15. A Visit to England. II: 



Donkin's Bermondsey Works 



The secrecy with which much of the machine- 

 building art was practiced in Europe during the 

 period of its most fruitful development has put 

 beyond our reach many of the answers to ques- 

 tions that we would ask. For example, who built 

 the first effective metal planing machine? The 

 1 8 1 7 machine of Richard Roberts, attributed 

 and dated years later, exists. However reason- 

 able the attribution and dating may be, the first 

 published description of a metal planer was by 

 Joseph Clement in the early 1830's. Meanwhile, 

 there were many other skilled and enterprising 

 craftsmen in whose secret rooms developments 

 and innovations were being hammered out nearly 

 in parallel. 



It is for this reason, apart from Sellers's skill in 

 constructing a life-size picture of the immensely 

 admirable if faintly pompous and plodding Bryan 

 Donkin, that this account of Donkin's Bermondsey 

 shops is particularly valuable, and perhaps unique. 

 Few others of the small number of visitors ad- 

 mitted would have noted the mechanical detail 

 that makes it possible for today's mechanician 

 to determine just what the shops were capable of 

 doing, and more accurately to assess the contri- 

 bution of the master. The comment of Andrew 

 Ure, author of one of the standard mechanical 

 dictionaries of the 19th centrury, is useful in its 

 way but of little help in letting the mind's eye 

 focus upon the machine tools of 1830. "I have 

 had the pleasure," Ure wrote, "of visiting more 

 than once the mechanical workshops of Messrs. 



Bryan Donkin and Co. in Bermondsey, and have 

 never witnessed a more admirable assortment of 

 exquisite and expensive tools, each adapted to 

 perform its part with despatch and mathematical 

 exactness, though I have seen probably the best 

 machine factories of this country and the 

 Continent." 149 



Bryan Donkin (1768- 1855) has been curiously 

 neglected by historians of technologv, in spite 

 of his very considerable contributions to the de- 

 sign and construction of the large and complex 

 Fourdrinier paper machines and to the more 

 general task of producing better tools with which 

 to shape metals with precision. 



He served an apprenticeship in John Hall's 

 machine works in Dartford, several miles south- 

 west of London. In 1801, when Hall was en- 

 gaged by the Fourdriniers to construct the 

 newly patented continuous-web paper machine 

 of the Frenchmen Robert and Didot, the major 

 share of building a machine model apparently 

 devolved upon Donkin, who was by this time 31 

 years old. The entire development of the ma- 

 chine had been turned over to Donkin by 1802, 

 when he took premises in Bermondsey, about 

 two miles down river from the London Bridge. 150 



The new works prospered, and by the time of 

 Sellers's visit, in 1832, Donkin had built more 

 than 100 Fourdrinier machines. 151 



Donkin earlier developed and built a "poly- 

 gonal" printing machine, forerunner of the much 

 later type-revolving cylinder machines of R. 



1,9 Andrew Ure, A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and 

 Mines . . . , 2 vols. (London, 1856), vol. 2, p. 336. 



150 See note 136, above; also Proceedings of the Royal Society of 

 London (1854-1855), vol. 7, pp. 586-589, an obituary of 

 Donkin. In Sydney B. Donkin, "Bryan Donkin, F.R.S., 

 M.I.C.E., 1 768-1855," Transactions of the Newcomen Society 



( 1 949-1 951), vol. 27, pp. 85-95, reference is made to Everard 

 Hesketh, J. & E. Hall Ltd., 1785 to 1935, which I have not seen. 

 151 Ure (cited in note 149 above). At the time of Ure's 

 article, probably 1834, 133 machines had been erected. There 

 were 200 machines at work by 1855. See Donkin's obituary, 

 cited in note 150 above. 



116 



