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Abstract
Four great exhibitions (two in London and two in Paris) put on show 1850s and 1860s international rivalries and achievements across wide realms of art and industry. Even before it opened, the 1862 London Exhibition illustrated how steam power could facilitate speedy completion of a major building project and the manoeuvring of heavy machinery exhibits. Once opened, the Exhibition included a galaxy of machinery, much of it demonstrated ‘in motion’. Getting the ‘Engineering Department’ operational in good time owed much to the diligence of its ‘Superintendent’, Daniel Kinnear Clark. His domain, extensively equipped with under-floor steam pipes and over-head rotating drive shafts, embraced machine tools, cotton spinning ‘mules’, water-pumping demonstrations, sugar mills — and a great deal more. Records of the Exhibition provide plentiful information about mid-nineteenth-century engineering progress. Clark’s own Cyclopædia of the Exhibited Machinery enlighteningly illustrates machine efficiency challenges and engineering design issues of the time.
Acknowledgements
For advice, encouragement and information, I gratefully thank Susan Bennett (William Shipley Group for RSA History), Luisa Calè (Birkbeck, University of London), Stefan Dickers (Library and Archives, Bishopsgate Institute), Carol Morgan (Archivist, Institution of Civil Engineers) and Eve Watson (Archivist, Royal Society of Arts). I give my grateful thanks also to Glasgow University Archives, to librarians at the British Library and at Senate House Library in London — and to Birkbeck Library for online database access (including JSTOR, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers and British Periodicals on line). The British Newspaper Archive has also proved a valuable resource. Except where otherwise noted, all illustrations in this article are scanned from original material in the author’s collection.
Notes
1 Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper Exhibitor (London, 1862–63). Priced at one penny per weekly issue, this well-illustrated publication covered widely varied aspects of the Exhibition from May 1862, through to early 1863. It was then also issued in bound volume format (page numbers given later refer to the bound volume).
2 See, for example, John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions (London: Studio Vista, 1977); Jeffrey Auerbach, ‘The Great Exhibition and Historical Memory’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6 (2001), 89–112; Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Katherine Smits and Alix Jansen, ‘Staging the Nation at Expos and World’s Fairs’, National Identities, 14 (2012), 173–88.
3 Allwood, p. 180; John E. Findling and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds, Encyclopedia of World’s Fairs and Expositions (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), p. 414.
4 Stephen Wildman, ‘Great, Greater? Greatest??: Anglo-French Rivalry at the Great Exhibitions of 1851, 1855 and 1862’, RSA Journal, 137 (1989), 660–64.
5 Edward Baines, ‘Paris in Autumn, 1855: No. 1, The Universal Exhibition; Manufacturers and others recommended to visit it’, Leeds Mercury, 11 September 1855, p. 2, col. 4. Much of this page in the Mercury carried details of the ‘Fall of Sebastopol’ including the ‘Latest News’ as sent by ‘Electric Telegraph’. The Crimean War lasted from 1853 to 1856.
6 John Hollingshead, A Concise History of the International Exhibition of 1862 (London, 1862), p. 41. This was an ‘official’ account, ‘Printed for Her Majesty’s Commissioners’ and bearing on its title page the words ‘By Authority’. One newspaper suggested that, ‘This volume will enable many who will not be able to pay a visit to the Exhibition to form an admirable idea of the plan and design of the great undertaking’ (Caledonian Mercury, 2 May 1862, p. 3, col. 1.)
7 Reliance on non-state Guarantors (‘collective private enterprise’) contrasts with the French conception of Expositions as state enterprises. Arguably Paris 1855 only went ahead despite the Crimean War because of Napoleon III’s intense desire to demonstrate the French state’s power and prestige (Wildman, p. 662). Unlike its 1851 predecessor, London 1862 made a (small) loss but one benefactor covered this and so the numerous Guarantors were not required to contribute.
8 Letter, John Deane to Society of Arts, 28 April 1859, Royal Society of Arts archive, DOC 2068.
9 Hollingshead, p. 41. This passage stresses the importance attached to establishing the Fair as an international event. The ‘Commissioners’ here are ‘The Commissioners of the 1851 Exhibition’ who continued (and still continue) to administer funds initially derived from the profit made by the 1851 Exhibition.
