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 Copyright

Copyright © 2018 by Brian Murphy

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First Edition: September 2018

Published by Da Capo Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a

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Illustrations © by Terry Kole

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied

for.

ISBNs: 978-0-306-90200-0 (hardcover), 978-0-306-90199-7 (ebook)

E3-20180714-JV-NF
 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
The Voyage of the John Rutledge, 1856
The Ice
Epigraph

Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Epilogue

Photos
Acknowledgments
Thomas Nye Family Tree
Types of Vessels
Bibliography
Index
 For Zoe, as always.
And to all the immigrants, refugees, and
sojourners, past and present, who shape
and enrich the world.
 Author’s Note

When my daughter was young, she and I enjoyed hunting for sea
glass on beaches around Greece. For years, we filled containers and
bottles with the sea-scrubbed nuggets. These castaway bits—
different shapes, different textures and colors—gradually built a
story. A layer of sea glass in a small cup might represent one week
attached to one specific memory. A fat jam jar filled to the brim
might be the remembrances of a full season.
This book is a lot like that.
I came across the first stray fragment of the story in a basement
on Cape Cod, where a local historical museum had assembled a
wonderful exhibit on shipwrecks. From there, and for the next three
years, I collected more pieces wherever I could find them. They
turned up in places such as the old waterfront in Liverpool on the
River Mersey, the side streets of Fairhaven on Buzzards Bay, and the
archives at Mystic Seaport on tidewaters pulled toward Long Island
Sound.
Like the sea glass, the scattered shards of this story, waiting to
be gathered and brought together, added up to a moment in time.
This one took place far out in the cold Atlantic more than a century
and a half ago.
This is a work of nonfiction. All the events occurred. I did my best
with what I found, making every effort to portray, with accuracy and
precision, the arc of the story and the people involved. The narrative
comes together from an array of sources that include published
material, family archives, civil and church records, shipping ledgers,
and interviews conducted in Europe and the United States.
 That was the easy part.
The more challenging task was properly conveying the thoughts,
emotions, and dialogue of the people involved.
There is, of course, no way to know the exact words exchanged
on the John Rutledge or among those huddled in an open lifeboat
adrift in the North Atlantic. Even harder to discern are characters’
inner voices and fears. On both fronts, I relied heavily on the only
person who could know: the sole survivor of the wreck. Fortunately,
just after rescue he gave detailed statements to various newspapers.
He also offered recollections decades later and his accounts did not
vary in any significant ways. Most important, they were highly
consistent in describing how those on the lifeboat interacted, battled
for life, and, ultimately, died. The various retellings, however, do
include some minor discrepancies, mainly in the order of events
aboard the lifeboat. None of these variations change the story in any
fundamental manner.
To further enhance the dialogue, I consulted experts in mid-
nineteenth-century linguistics and speech patterns in New England,
Ireland, and Britain.
I mention all this for an important reason:
To ask for a small indulgence. Do not look on the dialogue as
verbatim. Rather, view it as a carefully considered approximation
based on research. I put quotation marks around only the passages
that appear in logs, newspapers, and other sources. The rest of the
dialogue—exchanges among the crew and so forth—does not carry
quotation marks because I don’t want to suggest that these are the
exact words spoken. Instead, they are a literary reflection of what is
known about how the various figures in the story interacted.
I try to recount this story in its full sweep and attempt to explore
the souls and sensibilities of those involved. This is, I believe, my
duty as a storyteller. I also have an obligation as a journalist. I can
never turn my back on facts. I have endeavored to keep every
aspect of this book aligned with what is known or what can be
surmised with strong confidence.
The vagaries of recordkeeping and newspaper reporting in that
era forced some decisions. A few names appear in records with
different spellings. I added footnotes to further explain the choices I
made. In every case, I selected the spelling most widely used in the
accounts or confirmed through further documentation.
One final point of context: although this book keeps a tight focus
on one tragedy in the age of sail, it strives for a greater reach.
Scores of ships—carrying tens of thousands of passengers and crew
—met a similar fate in the Atlantic before twentieth-century
advances in communications technology enabled better notice on
looming ice fields and approaching storms. The names of some lost
ships are remembered. So are a few of the prominent figures who
perished at sea.
But almost totally forgotten are the others who went down with
them: emigrants, seamen, travelers, merchants, and envoys. Entire
families. Young men and women striking out for a new life. Children
too young to grasp the dangers of an Atlantic crossing.
They are the anonymous dead.
The sea is good at swallowing lives without a trace.
This is my belated elegy for them all and the risks they faced on
the North Atlantic.
 The Ice

The North Atlantic ice obeys its own rhythms.

Some years, the ice is sparse and sporadic. Jagged castaways
drift down from the Greenland ice sheets, but not in great numbers.
The next year, however, the ice can flake away from the glaciers,
thick and dangerous—as if the Arctic is shrugging off its frozen skin.
When the vectors of wind, currents, and other elements take over,
they can, under the right circumstances, keep most of the ice safely
in the far north. Or they can carry the ice floes farther south into the
main sea routes between Europe and North American ports, from
Newfoundland to Baltimore. In the era before satellites, radar, and
mobile communication, these years of thick southern ice frightened
even the most hardened sailors.
The year 1856 was a time of North Atlantic ice like few others.
Starting in January, seamen arrived in New York, Boston, and
other Eastern ports bearing alarming reports. No one had seen ice
this dreadful in ages. They weren’t just sighting huge icebergs—
some wider than the plans for Central Park or taller than the
Westminster Palace clock tower being built in London. The worries
about the ice in 1856 were a culmination of everything that made
mariners shudder. The bergs were bigger, the pack ice denser, and
the ice field’s edges more southerly than many could recall.
“Old and experienced sea captains state that they never saw the
ocean so much obstructed with ice,” said a dispatch in the New York
Times.
One clever wordsmith coined the phrase “ice armada.”
The steamship Arago, en route from the French port of Le Havre
to New York, was forced to take a two-hundred-mile southern detour
to stay clear of the ice. The steamship Baltic reported treacherous
ice as far south as 43 degrees, 30 minutes, about the same latitude
as southern Maine. Other ships sighted bergs in the North Atlantic
approaching the forty-second parallel, about as far south as Cape
Cod Bay.
Off Newfoundland, the crew on the ship Henry Reed passed
icebergs three hundred feet tall. These titans carried so much mass
below the surface that they ran aground on the seamounts of the
Grand Banks. In early 1856 at least a half-dozen ships arrived in
American and European ports with ice damage or tales of being held
tight for days in ice-locked seas.
They were the lucky ones.
Before the first three months of 1856 were out, nearly 830
passengers and crew went missing in the North Atlantic. The packet
ship John Rutledge was torn open by ice and sunk. This was the
presumed fate of at least three more vessels that vanished
somewhere between England and New York. Meanwhile, other ships,
carrying dozens more people, sailed or steamed into the Atlantic that
cursed winter.
They, too, were never heard from again.
… souls gone down in the great deep, without leaving a ripple
on the surface of the ocean, or causing a ripple on the great
surface of society. A cool announcement is made that they are
lost, and that is all. Who can estimate the long protracted
agony of surviving friends, who waited from day to day for the
arrival of the missing ships, until hope faded away into
despair! So passeth the world.
—Pittsburgh Gazette, August 1856

The most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable

cruelty.
—Joseph Conrad, “The Mirror of the Sea”
 Prologue

FEBRUARY 29, 1856.

