Richard Roberts (engineer)

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Roberts was born on the 22nd of April 1789 in Llanymynech, a village on the border between England and Wales. His father was a shoemaker who also kept the New Bridge tollgate. Biographer Richard Leslie Hills later called Roberts the most important British mechanical engineer of the 19th century. That claim is harder to dismiss when you know how many basic engineering tools trace back to his Manchester workshops. What path ran between that tollgate and those workshops? And what did Roberts have to build before the industrial world could build everything else?

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• 2. From Tollgate to Tool Shop

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  Roberts's earliest working years were spent on the Ellesmere Canal and at limestone quarries near Llanymynech. A road surveyor named Robert Baugh, who was working under the engineer Thomas Telford, gave Roberts his first lessons in technical drawing. That training found practical use when Roberts took up patternmaking at the Bradley Iron works in Staffordshire.

  Around 1813, he moved to a supervisory role at the Horseley Ironworks in Tipton. He had mastered turning, wheel-wrighting, and the repair of millwork by then. When his name was drawn for the militia, he fled north to Liverpool, found no work, and shifted to Manchester. He turned wood for a cabinet-maker and then moved to Salford to work at lathe and tool making.

  Salford offered no escape from the militia, so Roberts walked to London. There he found employment with Henry Maudslay as a fitter and turner. At Maudslay's, he absorbed his master's philosophy of 'the importance of accurate machine tools where hand-work was replaced by mechanisms.' By 1816, Napoleon was defeated and the militia threat was gone. Roberts returned to Manchester and set up at No. 15 Deans Gate as 'a turner of plain and eccentric work.'

  His lathe sat upstairs in a bedroom, driven by a large wheel in the basement turned by his wife. He soon moved to New Market Buildings at Pool Fold, where directories listed him as a 'Lathe and Tool Maker.' On the 18th of January 1823, the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society elected Roberts to membership. He was also, with other members of the Society, a founder of The Mechanics' Institute in Manchester.

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• 3. The Precision Workshop

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  Roberts's gear-cutting machine was the first tool he designed entirely to his own specifications. To check the dimensions of those gears, he adapted a measuring device called the sector, which he then developed for sale to other engineers. He also adopted rotary cutters, a technique he had observed at Maudslay's. This stands as one of the earliest recorded uses of a milling cutter in engineering.

  In 1816, Roberts built the first reliable wet gas meter. In 1817, he made a lathe capable of turning work six feet long. That lathe had a back gear for a wider range of speeds and a sliding saddle that moved the cutting tool along the work by screw drive. A disengagement mechanism let the saddle stop cleanly at the end of a cut.

  Also in 1817, Roberts built a planing machine for cutting flat metal surfaces. Before that machine existed, a fitter produced flat surfaces by hand, using hammers, chisels, files, and scrapers. Roberts's planer made the job a mechanical operation.

  Following the success of his power loom, Roberts in 1825 invented a slotting machine to cut keyways in gears and pulleys. Previously, those keyways were made by hand-chipping and filing. Roberts's slotter drove the tool vertically while the work table moved in both straight lines and rotary arcs, using the principle of Maudslay's slide rest. He later developed a shaping machine that moved the cutter horizontally over the work, which could be shifted in any direction by screw-driven slides.

  Roberts also manufactured and sold standardized sets of stocks and dies in his own range of pitches. Other engineers could use them to cut matching threads on nuts, bolts, and machine parts. His tools had a direct influence on Joseph Whitworth, who came to Manchester a decade later and built on what Roberts had already established.

  His machine tools, including the oldest existing metal planer, are now in the National Museum of Science and Industry in London.

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• 4. Spinning and Weaving

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  Roberts moved his business in 1821 to the Globe Works in Faulkner Street. There he improved a reed-making machine originally invented by the American Jeptha Avery Wilkinson. In 1822, he patented a power loom built entirely of iron. Because it was precision-made, it could run at high speed. By 1825, these looms were being turned out at the rate of four thousand per year.

  In 1824, Roberts invented the machine that became his most famous: the self-acting spinning mule. He patented it in March 1825. These mules were made in the hundreds, and Roberts used templates and gauges extensively to standardize their production. By 1826, his work had drawn him to Mulhouse, Alsace, where he helped Koechlin & Co build textile machinery for the French cotton industry.

  The machines Roberts was producing at this scale demanded a different kind of organization, and Roberts soon put one in place.

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• 5. Sharp, Roberts & Co.

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  Thomas Sharp, an iron merchant, was among the partners Roberts brought in as his textile machine business grew. Thomas's brother John Sharp joined as well, along with Robert Chapman, Thomas Jones Wilkinson, and James Hill. Two firms were formed: Sharp Hill & Co and Roberts, Hills & Co. In May 1826, these merged to create Sharp, Roberts & Co.

  Charles Beyer, who joined in 1834, contributed to the firm's growing reputation for locomotive building. Roberts was content to delegate most locomotive design to Beyer and turn his attention to other inventions. Those ranged from turret clocks to road vehicles to iron ship construction. Roberts also designed a punching machine that worked on the Jacquard loom principle. That puncher was made to pierce the rivet holes in the iron plates of the railway bridge over the river Conwy in North Wales.

  Roberts's Alpha turret clock won a prize medal at the Great Exhibition of 1851. He was not a particularly successful businessman. By the time the firm went out of business, the more commercially successful Sharp, Stewart and Company had already been formed.

  Sharp, Roberts & Co. closed in June 1852. Roberts continued as a consulting engineer and inventor.

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• 6. Legacy and Last Years

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  Roberts moved to London in 1860, aged 71, and fell into financial distress. A circle of friends, nearly all engineers, raised a fund to help him. He died in his daughter's arms on the 11th of March 1864, aged 74. He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London.

  Biographer Richard Leslie Hills identified Roberts's main contribution as the introduction of improved machine tools. Without those tools, the high standard of accuracy needed to make parts interchangeable could not have been achieved. That interchangeability laid the foundation for production engineering and mass production as we know them. The Roberts mechanism, a linkage designed to generate approximate straight-line movement, also carries his name. Across his career, Roberts took out 18 patents.

  His daughter later received a civil list pension in recognition of her father's achievements.

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