The Origins Of The Machine Shop

Richard Roberts was born in 1789 in a toll gate house on the Welsh border, cut stone in the Llanymynech quarries, worked boats on the Ellesmere Canal, and got his trade as a patternmaker in John Wilkinson's Bradley ironworks. When the militia ballot came for him he ran to London, and the flight put him at Henry Maudslay's bench in Lambeth. He took away one idea. Accuracy is designed into the machine and then collected for free, over and over, from workmen who do not personally possess it. Maudslay had proved that on round work. The lathe was solved. Nothing else was. In 1816 a flat surface was still produced by a man with a cold chisel, then files, then hours of scraping to a surface plate, by the slowest and most expensive men in the building. This documentary follows what Roberts did with that problem from an upstairs room at 15 Deansgate in Manchester, with one lathe, one drilling machine and a cellar wheel to drive them. The gear cutting engine of 1816 and the 1820 advertisement promising teeth that would not require filing up. The 1817 back geared screw cutting lathe, still in the Science Museum, carrying the back gear every engine lathe since has used. The 1817 planing machine, the oldest to survive, with an honest account of the priority question and the rival machines being built behind closed doors. The 1825 slotting machine that cut keyways without a chisel, the shaping machine, and the heavy radial arm drills of about 1826. The self acting mule gets covered in full, including the part usually left out. The Hyde and Stalybridge spinners struck in 1824, the manufacturers asked Roberts for a machine that would spin without their skilled men, and he delivered it in 4 months. The winding on problem, the 1830 quadrant that solved it, and Andrew Ure calling the result the Iron Man in 1835 while saying plainly what it was built for. The scale, from 100,000 spindles within 3 years to the 5,000,000 running in Lancashire at the peak, against about £12,000 spent developing it and £7,000 recovered by 1839. Then Sharp, Roberts and Company at the Atlas Works. The vertical cylinder locomotive Experiment of 1833, Hibernia for the Dublin and Kingstown in 1834, and the 2-2-2 Sharp Singles, about 600 built from 1837 and exported across Europe. Templates, gauges and stocks and dies cut to his own thread pitches, so parts came out of the shop to a dimension instead of being fitted one to another. The centrepiece is the punching machine of 1847, patent number 11,607, built for Robert Stephenson's tubular bridges at Conwy and the Menai Strait. A bank of punches whose firing pattern was held on Jacquard cards, working plates 12 feet long, driving 144 holes through half inch wrought iron at 3,168 holes an hour, with 3 men and a boy replacing 12. Stack the finished plates, take any 2 out of a thousand, and an iron bar drops straight through the holes. Programmed hole positions in wrought iron, a century before numerical control. The episode closes on the ceiling Roberts never broke. His gauges answered to his shop and to nothing outside it, and every other good works in Britain was in the same position, accurate to itself and to nobody else. He left the partnership in 1843, took out roughly 22 more patents that earned him almost nothing, and moved to London in 1860. He died on 11 March 1864 at Adam Street off the Adelphi, having spent his last day designing a machine for cutting slate. William Fairbairn convened a meeting at the Society of Arts to provide for his daughter, and the Crown granted her £200 a year in 1866. Sources Clark, Edwin. The Britannia and Conway Tubular Bridges. London: Day and Son, 1850. Dictionary of Welsh Biography. "Roberts, Richard (1789-1864)." National Library of Wales. https://biography.wales. Grace's Guide to British Industrial History. "Richard Roberts," "Richard Roberts: 1817 Lathe," "Self-acting Spinning Mule," "Early Planing Machines," "Sharp, Roberts and Co." https://www.gracesguide.co.uk. Hills, Richard L. Life and Inventions of Richard Roberts, 1789-1864. Landmark Publishing, 2002. Lee, Sidney, ed. Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900. "Roberts, Richard." London: Smith, Elder and Co. Lowe, James W. British Steam Locomotive Builders. Goose and Son, 1975. Marsden, Richard. Cotton Spinning. London: George Bell and Sons, 1884. Menai Heritage. "Richard Roberts." menaibridges.co.uk. Roe, Joseph Wickham. English and American Tool Builders. Yale University Press, 1916. Rolt, L. T. C. Tools for the Job. London: Batsford, 1965. Science Museum Group Collection. "Richard Roberts," "Sharp Roberts and Company." https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.... Smiles, Samuel. Industrial Biography. London: John Murray, 1863. The Engineer. "Richard Roberts" obituary. 18 March 1864. Ure, Andrew. The Philosophy of Manufactures. London: Charles Knight, 1835. Subscribe to Trade Archive for the history of the machines, the tools and the men who made the trade what it is.