John Wilkinson (industrialist)

• 1. Introduction

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  John Wilkinson was born in 1728 in the small settlement of Little Clifton, Bridgefoot, Cumberland, the son of an iron founder who stoked his blast furnace with coke at a time when most men still used charcoal. By the end of his life, Wilkinson would produce roughly one-eighth of all the cast iron in Britain. He became known as "Iron-Mad" Wilkinson, and the nickname was not merely a figure of speech. In the 1790s, he had nearly everything around him made of iron, up to and including his own coffins.

  But the story of John Wilkinson is not simply one man's obsession. He built a boring machine that would be called the first true machine tool. He kept the partnership between inventor James Watt and manufacturer Matthew Boulton alive by solving a problem Watt had struggled with for years. He helped drive the construction of the world's first iron bridge. And he spent decades building an industrial web stretching from north Wales to London to the copper mines of Cornwall. What drove a man to reshape the material world around him in iron, and what happened to everything he built? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. An Iron Education

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  Isaac Wilkinson, John's father, was the potfounder at the blast furnace in Little Clifton, among the first ironmasters to substitute coke for charcoal, following a practice pioneered by Abraham Darby. John grew up inside that industrial world from his earliest years. His family held non-conformist Presbyterian beliefs, and he was educated at a dissenting academy in Kendal, Westmorland, run by Dr Caleb Rotherham.

  In 1745, at age seventeen, John was apprenticed to a Liverpool merchant for five years, then entered a partnership with his father. His sister Mary would later marry the chemist Joseph Priestley in 1762, drawing one of the great scientific minds of the age into the family orbit. Priestley, in turn, played a role in educating John's younger half-brother William, who was seventeen years John's junior.

  When Isaac moved north to the Bersham furnace near Wrexham in 1753, John stayed behind at Kirkby Lonsdale in Westmorland. It was there, on the 12th of June 1755, that he married Ann Maudesley, beginning both his personal life and his independent career as an ironmaster.

• 3. Building the Iron Empire

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  From 1755 John Wilkinson became a partner in the Bersham concern, and in 1757 he and partners erected a blast furnace at Willey, near Broseley in Shropshire. He made his home in Broseley at a house called The Lawns, which served as his headquarters for many years. Adjacent buildings handled administration, and one, named The Mint, was used to distribute thousands of tokens each valued at the equivalent of a halfpenny.

  Wilkinson expanded relentlessly across east Shropshire, developing ironworks at Snedshill, Hollinswood, Hadley, and Hampton Loade. He and Edward Blakeway leased land to build another works at Bradley in Bilston parish, near Wolverhampton. Bradley became his largest and most successful enterprise, and Wilkinson became known as the Father of the South Staffordshire iron industry, with Bilston marking the start of the Black Country. In 1761 he took over Bersham Ironworks outright.

  Bradley was also the site of extensive experiments aimed at substituting raw coal for coke in producing cast iron. At its height the works included blast furnaces, a brick works, potteries, glass works, and rolling mills, and the Birmingham Canal was subsequently built nearby. In 1792 Wilkinson bought the Brymbo Hall estate in Denbighshire, where he installed furnaces and other plant. After his death the ironworks lay idle until 1842, then eventually became Brymbo Steelworks, which operated until 1990.

• 4. The Boring Machine

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  James Watt had spent several years trying without success to obtain accurately bored cylinders for his steam engines. The problem was fundamental: the boring tools then in use were cantilevered, meaning the cutting shaft was fixed at only one end, which caused it to flex and wander. The result was cylinders that were out of round, letting steam leak past the piston and robbing the engine of efficiency. Watt was forced to use hammered iron as a stopgap, and it was not good enough.

  In 1774 John Wilkinson patented a boring machine built on a different principle. The shaft holding the cutting tool extended all the way through the cylinder and was supported at both ends, holding it rigid. With this machine, Wilkinson bored the cylinder for Boulton and Watt's first commercial engine. The tolerance between piston and cylinder was far tighter than anything previously achieved, cutting steam losses sharply. Boulton and Watt gave Wilkinson an exclusive contract to supply cylinders as a result.

  The significance of this went beyond steam engines. Until that point, advances in boring technology had stayed within the narrow field of gun barrels. Wilkinson's boring machine opened that technology to engines, pumps, and the wider apparatus of industry. It has since been called the first machine tool. In 1783 the first rotary action steam engine was installed at Bradley, and by 1792 Wilkinson had patented a reversing rolling mill using two steam cylinders, registered as UK Patent 1857 of 1792.

• 5. Cannons and Patents

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  Bersham became well known for high-quality casting and for producing guns and cannon. Historically, cannon had been cast around a core and then bored to remove imperfections. In 1774, under UK Patent 1063, Wilkinson patented a technique for boring iron guns from a solid piece, rotating the gun barrel rather than the boring bar. Because the bore was cut uniformly in diameter, the guns were more accurate and far less likely to explode. Bronze cannon had already been bored from the solid, but boring large iron naval cannon this way was genuinely new.

