A treatise on mills and millwork by FAIRBAIRN, William - 1865

London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1865. Mixed editions. Cloth. Very good. Two vols., 8vo (230 × 150 mm), pp. xv, [1, list of plates and errata], 280, [4], 24 (publisher's catalogue); xvii, [1, list of plates and erratum], 292, 24 (publisher's catalogue); 18 folding engraved plates; inscription 'To Mr. Unwin with the Author's kind regards' to the half title of vol. I; very good in publisher's blind blocked green cloth, with small repairs to both volumes, the first volume re-backed. A very scarce work in the first edition for volume i and the second edition for volume ii, the first volume inscribed to William Cawthorne Unwin, at the time a clerk working for Fairbairn. This is a precious association copy linking two profoundly influential engineers from different generations.Sir William Fairbairn 1st Baronet of Ardwick (1789-1874) was the son of a Kelso farmer. He demonstrated talent in all things mechanical from an early age, and started his working life as an apprentice to a Newcastle millwright, where he befriended the young George Stephenson. He moved to Manchester in 1813 to work for Adam Parkinson and Thomas Hewes, and in 1817 started his own mill-machinery business in partnership with James Lillie as Fairbairn and Lillie Engine Makers (later William Fairbairn & Sons), which operated as a foundry and millwrighting factory, building ships and railway locomotives among other things.'Fairbairn became interested in studying [the] mechanical properties of [malleable iron] and its application to various engineering structures. He met Eaton Hodgkinson, who was already well known for his work in strength of materials, and proposed that the latter should carry out experiments in his works. A machine for testing materials (Fairbairn's lever) was designed and built, and most of the research work of Fairbairn and Hodgkinson was made with it … While Hodgkinson made experiments in tension and compression, Fairbairn undertook bending tests. In his work, he was especially interested in time effect and temperature effect. He found that after application of the load the deflection of a bar increased with time and he wanted to find the limiting load below which this was encountered. His study of the temperature effect showed that the breaking load decreased considerably with the increase of temperature.' (Stephen P. Timoshenko, History of strength of materials, pp. 124-125)Fairbairn's treatise on mills and millwork came out just before the publication of the final results of these long-continued experiments on stress in wrought-iron girders, 'Experiments to determine the effect of impact, vibratory action, and long-continued changes of load on wrought-iron girders', Philosophical Transactions, 154 (1864): 311-325, one of a series of articles on this topic, and serves as a kind of summary of his thinking on a wide range of industrial and technical issues. William Pole, Fairbairn's biographer, summarised the work in the following terms: 'The first volume is devoted to the general principles of mechanism and to prime movers. After a chapter of ten pages (which might have been much extended with advantage) on the history of mills, a discourse follows on the theory of mechanism, and the remainder of the book is occupied with notices of the modes by which water, steam, and wind are made available as sources of mechanical power. In regard to the former of these, Mr. Fairbairn has not confined himself, as previous authors have done, to the treatment of the machines for making use of the power, but he has traced the moving agent back to its source in the clouds, and followed in detail the circumstances of its fall, its distribution, its storage, and its conveyance to the point where it is to become useful. The construction of water wheels and other hydraulic machines is also given very fully - it is a department to which the author has evidently devoted much attention; and this division of the book forms the best and most comprehensive essay on water we have seen. We are the more pleased with this, because, since the general introduction of steam, water-power has been far too lightly esteemed.'The second part of the work is still more technical than the former, consisting, first, of chapters on wheels, straps, shafts, and couplings; and secondly, information on the arrangement of mills of various kinds - for corn, cotton, woollen fabrics, flax, silk, oil, paper, gunpowder, and iron. This latter division is, if we mistake not, almost entirely a novelty in engineering literature - the only similar attempt we remember being contained in an old work, called "[John] Nicholson's Operative Mechanic," which, though popular in its day, is now quite obsolete. We could find much in these essays to remark on, if we were writing a technical review; but we must here content ourselves with recommending the work as supplying a want of long standing, and as calculated to be of much practical utility. It is illustrated profusely with woodcuts, and contains also several plates, well drawn and engraved.' (cited in William Pole, The life of Sir William Fairbairn, Bart, pp. 415-416)Also see Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 39 (1875): 251-264 for an extensive obituary of Fairbairn.Provenance: volume I of the work offered here is inscribed by the author to William Cawthorne Unwin (1838-1933). Unwin studied at the City of London School and then at New College, St John's Wood. In 1856, after his studies, he went to work for Fairbairn as a clerk in the testing department carrying out and documenting various structural and material tests. He left in 1862 to go to work for the Williamson Brothers in Kendal. Unwin went on to become a fellow of the Royal (1886) and President of the both the Institution of Civil Engineers (1911-1912) and the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (1915-1916).Not in Bibliotheca Mechanica.