John Wilkinson

English inventor and engineer

• Born: 1728
• Birthplace: Clifton, Cumberland, England
• Died: July 14, 1808
• Place of death: Bradley, Staffordshire, England

Wilkinson was a pioneer of the Staffordshire iron trade, and he contributed to the perfection of the first steam engine with his inventions for boring cylinders. He helped build the first cast-iron bridge and built the first iron barge and the Paris waterworks.

Early Life

John Wilkinson was the son of Isaac Wilkinson, an overlooker at an iron furnace who also had a small farm. John was born sometime in 1728 in a market cart on the road between Workington and Little Clifton Furnace. His mother was going to market with butter and eggs from Isaac Wilkinson’s farm, and the expected birth produced a sensation in the area, leading some residents to predict that “sum tyme [he] wod bee a girt man.”

In July, 1738, Isaac Wilkinson left Little Clifton to become chief caster, or “potfounder,” of the Backbarrow Iron Company in Furness, North Lancashire. A blast furnace had existed there since 1711 and used a charcoal-smelting process. There he obtained a patent and began the manufacture of a laundress’ box iron. The enterprise was the first family financial success. Isaac lived in the village of Bare Syke and was a pioneer there in an unsuccessful attempt to develop the crude idea of roller milling. Later in the 1740’s he and his son John had both a furnace and a refinery, with a canal utilizing a small iron boat at Wilson House near Lindale.

In 1753, Isaac Wilkinson moved to Bersham, where he operated what would be his principal furnace from then until his failure in 1795. Proximity to the Chester and Liverpool markets and plentiful supplies of charcoal, iron ore, coal, and waterpower near the area were the site’s advantages. In 1762, Isaac Wilkinson became partners with two other men in the Dowlais Iron Company, and in 1763 at Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare. These concerns were unsuccessful, and in 1767 he became the sole owner of the Cyfarthfa ironworks in Glamorgan. From 1753 to 1764, he manufactured iron cylinders, pipes, and cannon in Bristol. He finally retired as a merchant ironmonger in that city, and he lived out the rest of his life there, impoverished and dependent on his children. His few possessions were left to Thomas Guest, the Welsh ironmaster.

A Presbyterian, Isaac gave his son John the best education available to Nonconformists in the 1740’s. The youth was sent to a Dissenting academy in Kendal, kept by the Unitarian divine Dr. Caleb Rotherham. Between 1733 and 1751, some 180 scholars received instruction there, mostly for possible ministerial office.

In 1745, at the age of seventeen, John was apprenticed to a merchant ironmonger in Liverpool, in whose shop or warehouse he remained for three years, until he returned to the place of his birth. In about 1748, John again left his father to work at Wolverhampton and later at Bilston, Staffordshire. When he was about twenty years old he built the first furnace there, naming it Bradley Furnace. It was there that he succeeded in using coal for wood charcoal in smelting and puddling iron ore.

Meanwhile, his father had moved to Bersham, near Wrexham in Denbighshire, and in 1756 John rejoined his father. There he built an improved machine for boring cylinders with accuracy. In 1759, John began to manufacture wrought iron at a larger forge of the New Willey Company, at Broseley near Bridgnorth, and in 1761 he became the manager of the Bersham works. Upon his father’s financial failure, John and his brother William, as partners, reconstituted the firm as the New Bersham Company.

In 1770, John expanded Bradley Furnace near Bilston, bringing to three the ironworks (Bersham, Broseley, and Bradley) that were run by Wilkinsons. In 1772, he displayed his business precociousness when, acting for the Bersham Company, he made a cartel agreement with Abraham Darby III, head of the Coalbrookdale Company, that they would charge the same for engine parts, cylinders, and bored parts (with the exception of London).

Life’s Work

John Wilkinson’s next achievement occurred in connection with a crisis that was caused by the increased size of Newcomen-style steam engines, which as a result became less efficient, using more coal and leather for pistons. In 1762-1764, James Watt had made his new design for a steam engine with a separate condenser, which was patented in 1769 and perfected by 1775. One of the most important steps in perfecting the engine resulted from Wilkinson inventing an improved boring mill. His patented boring mill was of unequaled accuracy. In it, castings, cylinders, or cannon could rotate around a fixed boring bar along which the cutting tool was traversed. This enabled a bored cylinder to be true in three dimensions. In 1770, Watt found that Wilkinson’s machine produced by far the most accurately bored cylinders for his engine. Wilkinson, who now owned the Bersham plant, quickly applied the third steam engine made by Matthew Boulton and Watt to blow the bellows at his new furnace at Broseley to manufacture wrought iron. A blast of air at a pressure of four pounds per square inch was supplied continuously to the furnace, and the higher temperature made possible by the blast simplified the use of coke for smelting. The steam engine was the first to be used for that function.

