14. A Visit to England. I: 

 Maudslay and Brunei 



George Escol Sellers departed from New York 

 on the first day of September 1832 in the packet 

 ship Hibernia, of the popular Black Ball line. 

 He arrived in Liverpool nearly four weeks later, 

 on September 27. After three busy months in 

 England, he returned home in January 1833, 

 after having spent New Year's Day on the 

 ocean. 139 



While Sellers was in England, his sister Eliza- 

 beth married Alfred Harrold, who had come to 

 the United States from Birmingham, England. 

 George Escol was accompanied during at least 

 a part of his journev down to London from 

 Liverpool through the Midlands by Alfred 

 Harrold's brother, who apparently was able to 

 open some doors that otherwise would have been 

 closed to an American visitor. 



Sellers had gone to England primarily to see 

 papermaking machinery, but he passed up few 

 opportunities to view anything in the mechanical 

 line that was accessible. In the present chapter, 

 his visit to the shops of Maudslay Sons and 

 Field occurred more than a year after the death 

 of the firm's founder, Henry Maudslay (1771- 

 1831), but Maudslay's stamp was so clearly upon 

 the shops and, indeed, upon the mechanical 

 practice of England, that more than -cursory 

 mention of him is called for. 140 



Maudslay's genius as a gifted craftsman and 

 original thinker in the machine-building art was 

 evident before he was 20 years old, while he was 

 employed by Joseph Bramah (1748-1814), lock- 

 smith and builder of a practical hydraulic press. 



It was here, in the development of machine 

 tools for producing lock parts, and a few years 

 later, in his own shop but in concert with Samuel 

 Bentham and Marc Isambard Brunei, in de- 

 veloping machines for making pulley-blocks for 

 the Royal Navy that his capacity as an innovator 

 became evident. But it was with the slide-tool, 

 or slide-rest, for an engine lathe that his name 

 has become inseparably associated. 



Although Maudslay was not the first to devise 

 a lathe-tool carrier, in which the cutting tool was 

 held securely and could be positively advanced 

 and traversed under control of sturdy screws, his 

 slide-rests were the first generally available in 

 England, and their advantages were within a 

 generation recognized by mechanics everywhere. 

 His screw-cutting lathe, while again not the first 

 in existence, was certainly the first to be widely 

 used. 



Perhaps more important than his works, how- 

 ever, was Henry Maudslay's influence upon 

 several younger men who later became prominent 

 machine tool builders. James Nasmyth, Richard 

 Roberts, Joseph Clement, and Joseph Whitworth, 

 all of them leading mechanicians of the generation 

 following Maudslay's, were sincere in their praise 

 of their old mentor. "The masterly manner in 

 which he would deal with his materials, and 

 cause them to assume the desired forms," wrote 

 Nasmyth, "was a treat beyond all expression. 

 Every stroke of the hammer, chisel, or file, told 

 is an effective step towards the intended result. 

 It was a never-to-be-forgotten practical lesson in 



139 George Escol Sellers letterbook, in Peale-Sellers papers 

 (American Philosophical Society Library), contains copies of 

 outgoing letters. The vessel, illustrated but not named in 

 this iournal (p. 5), is identified in Memoirs, book 10, p. 7. 

 Date of return is in Memoirs, book 17, p. 3. 



110 Maudslay is noticed in Dictionary of National Biography; 



a chapter is devoted to him in Joseph Roe, English and American 

 Tool Builders (New Haven: Yale University Press, 19 16); and 

 a brief summary of his work is in K. R. Gilbert's chapter 

 on "Machine-Tools'" in A History of Technology, Charles 

 Singer et al., edit., 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954- 

 1958), vol. 4. 



108 



