Difference between revisions of "Samuel John Hackney: Biographical Notes"
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Samuel John Hackney (1840-1918)<ref>Correspondence 20210105 CT</ref> | Samuel John Hackney (1840-1918)<ref>Correspondence 20210105 CT</ref> | ||
Samuel was born in Ancoats, Manchester. His father, William, was a provisions dealer, his mother, Catherine, an Irish immigrant. Samuel was | Samuel was born in Ancoats, Manchester in 1840. His father, William, was a provisions dealer, his mother, Catherine Connelly, an Irish immigrant. Samuel was their eldest child. | ||
In the 1861 census, Samuel was recorded as a bookkeeper. The following year he married Eliza Phillips. | In the 1861 census, Samuel was recorded as a bookkeeper living in Manchester. The following year he married Eliza Phillips. | ||
He established an oil lamp business in 1863. A trade directory from 1869 recorded that he was also manufacturing and merchandising glass products [1]. It is possible that these were lamp shades, globes and chimneys. The business premises were on China Lane, just outside Ancoats. | |||
In 1871 tragedy struck. Samuel and Eliza’s baby son William died and a few months later Eliza succumbed | In 1871 tragedy struck. Samuel and Eliza’s baby son William died and a few months later Eliza succumbed to tuberculosis. Samuel was now a widower with three young daughters to look after. Less than a year after Eliza’s death, Samuel married Emma Quane Clarke. They were to raise the three girls and a large family of their own | ||
At some point, Samuel formed a business partnership with Thomas Jackson. They traded as oil and lamp merchants under the name of Hackney and Jackson | At some point, Samuel formed a business partnership with a Thomas Jackson. They traded in China Lane as oil and lamp merchants under the name of Hackney and Jackson. The partnership was dissolved in 1872 [2], but Samuel continued the business from the same address for a few more years. | ||
In 1873, Samuel was fined for keeping “three casks of petroleum”, probably paraffin oil for lamps, in unlicensed stores at Oldham Road and Spittal Street. | In 1873, Samuel was fined for keeping “three casks of petroleum”, probably paraffin oil for lamps, in unlicensed stores at Oldham Road and Spittal Street [3]. | ||
By 1876, the family were living in a newly built, elegant three story house in the Blackley countryside on the outskirts of Manchester. Samuel’s business continued to grow and, in about 1879, he moved to larger premises in the city on the corner of Rochdale Road and Swan Street. | By 1876, the family were living in a newly built, elegant three story house in the Blackley countryside on the outskirts of Manchester. Samuel’s oil lamp business had become very well established. It was described in Slater’s Directory of that year as: “paraffin lamp manufacturers, wholesale and export, and dealer in all kinds of lamps, fittings, oils etc.” His business continued to grow and, in about 1879, he moved to larger premises in the city on the corner of Rochdale Road and Swan Street. | ||
Early in 1879, a fire broke out in Samuel’s Oldham Road lamp and oil store. Serious damage was done to the lower two floors and to stock [3]. | |||
In 1881, Samuel bought a brush making factory in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire [5]. Brushes were made there and transported to Manchester by train for retail in the city. At some point in the early years of the 1880s, these works were managed by his eldest daughter, Sarah. She was only about twenty years old when she became the works manager [6]. | |||
The year 1885 brought about the boldest move Samuel was to make in his professional life. He formed a partnership with Joseph Elton Bott that traded under the name of the Titanic Steel Company. | |||
The | The two men set up a small steel making foundry close to the Rochdale Canal at the north end of Pott Street, now St Vincent Street, in the New Islington area of Ancoats [7]. Joseph had recently returned from a remarkable adventure in the United States where, at the age of 27, he had become the President of the Titanic Steel Casting Company (which, incidentally, had no connection with the Titanic foundry in Manchester). Joseph was an extraordinary character. He was a serial inventor having registered at least thirty patents in his short life: he died in 1903 at the age of just 47 [8]. His inventions covered an eclectic range of technologies and products, including, among many others, a steelmaking furnace, a horseshoe, a pneumatic field gun and a circular saw. | ||
A summary of Joseph’s final year in America gives context to the establishment of the Titanic Steel Company partnership. In early 1884, Joseph was establishing a foundry in Philadelphia for the Titanic Steel Casting Company [9]. The works were to make use of his inventions for producing steel castings. Whether or not the foundry operated is something of a mystery. The fate of the company is unknown: it simply does not feature in any newspapers after 1884, nor does it appear in any trade directories of the city. | |||