The engine was set up in 1776 by Watt himself, and the model soon surpassed those of the older Newcomen design. Watt insisted that all cylinders on his engines should be provided by Wilkinson’s Broseley or Bradley works, even though Wilkinson’s prices were higher. The Wilkinsons expanded their industrial empire soon, acquiring coal, iron stone, and lead ore mines, but refused to manufacture steam engines. Wilkinson maintained a monopoly on the boring process until 1780, when the Darby’s Coalbrookdale Company and the Walkers of Rotherham began their manufacture. As time passed, the personal relationship between Wilkinson and Boulton and Watt ruptured when Watt’s son assumed control from his father and when William Wilkinson’s son married Boulton’s daughter.

In 1782 and again in 1795, John quarreled with William (who was in charge of his foreign operations) over the division of profits. In 1795, John closed the Bersham furnace and canceled Boulton and Watt’s outstanding orders for cylinders, with the result that Boulton and Watt opened their own foundry at Smethwick, for engine work that William helped design. It was run by Abraham Storey (John Wilkinson’s head man), whom they had enticed away. The dispute escalated when William revealed to the younger Watt that John had pirated the Watt patent in 1787 and had sold at least eight steam engines, including one for Cadiz, one for the Perrier brothers at Mons, and one for Count Reden in Prussia. To avoid costly litigation, John Wilkinson, in December, 1795, agreed to pay the Soho partners full reparations.

Before this feud, Wilkinson in 1781 had used a Watt engine to move a hammer of sixty pounds more than sixty strokes a minute, and by 1783, through a cam, it lifted a forge hammerhead, weighing eight hundred pounds, a distance of two feet. Soon many other ironmasters ordered forge engines from Watt. In 1786, Wilkinson was again first, this time in using a steam engine in a rolling mill.

Wilkinson was ever the improviser. Since 1753, the family had made cannon for the national and international markets, including the British East India Company, especially after 1762 at Bersham. Wilkinson’s new boring process, so valuable for boring cannon barrels, encouraged him, in 1775, to smuggle to France cannon disguised as water pipes. The Wilkinsons soon gained an affluence exceeding that of the Quaker ironmasters, whose pacifism made them reject the munitions trade. By 1786, thirty-two-pounders, howitzers, swivels, and shells were being exported to the Ottoman Empire, Russia, France, and various German states. In 1795, Wilkinson devised an even more improved apparatus for boring cannon, utilizing a completely opposite technique at Brymbo next to Bresham. These improvements in casting and boring cannon reduced the chance of the weapon vibrating and shattering into a thousand pieces, thereby killing the gunners. Demands for water pipes, malt and sugarcane rollers, and gas apparatuses led to more improvements in foundry practices. Wilkinson’s power-driven rolling mill at Bradley produced rolls four feet in diameter from twenty reverberating furnaces and 420 tons of bar iron a month. Bradley Furnace, near Bilston, had access to a ten-foot-wide seam of coal.

Wilkinson was relentless in his application of cast iron. In 1779, he aided Darby, who was the chief force behind constructing the first iron bridge across the Severn River between Broseley and Wadeley. In 1787, to facilitate sending war matériel down the Severn, he constructed the first iron barge, the Trial, which was launched near Broseley on July 9, 1787. He also had a warehouse and five wharves in London to distribute his products. Later, in Bradley, he erected a Wesleyan Chapel, in which the doors, the window frames, and even the pulpit were of cast iron.

Wilkinson also expanded overseas to meet demands. In 1770, he established a foundry in France. He also taught the French the art of boring cannon from solid castings to aid the cause of the American Revolution. In 1776, William Wilkinson helped the French remodel the ordnance works at Le Creusot. He later emigrated to France as the result of a family quarrel in 1781 pitting John and Mary against Isaac and William, probably over management and ownership of the Bersham furnace. William’s introduction of the use of coal to make iron at Nantes and elsewhere in France resulted in large profits, and the name Wilkinson became synonymous with “blast furnace” in France. John also cast forty miles of pipes, cylinders, and ironwork required by the Perrier brothers, engineers for the Paris waterworks, a great marvel in its day, and it was in connection with this project that he erected the first large steam engine in France.