Sir, you are wanted on deck. It’s urgent. We believe we see

something, the second mate added quickly, the words tumbling out.
First mate of the Germania, Charles Hervey Townsend, looked up
from his logbook. It was just before three in the afternoon on Leap
Year day. He had just recorded a somewhat uneventful shift. That
was always good for February in the North Atlantic. They were thirty
days out from France and bound for New York with forty-seven
passengers. For the past twenty-four hours, light winds rolled in
from the west-southwest to accompany the moderate swells and
steady snow. Nothing alarming. Best of all, the sea ice had eased. A
day earlier it had surrounded the ship, and the captain was forced to
haul in the sails. And then they waited and prayed the ice would not
grow thicker.
Everyone familiar with those waters knew well how quickly the ice
could change from a bothersome obstacle to a lethal danger. Even a
modest iceberg could easily rip open a hull. Pack ice could crush the
sturdiest vessel like a walnut. They were lucky this time. The ship
had slipped through a corridor of dense ice without damage. But the
angry winter weather kept the crew on guard. For days, howling
gales and towering waves had roared in from the general direction
of the Canadian Maritimes—it was the kind of weather that pushed
the Greenland sea ice toward the Atlantic shipping lanes. But that
morning the storms had finally taken a breather.
This respite on the last day of February gave Townsend a chance
to look ahead. With favorable winds, the Germania could clear the
most dangerous stretch through the ice fields off Newfoundland.
Once safely to the south, they would then set their final course for
New York, and possibly tie up before the next full moon, in late
March.
Good fortune was required to pass southeast of Newfoundland,
one of the busiest shipping corridors in the western Atlantic. It was
impossible to predict when the ice giants would appear. About
eighteen months earlier, the master of the British brig Queen
reported a berg five miles around and three hundred feet tall. This
monster was spotted just about where the Germania now sailed:
some three hundred fifty miles southeast of Newfoundland on the
eastern edge of the Grand Banks.
And there was the fog to contend with. It churned up thick and
sudden along the seams where the warmer Gulf Stream brushed
against the Arctic-chilled currents from the north. These were some
of the densest and most persistent fog zones in the world. The
Germania had been passing in and out of fog banks for days.
Townsend, in his cramped script, jotted down the ship’s
coordinates. Latitude: 44 degrees, 11 minutes north. Longitude: 47
degrees, 34 minutes west.
Sir? Please hurry, the second mate urged. You are needed.
Well, what is it? Townsend asked.
Some of the crew—the ones fixing the outer jib—they think they
spotted a small boat with a distress flag, sir. And…
Survivors? Townsend interrupted.
Maybe, said the mate. We think maybe.
Townsend went quickly to the deck. All he could think about was
the puzzling incident from a few nights earlier. He had spoken to no
one about it, but he knew the crew would be talking. That night, the
helmsman swore he heard a voice crying out from the sea. The crew
on deck thought they might have come across shipwreck survivors
somewhere out there in the darkness. Townsend dismissed the
noises as nothing more than the wind and ordered the ship to sail
on.
Now this.
Keep an open mind, he told himself. It could be debris that looks
like a boat. The North Atlantic was full of such flotsam.
 On deck, Townsend walked along paths cleared of the more than
six inches of snow that had fallen since morning. He climbed into the
rigging on the foremast near the bow. Even though snow still
fluttered down, the flat winter light was good, casting a nice contrast
between the water and anything on it. Townsend adjusted his
spyglass, a fine mariners’ model built back home in New Haven.
There it was, just as the mate had said. This was no hunk of
shipwreck. There was no doubt it was a lifeboat. But what was that
in the stern? It looked like a figure. A man perhaps. But alive or
dead? The figure didn’t offer any clues. It sat rigid. Townsend
wondered whether it was just a lifeless body rocking in the sea.
Signal flags flapped along a pole and line on the boat. Was that
an oar propped upright? And what was on the line running from the
oar to the stern? Were they shirts?
Townsend moved the spyglass lens slightly. Mounds of something
were scattered about the tiny boat. Possibly more people. No, wait.
Something was odd. Townsend studied the unnatural angles of their
arms and heads and then drew a sharp breath. Could they be frozen
bodies?
But hold on. The man sitting stiffly in the lifeboat seemed to stir.
It looked like he was moving.
The man raised a weak arm to signal the Germania.
Townsend, hesitantly, waved back.
 Chapter One

JANUARY 7, 1856; LIVERPOOL.

Call it a premonition.
Or perhaps a husband’s protective reflex. Then again, maybe the
impulse arose from something far more obvious: an ambitious ship
captain wanting to concentrate on a hard trip across the Atlantic
without any distractions. Such as his wife on board.
She was fine with any of these explanations. Each one offered
some comfort. At the very least, they were something to hang on to.
The way it turned out, however, was the worst of all possible
outcomes for Captain Alexander Kelley’s wife. She would never know
the real reason she was left behind in Liverpool that January. Later
court documents never offered a clue. And she cared not to talk
about it much. What was the point of revisiting a painful mystery?
All she was sure about was the peculiar way the matter was decided.
The captain—her husband of eight years—was unusually insistent.
He had made up his mind. Almost to the point of being
unreasonable.
She would stay in Liverpool, he said. And that was that.
This was a side of her husband that Irene Snow Kelley hadn’t
seen before. He could, at sea, be iron-willed. She expected that and
so did his crew. All ship captains had a bit of an imperious streak.
But Irene never had it directed at her in any meaningful way. She
considered herself more his partner and helpmate, in the model of
many captains’ wives. Their bond had grown even stronger on their
last trip, a December sail from New York to Liverpool.
Then, her husband made it clear she would not be making the
return crossing. At least not yet. Not in winter. Irene said nothing
and let him talk. She looked for a hole in his argument or a flaw in
his logic. He gave her little to work with. Well then, she thought.
Let’s look at this from his perspective. She couldn’t be blamed for his
decision to leave her behind. She had done nothing wrong to anger
him or the crew, either on the voyage over or while they were
docked in Liverpool. So it must be something about the coming trip
itself. There was no doubt he was caught up in the pressures of his
new command.
This was a big one for him.
It was Kelley’s first transatlantic circuit—New York to Liverpool
and back—as captain of the John Rutledge, a fine specimen of a
packet ship with less than five years of service under its belt. The
new responsibilities must be weighing on him. Why else would he
want to leave her in a strange port?
He justified his case.
There was simply no reason for her to endure a winter crossing
back to New York. The weather would be rough the entire way.
Wait here, Kelley said. Enjoy Liverpool. Maybe go to London. I will
be back in the spring, he added, and we can return to New York
together.
She thought it over.
True, she would not be lonely. Even though they were new to
Liverpool, the couple already had a wide circle of acquaintances and
others angling for the captain’s attention. All ship captains in the
Atlantic packet business were instantly included in a network on
shore as old as Liverpool’s shipping trade, made up of portside
gentry, businessmen of all stripes, royal contacts, self-styled dandies,
diplomatic liaisons, and various hangers-on. A constant hum of
invitations occupied ship captains—and their wives, of course, if they
were along—in northern England’s main port.
And Irene could not argue with her husband’s premise: setting
out on the North Atlantic in mid-January—westbound, with the wind
in your teeth—was guaranteed to be a nasty affair. The seas could
be monstrous and the ice could close in like a pack of hungry
wolves.
He would be back in the spring on the next sail of the John
Rutledge, she told herself.
If nothing else, she could count on the regularity of the Atlantic
packet ship fleet, which included the Rutledge and hundreds of other
sailing vessels and paddle-wheel steamers. They were in constant
motion: back and forth across the Atlantic on a demanding schedule
carrying passengers, freight, and mail. It certainly would be more
pleasant to stay in England. She could sail home in May and arrive in
time for the lovely first day of summer.
So, my dear, are we in agreement? Captain Kelley said this more
as a statement than a question.
Fine, she consented. But promise me one thing. Promise me you
will be safe.
She knew it was an empty appeal. The sea and ice dictated the
terms of the crossings, not the captains or crew. Still, it made her
feel better to hear him pledge to take extra care.
I promise, he said.
Irene Kelley then let the whole thing rest.
She didn’t want to quarrel with him two days before his thirty-
second birthday, which they planned to celebrate at the Waterloo
Hotel, one of Liverpool’s finest. At the Waterloo, you might just
bump into the American consul Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was
always happy to chat with a fellow New Englander, that is, so long as
they met his rather pretentious standards. Ship captains made the
cut. Normal seaman, middling merchants, and average working stiffs
most certainly did not merit his attention. Hawthorne liked the good
life and the exclusive company who could afford it or who were
welcomed in by benefactors.
Irene understood that her husband had a lot resting on his
shoulders just to prepare the John Rutledge for sea. The ship was
scheduled to set sail in a little more than a week and there was
much left to do. The Liverpool agent was still soliciting cargo. And
Kelley needed to round out the crew.
After shedding some deck hands to Liverpool’s many temptations
and traps, the Rutledge was a few men short, and a ship needed a
full complement in winter. There was always the chance of losing
one or two crewmen along the way: swept overboard or subject to a
ghastly accident. All it took was a rogue wave or a misplaced step on
the rigging.
Besides that, the crew would have to deal with an unexpectedly
full passenger list. Though many emigrants preferred to wait for
spring, more than a hundred had booked tickets for steerage, the
gloomy compartment below the main deck that would serve as their
place to sleep, eat, wash, worry, battle seasickness, stave off
disease, and generally hold on until the ship reached American
shores. To some of the poorest folks heading to America, the
hardships of a winter crossing didn’t matter all that much. Being cold
and miserable at sea was not much different from being cold and
miserable on land.
The steerage passengers booked on the John Rutledge were
mostly Irish. No surprise there. It was once assumed the flood of
Irish to America would ease up once the potato blight ran its course
in Ireland. But that wasn’t proving true at all. Even though potato
crops started to rebound by the mid-1850s, the number of Irish
emigrants did not decrease. Irishmen with jobs in the States were
like homing beacons for relatives and friends. Some dreamed of
setting out for America’s western frontier, maybe making it all the
way to California with the other strike-it-rich dreamers and
homesteaders. The island was emptying at a frightful clip. Packet
ships such as the John Rutledge crowded them in and sailed them
over if they had the fare.
Spring will be here before you know it, Kelley said. You are really
the lucky one, my dear. You can stay in Liverpool. I must get this
ship to New York.

