William Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong

William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong (born November 26, 1810 in Benwell / Newcastle upon Tyne , † December 27, 1900 in Cragside near Rothbury in Northumberland ) was an important British industrialist of the 19th century and founder of the Armstrong-Whitworth Group who was mainly active in the steel and heavy industry. He is the inventor of the first industrially manufactured breech-loading cannon to be used by the Royal Navy . In the field of manufacturing such weapons, he was a direct competitor of Joseph Whitworth and Alfred Krupp .

Life

As the son of a grain dealer in Newcastle, who also had a keen interest in natural history and mathematics, William George Armstrong would pursue the career of a lawyer. He successfully completed his legal training and worked as a partner in a law firm. Despite this education, like his father, he showed a keen interest in the natural sciences, although his main interest lay in the design and construction of machines. In the Club of the Newcastle Literary and Scientific Society, he gave a number of noteworthy lectures on this subject. In 1840 he finally constructed his first machine with a hydroelectric generator. This invention was based on the observation of an electrostatic discharge from a steam boiler that was in a Northumberland mine .

In 1846 he began to work on the construction of hydraulic machines. He gained a number of investors that enabled him to develop a hydraulic crane. This development was such a success from a financial point of view that he was able to give up his law firm in 1847 and devote himself only to building his first crane manufacturing factory in Elswick near Newcastle.

A cannon made by Armstrong's company on a so-called vanishing mount in a barbette position at Fort Chulachomklao, Samut Prakan , Thailand

After the outbreak of the Crimean War , Armstrong began to devote himself increasingly to the arms business. His first products were a breech loading rifle and breech loading cannon with a caliber of 2 inches (51 mm), which were sold to the Royal Navy from 1854. Five years later, he had developed a breech-loading gun with a caliber of 7 inches (178 mm), which was also adopted by the Royal Navy. It thus prevailed against a gun that had been developed and manufactured by Joseph Whitworth . In 1859 he founded the Elswick Ordnance Company for the expanding arms business . In 1589 Armstrong was knighted as a Knight Bachelor (" Sir ") and accepted as a Companion in the Order of the Bath .

His cannons, which were considered to be groundbreaking for modern artillery , were sold to numerous armies in Europe, and during the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 he supplied both the Confederate and Union armies with guns. He suffered a setback when it turned out during the bombardment of Kagoshima in 1863 that his heavy breech-loading guns had structural defects that killed 13 British sailors. The so-called Armstrong cannon , a 17.72 inch caliber muzzle-loading gun developed by Armstrong (which had a total weight of 100 tons), was used by the British and Italian navies on warships and in coastal fortifications - two of these guns still exist today Specimens, one in Gibraltar , the other in Fort Rinella on the island of Malta .

Bamburgh Castle

From 1863 Armstrong began to withdraw more and more from the management of his company and to devote himself to other interests (family, landscape gardening). He founded the College of Physical Science in Newcastle, which later became today's Newcastle University . In 1887 he was raised as a hereditary peer as Baron Armstrong , thereby becoming a member of the House of Lords and having the Cragside estate expanded into a family seat in line with his status . In 1880, Cragside was the first building in the world to be lit by hydroelectrically generated electricity and the first carbon filament lamps by Joseph Wilson Swan . His last major project, which he began at the age of 80, was the acquisition and restoration of Bamburgh Castle , a large castle on the Northumberland coast that is still owned by the Armstrong family today.

His companies also began to build ships, especially warships, from 1882. These were built, including guns, for many navies around the world, especially the Imperial Japanese Navy . Armstrong employed many skilled engineers at the Elswick shipyard, including George Wightwick Rendel , who invented the cruiser as a type of ship. The company merged in 1897 with the Whitworth operations to Armstrong Whitworth , which in turn was later taken over by the Vickers Group. When he died, his company employed over 20,000 people, making it one of the largest industrial empires of the Victorian Age .

Since his marriage to Margaret Ramshaw in 1835 remained childless, his title of nobility expired on his death in 1900. Heir to his fortune was his great-nephew William Watson-Armstrong , who was newly awarded the title of Baron Armstrong in 1903 .

literature

Web links

Wikisource: William George Armstrong  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ London Gazette . No. 25718, HMSO, London, July 5, 1887, p. 3626 ( PDF , English).
  2. ↑ George Edward Cokayne , Vicary Gibbs (Ed.): The Complete Peerage . Volume 1, The St Catherine Press, London 1910, pp. 218-219 ( archive.org ).
  3. ^ Electric Light Years 1878 AD - 1900 AD. Retrieved August 24, 2014 .
predecessor Office successor
New title created Baron Armstrong
1887-1900 		Title expired
personal data
SURNAME Armstrong, William, 1st Baron Armstrong
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Armstrong, William George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1810
PLACE OF BIRTH Newcastle upon Tyne
DATE OF DEATH December 27, 1900
Place of death Cragside at Rothbury, Northumberland