The Origins of Engineering in Lancashire

It is extraordinary how little is known about the engineers who produced the water wheels, steam engines, textile and other machinery of the early Industrial Revolution. In most economic histories of this period there are merely a few brief and vague references to smiths, carpenters, and millwrights, based on Smiles or Fairbairn, with no contemporary evidence whatever. Most accounts of the development of mechanical engineering normally begin with Bramah and Maudslay, from about 1800, and carry on with such renowned nineteenth-century names as Fairbairn, Roberts, Whitworth, and Nasmyth. Before the nineteenth century, we are usually led to believe, mechanical engineering hardly existed. This belief is largely based on nineteenth-century evidence. William Fairbairn, for example, stated that when he first came to Manchester, 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.” Similarly, the Select Committee on Exportation of Machinery reported in 1841 that “[machine] tools have introduced a revolution in machinery, and tool-making has become a distinct branch of mechanics, and a very important trade, although twenty years ago it was scarcely known.”