Instrument Makers as Corporate Identities: The Cary Microscope and Patrick Adie’s Extensometer

This is the first of a series of posts written by members of the Tools of Knowledge project. Our blog will deal with both scholarly and technical questions we encounter and give regular updates on the project’s progress.

The project team has just completed disambiguating c. 11,000 relations from the SIMON dataset using a customised relational disambiguator tool. This is a critical task for producing a remodelled linked open data version of SIMON. Our next post will look at the disambiguator tool in more detail.

In this post I will be looking at instrument makers whose names are used posthumously by instrument-making businesses as a corporate identity. In the SIMON dataset the active years for an instrument maker encompasses both the working years of a maker and instances when a business has carried on in the founder’s name after his death. This raises questions both in terms of data handling and the attribution of instruments to specific makers.

A case in point is William Cary (1759-1825), an optician who was apprenticed to Jesse Ramsden (1735-1800) and later opened his own business at 272 Strand, London in 1789. Cary quickly became renowned for the quality of his astronomical and mathematical instruments which he sold in both the United Kingdom and Europe.

Shortly after Cary’s death on 16 November 1825, one of the instrument makers in his workshop, Charles Gould, designed a pocket microscope for a new market of amateur naturalists. Since William’s nephews, John and George Cary, continued the business under their uncle’s name, Gould’s new invention became known as the Cary-type microscope and early examples of this instrument c.1825-1830 are engraved with Cary’s name.

Instruments continued to be manufactured under William Cary’s name as late as 1891. Alison Morrison-Low has examined a Cary-type microscope acquired by the National Museums Scotland with a near-complete paper record of its design, manufacture, and sale. However, despite the extant documentation it is difficult to determine which workshop manufactured this instrument. Morrison-Low notes that an accompanying leaflet stating that the microscope was manufactured by Alexander McKenize (active 1816-1822) is likely incorrect and suggests that the instrument was almost certainly sold by McKenzie but was probably manufactured in the industrial centres of the English Midlands and then sent by packhorse and subsequently by rail into the London marketplace.

 

 

This instrument is constructed from solid brass with a bone engraved scale, steel claw clamps and housed in its original boxwood case with a stuck-down trade card: “Patrick Adie, Optician, Mathematical & Scientific Instrument Maker. Broadway Works, Westminster. London S.W.” The printed address on the trade card, “Broadway Works” is struck out and replaced with a handwritten address, “45 Horseferry Road.” The steel claw clamps on the instrument are also engraved, “Patrick Adie. 45 Horseferry R^d. Westminister. S.W.”

The extensometer was invented by Charles Huston in 1879 for the purpose of measuring the elastic strain of materials under tensions. This example manufactured by the Adie company was a later iteration of the extensometer which was redesigned to a more simplified form by John Goodman (1862-1935) of the Engineering Laboratory at Leeds University. A detailed description of this instrument is given in Ewart S. Andrews’ The Strength of Materials: A Text-Book for Engineers and Architects (1915) pp.371-2. In 1887 Goodman was appointed chief assistant to W. H. Stranger at the Broadway Testing Works and it is perhaps during this period that he collaborated with the Adie company at Broadway Works to produce the redesigned extensometer.

Clarke, Morrison-Low, and Simpson note that in 1874 Patrick Adie had a shop at 15 Pall Mall and also ran a workshop from Broadway Works, Westminister. The Adie firm used ‘Broadway works’ for several distinct addresses from c.1874-1918, including Broadway Works, 1 Broadway, Westminister and Broadway Works, 24 & 26 Tothill St, Westminister. The earliest reference I could find to the Adie company address at 45 Horseferry Road is in the Trades and Professional Directory (1914) where it is designated as a factory. An advertisement for Adie’s cement testing machines from the Directory of Manufacturers in Engineering and Allied Trades (1918) gives both his Broadway Works and Horseferry factory addresses. The address was later modified in reproduced versions of this advert to “Patrick Adie (formerly Broadway Works)”.

I was able to locate one other catalogued example of this same extensometer in the scientific instrument collection at the University College Cork, Ireland (see Charles Mollan’s Irish National Inventory of Scientific Instruments, 1441 MIS014). It is also housed in its original boxwood case with a pasted down Broadway Works trade card but Mollan’s inventory description of the UCC extensometer omits any reference to a Horseferry factory address on the instrument or on the case suggesting that these instruments were originally manufactured at Broadway Works. The auctioned instrument was possibly serviced or sold from the Horseferry factory address once the firm had ceased operations at Broadway Works after 1918.

Another question we might raise here is who were the instrument makers that took over the firm after Adie’s death on 18 May 1886? Clarke et al note that in 1858 Patrick Adie married Clementina Hellaby, and they had four sons and three daughters but none of them went into the business. According to family tradition, Patrick Adie’s foreman Llyod continued the business into the 20^th century although the subsequent history of the business after Adie’s death has not been studied in any detail. After investigating I found several further clues about the later history of the Adie business. A notice in the London Gazette (30 April 1915) gives the identity of three instrument makers who traded under the name of Patrick Adie. Arthur Llyod (Senior), Arthur Llyod (Junior), and William Henry Llyod were makers of scientific and other instruments and partners of a business at 45 Horseferry Road who operated “under the style or firm of Patrick Adie”. The original partnership was dissolved by mutual consent on 30 September 1914 and the business was subsequently continued under the name of Patrick Adie by Arthur Llyod (Junior) and William Henry Llyod. As far as I can tell these three instrument makers who were active at the Horseferry factory have not been previously identified. Further investigation of the business history of firms that operated under the name of more well-known makers will likely uncover new trade connections and allow for a more comprehensive attribution of specific instruments to instrument-makers and workshops.

Further Reading:

Clarke, T.N., A.D. Morrison-Low and A.D.C. Simpson, Brass and Glass: Scientific Instrument Making Workshops in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1989).

Morrison-Low, A.D. ‘The Gentle Art of Persuasion: Advertising Instruments during Britain’s Industrial Revolution’, in A.D. Morrison-Low, Sara J. Schechner and Paolo Brenni (eds.), How Scientific Instruments Have Changed Hands (Leiden, 2017), pp.43-56.