10 Prince Albert had been the very active President of the Society of Arts. Accounts of his importance to both London Exhibitions and to the whole development of ‘Albertopolis’ in South Kensington can be found in The Albertine Legacy (ed. by David G. C. Allan and Susan Bennett, (William Shipley Group for RSA History, 2009)). Despite a long history of royal patronage, the Society of Arts (‘The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’) only received its ‘Royal’ title in 1908.
11 Fraser’s Magazine (November 1862, p. 638, col. 2) bitterly commented, ‘the war-engines exhibited are so numerous and varied that it is most evident that the ingenuity of man has been hard at work devising the best method of exterminating an enemy by land and sea’.
12 Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris (London: Pan Books, 1968), pp. 25–38.
13 W. L. Burn, The Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964). To label the 1850s and 1860s as a time of equipoise or as a ‘golden age’ is perhaps simplistic, yet arguably valid relative to the social and economic insecurity of both the preceding and the following decades. Relevant commentaries can be found in: Martin Hewitt, ed., An Age of Equipoise? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Harold Perkin, ‘“Nor all that Glisters ...”: The Not So Golden Age’, in The Golden Age, ed. by Ian Inkster (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 9–26.
14 London Gazette, 15 March 1861, p. 1197, col. 2. Achievement of a specified target in the Fund (250,000 pounds) was an agreed prerequisite for the Bank of England to release advances for the enterprise.
15 Hollingshead, p. 50.
16 Anthony Burton, Vision & Accident: The Story of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publications, 1999), p. 87.
17 In some 1860s publications, ‘annexe’ was given as ‘annex’ or ‘annexé’. (This paper uses ‘annexe’ except where other forms are appropriate in direct quotations.)
18 H. M. Chichester, ‘Fowke, Francis (1823–1865)’, rev. by Dale Dishon, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
19 Dale Dishon, ‘South Kensington’s Forgotten Palace’, The Victorian, 7 (2001), 13–15.
20 Henry Cole, ‘At the Meeting of the Society of Arts’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 8 December 1865, pp. 59–60. (See also The Athenaeum, 9 December 1865, pp. 808–09; The Times, 14 December 1865, p. 11, col. 6.) Experience in art gallery design was important because fine art was to be a major feature of the new Exhibition.
21 He had served on the planning committee for the Gardens and had himself designed the Conservatory and the south arcades (Cole (n. 20), p. 59).
22 Dishon, pp. 12–15.
23 Jean Jacques Élisée, Londres illustré: guide spécial pour l’exposition de 1862 (Paris, 1862).
24 Fraser’s Magazine (November 1862, p. 631, col. 1) described it as ‘one of the most monstrous architectural piles that ever deformed a city’.
25 Dishon, p. 13.
26 Building News, 18 April 1862, p. 269.
27 Dishon, pp. 12–15.
28 Hollingshead, p. 140.
29 Ibid.
30 Dishon, p. 13.
31 Hollingshead, p. 147.
32 The printed legend to this lithograph includes the wording, ‘London May 10th 1862 Lithographed & Published by Day & Son, Lithographers to the Queen, 6 Gate Strt Lincolns Inn Field & Processes Court International Exhibition’. The full lithograph (the figure shows only part of it) may well have been printed at the Exhibition. The Cheltenham Looker-on (7 June 1862, p. 398, col. 2) in a report on Day and Son’s display in the Processes Court reports that ‘the mode of printing in colours is shown by working impressions of the tinted lithograph views of the building from the Horticultural Gardens’. It goes on to outline the three-stage printing process — the first producing just black lines, the second giving the ‘warm tint of brown shading of the foreground’ while the third ‘fills in the blue fleccy [sic] sky’. The section reproduced in the figure shows (top centre) the Western Dome, plus the western arcades of the Gardens on the right — with part of the Western Annexe roof just visible above and behind the arcades; the (short) tower on the right of the figure is the ‘Austrian Tower’.
