X Joseph Whitworth and the growth of mass-production engineering

Abstract

Joseph Whitworth's name is still a household word among engineers, because he, more than anyone else, is considered to have brought into general practice the principles of modern production engineering, based on accurate measurement, precision tools, standardisation, and interchangeability.¹ Although mechanical engineering had been emerging long before his time, for making the steam engines and machinery of the eighteenth-century industrial revolution,² it was still in a rudimentary state during his early life. William Fairbairn, another great nineteenth-century Manchester engineer, stated in 1861 that when he first came there, in 1814, “the whole of the machinery was executed by hand. There were neither planing, slotting, nor shaping machines, and, with the exception of very imperfect lathes and a few drills, the preparatory operations of construction were effected entirely by the hands of the workmen”.³ James Nasmyth, another distinguished contemporary engineer, provided similar testimony: “Up to within the last thirty years”, he wrote in 1841, “nearly every part of a machine had to be made and finished… by mere manual labour; that is, on the dexterity of the hand of the workman, and the correctness of his eye, had we entirely to depend for accuracy and precision in the execution of such machinery as was then required”. This dependence on manual dexterity, involving both inaccuracy and high costs, was a formidable barrier to mechanical progress.⁴

Reprinted with permission from Business History, 17, 1975

Reprinted with permission from Business History, 17, 1975

Notes

Reprinted with permission from Business History, 17, 1975