Mr. Fairbairn himself fully recognised the value of the experiments, and proceeded to construct an iron vessel at his works at Manchester, in 1831, which went to sea the same year. Its success was such as to induce him to begin iron shipbuilding on a large scale, at the same time as the Messrs. Laird did at Birkenhead; and in 1835, Mr. Fairbairn established extensive works at Millwall, on the Thames,–afterwards occupied by Mr. Scott Russell, in whose yard the “Great Eastern” steamship was erected,– where in the course of some fourteen years he built upwards of a hundred and twenty iron ships, some of them above 2000 tons burden. It was in fact the first great iron shipbuilding yard in Britain, and led the way in a branch of business which has since become of first-rate magnitude and importance. Mr. Fairbairn was a most laborious experimenter in iron, and investigated in great detail the subject of its strength, the value of different kinds of riveted joints compared with the solid plate, and the distribution of the material throughout the structure, as well as the form of the vessel itself. It would indeed be difficult to over-estimate the value of his investigations on these points in the earlier stages of this now highly important branch of the national industry.
To facilitate the manufacture of his iron-sided ships, Mr. Fairbairn, about the year 1839, invented a machine for riveting boiler plates by steam-power. The usual method by which this process had before been executed was by hand-hammers, worked by men placed at each side of the plate to be riveted, acting simultaneously on both sides of the bolt. But this process was tedious and expensive, as well as clumsy and imperfect; and some more rapid and precise method of fixing the plates firmly together was urgently wanted. Mr. Fairbairn’s machine completely supplied the want. By its means the rivet was driven into its place, and firmly fastened there by a couple of strokes of a hammer impelled by steam. Aided by the Jacquard punching-machine of Roberts, the riveting of plates of the largest size has thus become one of the simplest operations in iron-manufacturing.
The thorough knowledge which Mr. Fairbairn possessed of the strength of wrought-iron in the form of the hollow beam (which a wrought-iron ship really is) naturally led to his being consulted by the late Robert Stephenson as to the structures by means of which it was proposed to span the estuary of the Conway and the Straits of Menai; and the result was the Conway and Britannia Tubular Bridges, the history of which we have fully described elsewhere.* [footnote…
Lives of the Engineers, vol. iii. 416-40. See also An Account of the Construction of the Britannia and Conway Tubular Bridges. By William Fairbairn, C.E. 1849.
…]
There is no reason to doubt that by far the largest share of the merit of working out the practical details of those structures, and thus realizing Robert Stephenson’s magnificent idea of the tubular bridge, belongs to Mr. Fairbairn.
In all matters connected with the qualities and strength of iron, he came to be regarded as a first-rate authority, and his advice was often sought and highly valued. The elaborate experiments instituted by him as to the strength of iron of all kinds have formed the subject of various papers which he has read before the British Association, the Royal Society, and the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. His practical inquries as to the strength of boilers have led to his being frequently called upon to investigate the causes of boiler explosions, on which subject he has published many elaborate reports. The study of this subject led him to elucidate the law according to which the density of steam varies throughout an extensive range of pressures and atmospheres,–in singular confirmation of what had before been provisionally calculated from the mechanical theory of heat. His discovery of the true method of preventing the tendency of tubes to collapse, by dividing the flues of long boilers into short lengths by means of stiffening rings, arising out of the same investigation, was one of the valuable results of his minute study of the subject; and is calculated to be of essential value in the manufacturing districts by diminishing the chances of boiler explosions, and saving the lamentable loss of life which has during the last twenty years been occasioned by the malconstruction of boilers. Among Mr. Fairbairn’s most recent, inquiries are those conducted by him at the instance of the British Government relative to the construction of iron-plated ships, his report of which has not yet been made public, most probably for weighty political reasons.
We might also refer to the practical improvements which Mr. Fairbairn has been instrumental in introducing in the construction of buildings of various kinds by the use of iron. He has himself erected numerous iron structures, and pointed out the road which other manufacturers have readily followed. “I am one of those,” said he, in his ‘Lecture on the Progress of Engineering,’ “who have great faith in iron walls and iron beams; and although I have both spoken and written much on the subject, I cannot too forcibly recommend it to public attention. It is now twenty years since I constructed an iron house, with the machinery of a corn-mill, for Halil Pasha, then Seraskier of the Turkish army at Constantinople. I believe it was the first iron house built in this country; and it was constructed at the works at Millwall, London, in 1839.”*
[footnote…
Useful Information for Engineers, 2nd series, 225. The mere list of Mr. Fairbairn’s writings would occupy considerable space; for, notwithstanding his great labours as an engineer, he has also been an industrious writer. His papers on Iron, read at different times before the British Association, the Royal Society, and the Literary and Philosophical Institution of Manchester, are of great value. The treatise on “Iron” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica is from his pen, and he has contributed a highly interesting paper to Dr. Scoffern’s Useful Metals and their Alloys on the Application of Iron to the purposes of Ordnance, Machinery, Bridges, and House and Ship Building. Another valuable but less-known contribution to Iron literature is his Report on Machinery in General, published in the Reports on the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855. The experiments conducted by Mr. Fairbairn for the purpose of proving the excellent properties of iron for shipbuilding–the account of which was published in the Trans actions of the Royal Society eventually led to his further experiments to determine the strength and form of the Britannia and Conway Tubular Bridges, plate-girders, and other constructions, the result of which was to establish quite a new era in the history of bridge as well as ship building. …]
Since then iron structures of all kinds have been erected: iron lighthouses, iron-and-crystal palaces, iron churches, and iron bridges. Iron roads have long been worked by iron locomotives; and before many years have passed a telegraph of iron wire will probably be found circling the globe. We now use iron roofs, iron bedsteads, iron ropes, and iron pavement; and even the famous “wooden walls of England” are rapidly becoming reconstructed of iron. In short, we are in the midst of what Mr. Worsaae has characterized as the Age of Iron.
