Engineering reminiscences contributed to "Power" and "American machinist"

by Charles T. Porter

My drawings and patterns were purchased by the Whitworth Company, and I was installed with one draftsman in a separate office, and prepared to put the work in hand at once for a 12×24-inch engine for the Paris Exposition, where Ormerod, Grierson & Co. had secured the space, and the drawings for which I had completed. If I remember rightly, the patterns were finished also. While I was getting things in order, Mr. Widdowson came into my office, and in a very important manner said to me: “You must understand, sir, that we work here to the decimal system and all drawings must be conformed to it.” I received this order meekly, and we went to work to make our drawings all over, for the single purpose of changing their dimensions from binary to decimal divisions of the inch. There was of course quite a body of detail drawings, and to make these over, with the pains required to make these changes to an unaccustomed system, and make and mount the tracings, took us nearly three weeks. When finished I took the roll of tracings to Mr. Widdowson’s office. He was not in, and I left them for him. An hour or so later he came puffing and blowing into my office with the drawings. He was a heavy man, and climbing upstairs exhausted him. When he got his breath, he broke out: “We can’t do anything with these. Haven’t got a decimal gauge in the shop.” “You gave me express orders to make my drawings to the decimal system.” “Damn it, I meant in halves and quarters and all that, and write them decimals.” So all that work and time were thrown away, and we had to make a new set of tracings from the drawings I had brought, in order to figure the dimensions in decimals. He told me afterwards that when Mr. Whitworth commenced the manufacture of cylindrical gauges he made them to the decimal divisions of the inch, imagining that was a better mode of division than that by continual bisection, and supposing that he had influence enough to effect the change. But nobody would buy his gauges. He had to call them in and make what people wanted. “And now,” said Mr. Widdowson, “there is not a decimal gauge in the world.” He knew, too, for up to that time they made them all. So Mr. Whitworth could make a mistake, and I found that this was not the worst one that he had made.

While time was being wasted in this manner, the subject of manufacturing the governors came up. Mr. Whitworth concluded that he would first try one on his own shop engine, so one was bought from Ormerod, Grierson & Co. I had a message from Mr. Widdowson to come to the shop and see my governor. It was acting in a manner that I had seen before, the counterpoise rising and dropping to its seat twice every time the belt lap came around. “Total failure, you see,” said Mr. Widdowson, “and I got a new belt for it, too.” I saw a chance to make an interesting observation, and asked him if he would get an old belt and try that. This he did, lapping the ends as before about 18 inches, according to the universal English custom, which I had long before found it necessary carefully to avoid. As I knew would be the case, the action was not improved at all. I then cut off the lap, butted the ends of the belt, and laced them in the American style, and lo! the trouble vanished. The governor stood motionless, only floating up and down slightly with the more important changes of load. Mr. Whitworth was greatly pleased, and at once set about their manufacture, in a full line of sizes.

He made the change, to which I have referred already, from the urn shape to the semi-spherical form of the counterpoise. In this connection he laid the law down to me in this dogmatic fashion: “Let no man show me a mechanical form for which he cannot give me a mechanical reason.” But Jove sometimes nods. They were to exhibit in Paris a large slotting-machine. The form of the upright did not suit Mr. Whitworth exactly. He had the pattern set up in the erecting-shop, and a board tacked on the side, cut to an outline that he directed. He came to look at it every day for a week, and ordered some change or other. Finally it was gotten to his mind, the pattern was altered accordingly, and a new casting made. This was set up in the shop, and I happened to be present when he came to see it. “Looks like a horse that has been taught to hold his head up,” said he. “Mechanical reason,” thought I, fresh from my lesson. When finished the slotting-machine was tried in the shop, and found to yield in the back. The tool sprang away from its work and rounded the corner. Mr. Whitworth had whittled the pattern away and ruined it. Instead of being sent to Paris, it was broken up.

My experiment with the governor proved the defect in the English system of lacing belts. Every machine in the land, of whatever kind, tool or loom or spinning or drawing frame, or whatever it was, driven by a belt, halted in its motion every time the lap in the belt passed over a pulley, sufficiently to drop my governor, when the same motion was given to it, and no one had ever observed this irregularity.

I thought they would never be ready to set about work on the engine. First, Mr. Widdowson ordered that every casting and forging, large and small, must be in the shop before one of them was put in hand. After this was done I found a number of men at work making sheet-iron templets of everything. I saw one man filing the threads in the edges of a templet for a ³⁄₈-inch bolt. When these were all finished and stamped, an operation that took quite a week, a great fuss was made about commencing work on everything simultaneously.

