Other mills soon followed. The first to have iron beams as well as stanchions seems to be the Benyons, Marshall & Bage flax spinning mill in St Michael’s Street, Shrewsbury. This was built in 1796-7 from the designs of Charles Bage (1752-1822) a friend and correspondent of Strutt. The much-publicized Salford Twist Company’s cotton mill at Salford of 1799-1801, designed and built by Boulton & Watt of steam-engine fame—they knew Bage’s mill since they had installed his steam-engine—was according to present evidence the second[[152]] to be erected with a complete internal skeleton of iron. By 1800, then, a system of fire-resistant construction using cast-iron stanchions and cast-iron beams, carrying what are sometimes called ‘jack-arches’ of brick, had been established in the world of English mill-building. By 1850 such construction was in use in Britain for almost all high-grade building. The system was significantly modified, however, after about 1845 by the substitution of rolled—that is wrought—iron beams, as proposed by Sir William Fairbairn (1789-1874),[[153]] since cast-iron ones had proved dangerously brittle.
It is not necessary here to do more than sketch out the steps by which the new iron skeleton structure became generally accepted. In 1802-11 James Wyatt introduced it in the Castellated New Palace that he built at Kew for George III, an edifice of which little is otherwise known since it was demolished in 1827-8. In line with this curious conjunction of technical and stylistic innovation, already noted in Schinkel’s somewhat later cast-iron Gothic monument of 1819-20 in Berlin, is Porden’s profuse use of iron for the Gothic traceries and balustrades at Eaton Hall[[154]] in Cheshire in 1804-12, as also by Hopper in the even more ornate Gothic Conservatory at Carlton House in London in 1811-12 (Plate [60B]).
Isolated columns of iron appeared in many edifices from the 1790s on. The most notable extant examples, perhaps, are those in the kitchen and in several of the rooms that were added by Nash to the Royal Pavilion at Brighton in 1818-21 (Plate [58A]). His ‘Chinese’ staircases of 1815-18 there are entirely of decorative pierced ironwork and the framing of his big onion dome is also of metal, although of course invisible. From the early use of iron columns for gallery supports in churches, increasingly general by the early 1800s, there shortly developed the aspiration to exploit iron still more extensively in such edifices. In three churches that Rickman and the ironmaster John Cragg built in Liverpool, St George’s, Everton, and St Michael’s, Toxteth Road, both begun in 1813, and St Philip’s, Hardman Street, completed in 1816, the entire internal structure is of iron. At St Michael’s the new material is not restricted to the interior but appears on the outside as well. Rickman’s increasing archaeological erudition and that of his contemporaries soon limited the use of iron in Gothic churches, however; by Pugin and the Camdenians it was rigidly proscribed. Structural elements of iron in churches of any architectural pretension became acceptable again only in the fifties (see Chapter [10]).
Turning to what long remained the most notable field of metal construction, bridge building,[[155]] one finds a rapid increase in the numbers and the spans of English metal bridges from the mid 1790s on. In Shropshire, where the first iron bridge and the first all-iron-framed factory had been built, one of the greatest English engineers, Thomas Telford (1757-1834),[[156]] built the Buildwas Bridge with a span of 130 feet in 1795-6. At the same time the much longer and handsomer metal arch of the Sunderland Bridge in County Durham was rising to the designs of Rowland Burdon. He was assisted, it appears, by certain ideas supplied by Thomas Paine (1737-1809), better known for his political writings than as a technician, who had had some association with bridge-building in America. Burdon was a Member of Parliament and neither an architect nor an engineer. Telford, however, though not professionally trained as an architect, had worked for Sir William Chambers as a journeyman-mason on Somerset House in his youth; throughout his career he built masonry toll-houses and even, on occasion, modest churches in a competent if rudimentary Romantic Classical vein.
In connexion with his work on the Bridgewater Canal and on the road system of the Scottish Highlands, Telford designed and built innumerable bridges, the majority of them of stone. But some of his later iron bridges, more skilfully devised technically and more graceful visually than the Buildwas Bridge, deserve mention here. On the Waterloo Bridge of 1815 at Bettws-y-Coed in Wales he used an openwork inscriptional band and floral badges rather than architectural detail to give elegance and even richness to a modest cast-iron arch. A longer and simpler bridge of similar design but unknown authorship built in 1816 still spans the Liffey in Dublin.