  The Royal Navy later moved to have the patent quashed, viewing it as a monopoly, and succeeded in 1779. Even so, Wilkinson remained a major manufacturer throughout.

  Fifteen years after the cannon-boring patent, in 1789, Wilkinson returned to the problem of artillery accuracy with UK Patent 1694. He devised and patented a method for machining rifling, the spiral grooves in a gun bore that spin a projectile and improve its accuracy, a principle that had been understood since the sixteenth century. His method would not come into widespread use until the middle of the nineteenth century, partly because the ammunition of the day was difficult to load while engaging with the rifling.

• 6. The Iron Bridge

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  In 1775 John Wilkinson became the prime mover behind a project to bridge the River Severn, connecting the industrial town of Broseley with the opposite bank. His friend Thomas Farnolls Pritchard had written to him with plans for the structure. A committee of subscribers, mostly Broseley businessmen, formed to agree on building it from iron rather than wood or stone and to seek parliamentary approval.

  Wilkinson's persistence held the group together through several difficulties during the parliamentary process. Without his influence and his ability to draw support from parliamentarians, the bridge might never have been built, or might have been built from conventional materials. The contract went to Abraham Darby III, who quoted a price of £3,150 to build it. When construction began, Wilkinson sold his shares to Darby in 1777, and Darby steered the project to completion in 1779. The bridge opened in 1781.

  The outcome mattered beyond the crossing itself. The district in Madeley took the name Ironbridge from the structure, and the area eventually attained UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Pritchard, the friend who had first written to Wilkinson with the bridge plans, also designed the memorial to Wilkinson's first wife, Ann, which can be seen in Wrexham church.

  In 1787, back in Broseley, Wilkinson launched the first commercial barge built of wrought iron. Iron barges would become common in the decades that followed, and iron would eventually dominate large ships in the century ahead.

• 7. Copper, Lead, and Tokens

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  By the 1760s the Royal Navy had begun cladding the hulls of its ships with copper sheet to slow marine growth and resist the Teredo shipworm, which caused severe hull damage in tropical waters. When the Navy decreed that all ships should be clad, demand for copper surged. Wilkinson noticed this during his visits to shipyards and moved to secure a position in the copper trade.

  He bought shares in eight Cornish copper mines and met Thomas Williams, the man known as the Copper King of the Parys Mountain mines in Anglesey. Wilkinson supplied Williams with large quantities of iron plate and equipment, and also supplied iron scrap for recovering copper from solution by cementation. He bought a one-sixteenth share in the Mona Mine at Parys Mountain, along with shares in Williams's enterprises at Holywell in Flintshire, St Helens near Liverpool, and Swansea in south Wales. Together in 1785 they established the Cornish Metal Company as a marketing body for copper, with warehouses in Birmingham, London, Bristol, and Liverpool.

  In lead, Wilkinson invested in mines at Minera in Wrexham, at Llyn Pandy at Soughton and Mold in Flintshire. He became the major partner in the Maesffynnon Wen mine in Minera in 1783 and installed a steam pumping engine there in 1784. He also built a lead smelter on his Brymbo estate in the 1790s and, under UK Patent 1735 of 1790, patented a method for making lead pipe, which he exploited through a factory at Rotherhithe in London. That factory endured long after his death, eventually producing solder filler alloys for the car factory at Dagenham.

  To support his workers across all these enterprises, Wilkinson minted his own tokens, known as Willeys, each valued at the equivalent of a halfpenny. He and Thomas Williams were among the first to issue such trade tokens, helping to ease a chronic shortage of small coin in circulation.

• 8. Eccentric End

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  By 1796, when Wilkinson was sixty-eight years old, he was producing about one-eighth of all the cast iron made in Britain. He had become, in the assessment of those who knew him, a titan: very wealthy and more than a little eccentric. His iron obsession peaked in the 1790s when he arranged for almost everything around him to be made of iron, including several coffins and a massive iron obelisk commissioned to mark his grave, which still stands in the village of Lindale-in-Cartmel in Cumbria.

  His personal life had been complicated. His first wife Ann died in Wrexham on the 17th of November 1756, aged twenty-three, after giving birth to their daughter Mary on the 13th of April that year. His second wife, Mary Lee, was forty-three when they married, and her money helped him buy out partners; they had no children together. When Wilkinson was in his seventies, his mistress Mary Ann Lewis, a maid at Brymbo Hall, bore him three children, a boy and two girls.

  He died on the 14th of July 1808 at his works in Bradley, probably from diabetes, and was buried at his Castlehead estate at Grange-over-Sands, on land he had drained and improved from 1778 onward. He left an estate worth more than £130,000, intending his three children as principal heirs. His nephew Thomas Jones contested the will in the Court of Chancery. By 1828 the estate had largely been consumed by lawsuits and poor management. His iron coffin was moved several times in the decades that followed. It has since been lost.