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'Vernacular Practice: Joseph Whitworth’s papers on Flatness & Threads' by John Gardner
2026-03-11 18:00 - 19:30 (Europe/London) | LONDON Alan Baxter Gallery, 75 Cowcross St, Clerkenwell, London, EC1M 6EL
This event is both an in-person and on-line event. No need to register – just come along or click this zoom link to join on-line.
This lecture examines the relationship between workshop practice and standards for threads and flatness by analysing two influential papers by Joseph Whitworth, which achieved a broad readership after being published in the 6d Mechanics’ Magazine in 1841. These papers are:
1. “Plane Metallic Surfaces and the Proper Mode of Preparing Them” (read at the British Association meeting in Glasgow in 1840, published in Mechanics’ Magazine, no. 910, 16 January 1841, pp. 39-42).
2. “A Uniform System of Screw Threads” (read to the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1841, published in Mechanics’ Magazine, no. 951, 30 October 1841, pp. 340-344).
The argument is that these papers remain relevant in modern engineering standards. Whitworth’s proposal for standard screw threads significantly contributed to the construction of the Crystal Palace in 1851, which was completed in just 190 days using approximately 30,000 nuts and bolts. This was achieved despite there being no standardized thread form until 1905. The contemporary engineer James Nasmyth highlighted the chaos and expense caused by the lack of a standardized thread form, where each bolt and nut was unique, leading to confusion and inefficiency:
‘No system was observed as to “pitch”, i.e., the number of threads to the inch, nor was any rule followed as to the form of these threads. Every bolt and nut was thus a specialty in itself […] all bolts and their corresponding nuts had to be marked as belonging to each other; and any mixing of them together led to endless trouble, hopeless confusion, and enormous expense.’ (James Nasmyth, Engineer: An Autobiography (1883), p.131.)
Whitworth’s proposal advocated for a practical, workshop-based method to promote his thread form, rather than relying solely on theoretical principles.
Research for this talk has involved working with the London Science Museum and the Crystal Palace Museum. Original bolts from the Crystal Palace and towers were examined, measured, and remanufactured establishing that Whitworth’s vernacular thread form was used to build the Palace. The plane metallic surfaces standard that Whitworth helped achieve, which relied on hand-scraping, initially annoyed his workers who thought hand work a retrograde step after using machines. Nevertheless, the method he published on stands to this day as process through which to achieve a high degree of flatness. In this talk, John Gardner will discuss Whitworth’s papers on flatness and threads, their origins in workshop practice, and their legacy in engineering standards.
About the Speaker
John Gardner is Dean of the Doctoral School at Anglia Ruskin University.
John’s recent publications include: ‘Thread form at the Crystal Palace’ (Journal for the History of Engineering and Technology, 2024); The 1830s, with David Stewart (CUP, 2024); ‘Waterloo to Peterloo‘ in The Oxford Handbook to Romantic Prose, ed. by Robert Morrison (OUP, 2024); ‘Liberalism’ in The 1820s, Innovation and Diffusion ed. by Matt Sangster and Jon Mee. (Edinburgh University Press, 2023); ‘Shelley’s Steamship’ Keats-Shelley Journal 71 (2022); and ‘A Dangerous Education; the Early Mechanics’ Institutes’ in Institutions as Networks (CUP, 2022).
John is currently working on a monograph entitled ‘Engineering Romanticism’.