At the end of 1884, Joseph returned to England [7]. He had been developing ideas for a new type of open hearth furnace which was described as “a direct process….a compromise between the Bessemer and crucible processes” [10]. It was claimed that this design gave the advantage of enabling the use of unbaked, green sand moulds for the castings. The design received a British patent at the end of 1886 [11], suggesting that the application was made around the end of 1885, a few months after the start of the partnership. The inventors were Joseph Elton Bott, Samuel John Hackney and William Craven. The record confirms that new furnaces were installed in the foundry at around the end of 1886. It is more than likely that they were of the new design. | |||
The Titanic Steel Company got off to a good start. Joseph got behind its promotion, ensuring articles appeared in engineering magazines extolling the virtues of their innovative process. Claims were made that their steel castings were being used by an “engine builder in Manchester [who was] adopting this metal for all the working parts of his high-speed engines, as well as for some parts of large engines”. The most impressive claim made was that: “the castings obtained from this new material have recently risen very greatly in the estimation of the engineering firms in Lancashire, as well as others at a remote distance” [12]. | |||
Despite the promising start, the partnership only lasted two years. Just before the men went their separate ways, they reserved a stand at the 1887 Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester to promote their castings. Examples of items made by the now defunct company went on display at this show [13]. | |||
The partnership ended acrimoniously, leading to a court action in 1887 in which Joseph sought to place the company into receivership. One of the factors leading to the split was a disagreement over the financing arrangements required to turn the firm into a limited company. | |||
After the partnership was dissolved, Samuel wished to continue the business on his own. Joseph wanted to stop this happening, hence his court action. The affidavits of both men and the court ruling are to be found in the National Archives [7]. Joseph won the case but his success was somewhat Pyrrhic as Samuel was appointed receiver. | |||
With Joseph gone, Samuel was able to settle the affairs of the wound-up firm and then set about restarting the business as a limited company under the name of the Titanic Steel Company Ltd. He took the role of managing director. The company had a share capital of £12,000. Shareholders included Joseph Byrom, the owner of large cotton mills in Droylsdon and William Nelson who owned the Ancoats Flint Glass Works [14]. The Titanic Steel Company invoices boasted that the foundry could produce “steel castings from 1oz to 1000lbs” [7]. | |||
It is possible that Samuel had been pursuing the development of steel or other metal technologies, but no record has been found of exactly what it was the company was doing in this regard. Adverts appeared in the press claiming the foundry could manufacture “steel wheels etc. that are Wanted to never break down” [15]. Presumably these would have been made using the process established in the previous incarnation of the foundry. | |||
The company did not prosper. It went into voluntary liquidation in October 1893 with Samuel appointed as liquidator. Records in the National Archive suggest that very little or no business was done by the company. Samuel stated as much in a reply to a query from the Official Receiver’s office [14]. This supports the notion that the company may have been putting most of its resources into product or process development. Family anecdotes suggest that Samuel had nearly perfected the development of a steel extrusion process when he was beaten to it by someone else. | |||
Taking that at face value has proved a fruitless line of research. However, one possibility is that the firm had been developing a means of extruding brass. The first person to develop metal extrusion on a commercial basis was Alexander Dick. He developed the technology between 1892 and 1893 and applied for a British patent in November 1894. He formed the Delta Metal Company in 1893 with works in London and Dusseldorf, and he went on to further develop extrusion techniques for a number of different alloys with great success [16]. The demise of the Titanic Steel Company Ltd. occurring at the same time as Alexander Dick was developing his extrusion process may simply be coincidence. However, the possibility that Samuel had also been developing this technology cannot be ruled out. This might be worthy of future research. | |||
Samuel’s failed attempts at running a foundry business cost him dear. He had sunk and lost at least a million pounds in today’s values, possibly much more. In order to remain solvent, he had to sell his Fenny Stratford brush making business. This was bought by James Root at around the end of 1894. | |||
