B. Hick and Sons
B. Hick and Sons, subsequently Hick, Hargreaves & Co, was a British engineering company based at the Soho Ironworks in Bolton, England. Benjamin Hick, a partner in Rothwell, Hick and Rothwell, later Rothwell, Hick & Co., set up the company in partnership with two of his sons, John and Benjamin Jr in 1833.
Locomotives
The company's first steam locomotive Soho, named after the works was a goods type, built in 1833 for carrier John Hargreaves. In 1834 an unconventional, gear-driven four-wheeled rail carriage was conceived for Bolton solicitor and banker, Thomas Lever Rushton. The engine was the first 3-cylinder locomotive and its design incorporated turned iron wheel rims with aerodynamic plate discs as an alternative to conventional spokes. The 3-cylinder concept evolved into Hick's experimental horizontal boiler A 2-2-2 locomotive about 1840, adopting the principle features of the vertical boiler engine. The A design appears not to have been put into production.More locomotives were built over the 1830s, some for export to the United
States including a Fulton for the Pontchartrain Railroad in 1834, New Orleans and Carrollton for the St. Charles Streetcar Line in New Orleans in 1835 and a second New Orleans for the same line in 1837. A 10 hp stationary engine was supplied to the Carrollton Railroad Company in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, for ironworking purposes, but damaged by fire in 1838. Two tender locomotives Potomak and Louisa were delivered to the Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad and a third, Virginia to the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad in North Carolina during 1836.
Between 1837 and 1840 the company subcontracted for Edward Bury and Company, supplying engines to the Midland Counties Railway, London and Birmingham Railway, North Union Railway, Manchester and Leeds Railway and indirectly to the Grand Crimean Central Railway via the London and North Western Railway in 1855. Engines were built for the Taff Vale Railway, Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway, Cheshire, Lancashire and Birkenhead Railway, Chester and Birkenhead Railway, Eastern Counties Railway, Liverpool and Manchester Railway, North Midland Railway, Paris and Versailles Railway and Bordeaux Railway.
In 1841 the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway successfully used American Norris locomotives on the notorious Lickey Incline and Hick built three similar locomotives for the line. Between 1844 and 1846 the firm built a number of "long boiler" locomotives with haystack fireboxes and in 1848, four s for the North Staffordshire Railway. In the same year, the company built Chester, probably the earliest known prototype of a 6-wheel coupled
Aerodynamic disc wheel
Benjamin Hick's wheel design was used on a number of Great Western Railway engines including what may have been the world's first streamlined locomotive; an experimental prototype, nicknamed Grasshoper, driven by Brunel at, c.1847. The 10 ft disc wheels from GWR locomotive Ajax were lent to convey the statue of the Duke of Wellington to Hyde Park Corner in London.Hick's patent extended the purpose of the design from the locomotive steam-carriage, '...I do not confine myself to this adaptation. Wheels for carts, waggons, coaches, timber carriages, and for many other uses, may be advantageously constructed on this principle. The forms, dimensions, nature, and strength of material of the naves, discs, and fellies, as well as the mode of uniting the different parts, may be varied, in order to suit the particular purpose for which the wheels are required, and to the wear and tear to which they are liable'.
Examples using wood paneling as streamlining are applied to the 16 ft flywheel and rope races of a Hick Hargreaves and Co. 120hp non-condensing Corliss engine, Caroline installed new at Gurteen's textile manufactorary, Chauntry Mills, Haverhill, Suffolk in 1879.
Disc wheels and wheel fairings have been used for armoured cars, aviation, drag racing, Land speed record attempts, Land speed racing, motor racing, motor scooters, motorcycle speedway, wheelchair racing, icetrack cycling, velomobiles and bicycle racing, particularly track cycling, track bikes and time trials.
Engineering drawings
Hick Hargreaves collection of early locomotive and steam engine drawings represents one of the finest of its kind in the world. The majority were produced by Benjamin Hick senior and John Hick between 1833-1855, they are of significant interest for their technical detail, fine draughtsmanship and artistic merit. The elaborate finish and harmonious colouring extends from the largest drawings for prospective customers to ordinary working drawings and records for the engineer.Works like this influenced the contemporary illustrators of popular science and technology of the time like John Emslie, their aesthetic quality stems from a romantic outlook in which science and poetry were partners.
The drawings are held by Bolton Metropolitan Borough Archives and the Transport Trust, University of Surrey.
Hick, Hargreaves & Co
After the death of Benjamin Hick in 1842, the firm continued as Benjamin Hick & Son under the management of his eldest son, John Hick; his second son, Benjamin Jr left the company after a year of its founding for partnership in a Liverpool company about 1834, possibly George Forrester & Co. In 1840 he filed a patent governor for B. Hick and Son using an Egyptian winged motif, that featured on the front page of Mechanics' Magazine. Hick's third and youngest son William served as an apprentice millwright, engineer in the company from 1834 and a 'fitter' from 1837, he was listed as an iron founder in 1843 with his eldest brother John, but died the next year.In 1845 John Hick took his brother-in-law John Hargreaves Jr into partnership followed by the younger brother William Hargreaves in 1847. John Hargreaves Jr left the firm in April 1850 before buying Silwood Park in Berkshire.
File:benjamin Hick & Son steam engine 2.jpg|left|thumb|B. Hick and Son 6 hp steam engine, mill-gear and ornamental column at the Great Exhibition. Photograph 1851 by Claude-Marie Ferrier from the Reports of the Juries.
