Joseph Whitworth

• 1. Introduction

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  Sir Joseph Whitworth was an English engineer, entrepreneur, inventor and philanthropist. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, he demonstrated a measuring system precise to one millionth of an inch. That is about 25 nanometres, a distance no unaided hand or eye could ever judge. How did a young apprentice in a cotton mill come to care so much about accuracy? Why did a rifle commissioned by the British government become famous in an American war? And where did his fortune go after he died? The answers run from the floors of spinning mills to the street signs of Manchester.

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• 2. A Mechanic's Education

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  John Street in Stockport, Cheshire, is where Whitworth was born on the 21st of December 1803. The site now lies beneath the Stockport Courthouse, and a blue plaque on its back wall marks the spot. His father, Charles Whitworth, was a teacher and congregational minister. The boy showed an early taste for machinery. He was educated at Idle, near Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and his aptitude for mechanics became plain once he began work for his uncle.

  Amber Mill at Oakerthorpe in Derbyshire was where he served as an indentured apprentice to his uncle, Joseph Hulse, a cotton spinner. The plan was for Whitworth to become a partner in the business. He was fascinated by the mill's machinery from the start, and he soon mastered the techniques of cotton spinning. He also noticed how poor the accuracy was, and he criticised the milling machinery. That early exposure gave him an ambition to build machines with far greater precision.

  Four years at Amber Mill were followed by four more working as a mechanic in a Manchester factory. Then he moved to London and found work with Henry Maudslay, the inventor of the screw-cutting lathe. His colleagues there included James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam hammer, and Richard Roberts.

  Under Maudslay, Whitworth developed precision machine tools and introduced a box casting scheme for their iron frames. The scheme made the frames stiffer and lighter at the same time. He also worked for Holtzapffel & Co, makers of lathes used mainly for ornamental turning, and for Joseph Clement. In Clement's workshop he helped build Charles Babbage's calculating machine, the difference engine.

  Openshaw in Manchester was where he returned in 1833 to start his own business making lathes and other machine tools. Its workmanship became renowned. Within a few years he was working on the first step of all accurate machinery, a truly flat surface.

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• 3. Precision and Standards

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  During the 1830s, Whitworth popularised the three-plates method for producing accurate flat surfaces. He used engineer's blue and scraping techniques on three trial surfaces. Before his scraping technique, the same three-plate method relied on polishing, which gave less accurate results. His approach set off an explosion of development in precision instruments, all built on flat surfaces made this way.

  In 1840 came his next innovation, a measuring technique called "end measurements". It used a precision flat plane and a measuring screw, and he invented both. Four years later, in 1844, he is credited with introducing the thou, a tiny unit of length used in engineering.

  The year 1841 brought the work for which his name is best known in workshops. Whitworth devised a standard for screw threads with a fixed thread angle of 55 degrees and a standard pitch for each diameter. It soon became the first nationally standardised system. Railway companies, which until then had each used different screw threads, adopted it, and their adoption drove its widespread acceptance. It later became a British Standard, called British Standard Whitworth, or BSW, and was governed by BS 84:1956.

  Accuracy of this kind caught the attention of the War Department, which wanted a better rifle.

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• 4. Rifles and Cannon

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  The Crimean War exposed the shortcomings of the Pattern 1853 Enfield, a rifle of calibre .577 inch. The War Department of the British government then commissioned Whitworth to design its replacement. His rifle had a smaller bore of 0.451 inch, and the bore was hexagonal. It fired an elongated hexagonal bullet and used faster rifling, with one turn in twenty inches. In tests in 1859, it proved superior to the Enfield in every way.

  On the 23rd of April, The Times reported the trials as a great success. The design, however, proved prone to fouling, and it cost four times as much to manufacture as the Enfield. The British government rejected it. The French Army adopted it instead.

  An unspecified number of Whitworth rifles reached the Confederate states during the American Civil War. There they were called "Whitworth Sharpshooters". They could place tight groups of shots at 500 yards. Their accuracy earned the nickname "sharpshooter", and the rifle is considered one of the earliest examples of a sniper rifle.

  Wimbledon in 1860 saw Queen Victoria open the first meeting of the National Rifle Association. She fired a Whitworth rifle from a fixed mechanical rest. The shot scored a bull's eye at a range of 400 yards.

