X 



faces, a method which he had devised when with Maudslay in London, 

 and in 1841 he read a paper before the Institution of Civil Engineers 

 on " An Uniform System of Screw Threads." During the next ten 

 years he introduced his system of standard gauges and perfected his 

 measuring machine, an instrument which is capable of detecting a 

 difference in size of one millionth of an inch. In 1853 he was 

 appointed as one of the Royal Commissioners to the New York Exhi- 

 bition, and in the following year his attention was directed, at the 

 request and with the aid of the Government, to the improvement of 

 fire-arms. Since that time the subject of fire-arms, large or small, 

 interested him more than any other to the day of his death. He was 

 President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1856, and in 

 1857 he was elected a Fellow of this Society. In 1868 Whitworth 

 founded the Engineering Scholarships which bear his name. He pro- 

 vided an annual income of £3000, to be distributed as scholarships 

 for the encouragement of the study of the theory and practice of 

 mechanics. In July, 1869, he was created a baronet. In 1870 his first 

 wife died, and in 1871 he married Mary Louisa, widow of Mr. Alfred 

 Orrell. The present works of Sir Joseph "Whitworth and Company, 

 Limited, were opened in 1881. Since then they have received a rapid 

 extension and development, and now undoubtedly contain the finest 

 collection of powerful machine tools in the world. Of late years the 

 state of Sir Joseph Whitworth's health usually necessitated his 

 spending the winter in the South of France. He died on the 22nd of 

 January, 1887, at Monte Carlo, and was buried in Darley Pale church- 

 yard, near his country residence at Stancliffe. 



One characteristic ran through the whole of Whitworth's work as an 

 engineer — insistance upon the very highest standard of excellence both 

 of workmanship and material ; and it is to this rather than to any 

 specific inventions or discoveries that his great success and reputation 

 are due. The principle of his method of preparing true planes was 

 the simple one that if any two of three surfaces accurately fit each other, 

 each of the three must be plane ; in addition to adopting this funda- 

 mental principle, he used a scraper for forming the surfaces, instead 

 of the practice previously in vogue of grinding the surfaces together. 



In the matter of screw threads and standard gauges, Whitworth 

 insisted on the desirability of all engineers adopting the same 

 standards, and working with them to the utmost attainable accuracy. 

 He adopted the inch as his unit, but divided it decimally; and this intro- 

 duction of the decimal system to the British workman must in itself 

 have had a very material educational effect. In fire-arms, both small 

 arms and artillery, the principal points on which Whitworth insisted 

 were, the use of a long projectile with a great angular velocity of 

 rotation about its axis, and the use of polygonal rifling of the barrel 

 instead of grooves, the projectile being formed to fit the barrel and so 