The following year B. Hick and Son exhibited engineering models and machinery at The Great Exhibition in Class VI. Manufacturing Machines and Tools, including a 6 horse power crank overhead engine and mill-gear driving Hibbert, Platt and Sons' cotton machinery and a 2 hp high-pressure oscillating engine driving a Ryder forging machine. Both engines were modelled in the Egyptian Style. The company received a Council Medal award for its mill gearing, radial drill mandrils and portable forges. The B. Hick & Son London office was at 1 New Broad Street in the City.
One of the Great Exhibition models, a 1:10 scale 1840 double beam engine built in the Egyptian style for John Marshall's Temple Works in Leeds, is displayed at the Science Museum and considered to be the ultimate development of a Watt engine. A second model, apparently built by John Hick and probably shown at the Great Exhibition, is the open ended 3-cylinder A 2-2-2 locomotive on display at Bolton Museum. Bolton Museum holds the best collection of Egyptian cotton products outside the British Museum as a result of the company's strong exports, particularly to Egypt. Leeds Industrial Museum houses a Benjamin Hick and Son beam engine in the Egyptian style c.1845, used for hoisting machinery at the London Road warehouse of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway.
Locomotive building continued until 1855, and in all some ninety to a hundred locomotives were produced; but they were a sideline for the company, which concentrated on marine and stationary engines, of which they made a large number.
B. Hick and Son supplied engines for the paddle frigates Dom Afonso by Thomas Royden & Sons and Amazonas by the leading shipbuilder in Liverpool, Thomas Wilson & Co. also builders of the Royal William; the screw propelled Mediterranean steamers, Nile and Orontes and the SS Don Manuel built by Alexander Denny and Brothers of Dumbarton. The Brazilian Navy's Afonso rescued passengers from the Ocean Monarch in 1848 and took part in the Battle of The Tonelero Pass in 1851; the Amazonas participated in the Battle of Riachuelo in 1865.
The company made blowing engines for furnaces and smelters, boilers, weighing machines, water wheels and mill machinery. It supplied machinery "on a new and perfectly unique" concept together with iron pillars, roofing and fittings for the steam-driven pulp and paper mill at Woolwich Arsenal in 1856. The mill made cartridge bags at the rate of about 20,000 per hour, sufficient to supply the entire British army and navy. The intention was to manufacture paper for various departments of Her Majesty's service.
Steel boilers were first produced in 1863, mostly of the Lancashire type, and more than 200 locomotive boilers were made for torpedo boats into the 1890s. The Phoenix Boiler Works were purchased in 1891 to meet an increase in demand.
Bolton Steam Museum hold a 1906 Hick, Hargreaves and Co. Ltd. Lancashire boiler front-plate, previously installed at Halliwell Mills, Bolton.
The company introduced the highly efficient Corliss valve gear into the United Kingdom from the United States in about 1864 and was closely identified with it thereafter; William Inglis being responsible for promoting the high speed Corliss engine. In the same year Swiss engineer Robert Lüthy came to the firm from L. and L.R. Bodmer. An early horizontal Corliss type built in 1866, arrived in Australia the following year for Bell's Creek gold mine, Araluan, New South Wales; the engine is now housed at Goulburn Historic Waterworks Museum. A 50 hp Inglis and Spencer improved Corliss girder bed engine built in 1873, used to power Gamble's lace factory, Nottingham and an 1879, 120 hp non-condensing Corliss engine with Inglis and Spencer patent double clip trip gear are held at Forncett Industrial Steam Museum and Gurteen's textile manufactorary, Haverhill, Suffolk.
About 1881 Hick, Hargreaves received orders for two Corliss engines of 3000 hp, the largest cotton mill engines in the world. Hargreaves and Inglis trip gear was first applied to a large single cylinder 1800 hp Corliss engine at Eagley Mills near Bolton and the company received a Gold Medal for its products at the 1885 International Inventions Exhibition. An 1886 Hick, Hargreaves and Co. inverted, vertical single cylinder Corliss engine with Inglis and Spencer trip gear, used to run Ford Ayrton and Co.'s spinning mill, Bentham until 1966 is preserved under glass at Bolton Town Centre.
Lüthy was appointed superintendent of hydraulic apparatus in 1870, about August 1883 he went on business to Australia connected with the shipping of frozen meat and to inspect machinery for a large freezing establishment, but died suddenly on 3 July 1884, the day after he returned home.
Mill gearing was a speciality including large flywheels for rope drives, one example of 128 tons being 32 ft in diameter and groved for 56 ropes. Turbines and hydraulic machinery were also manufactured. Many of the tools were to suit the specialist work, with travelling cranes to take 15 to 40 tons in weight, a large lathe, side planer, slotting machine, pit planer and a tool for turning four 32 ft rope flywheels simultaneously. The workshops featured an 80ton hydraulic riveting machine. For the ease of shipping and transportation, Soho Iron Works had its own railway system, traversed by sidings of the London North Western Railway. Inglis, who lived in Bolton was a neighbour of LNWR's chief mechanical engineer, Francis Webb.
The company was renamed Hick, Hargreaves and Company in 1867; John Hick retired from the business in 1868 when he became a member of parliament, leaving William Hargreaves as the sole proprietor. On the death of John Hick's nephew Benjamin Hick in 1882, a "much respected member of the firm", active involvement of the Hick family ceased. William Hargreaves died in 1889 and, under the directorship of his three sons, John Henry, Frances and Percy, the business became a private limited company in 1892.
In 1893 the founder's great grandson, also Benjamin Hick started an apprenticeship, followed by his younger brother Geoffrey about 1900.