That evening, just before five, a strange light appeared in the

southern sky.
It cut ruler-straight across the last blushes of twilight—a glowing
scar of aqua blue and silver that angled down into a cloudy haze on
the horizon. The streak in the heavens held there for minutes before
the last shimmer was gone.
The learned classes in Liverpool knew immediately what it was.
Why, a meteor was giving an uncommonly fiery farewell. “Very
similar,” wrote one observer in a Royal Astronomical Society journal,
“to the trace that is left by a Roman candle on a dark night.” But
many common deck hands in Liverpool, hard-wired to recognize
omens and specters, didn’t like it. Not one bit. This was not a
promising sign for those about to head out to sea.
The compendium of sailors’ superstitions is as vast as it is
baffling. It covered everything from specific days not to set sail—all
Fridays included—to special seagoing curses, including ones brought
on by crewmates with flat feet or ginger hair.
Seamen had no trouble interpreting a weird flash in the sky as
bad juju. About a century earlier, the Scottish poet William Falconer,
a seafarer who was lost rounding the Cape of Good Hope, wrote of
“portentous meteors” cutting through the gloom in his epic “The
Shipwreck.” The average shipmate probably never heard of Falconer,
let alone delved into his work. They might not have been able to
read at all. But Falconer was attuned to what set sailors’ knees
knocking. And that definitely included strange lights of all kinds.
One young seaman, a thin and soft-spoken American with coal-
black eyes and not much of a beard, didn’t go in for such
foolishness. Thomas W. Nye was firmly rooted in a world he could
see and measure and explain. The sea was complicated and
dangerous enough, he figured. Why add hocus-pocus to make it
more frightening?
Nye was not yet twenty-two, but he felt like he’d been partnered
with the sea forever. In one sense, he was right. His education in all
things nautical went back to as early as he could remember. It was
part of being a New Englander of the Nye clan, which extended far
and wide from its roots on Cape Cod. His pedigree included an
impressive assortment of ship captains, whaling shipowners, and
merchant sailors. There was always a Nye heading out to sea,
returning from sea, tallying up how much he was making off the
sea, or mourning someone lost at sea. Understanding the rewards
and the risks of life offshore was all part of being a Nye.
 The rest of Thomas’s upbringing came in the form of basic, but
solid, schooling. It was the kind drilled in by no-nonsense Quaker
schoolmarms along Buzzards Bay on Massachusetts’s southern coast.
The classes included reading, writing, civics, and enough etiquette to
get him by and spare him some embarrassments—nothing close to
the polishing offered by prestigious schools to the north, like Boston
Latin or Phillips Academy. Yet it was a far sight better than the
spotty schooling of many of his crewmates. Nye was no scholar. He
was no simpleton either.
He tried to tell his fellow seamen on the John Rutledge that the
thing in the sky was just a meteor. Same as a shooting star, he said.
You see those all the time, right? But this one was bigger and closer.
That’s all. No harbinger. No sign from sea nymphs or Davy Jones.
Simple, old science, my friends.
Some listened. Some scoffed. Nye didn’t push it.
He didn’t want to get a reputation as a nag or know-it-all. He had
to live and work with these men—a stitched-together crew of Yanks,
Scots, and Irish. They had come over from New York together on
the Rutledge, sorting out their personalities and peculiarities along
the way. It wasn’t a bad mix of gents. There were no big fights or
smoldering tensions crossing from New York to Liverpool. But that
leg was a smooth, twenty-one-day milk run, riding a nice late-fall
tailwind and relatively easy seas. They all knew the trip back would
be a far greater test. The season was later, the water colder, and the
winds brasher, slamming into their faces rather than caressing their
backs.
The John Rutledge had arrived in Liverpool on Christmas Eve. The
weather had warmed a bit, and that brought smiles after a wicked
cold snap had covered the port in a thick varnish of ice. The city’s
markets, decorated by festive gaslights, weren’t slowed by any
weather. Holiday geese and slabs of beef and extravagant seasonal
delights such as hot chocolate packed sellers’ stalls for those who
could afford them, and plenty could in Liverpool.
This was one of the world’s busiest ports. With ships came
money. That meant a few coins for the lowly dockhands, but piles of
cash for the traders and shippers at the highest reaches of the port
city pyramid. Still, not everyone was boosted by Liverpool’s rise.
Those who were sick, disabled, widowed, or orphaned and numbers
of others struggled in Liverpool, like they did in any Victorian-era city
on both sides of the Atlantic. The rules of the sea transposed onto
land: you stayed afloat or you went under. No one was going to help
you.
But once in a while, often at Christmas, guilt made an
appearance. Those with means might toss a bit extra to those
without. At one Liverpool workhouse, a last-chance haven for the
destitute, the overseers decided that their charges should be
“regaled” with roast beef and plum pudding on Christmas Day. By
their own count, there were 372 more paupers this Christmas week
compared with this Yuletide week in the previous year.
There was no holiday rest for the Rutledge crew. They were
thrown into work the moment the ship reached port. They stowed
the sails—first repairing any rips—checked the rigging, and scrubbed
the deck. They took shifts keeping an eye on the Liverpool dock
porters who unloaded the cargo, making sure nothing slipped into a
pocket or slipped away in a sack. The crew preferred sailing for
Liverpool for one important reason: usually the ship carried no
passengers down in steerage on the eastbound voyage. That spared
the sailors the unpleasant dockside task of cleaning and disinfecting
the bunks and alcoves that acted as steerage passengers’ makeshift
urinals and places for the seasick to retch. It was horrid work.
Sailors said it could be worse than slithering down into the head of a
giant sperm whale to scoop up that last bucket of oil.
Word spread among the crew that the ship would have an
unusually full manifest of emigrants for the westbound leg. That
brought some groans, especially from the cook, who would have to
keep the chow coming. The Rutledge crew expected a few dozen
passengers down in steerage—not the one hundred or more who
had already bought their tickets for New York. This was unusual.
Sometimes, a winter sail back to America could carry as many
passengers as crew. That didn’t matter too much to the shipowners.
The far more critical factor was keeping to the timetable and getting
the mail and cargo across the Atlantic on schedule. This was where
the real money was made. On its latest trip, the Rutledge had
carried some of America’s fall harvest bounty: 8,433 bushels of
wheat, 12,738 bushels of corn, 977 bags of oats, and 177 bales of
cotton. It was going back with iron rods, good English crockery, and
salt.