With bankruptcy avoided, Samuel carried on with his oil lamp enterprise. His business life had gone full circle, ending up much as it had begun. Towards the end of his career, Samuel moved his lamp making workshop and retail premises to Shudehill in Manchester [17]. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Samuel also had a wholesale crockery business at this time, importing stock from Germany and possibly elsewhere. No record has been found to confirm this. This is another aspect that requires further research. | |||
Samuel continued working well into the twentieth century. At around the beginning of the new century, he was selling incandescent lamp fittings [17]. Oil lamps were still in demand, but their days were numbered. | |||
Samuel’s life ended when he was 78. He died at his Blackley home in October 1918 [18]. Cause of death was recorded as senility. | |||
At some point, Samuel’s son George Frederick took over the lamp making business. In 1933, George was declared bankrupt and the business folded [19]. That marked the end of everything his father had established. The National Archive records show that Samuel was expecting to make his fortune with the foundry venture: he declared this aim in his affidavit in the 1887 court action [7]. Alas for Samuel, it was never to be realised. As it happens, financial disaster hit Joseph Elton Bott a few years after the end of the Titanic Steel Company, forcing him into bankruptcy. Samuel managed to avoid that fate and made a very good living for most of his life. But his story is one of a fortune never made. | |||
Chris Tombs | |||
'''Bibliography | |||
* [1] Slater's Directory, Manchester, 1869. | |||
* [2] The London Gazette, p. 5593, 22nd November 1872. | |||
* [3] "This Afternoon's Police - Storing Petroleum in Unlicensed Premises," Manchester Evening News, 19th March 1873. | |||
* [4] Manchester Evening News, p. 2, 14th February 1879. | |||
* [5] "Fenny Stratford," Leighton Buzzard Observer and Linslade Gazette, 2nd August 1881. | |||
* [6] "Robbery from a Brush Factory," Bucks Herald, 21st November 1885. | |||
* [7] Bott v Hackney: affidavits, National Archives ref. PL 31/82/10, 1887. | |||
* [8] "Deaths," Hamilton Record and Lanarkshire Weekly News, 23rd January 1903. | |||
[9] | |||
"A Chance for Marcus Hook - New Steel Works to be Put in Operation by a Syndicate," Delaware Daily County Times, p. 1, 26th November 1883. | |||
[10] | |||
"Iron and Steel Notes," Van Nostrand's Engineering Magazine, 18th November 1886. | |||
[11] | |||
S. J. Hackney, J. E. Bott and W. Craven, "Improvements to Furnace Design". U.K. Patent 16523, 16th December 1896 (date granted). | |||
[12] | |||
"A New Steel," Mechanical World, 29th February 1886. | |||
[13] | |||
"Metallurgical Exhibits," Manchester Guardian, p. 9, 30th July 1887. | |||
[14] | |||
Titanic Steel Co., Ltd. Winding-up Records and Liquidator's Accounts, National Archives ref. BT 31/525/35783 and BT 34/829/35783. | |||
[15] "Sales by Private Contract - Engines Machinery. Tools etc.," Manchester Evening News, 20th June 1894. | |||
[16] | |||
"Grace's Guide to British Industrial History," [Online]. Available: https://www.gracesguide.co.uk. | |||
[17] | |||
Manchester Evening News, 24th November 1906 (advertisement). | |||
[18] | |||
"Obituaries," Manchester Guardian, 5th October 1918. | |||
[19] | |||
The London Gazette, 3rd November 1933. | |||
---- | ---- | ||
Revision as of 11:54, 22 January 2021
Note: This is a sub-section of Samuel John Hackney
Samuel John Hackney (1840-1918)[1]
Samuel was born in Ancoats, Manchester in 1840. His father, William, was a provisions dealer, his mother, Catherine Connelly, an Irish immigrant. Samuel was their eldest child.
In the 1861 census, Samuel was recorded as a bookkeeper living in Manchester. The following year he married Eliza Phillips.
He established an oil lamp business in 1863. A trade directory from 1869 recorded that he was also manufacturing and merchandising glass products [1]. It is possible that these were lamp shades, globes and chimneys. The business premises were on China Lane, just outside Ancoats.
In 1871 tragedy struck. Samuel and Eliza’s baby son William died and a few months later Eliza succumbed to tuberculosis. Samuel was now a widower with three young daughters to look after. Less than a year after Eliza’s death, Samuel married Emma Quane Clarke. They were to raise the three girls and a large family of their own
At some point, Samuel formed a business partnership with a Thomas Jackson. They traded in China Lane as oil and lamp merchants under the name of Hackney and Jackson. The partnership was dissolved in 1872 [2], but Samuel continued the business from the same address for a few more years.
In 1873, Samuel was fined for keeping “three casks of petroleum”, probably paraffin oil for lamps, in unlicensed stores at Oldham Road and Spittal Street [3].
