ERIH - Key Persons
Annie Besant (nee Wood) led a long, varied and eventful life, and for a few years played a crucial role in industrial history. She was the daughter of an insurance underwriter in the City of London, and was educated until she was 16 by a governess, Ellen Marryat, sister of Captain Frederick Marryat, author of adventure books for boys. She had strong religious inclinations in her late teens, and was strongly influenced by the Oxford Movement. At the age of twenty she married a clergyman, Frank Besant (1840-1917), brother of the well-known author Sir Walter Besant (1836-1901), to whom she bore two children in 1869 and 1870.
After Besant was preferred in 1872 to the living of Sibsey, Lincolnshire, she was distressed at the prospect of a third pregnancy, but was told by E B Pusey, one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement whom she had previously respected, that she had read too much. She moved towards a free-thinking position, and after an ultimatum from her husband, left him in 1874 to live in London, where she worked for eleven years with Charles Bradlaugh (1833-91), the free-thinker and advocate of birth control. In 1885 she was introduced to the Fabian Society by the dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). On 13 November 1887 she led a delegation from the East End of London to a demonstration in Trafalgar Square protesting against the decision of the police authority to close the Square to political gatherings. Rioting broke out and the incident was known subsequently as Bloody Sunday. At about this time she split with Bradlaugh and, with William Morris and others, joined the Law & Liberty League, whose journal she came to edit.
In 1888 she published an account of girl workers employed in the East End by the match manufacturers Bryant & May, and subsequently helped them to form a trade union which organised a strike for better conditions. For a few years she was a leading figure in the ‘New Unionism', playing a prominent role in the organisation of unskilled female workers. She sought public office and was top of the poll in elections for the London School Board in 1889, but at that time women were ineligible for election to parliament or for the newly-formed London County Council. She became concerned increasingly with Theosophy and with eastern religions generally, and in 1893 went to India where she spent most of the remainder of her life. She was interned in 1917 by the imperial authorities after angry protests against the suppression of the Easter Rising of the previous year in Dublin, and for a time was a leading figure in the Congress movement advocating the end of British rule in the sub-continent. In the 1920s she was concerned principally with Theosophy, and travelled by air to many countries to advocate its principles.
Carl Friedrich Beyer was the son of a weaver from Plauen in Saxony, and studied at the polytechnic in Dresden, before taking advantage of a travel grant in 1834 to study in England. He declined offers of employment in Germany and settled in Manchester, working in the drawing office of the mechanical engineers Sharp, Roberts & Co., who from 1837 were involved in building railway locomotives. He became Chief Engineer of the company in 1843, but a disappointment - whether relating to the company or to his personal life is uncertain - led him to leave in 1853 to set up in the following year a new company in partnership with Richard Peacock (1820-89), and Henry Robertson (1816-88), a Scot who had experience in building railways, and had acquired interests in ironworks in the Wrexham area of North Wales.
Peacock had a varied early career working with locomotives on several railways. In 1841 he was appointed locomotive superintendent of the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester Railway, and laid out the company`s workshops and running sheds at Gorton on the east side of Manchester. The new partnership`s factory, designed by Beyer, was built alongside the company`s works. Most of the principal railway companies in Britain established their own locomotive-building facilities, and Beyer Peacock & Co relied on a substantial proportion of orders from overseas, as well as on supplying machine tools that could be used in the maintenance of locomotives. Some of the first orders were for locomotives for railways in Sweden, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands.
Beyer worked closed with Hermann Ludwig Lange (1837-92), also a native of Plauen, who moved to Manchester in 1861, became chief draughtsman in 1865, and chief engineer after Beyer`s death. The company built its first electric locomotives, for the City & South London Railway, in 1890, and from 1907 developed the articulated Beyer Garratt type of locomotive, developing a method of mounting artillery on railway bogies proposed by Herbert William Garratt (1864-1913), of the government of New South Wales. The capacity of Beyer Garratt locomotives to carry large quantities of water and fuel and their low axle loadings made them especially successful in Africa and in South America, but high speed versions were built for Spain and for the Algerian section of the Paris, Lyon & Mediterranean Railway. The last were built in 1958, and the factory closed in 1966.
Beyer was an outstanding engineer who developed a successful company in his adopted country, and the Beyer Peacock locomotives that are displayed in many of Europe`s railway museums testify to his influence.
Charles (Carlo) Bianconi was an Italian who transformed passenger transport in Ireland in the decades before the construction of main line railways. He was born at Costa Masnaga in Lombardy, 13 km south-west of Lecce, in a silk working region, where there was a tradition of migration to the British Isles.
He moved to Dublin in 1802 to avoid the Napoleonic invasion of Italy, and initially worked as an engraver and printer. In 1815 he began his first road service in a ‘bian' or trotting cart, between the towns of Clonmel and Cahir. As his business prospered he provided specially-designed two- and four-wheel vehicles in which passengers sat back-to-back looking at the roadsides, on either side of a central luggage well. Similar vehicles still take visitors on tours of the scenery at Killarney. By 1840 his ‘bians' were operating some 3000 miles per day. He opened several ‘Bianconi inns' of which examples remain at Piltown, Co Kilkenny and Killorgin, Co Kerry. Biancon's services were slowly superseded by railways, but he responded to their opening by provided connecting services from stations to towns that the railways did not serve. He continued to prosper and enjoyed an annual income of £35,000 in the mid-1860s.