Packet ships like the John Rutledge were the shuttles of the day.
The idea of the packets—born several decades earlier—was to
impose predictability on the unpredictable seas. The concept was
simple: if merchants and travelers knew a fixed date when a ship
was leaving port, they could make their plans accordingly, saving
time and limiting frustration. Before the advent of the packet lines,
ocean travel and trade were largely loose affairs. Ships left when
they had enough goods in the hold to make it worth their while, or
simply when the captain was in the mood.
The packet lines changed all that.
They advertised specific departure dates and schedules so that,
say, shopkeepers in Philadelphia would know when crates of British
silver or guns could be expected to arrive from London and
correspondents in Boston would know when their letters bound for
Le Havre or Bremen were leaving. Finally, the flow of commerce,
travel, news, and mail had some order and structure. And, in the
years before the transatlantic telegraph, fortunes could swing on the
timing of a packet ship’s arrival, especially those carrying news from
Liverpool.
The city was then the world’s biggest cotton market—a key
destination for loom-ready bales from the American South. If cotton
prices in Liverpool were up even slightly, an American trader in New
York or Boston could get that news straight from the docks and
telegraph orders to the South. Those who were quick could buy
cotton at a lower asking price—before Southern cotton brokers got
wise to the demand—and book the cargo on the next packet to
Britain to catch the higher price. Tens of thousands of dollars could
hang in the balance.
The packets represented a powerful change in how the world
traveled and conducted business.
But something else profound was unfolding in 1856. It was clear
for all to see along the Liverpool quays. More and more steamships
berthed there. Sea travel was in fast transition from one age to the
next. Bigger and better steamers crossed the Atlantic faster and in
more style than the sailing ships or even the sleek tall ship clippers
could. Steamers had come onto the scene a few decades earlier as
noisy, belching novelties. By the early 1840s, ships with a
combination of steam and sail were common. At the end of that
decade, powerful sidewheel steamers featured regularly in packet
ports from Scandinavia to New Orleans. And by the mid-1850s,
steamships were considered the speedsters of the seas; the press
covered their advances with breathless prose as transatlantic speed
records fell.
In the summer of 1854, the American wooden sidewheel steamer
Baltic made the Liverpool–New York run in a once-unthinkable time
of just under ten days. In early 1856, the Baltic possessed—for the
moment—the coveted Blue Riband, the unofficial title of the fastest
Atlantic crossing. The rival Cunard Line of Britain desperately wanted
the Riband prize back in its hands. Cunard set its engine designers
to work on ratcheting up horsepower and finding other ways to coax
higher knots from its vessels.
Speed came in some very handsome packages. The new
steamers were loaded with luxuries that would make a sultan blush:
heavy velvets, gleaming leathers, aromatic rosewood and mother-of-
pearl inlays. Even the handbills and newspaper ads for steamers
dripped with snob appeal: “The owners of these ships will not be
accountable for gold, silver, bullion, specie, jewelry, precious stones
or metals unless bills of lading are signed therefor, and the value
thereof therein expressed” read the standard disclaimer. For the
packets, the situation was a lot more down-to-earth; they advised
their passengers: keep an eye on your money and hand luggage.
The steamship lines were all about marketing. They knew people
would pay for speed and fine trappings. The faster the vessels and
the more lavish the amenities, the higher the ticket price to be
leveraged. Passenger fares sometimes hit stratospheric sums such as
$130 each for a first-class cabin and $325—about the annual salary
of a well-paid American craftsman—for an extra-size stateroom. Let
the packets tote the cargo and the immigrants, the steamship lines
reasoned. We will cater to the better classes, who care to zip along
under coal power and be happy paying for the privilege, thank you
very much.
The snooty strategy worked well. It even swayed people who
were still sinking their money into sailing ships.

While the John Rutledge was in port in Liverpool, so was one of its
owners.
James Lawrence Ridgway, a fifty-one-year-old New York
moneyman with a taste for the maritime inherited from his sea
captain father, was half of Howland & Ridgway, the shipping line that
had added the Rutledge to its stable of packets a few years earlier.
In Liverpool, Ridgway was meeting with the shipping agents and
port officials who kept things humming for the packet line on that
side of the Atlantic. But it was time he thought about getting back to
New York, where his wife and children were still a bit peeved that he
had scheduled this trip to Liverpool over the holidays.
Just one cabin passenger was booked on the Rutledge, a fellow
described as a Philadelphia businessman named C. J. Gale, so
Ridgway could have picked any accommodation he wanted on his
own ship. But he desired to return to New York in more elegant
surroundings.
He booked passage on the Pacific, a sidewheel steamer like the
Baltic and a past winner of the Blue Riband for the eastbound
voyage.
Young Thomas W. Nye,* seaman on the Rutledge, had made a
point of getting a closer look at the Pacific. He’d been hearing about
the very same steamship from proud relatives for quite a while.
A distant uncle from his family’s Cape Cod branch, Ezra Nye, had
been captain of the Pacific for more than five years. Recently, Ezra
had entered a kind of celebrity retirement, giving lectures, offering
Old Salt observations to newspaper reporters, and, in banquet halls
and salons from Boston to Philadelphia, using his sea chest of stories
as a meal ticket. Ezra’s career embodied the fast-moving times at
sea. He had spent more than a decade as master of the fine sailing
ship Independence, which he pushed in 1836 to an astonishing New
York–Liverpool run of fourteen days, twelve hours, throwing down a
new speed mark. He then moved up to the Clay, a sailing ship
considered so luxurious that British aristocracy toured its
accommodations during port calls in Liverpool.
In 1850, Ezra embraced the advancing technology of steam and
took command of the stunning Pacific, which offered such hotel-style
graces as steam heating and the service of a maître de cuisine from
France. On one of his first runs, he just missed breaking the ten-day
barrier for an Atlantic crossing to New York.
Not many ship captains’ names were recognized instantly. But
anyone who knew even a little about transatlantic shipping knew
Ezra Nye, and he looked the part as well. He kept his beard cropped
into mutton chops, as was the fashion for New England seafarers.
He seemed always at the right place at the right time. In 1852, six
days out of Liverpool on the Pacific, Captain Nye came across the
British bark Jessie Stephens being pummeled by a gale that nearly
sank it. Nye managed to rescue all aboard, and for the act, he was
presented with a gold chronometer by Queen Victoria. The Liverpool
Shipwreck and Humane Society later commissioned a gold medallion
in Captain Ezra Nye’s honor.
A widely read nautical publication, The Sailor’s Magazine and
Naval Journal, helped further fan the Ezra Nye mystique. It ran a
piece describing him as something of a Good Samaritan of the high
seas. “It might be readily supposed, from the rivalry existing
between the companies which are contended for supremacy of the
Atlantic, it was no light matter for Captain Nye to turn aside from his
course. Of course we do not mean to say that as a man of proper
feeling there was any alternative open to him but that of saving his
perishing fellow creatures at all reasonable hazard at whatever
commercial risk. There is, however, such a thing as cheerful and
such a thing as reluctant aid.”
As Ezra was fond of saying: a good name is better than precious
ointment.
The seaman Thomas Nye paid attention.
As Thomas walked along the Liverpool waterfront, he passed
more of the steam giants of the day.
There was the Arabia, a pride of the Cunard Line, with a hybrid
design of sails and huge boilers that cranked out 950 horsepower—
and burned up to 120 tons of coal a day—for its three-story-tall
sidewheel. Nearby was its brand-new sister ship, Persia, being
readied for its maiden voyage. The Persia was the biggest steamer
of the day, 390 feet of wave-flattening power on a frame of twenty-
one thousand tons of iron. A “leviathan vessel,” wrote the Illustrated
London News, which gushed about its “ponderous metal welded,
jointed and riveted into each other with exceeding deftness.” Here
lay Cunard’s new hope to get back the fastest-crossing crown.
It didn’t take a nautical scholar to see where money and energy
were being spent. But it took a while to get it right with the
steamers. The early years of steam travel were shambolic. Boilers
exploded, pipes sprung leaks with scalding jets, pistons ruptured,
and crank shafts literally shook apart. In 1852 alone—just before US
reforms were enacted to improve steamship safety—at least
eighteen major explosions on steamships claimed 395 lives,
according to a congressional report. The new safety measures didn’t
mean an end to the risks. On the California coast, in late January
1855, a boiler rupture blew apart the sidewheel steamer Pearl at the
mouth of the American River, the same river where a chance
discovery had set off the California gold rush. More than seventy
people died on the Pearl.
Tragedies occurred. But no one doubted that steam power was
Another random document with
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on a feather, so that by means of another shaft containing levers and
a tumbling ball, the box on reversing was carried from one bevel-
wheel to the opposite one.”[54] This planer was in regular use as late
as 1859. The driving and reversing mechanism described above is
almost exactly that used on Clement’s great planer, built a dozen
years later. Fox is said to have also invented a screw-cutting
machine, an automatic gear cutter and a self-acting lathe, but the
evidence in regard to their dates is uncertain.
[54] Ibid., p. 315.