John Wilkinson was far more successful financially than his father. He owned a five-hundred-acre farm at Brymbo, near Wrexham, where he utilized one of the first steam-powered threshing machines. He also invested more than œ2,000 in the Shrewsbury Canal. In addition, Wilkinson had investments as early as 1781 with Thomas Williams, “the copper king,” and in 1783 he developed a lead mine at Minera and coal at Soughton. In 1790, he established a lead-pipe factory at Rotherhithe on the Thames. Not content with financial power, in 1799 he was high sheriff for Denbighshire. Between 1787 and 1793, because of the shortage of coins in the area, Wilkinson issued numerous tokens, both silver and copper, as well as guinea notes, for private circulation in Staffordshire and Shropshire. He was also a partner with William Reynolds in a Shrewsbury bank. Rumors of his radicalism no doubt stemmed from the fact that his sister Mary had married Joseph Priestley on June 23, 1762, and that after the destruction of his property at Birmingham, Wilkinson had assisted him during a time of financial distress. Like Priestley, he was sympathetic to the works of Thomas Paine and to the French Revolution.

Wilkinson was married twice, first to Anne Mawdsley in 1755, who died a year later when she was only twenty-three years old, and then to a Miss Lee of Wroxeter. Both possessed sizable landed fortunes. Wilkinson’s second marriage, in 1763, had enabled him to become owner of the Broseley forge. His domestic life was free-spirited: While in his seventies, he had three children by his mistress Mary Ann Lewis, a servant girl; he had them declared legitimate in 1808. These sons would contest his large fortune with nephews in Chancery Court (especially his factotum Thomas Jones, the son of his sister Sarah Wilkinson and a Leeds surgeon).

Wilkinson died at Bradley, Staffordshire, on July 14, 1808, and was buried on his estate Castlehead near Grange-over-Sands in North Lancashire, his home since 1779. Originally he had planned to be buried in a cast-iron casket, but by the time he died he had grown too stout. He at least had the satisfaction of having a cast-iron memorial erected at Castlehead after his death. The value of his estate at the time of his death was œ120,000, although it was dissipated by the twelve years of litigation that followed. Alone among ironmasters, Wilkinson became a folk hero, revered in song. In 1815, seven years after his death, several thousand people assembled on Monmore Green near Bradley, expecting his second coming on his gray horse.

Significance

John Wilkinson had a dominating nature, an inflated ego, and a great capacity for hatred, with competitors, customers, and employees. On the other hand, in 1776 his workers earned a good wage—between eight and eleven shillings a week—and he gave some of them old-age pensions. He also gave several thousand pounds to philanthropic causes in Shropshire and London. Wilkinson was handsome in his youth, with fine features, but his profile on his silver and copper tokens shows a homely, heavy face with haughty eyebrows and a scornful, contemptuous mouth. His religious preferences have been described as Unitarian, Anglican, Methodist, and atheist.

His ability as an engineer, ironmonger, and businessman to find new uses for cast iron and implement new business techniques marks him as one who enriched the world more than he enriched himself. After his death, his industrial empire was leased or closed and eventually disappeared.

Bibliography

Ashton, Thomas Southcliffe. Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1924. Using Wilkinson’s letter books as sources, this book provides information with a wide chronological range.

Birch, Alan. The Economic History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, 1784-1879. London: Frank Cass, 1967. Contains many quantitative details. Good on technological aspects of the subject. Includes references to William Wilkinson.

Chaloner, William H. “Isaac Wilkinson, Potfounder.” In Studies in the Industrial Revolution Presented to T. S. Ashton, edited by L. S. Pressnell. London: Athlone Press, 1960. An easy-to-obtain source that, despite its title, is one of the most abundant sources of information on John Wilkinson and his personal life and career as an industrialist.

Dickinson, Henry Winram. John Wilkinson, Ironmaster. Ulverston, England: H. Kitchin, 1914. Written by one of the first authorities on the history of the steam engine. A rare book, much used by historians.

Musson, Albert Edward, and Eric Robinson. Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1979. A good overall modern treatment of the subjects that deals with their interactions by two of the best contemporary experts. Good on European contacts.

Raistrick, Arthur. Dynasty of Ironfounders: The Darbys and Coalbrookdale. London: Longmans, Green, 1953. While dealing mainly with the Darbys, it contains a good bibliography for the Coalbrookdale area and contains some references to Wilkinson’s career in the Madeley area.

Randall, John. The Wilkinsons. Madeley, England: John Randall, 1876. A local historian gives details of Wilkinson’s domestic life. A rare book, with few copies extant in the United States.

Soldon, Norbert C. John Wilkinson, 1728-1808: English Ironmaster and Inventor. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. Detailed biography of Wilkinson, covering, among other subjects, his family origins, the creation of his iron business, contemporary opinion of Wilkinson, and Wilkinson’s legacy.

Trinder, Barrie. The Industrial Revolution in Shropshire. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman, Littlefield, 1973. Written by the author of many social, technological, and archaeological books and articles of the region. Raises a variety of questions on subjects that concern modern economic historians. Highly recommended.