By 1876, the family were living in a newly built, elegant three story house in the Blackley countryside on the outskirts of Manchester. Samuel’s oil lamp business had become very well established. It was described in Slater’s Directory of that year as: “paraffin lamp manufacturers, wholesale and export, and dealer in all kinds of lamps, fittings, oils etc.” His business continued to grow and, in about 1879, he moved to larger premises in the city on the corner of Rochdale Road and Swan Street.
Early in 1879, a fire broke out in Samuel’s Oldham Road lamp and oil store. Serious damage was done to the lower two floors and to stock [3].
In 1881, Samuel bought a brush making factory in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire [5]. Brushes were made there and transported to Manchester by train for retail in the city. At some point in the early years of the 1880s, these works were managed by his eldest daughter, Sarah. She was only about twenty years old when she became the works manager [6].
The year 1885 brought about the boldest move Samuel was to make in his professional life. He formed a partnership with Joseph Elton Bott that traded under the name of the Titanic Steel Company.
The two men set up a small steel making foundry close to the Rochdale Canal at the north end of Pott Street, now St Vincent Street, in the New Islington area of Ancoats [7]. Joseph had recently returned from a remarkable adventure in the United States where, at the age of 27, he had become the President of the Titanic Steel Casting Company (which, incidentally, had no connection with the Titanic foundry in Manchester). Joseph was an extraordinary character. He was a serial inventor having registered at least thirty patents in his short life: he died in 1903 at the age of just 47 [8]. His inventions covered an eclectic range of technologies and products, including, among many others, a steelmaking furnace, a horseshoe, a pneumatic field gun and a circular saw.
A summary of Joseph’s final year in America gives context to the establishment of the Titanic Steel Company partnership. In early 1884, Joseph was establishing a foundry in Philadelphia for the Titanic Steel Casting Company [9]. The works were to make use of his inventions for producing steel castings. Whether or not the foundry operated is something of a mystery. The fate of the company is unknown: it simply does not feature in any newspapers after 1884, nor does it appear in any trade directories of the city.
At the end of 1884, Joseph returned to England [7]. He had been developing ideas for a new type of open hearth furnace which was described as “a direct process….a compromise between the Bessemer and crucible processes” [10]. It was claimed that this design gave the advantage of enabling the use of unbaked, green sand moulds for the castings. The design received a British patent at the end of 1886 [11], suggesting that the application was made around the end of 1885, a few months after the start of the partnership. The inventors were Joseph Elton Bott, Samuel John Hackney and William Craven. The record confirms that new furnaces were installed in the foundry at around the end of 1886. It is more than likely that they were of the new design.
The Titanic Steel Company got off to a good start. Joseph got behind its promotion, ensuring articles appeared in engineering magazines extolling the virtues of their innovative process. Claims were made that their steel castings were being used by an “engine builder in Manchester [who was] adopting this metal for all the working parts of his high-speed engines, as well as for some parts of large engines”. The most impressive claim made was that: “the castings obtained from this new material have recently risen very greatly in the estimation of the engineering firms in Lancashire, as well as others at a remote distance” [12].
Despite the promising start, the partnership only lasted two years. Just before the men went their separate ways, they reserved a stand at the 1887 Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester to promote their castings. Examples of items made by the now defunct company went on display at this show [13].
The partnership ended acrimoniously, leading to a court action in 1887 in which Joseph sought to place the company into receivership. One of the factors leading to the split was a disagreement over the financing arrangements required to turn the firm into a limited company.
After the partnership was dissolved, Samuel wished to continue the business on his own. Joseph wanted to stop this happening, hence his court action. The affidavits of both men and the court ruling are to be found in the National Archives [7]. Joseph won the case but his success was somewhat Pyrrhic as Samuel was appointed receiver.
With Joseph gone, Samuel was able to settle the affairs of the wound-up firm and then set about restarting the business as a limited company under the name of the Titanic Steel Company Ltd. He took the role of managing director. The company had a share capital of £12,000. Shareholders included Joseph Byrom, the owner of large cotton mills in Droylsdon and William Nelson who owned the Ancoats Flint Glass Works [14]. The Titanic Steel Company invoices boasted that the foundry could produce “steel castings from 1oz to 1000lbs” [7].
It is possible that Samuel had been pursuing the development of steel or other metal technologies, but no record has been found of exactly what it was the company was doing in this regard. Adverts appeared in the press claiming the foundry could manufacture “steel wheels etc. that are Wanted to never break down” [15]. Presumably these would have been made using the process established in the previous incarnation of the foundry.