George Rennie was the brother of Sir John Rennie. They

succeeded to the business founded by their father, the elder John
Rennie, one of Watt’s best-known workmen and next to Murdock the
most important of his assistants, who built the Albion Flour Mills in
Black Friars, where one of the first rotative engines was installed
about 1788. The mill was a great success until it burned down a few
years later. John Rennie’s connection with it established his
reputation and he shortly after started out for himself as a millwright
and founded the business which his two sons carried on for many
years and which had a great influence throughout all England. Sir
William Fairbairn was one of those who worked for George Rennie
and furnishes another example of the cumulative influence of a
succession of strong mechanics.
Matthew Murray was born at Stockton about 1765. He was
apprenticed to a blacksmith and soon became an expert mechanic.
He married before his term of apprenticeship expired and as it was
difficult to find sufficient work near Stockton, he left his wife behind
him as soon as he was free and set out for Leeds with his bundle on
his back. He obtained employment with a John Marshall who had
begun the manufacture of flax machinery near Adel. Murray
suggested improvements which brought him a present of £20 and
rapid promotion until he soon became the first mechanic in the shop.
He sent for his wife and settled down in Leeds, remaining with Mr.
Marshall for about twelve years. He formed a partnership with James
Fenton and David Wood and started an engineering and machine-
building factory at Leeds in 1795. Here he began the manufacture of
steam engines and soon established a high reputation, pushing
Boulton & Watt hard. Murdock was sent down to Leeds, called on
Murray, was received cordially, and was shown freely over the entire
work. On visiting the Soho works a short time afterward Murray was
received cordially by Murdock, and was invited to dinner but was told
that there was a rule against admitting anyone in the trade to the
works. Under the circumstances Murray was indignant and declining
the invitation to dinner left without further delay. A little later Boulton
& Watt attempted to “plug him up” by buying the property adjoining
his factory, and this tract of land remained vacant for over 50 years.
He improved the D-slide valve and did much work toward simplifying
the design of the steam engine. The flat surfaces required in this
type of valve led to the building of his planer. Mr. March, a well-
known tool manufacturer of the next generation, went to work for
Murray in 1814. Mr. March said the planer was in use at that time. “I
recollect it very distinctly,” he continues, “and even the sort of
framing on which it stood. The machine was not patented, and like
many inventions in those days it was kept as much a secret as
possible, being locked up in a small room by itself, to which the
ordinary workmen could not obtain access. The year in which I
remember it being in use was, so far as I am aware, long before any
planing machine of a similar kind had been invented.”[55]
[55] Ibid., p. 316.

Like many of the owners of that time Murray lived directly opposite
his works and he installed in his house a steam heating apparatus
which excited much wonder and which must have been one of the
first in use. He built the first locomotive which was put to successful
commercial use. Trevithick had invented a steam road-engine with a
single steam cylinder and a large flywheel, which had attracted
considerable attention, but was wholly impracticable. It was
important, however, as it had one of the first high-pressure engines,
working above atmospheric pressure. In 1811 Blenkinsop of Leeds,
taking his idea from Trevithick, had a number of locomotives built to
operate a railway from the Middletown collieries to Leeds, a distance
of 3¹⁄₂ miles. Blenkinsop was not a mechanic and the work was
designed and executed by Matthew Murray. Murray used two steam
cylinders instead of one, driving onto the same shaft with cranks set
at right angles, and therefore introduced one of the most important
features of modern locomotive design. These engines were in daily
use for many years and were inspected by George Stephenson
when he began his development of the locomotive. Murray’s design
formed the basis from which he started. The engines, however, were
operated by a cog-wheel driving onto a continuous rack laid along
the road bed. It was not until a number of years later that Hedley and
Stephenson established the fact that the wheel friction of smooth
drivers would furnish adequate tractive power. The old Blenkinsop
engines, as they were called, hauled about thirty coal wagons at a
speed of 3¹⁄₄ miles an hour.
Murray’s most important inventions were connected with the flax
industry and for these he obtained a gold medal from the Society of
Arts. At the time they were developed, the flax trade was dying. Their
effect was to establish the British linen trade on a permanent and
secure foundation. All the machine tools used in his establishment
were designed and built by himself and among these was the planer
which was unquestionably one of the earliest built. He made similar
articles for other firms and started a branch of engineering for which
Leeds became famous. He was a frank, open-hearted man, and one
who contributed greatly to the industrial supremacy of England.
Joseph Clement was born in Westmoreland in 1779.[56] His father
was a weaver, a man of little education but of mental ability, a great
lover of nature and something of a mechanic. Joseph Clement
himself had only the merest elements of reading and writing. He
started in life as a thatcher and slater, but picked up the rudiments of
mechanics at the village blacksmith shop. Being grateful to the
blacksmith, he repaid him by making for him a lathe which was a
pretty creditable machine. On this he himself made flutes and fifes
for sale and also a microscope for his father to use in his nature
studies. As early as 1804 he began to work on screw cutting and
made a set of die-stocks, although he had never seen any. He
worked in several small country shops, then in Carlisle and in
Glasgow, where he took lessons in drawing from a Peter Nicholson
and became one of the most skillful draftsmen in England. Later he
went to Aberdeen and was earning three guineas ($15) a week
designing and fitting up power looms. By the end of 1813 he had
saved £100. With this he went to London, meaning sooner or later to
set up for himself. He first worked for an Alexander Galloway, a ward
politician and tradesman who owned a small shop. Galloway was a
slovenly manager and left things to run themselves. When Clement
started in he found the tools so poor that he could not do good work
with them, and immediately set to work truing them up, to the
surprise of his shopmates who had settled down to the slipshod
standards of the shop. Seeing that Clement was capable of the
highest grade work, one of his shopmates told him to go to Bramah’s
where such workmanship would be appreciated.
[56] The best information on Clement comes from Smiles’ “Industrial
Biography,” Chap. XIII.

