﻿4 NICHOLSON, Notes on the Wilkinsons, Ironmasters. 



useful, as well as cheap and expeditious manner, than 

 any method hitherto known and made use of." The 

 specification gives the following particulars : — " The out- 

 side or cope of the mould or moulds in which the guns or 

 cannon, fire engines, cylinders, pipes, and sugar rolls, or 

 such like instruments, or any of them, is or are intended 

 to be cast must be made of sand, mixt with a little 

 horse or cow dung, or any other thing to make it porous. 

 This sand is made wett and then rammed up, the patern 

 being first put in iron boxes made for that purpose, of 

 2, 3, 4, 5 or any no. of parts or pieces, as the nature of the 

 instrument to be cast requires : then the boxes are to be 

 taken asunder into pieces and the patern taken out ; 

 then the sand in the boxes is dried in a stove and when 

 dry it must be blacked or faced with some wett charcoal 

 dust, or black lead or any other mixture or thing to make 

 the sand come of or part from the metal when cast. The 

 insides or cords of all the different instruments above 

 mentioned are made with iron bars, either hollow and 

 full of holes, or sollid and traced or fluted, and if the bore 

 is large it may be made of bricks walled, and the barrs of 

 iron or bricks are to be wraped round with ropes made of 

 straw or hay, to take the air of, and must be then covered 

 with a proper thickness of the said sand, and then dried 

 and blacked, as before directed ; and then the moulds are 

 put together and the instruments cast, and bored, and 

 turned as required." From 1652 to 1758 only 723 patents 

 for inventions were taken out, and it is a remarkable fact 

 that of these Isaac Wilkinson took out four. 



Isaac Wilkinson was evidently a man of great 

 enterprise, and if, as we may presume, his patents were 

 for his own inventions, he was also a man of ingenuity. 

 But though he was apparently prosperous for many years 

 of his life, he became impoverished in his later years, 