33 Hollingshead, pp. 78–79. Clark was also responsible for ‘Class X, Civil engineering, architectural and building contrivances’, housed in the main building.
34 His official designation was (usually) given as ‘Superintendent of the Engineering Department’.
35 The Engineer, 2 May 1862, p. 271, col. 1.
36 Leeds Mercury, 3 April 1862, p. 3, col. 4.
37 The Standard, 28 April 1862, p. 5, col. 6.
38 The Standard, 8 May 1862, p. 6, col. 3.
39 These were classes not under Clark’s superintendence.
40 Outline biographical information can be found in obituaries published after his death in 1896: The Engineer, 31 January 1896, p. 118, col. 1; Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 124, Part 2, January 1896, pp. 409–413.
41 An advertisement read, ‘Just published, in 2 vols imp. 4to. half morocco’ with the price given as £4 15s: The Athenaeum, 25 August 1855, p. 963, col. 3. The book carried the title, ‘Railway Machinery: a treatise on the mechanical engineering of railways; embracing the principles and construction of rolling and fixed plant; illustrated by a series of plates on a large scale, and by numerous engravings on wood’.
42 D. K. Clark, The Exhibited Machinery of 1862: A Cyclopædia of the Machinery Represented at the International Exhibition (London, 1864). Cited hereafter just as ‘Clark’.
43 Morning Post, 2 April 1862, p. 6, col. 1. The loads brought in by Bray’s engine were hauled directly from docks and railway termini. Luck was here very much on Clark’s side as a ban was soon afterwards imposed on daytime traction engine journeys on London streets. Clark himself had been a member of a delegation to the Home Secretary arguing (unsuccessfully!) against this ban.
44 Clark, p. vi.
45 Along with other acknowledgements he gives, this strongly suggests effective cooperation between Clark and some of the most significant engineering exhibitors.
46 Dated 10 March 1862, a photograph in the V&A Collection depicts a closely similar view of a steam crane at work in an almost empty Annexe (when there were less than eight weeks remaining prior to Opening Day).
47 Clark had already shown considerable interest in smoke abatement issues and was to continue to do so throughout his professional career.
48 Derby Mercury, 12 March 1862, p. 6, col. 4.
49 Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper Exhibitor, p. 116; George Frederick Pardon, ed., A Guide to the International Exhibition (London, 1862), p. 71. Pardon’s Guide (priced at only 1s.) was highly praised by The Standard (24 May 1862, p. 6, col. 5): ‘[…] a more concise, clear, and intelligible account of the Exhibition as a whole has not been published’.
50 Derby Mercury, 12 March 1862, p. 6, col. 4.
51 Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper Exhibitor, p. 18.
52 Ibid., pp. 20–21.
53 North London News, 17 May 1862, p. 7, col. 1.
54 Northampton Mercury, 17 May 1862, p. 5, col. 1.
55 North Devon Journal, 19 June 1862, p. 7, col. 1.
56 Positions 1, 2 and 3 in the ‘map’ housed giant marine engines from, respectively, Maudslay, Sons & Field, John Penn & Sons and Humphrys & Tennant. The line of locomotives (at the top of the ‘map’) extended far further to the north than shown in this extract from Clark’s full plan. The ‘Austrian Tower’ is the tower shown on the right of Figure 3.
57 North London News, 17 May 1862, p. 7, col. 1.
58 Clark, p. 380.
59 C. T. Porter, Engineering Reminiscences (New York, 1908), p. 72.
60 Clark, p. 323.
61 Dundee Advertiser, 2 June 1862, p. 3, col. 2.
62 St James’s Magazine, May 1862, p. 248.
63 North London News, 17 May 1862, p. 7, col. 1; Pardon’s Guide (p. 82) however took the contrary view that while slow motion demonstration would enable ‘the observer to examine the mode in which the large engines act’ it had the drawback that ‘the small engine seems to many, particularly without some degree of attention, to be meant as a help to the larger ones, and thus some confusion of ideas is produced’.