He saw Bramah and engaged to work for him for a month on trial.
The result was so satisfactory that he signed an agreement for five
years, dated April 1, 1814, under which he became chief draftsman
and superintendent of the Pimlico works. Clement threw himself
eagerly into the new work and took great satisfaction in the high
quality of work which was the standard in Bramah’s establishment.
Bramah was greatly pleased with him and told him, “If I had secured
your services five years since I would now have been a richer man
by many thousands of pounds.” Bramah died, however, within a year
and his two sons returning from college took charge of the business.
They soon became jealous of Clement’s influence and by mutual
consent the agreement signed with their father was terminated.
Clement immediately went to Maudslay & Field’s as chief draftsman
and assisted in the development of the early marine engines which
they were building at that time. In 1817 he started in for himself in a
small shop in Newington, with a capital of £500 and his work there
until his death in 1844 is of great importance.
Figure 18. Matthew Murray
 Figure 19. Richard Roberts

As already pointed out, he had been working for many years on

the problem of screw cutting. Maudslay had carried this to a more
refined point than any other mechanic. Profiting by Maudslay’s
experience, Clement began the regular manufacture of taps and dies
in 1828, using the thread standards developed by Maudslay as his
basis. He introduced the tap with a small squared shank which would
fall through the threaded hole and save the time of backing out. He is
said to have been one of the first in England to employ revolving
cutters, using them to flute his taps. While he may have used such
cutters, he was certainly not the first to do so, as they were in use in
France at least thirty years earlier. He did important work in
developing the screw-cutting lathe, again improving upon Maudslay’s
work and increasing the accuracy of the device. He was given a
number of gold medals for various improvements in it, as well as for
his work on the planer. We have already referred to his “great planer”
and will only say here that of those who contributed to the early
development of this machine none have had a greater influence. He
executed the work on Charles Babbage’s famous calculating
machine, which attracted so much attention eighty years ago and
was probably the most refined and intricate piece of mechanism
constructed up to that time.
Clement was a rough and heavy-browed man, without polish, who
retained until the last his strong Westmoreland dialect. At no time did
he employ over thirty workmen in his factory, but they were all of the
very highest class. Among them was Sir Joseph Whitworth, who
continued his work on screw threads and brought about the general
use of what is now known as the Whitworth thread.
Richard Roberts, the last of those mentioned as inventors of the
metal planer, was born in Wales in 1789. Like most of the early
mechanics he had little or no education, and as soon as he was
strong enough he began work as a laborer in a quarry near his
home. His mechanical aptitude led him into odd jobs and he soon
became known for his dexterity. He finally determined to become a
mechanic and worked in several shops in the neighborhood. He was
employed for a time as pattern maker at John Wilkinson’s works at
Bradley, and is one of the few links between Wilkinson, who made
the first modern metal-cutting tool—his boring machine—and the
later generation of tool builders.
He drifted about, a jack-of-all-trades—turner, millwright, pattern
maker and wheelwright—to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and
finally up to London, where, after being with Holtzapffel for a short
time, he found work with Maudslay in 1814 and remained with him
several years. His experience here was valuable as he came in
contact with the best mechanical practice. The memoir of Roberts in
the “Transactions of the Institution of Civil Engineers”[57] states that
he worked on the Portsmouth block machinery, but this could hardly
have been true, as that machinery was in operation by 1808. He
ceased roving and did so well that he determined to return to the
North and begin business for himself.
[57] Vol. XXIV, p. 536. 1864.

He started at Manchester in 1817 and there he spent the best

years of his life. Few inventors have been more prolific or more
versatile. Within a year or two he had made one of the first planers,
already described; had invented the back-geared headstock, having
the cone pulley running loose upon the main spindle,[58] shown in
Fig. 21, and made other improvements in the screw-cutting lathe;
invented the first successful gas meter and built gear-cutting,
broaching and slotting machines and an improved beam-scale.
Holtzapffel says: “Probably no individual has originated so many
useful varieties of drilling machines as Mr. Richard Roberts.”
Throughout his book he frequently illustrates and describes tools and
machinery designed by Roberts, crediting him with the invention of
the slotter and key-seater, which he thinks was an outgrowth of
Brunel’s mortising machine, Fig. 11. Roberts’ punching and shearing
machinery was the standard for that time.[59]
[58] Ibid., p. 537.
[59] Holtzapffel: “Turning and Mechanical Manipulation,” Vol. II, pp. 568,
900, 920-922. London, 1847.
Figure 20. Roberts’ Planer, Built in 1817
 Figure 21. Roberts’ Back-Geared Lathe

By 1825 his reputation had so increased that his firm, Sharp,

Roberts & Company, was asked by a committee of the cotton
manufacturers of Manchester to undertake the development of an
automatic spinning mule. The spinners were the highest paid labor in
Lancashire textile industry, but they were difficult to work with and
prone to strike on a moment’s notice, closing the mills and throwing
other workmen out of employment. The operators asked Roberts
repeatedly to help them but he gave them no encouragement, as the
problem was conceded to be difficult and he said he was not familiar
with textile machinery. He had been thinking over the problem,
however, and the third time they called on him he said that he now
thought he could construct the required machinery. The result was
the invention in 1825 of his delicate and complex automatic spinning
mule in which hundreds of spindles “run themselves” with only the
attention of a few unskilled helpers to watch for broken threads and
mend them. This was one of the great textile inventions and has had
an enormous influence on the development of the cotton industry.
The next year, 1826, he went to Mülhouse in Alsace and laid the
foundation of modern French cotton manufacture. Later he invented
and patented a number of other important textile machines.
 With the development of the railway his firm began the
manufacture of locomotives. They built more than 1500, and
established a reputation equal to that of Stephenson & Company in
Newcastle. The engines were built interchangeably to templates and
gauges, and Roberts’ works were one of the first in England to grasp
and use the modern system of interchangeable manufacture.
In addition to all that has been mentioned, he invented the iron
billiard table, a successful punching and shearing machine, the most
powerful electro-magnet then made, a turret clock, a cigar-making
machine and a system of constructing steamships and equipping
them with twin screws having independent engines.
With a wonderful mechanical genius, he was lacking in worldly
wisdom and was a poor business man. He severed his connection
with Sharp, Roberts & Company, became involved financially and
finally died at London in 1864 in poverty. At his death a popular
subscription, headed by Sir William Fairbairn and many of the
nobility, was started to provide for his only daughter as a memorial of
the debt which England owed him. The memoir of him in the
“Transactions of the Institution of Civil Engineers” closes with the
following words: “The career of Mr. Roberts was remarkable, and it
should be carefully written by some one who could investigate
impartially the numerous inventions and improvements to which
claim could justly be laid for him, and who, at the same time, would,
with equal justice, show where his inventions have been pirated.” It
is a great pity that this was never done.
He was a rugged, straightforward, kindly man, of great inventive
power. He improved nearly everything he touched or superseded it
entirely by something better, and neither his name nor his work
should be forgotten.
 CHAPTER VI
GEARING AND MILLWORK
By 1830 the use of machine tools was becoming general; they
were being regularly manufactured and their design was
crystallizing. It was the period of architectural embellishment when
no tool was complete without at least a pair of Doric columns, and
planers were furnished in the Greek or Gothic style. As the first
machine frames were made of wood, much of the work probably
being done by cabinet makers, it was natural that they should show
the same influence that furniture did. It took several generations of
mechanics to work out the simpler lines of the later machines.
The application of scientific forms for gear teeth came at about this
time with the general development of the machine tool. The
suggestion of the use of epicyclic and involute curves is much older
than most of us realize. The first idea of them is ascribed to Roemer,
a Danish mathematician, who is said to have pointed out the
advantages of the epicyclic curve in 1674. De la Hire, a Frenchman,
suggested it a few years later, and went further, showing how the
direction of motion might be changed by toothed wheels. On the
basis of this, the invention of the bevel-gear has been attributed to
him. Willis,[60] however, has pointed out that he missed the essential
principle of rolling cones, as the conical lantern wheel which he used
was placed the wrong way, its apex pointing away from, instead of
coinciding with, the intersection of the axes. De la Hire also
investigated the involute and considered it equally suitable for tooth
outlines. Euler, in 1760, and Kaestner, in 1771, improved the method
of applying the involute, and Camus, a French mathematician, did
much to crystallize the modern principles of gearing. The two who
had the most influence were Camus and Robert Willis, a professor of
natural philosophy in Cambridge, whose name still survives in his
odontograph and tables. All of the later writers base their work on the
latter’s essay on “The Teeth of Wheels,” which appeared originally in
the second volume of the “Transactions of the Institution of Civil
Engineers,” 1837. Willis’ “Principles of Mechanism,” published in
1841, which included the above, laid down the general principles of
mechanical motion and transmission machinery. In fact, many of the
figures used in his book are found almost unchanged in the text-
books of today. Smeaton is said to have first introduced cast-iron
gears in 1769 at the Carron Iron Works near Glasgow, and Arkwright
used iron bevels in 1775. All of these, except the last two, were
mathematicians; and no phase of modern machinery owes more to
pure theory than the gearing practice of today.
[60] “Principles of Mechanism,” p. 49. London, 1841.