I went into the shop to see what was going on. The first thing to attract my attention was the steam-chest, then made separate from the cylinder. A workman—their best fitter, as I afterwards learned—was engaged in planing out the cavities in which the exhaust valves worked. I saw no center line, and asked him where it was. He had never heard of such a thing. “What do you measure from?” “From the side of the casting.” I called his attention to the center line on the drawing, from which all the measurements were taken, and told him all about it. He seemed very intelligent, and under my direction set the chest up on a plane table and made a center line around it and another across it, and set out everything from these lines, and I left him going on finely. An hour later I looked in again. He was about his job in the old way. To my question he explained that his foreman had come around and told him I had no business in the shop, that he gave him his directions, and he must finish his job just as he began it.

I made no reply but went to Mr. Hoyle’s office, and asked him if he knew what they were doing in the shop. He smiled and said, “I suppose they are finally making an engine for you.” “No, they are not.” “What are they doing?” “Making scrap iron.” “What do you mean?” I told him the situation. He took his hat and went out, saying, “I must see this myself.”

A couple of hours later he sent for me, and told me this. “I have been all around the works and seen all that is doing. It is all of the same piece. I have had a long interview with Mr. Widdowson, and am sorry to tell you that we can’t make your engine; we don’t know how. It seems to be entirely out of our line. The intelligence does not exist in these works to make a steam-engine. Nobody knows how to set about anything. I have stopped the work, and want to know what you think had better be done about it?” I asked him to let me think the matter over till the next morning. I then went to him and suggested to him to let me find a skilled locomotive-erecter who was also a trained draftsman, and to organize a separate department for the engine and governor manufacture, and put this man at the head of it, to direct it without interference. This was gladly agreed to. I found a young man, Mr. John Watts, who proved to be the very man for the place. In a week we were running under Mr. Watts’ direction, and the engine was saved. But what a time the poor man had! Everything seemed to be done wrong. It is hardly to be believed. He could not get a rod turned round, or a hole bored round.

In their toolmaking they relied entirely on grinding with “Turkey dust.” I once saw a gang of a dozen laborers working a long grinding-bar, in the bore, 10 inches diameter by 8 feet long, in the tailstock of an enormous lathe. I peered through this hole when the bar was withdrawn. It looked like a ploughed field. Scattered over it here and there were projections which had been ground off by these laborers. On the other hand, the planing done in these works was magnificent. I never saw anything to equal it. But circular work beat them entirely. I found that the lathe hands never thought of such a thing as getting any truth by the sliding cut. After that they went for the surface with coarse files, and relied for such approximate truth as they did get upon grinding with the everlasting Turkey dust.

Mr. Whitworth invented the duplex lathe tool, but I observed that they never used it. I asked Mr. Widdowson why this was. “Because,” said he, “the duplex tool will not turn round.” After a while I found out why. When our engine was finished, Mr. Widdowson set it upon two lathe beds and ran it. Lucky that he did. The bottom of the engine bed was planed, and it could be leveled nicely on the flat surfaces of their lathe beds. The fly-wheel ran nearly a quarter of an inch out of truth. He set up some tool-boxes on one of the lathe beds, and turned the rim off in place, both sides and face being out. That, of course, made it run perfectly true. I asked the lathe hand how he could turn out such a job. He replied, “Come and see my lathe.” I found the spindle quite an eighth of an inch loose in the main bearing, the wear of twenty or thirty years. He told me all of the lathes in the works were in a similar condition. That explained many things. The mystery of those gear patterns was solved. Every spindle in the gear-cutting machine was wabbling loose in its holes. I can’t call them bearings. Now it appeared why they could not use the duplex tools. With a tool cutting on one side, they relied on the pressure of the cut to keep the lathe spindle in contact with the opposite side of its main bearing, and a poor reliance that was, but with a tool cutting on each side, fancy the situation. Then boring a true hole was obviously impossible. The workmen became indifferent; they had no reamers, relied entirely on grinding. I asked, Why do you not renew these worn-out bushings? but could never get an answer to the question. Some power evidently forbade it, and the fact is that no man about the place dared to think of such a thing as intimating to Mr. Whitworth that one of his lathe bearings required any fixing up, or that it was or could be anything short of perfect. He (Mr. Whitworth) had designed it as a perfect thing; ergo, it was perfect, and no man dared say otherwise.