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During the 19th century, there was a marked change in the structure and form of the rule-making trade in Birmingham and Wolverhampton. Making rules for tradesmen across the UK and abroad to measure, lay-out and calculate, effectively vanished from Wolverhampton. Established craft skills, practiced in small Birmingham workshops by a skilled master, assisted by trained journeymen using techniques passed onto apprentices, were swept aside by mechanisation.

Despite the active opposition of time-served journeymen, unskilled young operatives of both genders came to dominate a growing workforce, along with a decline in the number of employers and the emergence of a few large manufacturing units – the rule factory. A leading activist in this change was the entrepreneurial John Rabone II (1820-1892).

Informal and formal records kept by the Rabone business and preserved in Sheffield and Birmingham, together with data drawn from Census returns, the local press, and publications by or for the rule manufacturers, have been examined for the first time.

About the Speaker

David J. Bryden BSc MA PhD FSA took a degree in engineering at Leicester in 1964 followed by a year taking a taught course in the history and philosophy of science at Oxford.

David was then employed for nearly four decades in various national and university museums. His PhD (Cambridge 1993) was awarded on the basis of publications on early scientific instruments and the British instrument making trade.

Retiring to the West Midlands, David has continued to research and publish.