Job Titles:
- Secretary General
- Am Striebruch 42 40668 Meerbusch Germany
Karl Benz designed and built the fist practical motorcar to be powered by an internal combustion. He was born in Karlsruhe, the son of a railway engine driver, and educated in the same city. After several jobs, including one in Vienna, where he failed to settle, he set up an iron foundry with August Ritter in 1871. His partner proved unreliable, and Benz had to use his wife`s dowry to purchase control of the whole company.
He experimented with two-stroke engines during the 1870s, and in 1879 made his first practical engine, on which he took out patents. He established Benz & Cie, Rheinishche Gasmotrenfabrik (Rhineland Gas Engine Works) in Mannheim in 1882, but withdrew from the company the next year to found Benz Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik. His first working motorcar, a three-wheeler, now preserved in Munich, was completed in 1885 and patented in 1886. Benz subsequently manufactured and sold the car, the first motor vehicle that was available commercially. He made his first four-wheel car in 1893, after which the company produced the Benz Velo car on a regular basis, making 572 in the year 1899.
He ceased to be active in his company in 1903, which produced 3480 vehicles in the following year, but remained a member of its board until it was merged with Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft in 1926, and of the board of that company till his death. Between 1906 and 1923 he was also concerned, with his son Eugen, with another car-making company Benz-Sohne. Benz`s mansion at Ladenburg, 10 km E Mannheim, is conserved and is the headquarters of the Gottlieb Daimler & Karl Benz Stiftung (Foundation), established in 1986, which promotes research, especially interdisciplinary enquiries into the relationships between society, the environment and technology.
Louis Bergeron was a distinguished French scholar who did much to establish the value of the study of industrial heritage with international bodies such as ICOMOS and UNESCO. He was born in Strasbourg and studied at the École normale supérieure, graduating in 1951. He spent ten years teaching in high schools before returning to the École, by which time he was fluent in German, English and Italian.
He interest in Industrial Archaeology developed in the 1970s under the influence of the historian Maurice Daumas (1910-84). He began to advocate in use of field evidence in the study of industrial and economic history, an approach that was then novel. In 1971 he was appointed director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) where he ran the centre for historical research between 1986 and 1992. His own research was initially on the French Revolution and the Napeolonic Empire, but his later studies focussed more broadly on banks, business and the social and economic elites of the nineteenth century. He had a particular interest in Paris. In 1978 he was one of the founders of the Comité d'information et de liaison pour l'archéologie, l'étude et la mise en valeur du patrimoine industriel (CILAC) and was the organisation's vice president from 1978. He was largely responsible for the fourth meeting of The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) at Lyon and Grenoble in 1981 which led to the setting up of a group responsible for establishing a national inventory of industrial heritage at the Ministry of Culture in 1984. He actively promoted research at the EHESS where he developed links with Francophone communities in other parts of the world, particularly with Quebec. He was president of the écomusée at Le Creusot between 1996 and 2000.
While president of TICCIH between 1990 and 2000 he achieved recognition of the organisation by ICOMOS and UNESCO which was confirmed at the organisation's London conference in 2000. Amongst his many publications, two of the most important are Industrial Heritage: a new territory (with Grace Dorel-Ferré, 1996) and Luxury Industries in France (1998)
Sir Richard Arkwright transformed the cotton industry throughout Europe. He was born at Preston, and after being apprenticed as a barber, moved to work for a peruke maker at to Bolton-le-Moors, where textile workers were producing increasing amounts of cotton cloth. Arkwright took a close interest in the improvement of spinning machinery.
In 1768 he moved to Nottingham, where he formed a partnership to develop the spinning machine that incorporated rollers rotating at different speeds that gained the name of the water frame. He leased premises in the city in 1769 for a horse-powered factory, although it may not have operated until 1772. From 1770 he developed financial links with Jedediah Strutt (1726-97) and Samuel Need.
On 1 August 1771 he leased premises at Cromford, where he built a five-storey, water-powered cotton-spinning mill, in which he had a 20% share, which attracted attention from all over Europe. The Cromford Mill site, which probably began to work in 1774, was powered by the Bonsall Brook, a tributary of the River Derwent. The mill was extended, and in 1780 Arkwright bought land for another mill complex powered by the Derwent itself. Masson Mill, as it came to be called, was built in brick, in contrast with the plain local stone of Cromford Mill, and, with Venetian and Diocletian windows and a cupola housing a bell, had the appearance of a country house. Arkwright built terraced houses to accommodate his textile workers around the few leadminers` cottages that have previously comprised the settlement called Cromford. He laid out a market place and built an inn and a church.
During the 1770s he bought out his partners, and took shares in cotton mills, in Bakewell, Wirksworth, Rocester, Chorley and Manchester, and at New Lanark. His patents for the water frame and associated carding machinery were challenged, and he lost them in 1785. The originality of his mechanical innovations remains a subject for debate, but there is no doubt that it was he who for the first time organised the production of cotton yarn on a factory basis, using a succession of carding and spinning machines operated by water-power and subsequently by steam engines.
His methods were carried to Germany by Johann Brugelman, and to the United States by Samuel Slater (1768-1835) who for a time worked at Cromford. They were also in France and Bohemia before 1790.
Arkwright was involved with the canal that linked Cromford to the inland waterways network, and was well-acquainted with intellectuals of the Industrial Revolution period, including Erasmus Darwin, James Watt and Samuel More.