64 Standard, 8 May 1862, p. 6, col. 3.
65 The line-up of locomotives begins with areas 138 to 141 in Figure 7, just below the label ‘Permanent Way etc’.
66 The Times, 28 May 1862, p. 5, col. 5.
67 Clark, pp. 10–26 (and table facing p. 10).
68 The Engineer, 25 December 1863, p. 371, cols 1–3 and 8 January 1864, p. 8, cols 1–3; a shorter (earlier) version can also be found in The Engineer, 13 June 1862, p. 349, cols 1–3.
69 Clark, p. 25.
70 Ibid.
71 The Engineer, 26 September 1862, p. 191, col. 1.
72 The Times, 2 September 1862, p. 7, col. 2.
73 Building News, 27 June 1862, p. 445.
74 Ibid., pp. 445–46.
75 Morning Post, 12 September 1862, p. 2, col. 3.
76 Cambridge Independent Press, 26 July 1862, p. 5, col. 1.
77 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 31 May 1862, p. 6, col. 6.
78 St James’s Magazine, May 1862, p. 248.
79 The Engineer, 2 May 1862, p. 266, col. 1. The heaviest of all exhibits was, according to the Engineer, the marine double-engine from the Maudslay firm.
80 Ibid., p. 266, col. 2.
81 Ibid., p. 266, col. 1.
82 Manchester Weekly Times, 7 June 1862, p. 3, col. 4.
83 Clark, pp. 54–63.
84 Daily News, 18 July 1862, p. 5, col. 3.
85 Parliamentary Paper (PP) 1863 (3076), Reports of the Inspectors of Factories for the Half-year Ending 31st October 1862, p. 19. The report in question is based on returns from 1590 mills.
86 As, for just one example, in the Burnley Advertiser, 3 May 1862, p. 2, col. 4. Commenting on ‘the condition of the pining operatives’, this newspaper writes of the distress in Lancashire ‘increasing at a rapid rate’ and ‘beginning to be regarded with considerable anxiety […] throughout the land’.
87 As, for example, in the Derby Mercury, 7 May 1862, p. 2, col. 6.
88 D. A. Farnie and W. O. Henderson, eds, Industry and Innovation: Selected Essays, W.H. Chaloner (London: Frank Cass, 1990), p. 113; Douglas A. Farnie, ‘The Role of Cotton Textiles in the Economic Development of India, 1600–1990’, in The Fibre that Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600–1990s, ed. by Douglas A. Farnie and David J. Jeremy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 395–430 (p. 401).
89 At No. 255, the space allocated to Porter lies just below the letter ‘y’ in ‘Fancy’ (‘Fancy & Woollen Looms’) in Figure 11.
90 Porter, pp. 65–70; Otto Mayr, ‘Yankee Practice and Engineering Theory: Charles T. Porter and the Dynamics of the High-Speed Steam Engine’, Technology and Culture, 16 (1975), 570–602; Richard L. Hills, Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 193–203. Figure 13 comes from part of a detailed set of diagrams published in: Robert Mallet, ed., The Record of the 1862 International Exhibition (Glasgow, 1862), pl. 12, facing p. 230.
91 Mallet, p. 231.
92 Porter, pp. 65–68.
93 Mallet, p. 231.
94 Porter, pp. 67–68. A different exhibitor’s ‘inadequate’ engine had already been removed on Clark’s orders.
95 Ibid., p. 67.
96 Ibid., p. 70.
97 Ibid., p. 70.
98 Figure 14 shows a detail from Clark (pl. XXVIII, facing p. 318) — including also the felt lining Porter carefully used to minimize temperature drop within the cylinder (bearing in mind also that the engine’s high speed lessened the time available for the temperature to drop).
99 Mallet, p. 231.
100 Details of the ‘link’ system geometry used to operate the valves are given by both Clark (p. 320) and Mallet (p. 232).