  Whitworth also designed a large rifled breech-loading gun with a 2.75 inch bore. It fired a projectile weighing 12 lb 11 oz to a range of about 6 miles. He patented its spirally-grooved projectile in 1855. The British Army rejected the gun and preferred those made by Armstrong. It was used in the American Civil War.

  While trying to increase the bursting strength of his gun barrels, Whitworth patented a process for casting steel under pressure. He called it "fluid-compressed steel", and he built a new steel works near Manchester. Some of his castings were shown at the Great Exhibition in Paris around 1883.

  In 1897, ten years after his death, his company merged with the W.G. Armstrong & Mitchell Company. The new firm was called Armstrong Whitworth, and it joined the name of the army's preferred gunmaker to his own.

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• 5. Travels and Honours

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  In 1853, Whitworth and his lifelong friend George Wallis were appointed British commissioners for the New York International Exhibition. Wallis was an artist and art educator who lived from 1811 to 1891. The two men toured industrial sites in several American states. Their journey produced a report titled 'The Industry of the United States in Machinery, Manufactures and Useful and Applied Arts', published in London in 1854.

  By 1850, Whitworth was president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and financially very successful. That year he built a house called The Firs in Fallowfield, south Manchester, designed by Edward Walters. In 1854 he bought Stancliffe Hall in Darley Dale, Derbyshire. He moved there in 1872 with his second wife, Louisa. Four six-ton blocks of stone from the Darley Dale quarry went to make the lions of St George's Hall in Liverpool.

  The 22nd of January 1839 brought his election to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1857. In 1859 he received Honorary Membership of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland. His designs won many awards over the years. Queen Victoria made him a baronet in 1869. By then he was already turning his wealth toward schools and scholarships.

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• 6. Giving It Back

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  In 1868, Whitworth donated £128,000 to the government, roughly £6.5 million in 2010 money. He wanted to bring "science and industry" closer together and to fund scholarships. That same year he founded the Whitworth Scholarship for the advancement of mechanical engineering.

  A strong believer in technical education, he backed the new Mechanics' Institute in Manchester, which later became UMIST. He also helped found the Manchester School of Design.

  Today the Whitworth Scholarships are run with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, which handles their administration. Ten to fifteen scholarships are awarded each year. They are aimed at outstanding engineers who combine academic and practical skill, like Whitworth himself. Applicants may be starting an engineering degree or already be on one, in any engineering discipline. As of 2018, a full-time undergraduate could receive up to £5,450 per year for up to four years. Since 2006, a Whitworth Senior Scholarship has also supported postgraduate research leading to an MPhil, PhD or EngD.

  The Whitworth Society was founded in 1923 by Henry Selby Hele-Shaw, then president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. It supports all Whitworth Scholars and promotes engineering in the UK.

  His will held far larger sums than any scholarship, and it named three friends to carry them out.

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• 7. Names and Last Days

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  Richard Copley Christie, a friend of Whitworth's, was one of three legatees named in the will. Each was left more than half a million pounds for their own use. The will said they were each of them "aware of the objects" to which Whitworth would have put the funds. They chose to spend more than a fifth of the money supporting Owens College. They also bought land now occupied by the Manchester Royal Infirmary.

  In 1897, Christie personally assigned more than £50,000 to build the Whitworth Building, which completed the front quadrangle of Owens College. He was president of the Whitworth Institute from 1890 to 1895. He also chaired the committee of the Cancer Pavilion and Home from 1890 to 1893, and that body later became the Christie Hospital. Part of the bequest paid for the Whitworth Institute in Darley Dale.

  The university's Whitworth Art Gallery and the adjacent Whitworth Park were established under the will after his death. The Whitworth Park Halls of Residence also carry his name. So does Whitworth Street, one of the main streets in Manchester city centre, running from London Road to the south end of Deansgate. Near The Firs, a cycleway behind Owens Park is called Whitworth Lane. Darley Dale has a Whitworth Park of its own. The Whitworth Building at the University of Manchester honours his contribution to education in the city.

  In January 1887, at the age of 83, Whitworth died in Monte Carlo. He had travelled there hoping to improve his health. He was buried at St Helen's Church in Darley Dale, Derbyshire. The American magazine The Manufacturer and Builder published a detailed obituary. He had told his trustees to spend his fortune on philanthropic projects, and they are still doing so today.

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