Joseph Clement

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Clement was born on the 13th of June 1779 in Great Asby, Westmorland, the son of a hand-loom weaver. He would go on to become the craftsman most responsible for attempting to turn Charles Babbage's dream of a mechanical calculating machine into physical reality. How does a boy from a weaver's cottage, taught metalwork by a village blacksmith, end up shaping the fate of one of history's most ambitious engineering projects? And what did his precision tools, his lathe designs, and his falling out with Babbage reveal about the limits of craft in an age hungry for industrial machinery? Those questions sit at the heart of Clement's story.

• 2. A Craftsman Self-Made

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  Thomas Clement, Joseph's father, had built himself a lathe, and that fact shaped everything that followed. Joseph did not grow up with formal engineering training; he worked first as a weaver, then as a slater, and absorbed metalwork from the local blacksmith. With those combined skills he built his own lathe, used it to turn woodwind instruments, and then taught himself to play them.

  By 1805, Clement was making looms at a factory in Kirkby Stephen. He then moved to Carlisle, and from there to Glasgow, where he learned draughtsmanship from Peter Nicholson. By 1812 he had reached Aberdeen, working with Leys, Masson and Co. and attending lectures in natural philosophy at Marischal College. Each move added a new layer of technical knowledge to a foundation that had started, literally, at a weaver's loom.

• 3. London and the Great Workshops

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  In 1813, Clement arrived in London and began work for Alexander Galloway in Holborn. He did not stay long. Seeking wages that better matched his skills, he moved to Joseph Bramah at Pimlico. Bramah doubled what Galloway had paid. On the 1st of April 1814, the two men signed a formal five-year agreement making Clement chief draughtsman and superintendent of Bramah's Pimlico works.

  After Bramah's death, Clement took up the role of chief draughtsman at Maudslay, Sons and Field in Lambeth, where he contributed to the design of the firm's early marine steam engines. It was while at Maudslay's workshop that the Duke of Northumberland, a frequent visitor to the premises, encouraged Clement to strike out on his own. In 1817, Clement left Maudslay and Field. He had saved £500, and he took a small workshop at 21 Prospect Place, Newington, setting himself up as a maker of precision machinery.

• 4. Tools That Set Standards

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  In 1818, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts awarded Clement its gold medal for a machine he invented to mark ellipses, a design inspired by the trammels that carpenters used. That prize was the first of several. Clement's deepest passion was the improvement of self-acting machine tools, lathes above all, and by 1827 the Society for the Encouragement of Arts had awarded him the gold Isis medal for a lathe of unprecedented precision. The following year he added a self-adjusting centre chuck to the lathe and received the Society's silver medal for that improvement.

  Also in 1828, Clement began producing fluted screw-cutting taps and dies and pushed for a standardised system of screw threads, arguing that every machine screw of a particular diameter should carry a set number of threads at a predetermined pitch. One of his journeymen at the time was Joseph Whitworth, who would later carry that standardisation project much further; the Whitworth thread became a widely adopted standard for machine screws.

  Clement's great planer, built some years after his first planer of 1820, became a landmark in the trade. A detailed account of it, illustrated with copper plates drawn from Clement's own drawings, appeared in the Transactions of the Society of Arts in 1832. The machine took in work six feet square, was hand-driven, and could handle circular, spiral, and conical work as well as flat surfaces. For more than a decade it was the only planer of its size in existence, and it ran night and day on jobbing work, its earnings forming Clement's principal income.

• 5. Babbage's Engine

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  Charles Babbage engaged Clement in 1823 to build his difference engine, a mechanical device designed to perform mathematical calculations automatically. The recognised quality of Clement's machine tools and his reputation for precision engineering made him the logical choice for a project that demanded both attributes in full measure.

  The collaboration was productive but not smooth. Clement's large precision tools carried high prices, and at the time the custom of the trade allowed workmen to keep tools they had made in the course of their employment. That practice put Babbage and Clement at odds. Despite the friction over costs, Clement's skill and the quality of what he produced kept him attached to the project for many years, from 1824 through to 1833. The engine was never completed, but the parts Clement machined remain among the most precisely crafted mechanical components of the early nineteenth century.

• 6. Final Years

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  In his later years, Clement returned to music and built an organ, a quiet echo of the woodwind instruments he had turned on his first lathe decades earlier. He died on the 28th of February 1844 at 31 St George's Road, Southwark. He had never married, but he left behind a daughter, Sarah Clement, by Agnes Esson of County Durham.