The Andrews Pages Magazine & Newspaper Articles> This Page Joseph Whitworth: Lives Which Hung by a Thread* Recently, it was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir Joseph Whitworth of Darley Dale, near Matlock. Most will remember him for his development of the standardised Whitworth thread and for his local philanthropy. What is less known, however, is his work on the development of armaments and, in particular, the rifle implicated in many of the 600,000 lives lost in the American Civil War. It was known as the Whitworth sharpshooter. Lawton Slaney Articles Index Previous Page Next Page More Links Also see About Matlock About Matlock Bath Images of Matlock Find a Name The Whitworth designed cannon which could fire a shell over 6 miles. Sir Joseph Whitworth's early life and rise to ultimate fame and honour is well enough documented. The local reader will know that he was born in Manchester, and ended his life with a name and fame almost synonymous with the village of Darley Dale, near Matlock, where he was buried in 1887 after his death in Monaco. Joseph Whitworth   This prolific inventor designed not only most of the revolutionary machinery which fathered the Industrial Revolution, but was responsible for the techniques of standardisation which produced astonishingly accurate machinery, even by today's standards. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 Whitworth exhibited no less than twenty-three inventions, for which he won more awards than anyone else at this show. It was seen by more than six million people. Until standardisation appeared, every machine was a one-off. If something broke, a replacement had to be manufactured to fit; but mass production of spare parts such as nuts, bolts, washers and so on meant that substitutes were immediately available... and most importantly, were interchangeable. Joseph Whitworth's contribution to this rationalisation earned him the title 'the father of modern production engineering.' Without him, the Industrial Revolution could easily have petered out. With him, mass production took off. From industrial knitting machines and horse-drawn combine harvesters to a whole range of armaments, Whitworth's genius, allied to his passion for accuracy and capacity for limitless hard work, paid dividends. The many tools produced at this time, in the middle of the nineteenth century, were, however, to have a far-reaching effect on the very lives and deaths of countless thousands of people. Whitworth and weapons of individual destruction Whitworth's all-embracing interest turned to armaments at the time of the Crimean War in the mid-1850s. He saw room for improvement in everything, including guns, and he began making suggestions to the Government for the mass-production of these weapons. Finding fault everywhere, he produced a rifle that was more efficient than the then-standard Enfield; so in 1854 Whitworth redesigned the bullets to fit an hexagonal barrel, and it was found that accuracy was doubled as a result (Rifling, designed to spin the bullet as it left the muzzle, was originally used in Austria as far back as 1520.) The Whitworth rifle was tested by the National Rifle Association, who rejected it because they judged the bore, at 0.45 calibre, to be too small, compared with the current standard 0.577. This was in spite of the fact that the Whitworth rifle had a barrel length of only 20", whereas the Enfield was 78". Whitworth, incensed at this move in the wrong direction, moved house to Pall Mall so that he could live directly opposite his enemy, the War Office. By 1859 Whitworth was growing rich, and was able to afford extensive testing of his rifle. He conducted a hair-raising and elaborate series of tests in which the muzzle end of a rifle was blocked with an 18"-length of lead, rammed home hard. The gun was then fired to see if the breech end of the gun would burst. This experiment was repeated with increasing loads of gunpowder, with the same result. Not only was the Whitworth rifle more accurate... it had treble the power of penetration. The new technique had fathered yet another of Whitworth's inventions: he invented a process for making a much stronger 'fluid compressed' steel from which to make his rifles, steel which ensured that his guns were unburstable. New rifles changed the way wars were fought These improvements changed the face of war, because a defending army couldn't now get close to the enemy, shelter behind sandbags, and then charge whilst the opposing troops were reloading: the new rifles penetrated protective barricades with the ease of a knife through butter. But the new design was found to be prone to fouling and, as a result, was rejected by the British government. It was, however, adopted by the French Army, and found its way across the Atlantic to where the American Civil War had erupted in 1861. The Civil War rifled musket was able to kill at a range of over half a mile, thus making a direct frontal assault a suicidal affair. The accurate fire of these new rifles spelt disaster for troops of both sides. On one occasion 26,000 men died in a day's fighting. The Confederate States found devious ways of evading the blockade imposed by the Unionists, and bought the English rifle in large quantities. It was known here as the Whitworth Sharpshooter. Queen Victoria opened the first meeting of the British Rifle Association in 1860 by firing a Whitworth Sharpshooter and scoring a bullseye at 400 yards. It's worth noting that this was in no way a demonstration of royal prowess on the range: a mechanical rest had been set up for Her Majesty, and tested by expert marksmen before she was allowed to squeeze the trigger. In 1855 Whitworth also designed a large 2.75-inch-bore rifled cannon which hurled a 121b 11oz shell over a distance of six miles. This was also used in the Civil War, but was again rejected by the British Army. A depressing contradiction Whitworth was created a baronet in 1869, and in 1870 he and his second wife Mary moved to Stancliffe Hall in Darley Dale, where they settled down to a less frantic way of life. By this time, Sir Joseph's years as an inspired mechanical engineer were about to come to an end. He directed his attention to extracting stone from his quarries at Stancliffe, but settled into philanthropic local activities, and died in January 1887. A century-and-a-half later we can still buy sets of tools known as 'Whitworth' spanners, taps and dies. Looking back, however, over Joseph Whitworth's non-martial achievements in the earlier part of his life, together with the extraordinary fruitfulness of his contributions to making man's life easier and more comfortable, it seems a sad contradiction that he spent around twenty years perfecting a very efficient means of slaughtering his fellow human beings. [One image not included] *This is a copy of an article published in "Reflections" in May 2004, Vol. 13 Issue 148, pp.18-21. "Reflections" is Derbyshire's largest-circulation targeted lifestyle magazine, serving Dronfield, Chesterfield, Matlock and Bakewell areas. The article is reproduced here with the very kind permission and written consent of the author, © Lawton Slaney, and Bannister Publications Ltd. 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