The same year as the Waterloo Bridge, at Craigellachie, amid austere Scottish mountains, Telford bridged the Spey with a plain latticed iron arch. But it is worth noting that he elaborated the masonry abutments as battlemented towers in a wholly Picturesque way (Plate [59]). For the Menai Bridge, built in 1819-24 between North Wales and Anglesey, Telford used a new principle in metal construction, suspending his roadbed from metal chains (Plate [58B]). This was a principle of great antiquity already exploited with success in America.[[157]] Telford’s masonry towers at the Menai Bridge are of extremely elegant Romantic Classical design, tapered like Egyptian pylons and pierced with delicate arches. In the twin bridge to this at Conway, also in North Wales, the close proximity of the Edwardian castle led him to provide Castellated towers. In a still later arched bridge at Tewkesbury of 1826 the latticed metalwork itself has the cuspings of Gothic tracery.
The Menai Bridge remains the longest of its type in the British Isles. I. K. Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol, for which he won the competition in 1829, but which was begun only in 1837, has already been mentioned because of the Egyptian detailing proposed for the piers. This bridge was finally completed only in 1864 by W. H. Barlow (1812-92) using the materials of Brunel’s earlier Hungerford Suspension Bridge in London. Of early arched metal bridges there are very many and by all the leading English engineers of the first half of the century: John Rennie (1761-1821), I. K. Brunel (1806-59), George Stephenson (1781-1848) and his son Robert (1803-59), as well as Telford. The new railways, from the early thirties on, required even more bridges than the canals constructed by the previous generation.
In France Napoleon’s engineers built two arched iron bridges across the Seine. L.-A. de Cessart (1719-1806) designed before 1800 and Delon in 1801-3 executed the Pont des Arts, the first French bridge of iron, and Lamandé completed the Pont du Jardin du Roi in 1806.[[158]] Neither is comparable in span or in logic of design to the earlier English examples, thus reversing the pre-eminence which the French had held as bridge-builders so long as masonry was used. The much later Pont du Carrousel in Paris, built by A.-R. Polonceau (1788-1847) in 1834-6, was considerably superior to these Napoleonic examples, though hardly epoch-making. But already in 1824, just as Telford’s Menai Bridge was completed, Marc Séguin (1786-1875) was spanning the Rhône near Tournon with a suspension bridge hung on wire ropes[[159]] instead of chains.
From the early forties Séguin’s cable principle was developed much further in America in bridges at Wheeling, W. Va., Pittsburgh, Penna., and Cincinnati, Ohio, by the German immigrant John A. Roebling (1806-69). Those at Wheeling[[160]] and Cincinnati are still in use. The more dramatically sited Niagara Falls Bridge of 1852, which attracted world-wide attention when it was new, is no longer extant (Plate [60A]); its success, however, led to Roebling’s being commissioned to build the famous Brooklyn Bridge[[161]] in New York. Begun by him in 1869 and completed by his son Washington A. Roebling (1837-1926) in 1883, this is still one of the principal sights of New York. It is sad to record that work in the caissons sunk for the foundations of the piers killed the designer.
Bridges are at the edge of the realm of architecture. Fairly early, moreover, they came almost entirely under the control of men without architectural training or standards—Roebling, for example, was such a one. Ordinary buildings, all of iron or with much use of iron, are more significant as the century proceeds, both in France and in England. Hopper’s Carlton House Conservatory (Plate [60B]) has been mentioned. In 1809 the architect F.-J. Belanger (1744-1818), a pupil of Brongniart, replaced the domed wooden roof of the Halle au Blé in Paris, added in 1782 by J.-G. Legrand (1743-1807) and J. Molinos (1743-1831), with one of metal. The Marché de la Madeleine, designed by M.-G. Veugny (1785-1850) possibly as early as 1824 but not built until 1835-8, was apparently all of metal internally; its masonry exterior, however, was quite conventional. Already in 1835, in the fish pavilion which formed part of his rather Durandesque Hungerford Market in London, Charles Fowler had outstripped this in the direct and elegant use of light metal components, here with no surrounding shell of masonry at all.