts in London, the Royal societies of London and Edinburgh, and the Lunar Society of Birmingham, so called because it met during the full moon. He contributed two articles to the Philosophical Transactions of the London Royal Society. The first appeared in 1775 and dealt with the temperature of London versus that of Edinburgh. Appearing the following year, the second discussed the nature of heat in bodies and was based upon a series of experiments he carried out in Birmingham with the assistance of Boulton. Roebuck tested whether an iron ball weighed more when heated than when cold and found no indication that heating an object caused an increase in weight, which was contrary to the commonly held scientific theory that heat had weight.

Significance

The invention and eventual spread of John Roebuck’s lead chamber process sparked a revolution in the chemical industry, which the discovery of Nicolas Leblanc’s method of manufacturing alkali continued. That chemical revolution, however, was but one of several interrelated revolutions that took place at approximately the same time in Great Britain and which have been named the Industrial Revolution. In addition to the lead chamber process, Roebuck contributed to the larger Industrial Revolution through his establishment of the Carron ironworks, his attempt (though failed) to manufacture alkali, and his support of Watt in the improvement of the steam engine. Iron and coal, sulfuric acid and alkali, and the steam engine were important ingredients of the Industrial Revolution.

One of the salient features of the industrialized societies that have grown out of the British Industrial Revolution is the integration of industries. The purchase of coal mines and railroads by American steel magnates in the late nineteenth century is well known, and both the vertical and the horizontal integration of industries have become common practices. In the eighteenth century, Roebuck pioneered in industrial integration.

Starting with a chemical process that utilized sulfuric acid, he devised the lead chamber method and established a plant for making sulfuric acid on a large scale, the surplus of which he sold. Transferring his business operations to Scotland, Roebuck started manufacturing sulfuric acid at Prestonpans and opened an ironworks at Carron. He then leased the Bo’ness coal and salt works to supply coal for the Carron iron-smelting operation. In turn, he used the slag from the Carron works to manufacture sulfuric acid at Prestonpans. He tried to manufacture alkali from the salt and coal of Bo’ness. Roebuck failed; his coal mines flooded faster than contemporary steam engines could remove the water. Nevertheless, he was a pioneer in industrial integration in an age when the concept did not yet exist; in the process, he helped create the very Industrial Revolution that would put his ideas into practice a century later.

Bibliography

Cadell, Henry M. The Story of the Forth. Glasgow, Scotland: J. Maclehose and Sons, 1913. An old, but still useful history of the area Roebuck chose for his Scottish enterprises.

Clow, Archibald, and Nan L. Clow. The Chemical Revolution. London: Batchworth Press, 1952. Detailed history of Roebuck’s sulfuric acid and ironworks in the industrialization of Scotland.

Hamilton, Henry. An Economic History of Scotland. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1963. Portions relate the role of Roebuck’s sulfuric acid and ironworks in the industrialization of Scotland.

Muirhead, James Patrick. The Origins and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1854. Still the most complete work on Watt and the steam engine. Relates the contribution of Roebuck at some length.

Roebuck, Arthur W. The Roebuck Story. Don Mills, Ont.: T. H. Best, 1963. A family history. Information on John Roebuck is found on pages 6-18.

Roebuck, John. “A Comparison of the Heat of London and Edinburgh.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 65 (1775): 459-462. Roebuck’s first publication, which is a comparison of city temperatures.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Experiments on Ignited Bodies.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 66 (1776): 509-510. In his second and last scientific publication, Roebuck investigated the nature of heat to determine whether it had weight, as contemporary scientists believed. Eventually, heat was understood no longer as a substance but as a form of energy. An important, if forgotten study.

Schofield, Robert E. The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1963. An excellent study of an informal scientific society in provincial England. Describes Roebuck’s sulfuric acid, iron, alkali, and steam engine ventures.

Uglow, Jenny. The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002. An updated history of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Roebuck’s Carron ironworks and his experiments with thermometers, the steam engine, and alkalis are included in this book about the scientific and technological innovations that were created by society members.