to make one thing of elegance and evident precision. He may even make three or four or five of the same thing. And all will be beautiful, and most will inspire awe.
Large cabinets in museums devoted to the history of science (most notably at Oxford and Cambridge and Yale) are today filled with such objects. There are astrolabes and orreries, armillary spheres and astraria, octants and quadrants, and formidably elaborate sextants, both mural and framed, which are to be seen in particular abundance, most of them utterly exquisite, intricate, and assembled with a jeweler’s care.
At the same time, all of each instrument was perforce made by hand. Every gear was hand-cut, as was every component part (every mater and rete and tympan and alidade, for example; astrolabes have their own quite large vocabulary), every tangent screw and index mirror (words relating to sextants are similarly various). Also, the assembly of each part to every other and the adjustment of the assembled whole—all had to be accomplished with, quite literally, fingertip care. Such an arrangement produced fine and impressive instruments, without a doubt, but given the manner in which they were made and how they were put together, they could necessarily have been available only in rather limited numbers and to a small corps d’élite of customers. They may have been precise, but their precision was very much for the few. It was only when precision was created for the many that precision as a concept began to have the profound impact on society as a whole that it does today.
And the man who accomplished that single feat, of creating something with great exactitude and making it not by hand but with a machine, and, moreover, with a machine that was specifically created to create it—and I repeat the word created quite deliberately, because a machine that makes machines, known today as a “machine tool,” was, is, and will long remain an essential part of the precision story—was the eighteenth-century Englishman denounced for his supposed lunacy because of his passion for iron, the then-uniquely suitable metal from which all his remarkable new devices could be made.
IN 1776, THE forty-eight-year-old John Wilkinson, who would make a singular fortune during his eighty years of life, had his portrait painted by Thomas Gainsborough, so he is far from an uncelebrated figure—but if not uncelebrated, then not exactly celebrated, either. It is notable that his handsome society portrait has for decades hung not in prominence in London or Cumbria, where he was born in 1728, but in a quiet gallery in a museum far away in Berlin, along with four other Gainsboroughs, one of them a study of a bulldog. The distance suggests a certain lack of yearning for him back in his native England. And the New Testament remark about a prophet being without honor in his own country would seem to apply in his case, as Wilkinson is today rather little remembered. He is overshadowed quite comprehensively by his much-better-known colleague and customer, the Scotsman James Watt, whose early steam engines came into being, essentially, by way of John Wilkinson’s exceptional technical skills.
History will show that the story of such engines, which were so central to the mechanics of the following century’s Industrial Revolution, is inextricably entwined with that of the manufacture of cannons, and not simply because both men used components made from heavy hunks of iron. A further link can be made, between the thus gun-connected Wilkinson and Watt on the one hand and the clockmaker John Harrison on the other, as it will be remembered that Harrison’s early sea clock trials were made on Royal Naval warships of the day, warships that carried cannon in large numbers. Those cannons were made by English ironmasters, of whom John Wilkinson was among the most prominent and, as it turned out, the most inventive, too. So the story properly begins there, with the making of the kind of large weapons used by Britain’s navy during the mid-eighteenth century, a time when the nation’s sailors and soldiers were being kept exceptionally busy.*
John “Iron-Mad” Wilkinson, whose patent for boring cannon barrels for James Watt marked both the beginning of the concept of precision and the birth of the Industrial Revolution.
John Wilkinson was born into the iron trade. His father, Isaac, originally a Lakeland shepherd, discovered by fortuitous chance the presence of both ore and coal on his pastures and so became in time an ironmaster, a trade very much of its time. The word describes the owner of a family of furnaces, and one who used them to smelt and forge iron from its ore with either charcoal (which stripped England of too-large tracts of forest) or (as an environmentally responsible response) coal that had been half burned and transmuted into coke. John himself, uncomfortably born, it was said, bumping along in a market cart while his mother was en route to a country fair, became fascinated by white heat and molten metal and the whole process of taking mere rocks that lay underground and creating useful things simply by violently heating and hammering them. He learned the trade at the various places in the English Midlands and the Welsh Marches where his father settled down, and was sufficiently adept that by the early 1760s, by now married into money and owning a considerable foundry in the Welsh-English borderland village of Bersham, he began in earnest the production, according to the firm’s first ledger, of “calendar-rolls, malt mill rolls, sugar rolls, pipes, shells, grenades and guns.” It was the final item on the list that would give the tiny village of Bersham, along with the man who would become its most prosperous resident and its largest employer, a unique place in world history.
Bersham, which lies in the valley of the River Clywedog, enjoys an indisputable though half-forgotten role both in the founding of the Industrial Revolution and in the story of precision. For it is here that on January 27, 1774, John Wilkinson, whose local furnaces, all fired by coal, were producing a healthy twenty tons of good-quality iron a week, invented a technique for the manufacture of guns. The technique had an immediate cascade effect very much more profound than those he ever imagined, and of greater long-term importance, I would argue, than the much more famed legacies of his friend and rival Abraham Darby III, who threw up the still-standing great Iron Bridge of Coalbrookdale that attracts tourist millions still today, and is regarded by most modern Britons as the Industrial Revolution’s most potent and recognizable symbol.
Wilkinson filed a patent, Number 1063—it was still quite early in the history of British patents, which were first issued in 1617—with the title “A New Method of Casting and Boring Iron Guns or Cannon.” By today’s standards, his “new method” seems almost pedestrian and an all-too-obvious improvement in cannon making. In 1774, however, a time when naval gunnery all over Europe was enjoying a period of sudden scientific improvement in both technique and equipment, Wilkinson’s ideas came as a godsend.
Up until then, naval cannons (most particularly the thirty-two-pound long gun, a standard on first-rate ships of the line in the Royal Navy, often ordered a hundred at a time when a new vessel was launched) were cast hollow, with the interior tube through which the powder and projectile were pushed and fired preformed as the iron was cooling in its mold. The cannon was then mounted on a block and a sharp cutting tool advanced into it at the end of a long rod, with the idea of smoothing out any imperfections on the tube’s inner surface.
The problem with this technique was that the cutting tool would naturally follow the passage of the tube, which may well not have been cast perfectly straight in the first place. This would then cause the finished and polished tube to have eccentricities, and for the inner wall of the cannon to have thin spots where the tool wandered off track. And thin spots were dangerous—they meant explosions and bursting tubes and destroyed cannon and injuries to the sailors who manned the notoriously dangerous gun decks. The poor quality of early eighteenth-century naval artillery pieces led to failure rates that decidedly alarmed the sea lords at Admiralty headquarters in London.
Then came John Wilkinson and his new idea. He decided that he would cast the iron cannon not hollow but solid. This, for a start, had the effect of guaranteeing the integrity of the iron itself—there were fewer parts that cooled early, for example, as would happen if there was a form installed to create the inner tube. A solid cylindrical chunk of iron, heavy though it might have been, could, if carefully made, come out of the Bersham furnaces without the air bubbles and spongy sections (“honeycomb problems,” as they were called) for which hollow-cast cannon were then notorious.
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