Jan Verbruggen

• 1. Introduction

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  Jan Verbruggen introduced the first industrial size lathe ever installed in England. That single piece of machinery reshaped how Britain's Royal Arsenal cast and finished its guns. Verbruggen was not born into that world; he came from the Dutch Republic, where his career had already taken a difficult turn. What happened in the Netherlands, and how did a foreign founder end up running England's royal gun foundry?

• 2. Dutch Foundries and Family

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  Verbruggen was born in 1712 in Enkhuizen, in the Netherlands, the son of Pieter Verbruggen and Maria Brouwer. In 1734, he married Eva van Schaack, and the couple had three children together. By 1740, he held the post of gun-founder at the Dutch admiralty's foundry in Enkhuizen. His career advanced further from June 1755, when he became master gun-founder in The Hague.

  Within a few years, Verbruggen was suspended from that Hague post after his guns were judged unsound. In 1763, he tried to secure a position at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, London, and failed.

• 3. The Painter of Enkhuizen

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  Jan van Call the Younger trained Verbruggen as a painter, a craft entirely separate from his work with cannon and iron. He painted seascapes and coastal scenes, including yachts and East Indiamen near Enkhuizen. No further details about his life as a painter are recorded.

• 4. Rebuilding the Royal Arsenal

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  By 1769, two of Britain's own contracted gun-founders, William Bowers and Richard Gilpin, were nearing retirement. Andrew Schalch, master founder at the Royal Arsenal since 1718, had produced few guns and drawn criticism for years. On the 12th of January 1770, Jan and his son Pieter, born in 1735, were appointed master founders at the Royal Arsenal. The following May, the two men moved to England to take up their new roles.

  At the Royal Brass Foundry, the Verbruggens installed a horizontal boring machine that bored guns cast solid rather than reamed around a cast core. Verbruggen had already tested this same system in The Hague during the 1750s. The pair also rebuilt the foundry's furnaces and casting pits, and used precast moulds to shape the guns' cascabels.

  Henry Maudslay, who would later invent many improvements to the lathe, worked as an apprentice inside Verbruggen's Woolwich workshop. The first guns produced under the Verbruggens passed their proof tests in April 1774. The foundry produced cannons, mortars, and howitzers, with a better proof record than in earlier years, meeting Britain's military needs.

  Jan Verbruggen died in London on the 27th of October 1781, and was buried on the 2nd of November at the Dutch Church, Austin Friars. His son Pieter, who lived until 1786, carried on alone as master founder at the Woolwich foundry.