Joseph Whitworth

Whitworth was created a baronet by Queen Victoria in 1869. Upon his death in 1887, Whitworth donated much of his fortune for the people of Manchester, with the Whitworth Art Gallery and Christie Hospital partly funded by Whitworth. Whitworth Street, Whitworth Park and the Whitworth Building in Manchester are named in his honour. Whitworth's company merged with the W.G. Armstrong & Mitchell Company to become Armstrong Whitworth in 1897.

• Name — Sir Joseph Whitworth • Honorific Suffix — FRSA • Born — 21 December 1803 • Birthplace — Stockport, Cheshire, England • Died — 22 January 1887 • Place of death — Monte Carlo, Monaco • Occupation — * Engineer • entrepreneur • inventor • philanthropist • Institutions — Royal Society Institution of Mechanical Engineers • Significant Advance — Whitworth standardised screw threads • Significant Awards — Albert Medal (1868)

Whitworth was born in John Street, Stockport, Cheshire, where the Stockport Courthouse is today. The site is marked by a blue plaque on the back wall of the courthouse. He was the son of Charles Whitworth, a teacher and congregational minister, and at an early age developed an interest in machinery. He was educated at Idle, near Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire; his aptitude for mechanics became apparent when he began work for his uncle.

After leaving school Whitworth became an indentured apprentice to his uncle, Joseph Hulse, a cotton spinner at Amber Mill, Oakerthorpe in Derbyshire. The plan was that Whitworth would become a partner in the business. From the outset he was fascinated by the mill's machinery. Soon, he mastered the techniques of the cotton spinning industry. Even at this age, however, he noticed the poor standards of accuracy and was critical of the milling machinery. This early exposure to the mechanics of the industry forged in him the ambition to make machinery with much greater precision. His apprenticeship at Amber Mill lasted for a four-year term after which he worked for another four years as a mechanic in a factory in Manchester. He then moved to London where he found employment working for Henry Maudslay, the inventor of the screw-cutting lathe, alongside such people as James Nasmyth (inventor of the steam hammer) and Richard Roberts. Whitworth developed great skill as a mechanic while working for Maudslay, developing various precision machine tools and also introducing a box casting scheme for the iron frames of machine tools that simultaneously increased their rigidity and reduced their weight. Whitworth also worked for Holtzapffel & Co (makers of lathes used primarily for ornamental turning) and Joseph Clement. While at Clement's workshop he helped with the manufacture of Charles Babbage's calculating machine, the difference engine. He returned to Openshaw, Manchester, in 1833 to start his own business manufacturing lathes and other machine tools, which became renowned for their high standard of workmanship. He was elected to membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 22 January 1839. Whitworth is attributed with the introduction of the thou in 1844. In 1853, along with his lifelong friend, artist and art educator George Wallis (1811–1891), he was appointed a British commissioner for the New York International Exhibition. They toured around industrial sites of several American states, and the result of their journey was a report 'The Industry of the United States in Machinery, Manufactures and Useful and Applied Arts, compiled from the Official Reports of Messrs Whitworth and Wallis, London, 1854.' • Illustration — The Firs, now the Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre Whitworth received many awards for the excellence of his designs and was financially very successful. In 1850, then a President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, he built a house called 'The Firs' in Fallowfield in south Manchester designed by Edward Walters. In 1854 he bought Stancliffe Hall in Darley Dale, Derbyshire and moved there with his second wife Louisa in 1872. He supplied four six-ton blocks of stone from Darley Dale quarry, for the lions of St George's Hall in Liverpool. He was conferred with Honorary Membership of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland in 1859. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1857. A strong believer in the value of technical education, Whitworth backed the new Mechanics' Institute in Manchester (later UMIST) and helped found the Manchester School of Design. In 1868, he founded the Whitworth Scholarship for the advancement of mechanical engineering. He donated a sum of £128,000 to the government in 1868 (approximately £6.5 million in 2010) to bring "science and industry" closer together and to fund scholarships. In 1869, Queen Victoria made Whitworth a baronet. • Illustration — Graphic representation of formulas for the pitches of threads of screw bolts • Illustration — Screw-making machine from 1871

Whitworth popularised the three-plates method for producing accurate flat surfaces (see Surface plate) during the 1830s, using engineer's blue and scraping techniques on three trial surfaces. Up until his introduction of the scraping technique, the same three-plate method was employed using polishing techniques, giving less accurate results. This led to an explosion of development of precision instruments using these flat-surface generation techniques as a basis for further construction of precise shapes. His next innovation, in 1840, was a measuring technique called "end measurements" that used a precision flat plane and measuring screw, both of his own invention. The system had a resolution of one millionth of an inch (25 nm), as was demonstrated at the Great Exhibition of 1851. However, the absolute accuracy was limited to roughly 500 nm by practical problems such as thermal expansion. In 1841 Whitworth devised a standard for screw threads with a fixed thread angle of 55° and having a standard pitch for a given diameter. This soon became the first nationally standardised system; its adoption by the railway companies, who until then had all used different screw threads, led to its widespread acceptance. It later became a British Standard, "British Standard Whitworth", abbreviated to BSW and governed by BS 84:1956.

Whitworth was commissioned by the War Department of the British government to design a replacement for the calibre.577-inch Pattern 1853 Enfield, whose shortcomings had been revealed during the recent Crimean War. The Whitworth rifle had a smaller bore of 0.451 in which was hexagonal, fired an elongated hexagonal bullet and had a faster rate of twist rifling [one turn in twenty inches] than the Enfield, and its performance during tests in 1859 was superior to the Enfield's in every way. The test was reported in The Times on 23 April as a great success. However, the new bore design was found to be prone to fouling and it was four times more expensive to manufacture than the Enfield, so it was rejected by the British government. An unspecified number of Whitworth rifles found their way to the Confederate states in the American Civil War, where they were called "Whitworth Sharpshooters". The rifles were capable of sub-MOA groups at 500 yards. It was often called the "sharpshooter" because of its accuracy, which is considered one of the earliest examples of a sniper rifle. Queen Victoria opened the first meeting of the National Rifle Association at Wimbledon, in 1860 by firing a Whitworth rifle from a fixed mechanical rest. The rifle scored a bull's eye at a range of 400 yd.

• Illustration — 12-pounder Whitworth rifle Whitworth also designed a large rifled breech-loading gun with a 2.75 in bore, a 12 lb projectile and a range of about 6 mi. The spirally-grooved projectile was patented in 1855. This was rejected by the British Army, who preferred the guns from Armstrong, but was used in the American Civil War. While trying to increase the bursting strength of his gun barrels, Whitworth patented a process called "fluid-compressed steel" for casting steel under pressure and built a new steel works near Manchester. Some of his castings were shown at the Great Exhibition in Paris c. 1883.

• Illustration — The grave of Sir Joseph Whitworth Bart. In the grounds of St Helen's Parish Church, Darley Dale, Derbyshire (Whitworth's grave is the central tomb) In January 1887 at the age of 83, Sir Joseph Whitworth died in Monte Carlo where he had travelled in the hope of improving his health. He was buried at St Helen's Church, Darley Dale, Derbyshire. A detailed obituary was published in the American magazine The Manufacturer and Builder. He directed his trustees to spend his fortune on philanthropic projects, which they still do to this day.