Camus gave lectures on mathematics in Paris when he was

twelve years old. At an early age he had attained the highest
academic honors in his own and foreign countries, and had become
examiner of engines and professor in the Royal Academy of
Architecture in Paris. He published a “Course of Mathematics,” in the
second volume of which were two books, or sections, devoted to the
consideration of the teeth of wheels, by far the fullest and clearest
treatment of this subject then published. These were translated
separately, the first English edition appearing in London in 1806, and
the second in 1837.[61] In these the theory of spur-, bevel-, and pin-
gearing is fully developed for epicycloidal teeth. In the edition of
1837, there is an appendix by John Hawkins, the translator, which is
of unusual interest. He gives the result of an inquiry which he made
in regard to the English gear practice at that time.[62] As the edition is
long since out of print and to be found only in the larger libraries, we
give his findings rather fully. His inquiries were addressed to the
principal manufacturers of machinery in which gearing was used,
and included, among others, Maudslay & Field, Rennie, Bramah,
Clement, and Sharp, Roberts & Company. To quote Hawkins:
[61] “A Treatise on the Teeth of Wheels.” Translated from the French of
M. Camus by John Isaac Hawkins, C.E. London, 1837.
[62] Ibid., p. 175.
 A painful task now presents itself, which the editor would gladly avoid, if he
could do so without a dereliction of duty; namely, to declare that there is a
lamentable deficiency of the knowledge of principles, and of correct practice, in a
majority of those most respectable houses in forming the teeth of their wheel-work.
Some of the engineers and millwrights said that they followed Camus, and
formed their teeth from the epicycloid derived from the diameter of the opposite
wheel....
One said, “We have no method but the rule of thumb;” another, “We thumb out
the figure;” by both which expressions may be understood that they left their
workmen to take their own course.
Some set one point of a pair of compasses in the center of a tooth, at the
primitive circle (pitch-circle), and with the other point describe a segment of a circle
for the off side of the next tooth.... Others set the point of the compasses at
different distances from the center of the tooth, nearer or farther off; also within or
without the line of centers, each according to some inexplicable notion received
from his grandfather or picked up by chance. It is said inexplicable, because no
tooth bounded at the sides by segments of circles can work together without such
friction as will cause an unnecessary wearing away.
It is admitted that with a certain number of teeth of a certain proportionate length
as compared with the radii, there may be a segment of a circle drawn from some
center which would give “very near” a true figure to the tooth; but “very near” ought
to be expunged from the vocabulary of engineers and millwrights; for that “very
near” will depend on the chance of hitting the right center and right radius,
according to the diameter of the wheel, and the number of teeth; against which
hitting, the odds are very great indeed.
Among the Mathematical Instrument Makers, Chronometer, Clock and Watch
Makers, the answers to the inquiries were, by some, “We have no rule but the eye
in the formation of the teeth of our wheels;” by others, “We draw the tooth correctly
on a large scale to assist the eye in judging of the figure of the small teeth;” by
another, “In Lancashire, they make the teeth of watch wheels of what is called the
bay leaf pattern; they are formed altogether by the eye of the workman; and they
would stare at you for a simpleton to hear you talk about the epicycloidal curve.”
Again, “The astronomical instrument makers hold the bay leaf pattern to be too
pointed a form for smooth action; they make the end of the tooth more rounding
than the figure of the bay leaf.”
It is curious to observe with what accuracy the practiced eye will determine
forms.... How important it is, then, that these Lancashire bay leaf fanciers should
be furnished with pattern teeth of large dimensions cut accurately in metal or at
least in cardboard; and that they should frequently study them, and compare their
work with the patterns. These Lancashire workmen are called bay leaf fanciers,
because they cannot be bay leaf copiers; since it is notorious that there are not
two bay leaves of the same figure.
 Hawkins then describes a method of generating correctly curved
teeth, or rather of truing them after they had been roughly formed,
devised by Mr. Saxton of Philadelphia, “who is justly celebrated for
his excessively acute feeling of the nature and value of accuracy in
mechanism; and who is reputed not to be excelled by any man in
Europe or America for exquisite nicety of workmanship.” By this
method the faces of the teeth were milled true by a cutter, the side of
which lay in a plane through the axis of a describing circle which was
rolled around a pitch circle clamped to the side of the gear being cut.
It is by this general method that the most accurate gears and gear
cutters are formed today.
While he by no means originated the system, Hawkins seems first
to have grasped the practical advantages of the involute form of
teeth. Breaking away from the influence of Camus, the very authority
he was translating, who seems to have controlled the thought of
everyone else, Hawkins writes the following rather remarkable
words:[63]
[63] Ibid., pp. 160 et seq.

Since M. Camus has treated of no other curve than the epicycloid, it would
appear that he considered it to supersede all others for the figure of the teeth of
wheels and pinions. And the editor must candidly acknowledge that he entertained
the same opinion until after the greater part of the foregoing sheets were printed
off; but on critically examining the properties of the involute with a view to the
better explaining of its application to the formation of the teeth of wheels and
pinions, the editor has discovered advantages which had before escaped his
notice, owing, perhaps, to his prejudice in favor of the epicycloid, from having,
during a long life, heard it extolled above all other curves; a prejudice strengthened
too by the supremacy given to it by De la Hire, Doctor Robison, Sir David
Brewster, Dr. Thomas Young, Mr. Thomas Reid, Mr. Buchannan, and many others,
who have, indeed, described the involute as a curve by which equable motion
might be communicated from wheel to wheel, but scarce any of whom have held it
up as equally eligible with the epicycloid; and owing also to his perfect conviction,
resulting from strict research, that a wheel and pinion, or two wheels, accurately
formed according to the epicycloidal curve, would work with the least possible
degree of friction, and with the greatest durability.
But the editor had not sufficiently adverted to the case where one wheel or
pinion drives, at the same time, two or more wheels or pinions of different
diameters, for which purpose the epicycloid is not perfectly applicable, because
the form of the tooth of the driving wheel cannot be generated by a circle equal to
the radius of more than one of the driven wheels or pinions. In considering this
case, he found that the involute satisfies all the conditions of perfect figure, for
wheels of any sizes, to work smoothly in wheels of any other sizes; although,
perhaps, not equal to the epicycloid for pinions of few leaves.

With Joseph Clement, he experimented somewhat to determine

the relative end-thrust of involute and cycloidal teeth, deciding that
the advantage, if any, lay with the former. He details methods of
laying out involute teeth and concludes:
Before dismissing the involute it may be well to remark that what has been said
respecting that curve should be considered as a mere sketch, there appearing to
be many very interesting points in regard to its application in the formation of the
teeth of wheels which require strict investigation and experiment.
It is the editor’s intention to pursue the inquiry and should he discover a clear
theory and systematic practice in the use of the involute, he shall feel himself
bound to give his views to the public in a separate treatise. He thinks he perceives
a wide field, but is free to confess that his vision is as yet obscure. What he has
given on the involute is more than was due from him, as editor of Camus, who
treated only of the epicycloid, but the zeal of a new convert to any doctrine is not
easily restrained.