The company did not prosper. It went into voluntary liquidation in October 1893 with Samuel appointed as liquidator. Records in the National Archive suggest that very little or no business was done by the company. Samuel stated as much in a reply to a query from the Official Receiver’s office [14]. This supports the notion that the company may have been putting most of its resources into product or process development. Family anecdotes suggest that Samuel had nearly perfected the development of a steel extrusion process when he was beaten to it by someone else.
Taking that at face value has proved a fruitless line of research. However, one possibility is that the firm had been developing a means of extruding brass. The first person to develop metal extrusion on a commercial basis was Alexander Dick. He developed the technology between 1892 and 1893 and applied for a British patent in November 1894. He formed the Delta Metal Company in 1893 with works in London and Dusseldorf, and he went on to further develop extrusion techniques for a number of different alloys with great success [16]. The demise of the Titanic Steel Company Ltd. occurring at the same time as Alexander Dick was developing his extrusion process may simply be coincidence. However, the possibility that Samuel had also been developing this technology cannot be ruled out. This might be worthy of future research.
Samuel’s failed attempts at running a foundry business cost him dear. He had sunk and lost at least a million pounds in today’s values, possibly much more. In order to remain solvent, he had to sell his Fenny Stratford brush making business. This was bought by James Root at around the end of 1894.
With bankruptcy avoided, Samuel carried on with his oil lamp enterprise. His business life had gone full circle, ending up much as it had begun. Towards the end of his career, Samuel moved his lamp making workshop and retail premises to Shudehill in Manchester [17]. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Samuel also had a wholesale crockery business at this time, importing stock from Germany and possibly elsewhere. No record has been found to confirm this. This is another aspect that requires further research.
Samuel continued working well into the twentieth century. At around the beginning of the new century, he was selling incandescent lamp fittings [17]. Oil lamps were still in demand, but their days were numbered.
Samuel’s life ended when he was 78. He died at his Blackley home in October 1918 [18]. Cause of death was recorded as senility.
At some point, Samuel’s son George Frederick took over the lamp making business. In 1933, George was declared bankrupt and the business folded [19]. That marked the end of everything his father had established. The National Archive records show that Samuel was expecting to make his fortune with the foundry venture: he declared this aim in his affidavit in the 1887 court action [7]. Alas for Samuel, it was never to be realised. As it happens, financial disaster hit Joseph Elton Bott a few years after the end of the Titanic Steel Company, forcing him into bankruptcy. Samuel managed to avoid that fate and made a very good living for most of his life. But his story is one of a fortune never made.
Chris Tombs
Bibliography
- [1] Slater's Directory, Manchester, 1869.
- [2] The London Gazette, p. 5593, 22nd November 1872.
- [3] "This Afternoon's Police - Storing Petroleum in Unlicensed Premises," Manchester Evening News, 19th March 1873.
- [4] Manchester Evening News, p. 2, 14th February 1879.
- [5] "Fenny Stratford," Leighton Buzzard Observer and Linslade Gazette, 2nd August 1881.
- [6] "Robbery from a Brush Factory," Bucks Herald, 21st November 1885.
- [7] Bott v Hackney: affidavits, National Archives ref. PL 31/82/10, 1887.
- [8] "Deaths," Hamilton Record and Lanarkshire Weekly News, 23rd January 1903.
[9]
"A Chance for Marcus Hook - New Steel Works to be Put in Operation by a Syndicate," Delaware Daily County Times, p. 1, 26th November 1883.
[10]
"Iron and Steel Notes," Van Nostrand's Engineering Magazine, 18th November 1886.
[11]
S. J. Hackney, J. E. Bott and W. Craven, "Improvements to Furnace Design". U.K. Patent 16523, 16th December 1896 (date granted).
[12]
"A New Steel," Mechanical World, 29th February 1886.
[13]
"Metallurgical Exhibits," Manchester Guardian, p. 9, 30th July 1887.
[14]
Titanic Steel Co., Ltd. Winding-up Records and Liquidator's Accounts, National Archives ref. BT 31/525/35783 and BT 34/829/35783.
[15] "Sales by Private Contract - Engines Machinery. Tools etc.," Manchester Evening News, 20th June 1894.
[16]
"Grace's Guide to British Industrial History," [Online]. Available: https://www.gracesguide.co.uk.
[17]
Manchester Evening News, 24th November 1906 (advertisement).
[18]
"Obituaries," Manchester Guardian, 5th October 1918.
[19]
The London Gazette, 3rd November 1933.
See Also
Sources of Information
- ↑ Correspondence 20210105 CT