101 Clark, pp. 373–74; Mallet, p. 233.
102 Clark, pp. 373–74.
103 Clark, p. 370. Alongside the image in the Figure of the Richards Indicator, inset (a) reproduces Clark’s explanatory diagram (Clark, p. 299) of the key features to be looked for in an indicator record; he writes that the actual tracing he based this on was taken from the cylinder of a railway locomotive and the dotted line illustrates the effect of an increased piston speed. Below this, inset (b), is a reproduction (from Mallet, p. 232) of one of three ‘indicator cards’ taken (at the Exhibition) from the Porter-Allen engine using the Richards Indicator; this card corresponds to steam cut-off at approximately one-fifth of stroke volume (the Clark example in (a) corresponds to cut-off at about one-third of stroke volume).
104 Porter (p. 58) gives an account of how he had very strongly encouraged Charles Richards to come up with a design that would give steady traces from a high-speed engine. With Richards’ agreement, Porter patented the Indicator in 1861 (Porter, p. 60).
105 Mallet, p. 237; he also outlines the lever system used ‘to guide the pencil in a straight line’. Clark (p. 369) likewise comments on the lever system, but adds the detail that the ‘pencil’ was, in fact, ‘a pointed brass wire, which marks on prepared metallic paper, and is lighter, stronger, and more durable than black-lead pencils’.
106 Burnley Advertiser, 21 June 1862, p. 3, col. 2.
107 As examples, Bury and Norwich Post, 1 July 1862, p. 6, col. 4; Daily News, 1 July 1862, p. 5, col. 5; Dundee Advertiser, 1 July 1862, p. 3, col. 7; Standard, 1 July 1862, p. 6, col. 4.
108 Daily News, 9 June 1862, p. 3, col. 1. Princess Alice, Queen Victoria’s second daughter, was aged 19 at the time; Queen Victoria herself, deeply in mourning for Prince Albert, never — publicly at least — visited the Exhibition.
109 Ibid.
110 Morning Post, 9 June 1862, p. 7, col. 1 (other newspapers also carried reports of the same visit.)
111 The Times, 14 June 1862, p. 13, col. 1. Clark (p. 14) described the ‘Manchester’ locomotive as ‘a first-rate six-coupled-wheel goods engine, with 5-feet wheels and 17-inch cylinders, of maximum power, adapted for heavy loads [and] heavy gradients’.
112 Daily News, 2 July 1862, p. 3, col. 5; North London News, 5 July 1862, p. 6, col. 5; South London Chronicle, 5 July 1862, p. 7, col. 4; Westmorland Gazette, 5 July 1862, p. 8, col. 2 — and others. Prince Napoleon, cousin of the Emperor Napoleon III, was President of the French Imperial Commission to the 1862 Exhibition and a prime mover in organizing the 1855 and 1867 Paris Exhibitions.
113 See, for example, a variety of 1860s articles in The Engineer and in the Practical Mechanic’s Journal.
114 Dundee Advertiser, 2 June 1862, p. 3, col. 2.
115 Newcastle Courant, 11 July 1862, p. 5, col. 7.
116 Dundee Advertiser, 2 June 1862, p. 3, col. 2.
117 Penny Illustrated Paper, 27 September 1862, p. 206, col. 1.
118 PP 1852 (196), Finance Accounts I–VIII of the United Kingdom, p. 121.
119 PP 1864 (370), Finance Accounts I–VII of the United Kingdom, p. 91.
120 PP 1852 (196), pp. 120–21; PP 1864 (370), pp. 90–91. The economic importance of cotton processing machinery was emphasized in many 1862 press commentaries and (implicitly) by the central position this machinery occupied in the Western Annexe.
121 Derek Hudson and Kenneth W. Luckhurst, The Royal Society of Arts, 1754–1954 (London: John Murray, 1954), p. 209. A subsequently published set of reports by ‘Artisans’ who had attended the Paris 1867 Exhibition covered, in a 732-page volume, the ‘principal industries represented in the Exhibition’ together with some reports on the ‘conditions and habits of the French working classes’ (Journal of the Society of Arts, 24 January 1868, p. 155, col. 1).
122 Minutes of Proceedings Inst. C. E., Part 2, January 1896, p. 413.
123 Clark, p. 431.
124 The Times, 10 June 1862, p. 9, col. 1.
125 ‘The International Exhibition’, Quarterly Review, 112 (1862), 179–214 (p. 214).