CHAPTER XV.
JOSEPH AND EDMUND FRY, 1764.
HIS foundry, first known as Fry and Pine’s, had its origin in Bristol in the year 1764.
Mr. Joseph Fry, a prominent and enterprising Bristolian, was the son of Mr. John Fry, and was born in the year 1728. He entered the medical profession, where, says a biographer,[611] “his affable, courteous manners and sound Christian principles soon secured to him a large practice amongst the highest class of his fellow citizens. Possessing uncommon energy and activity of mind, he was led to take a part in many new scientific undertakings, actuated more by the desire to be useful to society and advance the arts than by any hope of individual profit.”
This spirit of enterprise induced him, in the year 1764, to turn his attention to letter-founding, which, though hardly to be called a new scientific undertaking, was at least a novel industry for a provincial city. The success of Baskerville’s foundry at Birmingham, at that time in the height of its celebrity, was undoubtedly an incentive to the adventurers of Bristol, whose first founts were avowedly cut in close imitation of those famous models.