So far as the writer knows this is the first real appreciation of the
value of the involute curve for tooth outlines, and Hawkins should be
given a credit which he has not received,[64] especially as he points
the way, for the first time, to the possibility of a set of gears any one
of which will gear correctly with any other of the set. It was thought at
that time that there should be two diameters of describing circles
used in each pair of gears, each equal to the pitch radius of the
opposite wheel or pinion. This gave radial flanks for all teeth, but
made the faces different for each pair. The use of a single size of
describing circle throughout an entire set of cycloidal gears, whereby
they could be made to gear together in any combination, was not
known until a little later.
[64] John Isaac Hawkins was a member of the Institution of Civil
Engineers. He was the son of a watch and clock maker and was born at
Taunton, Somersetshire, in 1772. At an early age he went to the United
States and “entered college at Jersey, Pennsylvania, as a student of
medicine,” but did not follow it up. He was a fine musician and had a
marked aptitude for mechanics. He returned to England, traveled a great
deal on the Continent, and acquired a wide experience. He was consulted
 frequently on all kinds of engineering activities, one of them being the
attempt, in 1808, to drive a tunnel under the Thames. For many years he
practiced in London as a patent agent and consulting engineer. He went to
the United States again in the prosecution of some of his inventions, and
died in Elizabeth, N. J., in 1865. From a Memoir in the “Transactions of the
Institution of Civil Engineers,” Vol. XXV, p. 512. 1865.

Professor Willis seems to be the first to have pointed out the

proper basis of this interchangeability in cycloidal gearing. With the
clearness which characterized all his work he states: “If for a set of
wheels of the same pitch a constant describing circle be taken and
employed to trace those portions of the teeth which project beyond
each pitch line by rolling on the exterior circumference, and those
which lie within it by rolling on its interior circumference, then any two
wheels of this set will work correctly together.... The diameter of the
describing circle must not be made greater than the radius of the
pitch-circle of any of the wheels.... On the contrary, when the
describing circle is less in diameter than the radius of the pitch-circle,
the root of the tooth spreads, and it acquires a very strong form....
The best rule appears to be that the diameter of the constant
describing circle in a given set of wheels shall be made equal to the
least radius of the set.”[65] This practice is standard for cycloidal
gearing to this day. In his “Principles of Mechanism,” Willis did the
work on involute gearing which Hawkins set before himself; and also
describes “a different mode of sizing the teeth” which had “been
adopted in Manchester,” for which he suggests the name “diametral
pitch.”[66]
[65] Willis: “Principles of Mechanism,” Articles 114-116. London, 1841.
See also “Transactions of the Institution of Civil Engineers,” Vol. II, p. 91.
[66] Diametral pitch, which is credited to John George Bodmer, was long
known as “Manchester pitch.”
 CHAPTER VII
FAIRBAIRN AND BODMER
With the improvement in machinery came improvement in millwork
and power transmission. We quote in the next chapter Nasmyth’s
description of the millwork of his boyhood.[67] Two of the mechanics
most influential in the change from these conditions were Sir William
Fairbairn and his younger brother, Sir Peter Fairbairn. They were
born in Scotland but spent their boyhood in poverty in the
neighborhood of Newcastle, in the same village with George
Stephenson.
[67] See page 85.

Sir William Fairbairn went to London in 1811 and obtained work

with the Rennies. The shop, however, was filled with union men who
set their shoulders against all outsiders. After struggling for a
foothold for six weeks, he was set adrift, almost penniless, and
turned his face northward. He obtained odd jobs in Hertfordshire as
a millwright, and returned again to London in a few weeks, where he
finally found work and remained for two years, most of the time at
Mr. Penn’s engine shop in Greenwich. In the spring of 1813 he
worked his way through southern England and Wales to Dublin,
where he spent the summer constructing nail-making machinery for
a Mr. Robinson, who had determined to introduce the industry into
Ireland. The machinery, however, was never set at work owing to the
opposition of the workmen, and the trade left Ireland permanently.
Fairbairn went from Dublin to Liverpool and proceeded to
Manchester, the city to which Nasmyth, Roberts, Whitworth and
Bodmer all gravitated. He found work with an Adam Parkinson,
remaining with him for two years as a millwright, at good wages. “In
those days,” wrote Fairbairn, “a good millwright was a man of large
resources; he was generally well educated, and could draw out his
own designs and work at the lathe; he had a knowledge of mill
machinery, pumps, and cranes, could turn his hand to the bench or
the forge with equal adroitness and facility. If hard pressed, as was
frequently the case in country places far from towns, he could devise
for himself expedients which enabled him to meet special
requirements, and to complete his work without assistance. This was
the class of men with whom I associated in early life,—proud of their
calling, fertile in resources, and aware of their value in a country
where the industrial arts were rapidly developing.”[68]
[68] “Useful Information for Engineers, Second Series,” p. 212.

In 1817 Fairbairn and James Lillie, a shopmate, started out as

general millwrights. They hired a small shed for 12 shillings a week
and equipped it with a lathe of their own making, to turn shafts, and
“a strong Irishman to drive it.” Their first order of importance came
from Mr. Adam Murray, a large cotton spinner, who took them over
his mill and asked them whether they were competent to renew his
main drive. They boldly replied that they were willing and able to
execute the work, but were more than apprehensive when Mr.
Murray told them he would call the next day and look over their
workshop to satisfy himself. He came, pondered over “the
nakedness of the land,” “sized up” the young partners and told them
to go ahead. Although a rush job, the work was done on time and so
well that Murray recommended the new firm to Mr. John Kennedy,
the largest cotton spinner in the kingdom. For his firm, MacConnel &
Kennedy, Fairbairn & Lillie equipped a large, new mill in 1818, which
was an immediate success and at once put the struggling partners in
the front rank of engineering millwrights.
“They found the machinery driven by large, square cast-iron shafts
on which huge wooden drums, some of them as much as four feet in
diameter, revolved at the rate of about forty revolutions a minute; and
the couplings were so badly fitted that they might be heard creaking
and groaning a long way off.... Another serious defect lay in the
construction of the shafts, and in the mode of fixing the couplings,
which were constantly giving way, so that a week seldom passed
without one or more breaks-down.”[69]
 [69] Smiles: “Industrial Biography,” p. 389.

Fairbairn remedied this by the introduction of wrought-iron shafts,

driven at double or treble the speed, and by improving and
standardizing the design of pulleys, hangers and couplings. In the
course of a few years a revolution was effected, and by 1840 the
shafting speeds in textile mills had risen to from 300 to 350
revolutions per minute.
William Fairbairn’s influence was felt in many ways. His treatise on
“Mills and Millwork” and numerous papers before the learned
societies were authoritative for many years. He improved the design
of waterwheels, and was one of the first to undertake iron
shipbuilding as a special industry. He established a plant at Millwall,
on the Thames, “where in the course of some fourteen years he built
upwards of a hundred and twenty iron ships, some of them above
two thousand tons burden. It was, in fact, the first great iron
shipbuilding yard in Britain.”[70] To facilitate the building of his iron
ships he invented, about 1839, improved riveting machinery. With
Robert Stephenson he built the Conway and Britannia Tubular
Bridges. Probably no man in England did so much to extend the use
of iron into new fields, and his formulæ for the strength of boilers,
tubing, shafting, etc., were standard for years. Like Nasmyth, William
Fairbairn has left an autobiography which gives a full account of his
career. It is not, however, so well written or so interesting. He died in
1874, at the age of eighty-five, loaded with every honor the nation
could bestow.
[70] Ibid., p. 394.

His younger brother, Sir Peter Fairbairn, of Leeds, was

apprenticed to a millwright while William was a journeyman
mechanic in London. A few years later he became foreman in a
machine shop constructing cotton machinery, and for ten years he
worked in England, Scotland and on the Continent, wholly on textile
machinery. In 1828 he came to Leeds, in the first flush of its
manufacturing prosperity. Mr. Marshall, who had helped Matthew
Murray, gave him his start and encouraged him to take over the
Wellington Foundry, which, under Fairbairn’s management, was for
thirty years one of the greatest machine shops in England. To the