At the celebration of the opening of the North Wales Railway at Bangor, almost within sight of his iron bridge across the Straits of Menai, Robert Stephenson said, “We are daily producing from the bowels of the earth a raw material, in its crude state apparently of no worth, but which, when converted into a locomotive engine, flies over bridges of the same material, with a speed exceeding that of the bird, advancing wealth and comfort throughout the country. Such are the powers of that all-civilizing instrument, Iron.”
Iron indeed plays a highly important part in modem civilization. Out of it are formed alike the sword and the ploughshare, the cannon and the printing-press; and while civilization continues partial and half-developed, as it still is, our liberties and our industry must necessarily in a great measure depend for their protection upon the excellence of our weapons of war as well as on the superiority of our instruments of peace. Hence the skill and ingenuity displayed in the invention of rifled guns and artillery, and iron-sided ships and batteries, the fabrication of which would be impossible but for the extraordinary development of the iron-manufacture, and the marvellous power and precision of our tool-making machines, as described in preceding chapters.
“Our strength, wealth, and commerce,” said Mr. Cobden in the course of a recent debate in the House of Commons, “grow out of the skilled labour of the men working in metals. They are at the foundation of our manufacturing greatness; and in case you were attacked, they would at once be available, with their hard hands and skilled brains, to manufacture your muskets and your cannon, your shot and your shell. What has given us our Armstrongs, Whitworths, and Fairbairns, but the free industry of this country? If you can build three times more steam-engines than any other country, and have threefold the force of mechanics, to whom and to what do you owe that, but to the men who have trained them, and to those principles of commerce out of which the wealth of the country has grown? We who have some hand in doing that, are not ignorant that we have been and are increasing the strength of the country in proportion as we are raising up skilled artisans.”*
[footnote…
House of Commons Debate, 7th July, 1862. …]
The reader who has followed us up to this point will have observed that handicraft labour was the first stage of the development of human power, and that machinery has been its last and highest. The uncivilized man began with a stone for a hammer, and a splinter of flint for a chisel, each stage of his progress being marked by an improvement in his tools. Every machine calculated to save labour or increase production was a substantial addition to his power over the material resources of nature, enabling him to subjugate them more effectually to his wants and uses; and every extension of machinery has served to introduce new classes of the population to the enjoyment of its benefits. In early times the products of skilled industry were for the most part luxuries intended for the few, whereas now the most exquisite tools and engines are employed in producing articles of ordinary consumption for the great mass of the community. Machines with millions of fingers work for millions of purchasers–for the poor as well as the rich; and while the machinery thus used enriches its owners, it no less enriches the public with its products.
Much of the progress to which we have adverted has been the result of the skill and industry of our own time. “Indeed,” says Mr. Fairbairn, “the mechanical operations of the present day could not have been accomplished at any cost thirty years ago; and what was then considered impossible is now performed with an exactitude that never fails to accomplish the end in view.” For this we are mainly indebted to the almost creative power of modern machine-tools, and the facilities which they present for the production and reproduction of other machines. We also owe much to the mechanical agencies employed to drive them. Early inventors yoked wind and water to sails and wheels, and made them work machinery of various kinds; but modern inventors have availed themselves of the far more swift and powerful, yet docile force of steam, which has now laid upon it the heaviest share of the burden of toil, and indeed become the universal drudge. Coal, water, and a little oil, are all that the steam-engine, with its bowels of iron and heart of fire, needs to enable it to go on working night and day, without rest or sleep. Yoked to machinery of almost infinite variety, the results of vast ingenuity and labour, the Steam-engine pumps water, drives spindles, thrashes corn, prints books, hammers iron, ploughs land, saws timber, drives piles, impels ships, works railways, excavates docks; and, in a word, asserts an almost unbounded supremacy over the materials which enter into the daily use of mankind, for clothing, for labour, for defence, for household purposes, for locomotion, for food, or for instruction.