Engineers & Inventors

Initially, many of the engine erectors and engineers came from outside Cornwall and were originally agents or representatives of the pioneering Midlands foundries which had supplied the majority of the parts for the early beam engines. Some settled in Cornwall to work. Josiah Hornblower came from the Midlands in the 1720s. His son Jonathon followed him from Coalbrookdale in 1745 and four of his children worked as engine erectors for Boulton & Watt before setting up as engineers in their own right. John Wise came from Warwickshire in the 1740s. Of all these incomers the most important were the engineers and erectors sent to Cornwall by Mathew Boulton & James Watt in the later decades of the eighteenth century. William Murdoch was one, and he came to Cornwall as their chief engineer. But local engineers of distinction soon appeared. Richard Trevithick (see also link) was the son of one of the mine captains at Dolcoath and was brother-in-law to Henry Harvey of Hayle. Arthur Woolf left Cornwall in 1785 to work for Joseph Bramah’s engineering works in Pimlico (London) and subsequently worked as an engine erector and engineer until his return to Cornwall in 1811. There were many others, amongst whom were: William Sims, the self-taught son of an engine man, James Sims, John Hocking, Michael Loam, William West , the Michells, the Eustices, Samuel Grose, Billy Jenkin, the Tonkins, James Bullen and others on whose expertise rested the efficient running of Cornwall’s mines. They became highly respected engineers.

The development of deep, hard-rock mining during the eighteenth century repeatedly threw up problems for which practical answers had to be found. Other people’s ideas and skills were sometimes imported, whilst local mineral owners, merchants, miners and engineers, in an inherent empirical tradition, were constantly experimenting, improving and cumulatively innovating. In 1702 Robert Lydall of Truro developed an improved reverberatory tin furnace; in 1762 Sampson Swaine of Camborne developed a moorstone boiler which combined the production of steam with the reduction of low-grade copper ore to a partial smelt; in 1772 James Budge developed the tapered barrel whim; in 1805 John Taylor designed the mechanised copper ore crusher that became known as the Cornish Roll. These were first manufactured by Mount Foundry in Tavistock and first applied to ore-dressing at the important copper mines of Wheal Friendship (Mary Tavy) and Wheal Crowndale (adjacent to the Tavistock Canal); in 1812 Woolf's steam stamps were erected at the Carn Brea mines. Whilst the best-known developments in mining technology lay in the field of steam engines, engineers from Cornwall and Devon were also responsible for numerous important improvements to boilers, mine pitwork, pumps, hydraulics, surveying equipment and ore-dressing. In 1829 the Brunton calciner was installed at Wheal Vor; in 1830 the first hydraulic jig was invented at Fowey Consols; in 1840 wire rope haulage was introduced at South Frances; in 1844 the Brunton Belt Concentrator (a forerunner of the frue vanner) was installed at Devon Great Consols; in 1844 the Oxland process was developed for the removal of wolfram from tin ores; in 1856 the hydraulic classifier was invented by Isaac Richards; in 1860 Vincent invented the rag frame; in the 1870s Harvey’s of Hayle developed the pneumatic stamps; in 1880 Michell & Tregonning invented the barrel pulveriser (forerunner to the ball mill); in 1912 the James tin concentrating table was first manufactured by Holmans. The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of a substantial gunpowder-making industry, the invention and manufacture of the safety fuse by William Bickford (whose company was to dominate world production for decades), the expansion of Perran Foundry and Harveys of Hayle into international suppliers of mining equipment, and the eventual emergence of Holmans of Camborne as world leaders in the field of rock drills and compressed air equipment. Murdoch lit his Redruth house with gas in 1792, Humphry Davy (see also link) established himself as a pioneering British chemist, Goldsworthy Gurney ran a steam-driven coach from London to Bath in 1829 before turning his attention to lighthouses, Trevithick had trialled a practical steam carriage in 1801 and produced the first successful steam locomotive in the world.