User:Apwoolrich/Richard Prosser

Prosser, Richard (1804–1854), inventor and patent reformer, was born in Aston, Warwickshire, on 3 April 1804, the third child of Walter Prosser (1772–c.1840), a joiner and builder, and his wife, Eleanor Davies (1764–1854). Evidence of any formal education is lacking but, during his early employment with the Birmingham brass-founders Penn and Williams, Prosser reportedly spent his leisure hours studying the theory and practice of mechanics, and thus 'qualified himself for the profession of civil engineer' (Birmingham Journal, 27 May 1854). In 1831 Prosser obtained a patent for making iron coffin nails with brass-plated heads, the first of his eleven English (pre-1852) and three UK (post-1852) patents. He established a manufacture in Bradford Street, Aston, in partnership with his elder brother, Thomas Prosser (1800–1870), an architect and surveyor, and John Rowlands junior, both of Worcester; the partnership was dissolved in March 1834. The following year, he was indicted at Warwick assizes on a charge of forging an acceptance on a bill of exchange and bailed for £800, half of which he was able to provide himself. Acquitted in March 1836, he immediately sued Rowlands for malicious prosecution and Thomas for slanderous imputations; both settled out of court. Thomas, now bankrupt, emigrated in 1838 to Paterson, New Jersey. In 1840 Richard patented an important process to make porcelain or ‘agate’ buttons and other items, including tiles and tesserae; in 1841 Thomas obtained an American patent for the buttons, later claiming that he had invented them in 1832 and Richard, the machinery to mass-produce them. Thomas subsequently manufactured 'Prosser buttons' (and imported Richard's patented, lap-welded tubes) which he sold through his New York store. On 26 April 1836 Prosser married Sarah Potter (1814–1848), the daughter of Robert Potter, engineer and victualler, and his wife, Jane, his neighbours in Bradford Street. The first of their seven children was born in February 1837, in Aston, possibly at the Chunk Engine Works in Coventry Road where Prosser had workshops and, it seems, living quarters; by May 1840 they had moved into 9 Camp Hill, Aston. Prosser's income at this point came mostly from producing nail-making and other machinery and from licensing his second patent, obtained in 1835, which covered a process for casting nails that involved a series of slitting and rolling machines. He may also have secured a French patent as the basis for a highly profitable nail manufactory in France that he cited in 1839 when advertising licences under his third English nail-making patent. Between February 1839 and June 1840 he obtained four more patents in three other industrial sectors, which he sought to commercialize by strategies that minimized his personal investment in their development. These covered the Chunk and Vesta stoves, manufactured and sold exclusively by Rippon and Burton, of London's Oxford Street; also the ‘agate’ buttons and tiles, in which the Staffordshire potter Herbert Minton bought a half share, and 'lap-welding', a new method of making metal tubes, which proved a lucrative enterprise for a series of assignees (from 1845, the Birmingham Patent Tube Company). It is not known why the Chunk Works' contents were auctioned off in February 1840, when Prosser was described by J. C. Robertson, patent agent and editor of the Mechanics' Magazine, as his 'agent for the manufacturing district', based at 2 Cherry Street, Birmingham (since at least December 1838) but by 1839 he owned a site on Watery Lane (where Thomas had experimented on the button process in 1837–8). The heyday of English porcelain button production lasted only until 1846, when it was undercut by a French innovation. By then, however, Minton, Hollins, and Company's mass-production of ceramic tiles and tesserae for floors and walls was proving the true value of Prosser's patent. Prosser's process of moulding dry, finely ground clay in metal dies under very high pressures eliminated both the extended time and the risk of warping that the drying of wet clay incurred; he probably also supplied Minton's with the hydraulic presses it required. Already in 1843, the brouhaha generated by the process's demonstration to the Society of Arts and the British Association led to Prosser and Minton being summoned to describe it to Prince Albert in person and to the tiles' extensive incorporation into Albert's designs for Osborne House. The partners were liberal with their samples and Prosser donated a tesselated pavement for the entrance to Birmingham's new library, where he was a subscriber. Astute marketing and royal patronage together with the tiles' cheap functionality created an enormous market, everywhere from breweries to railway stations, and drove the Victorian fashion for decorative tiling in major public buildings, not least Pugin's new Palace of Westminster. Less happy was Prosser's attempt to directly exploit his patented machinery for the rapid welding of long metal (lap-welded) tubes. A Scottish patent obtained jointly with Job Cutler, also of Birmingham, in 1843 led to their establishing the Caledonian Tube Company, in Coatbridge, near Glasgow, but Prosser's resignation in 1846 culminated in complex litigation. In 1850 he launched his 'anti-welded' tube for boilers, developed at a cost of over £20,000, but trials in a London and North Western Railway locomotive were disappointing. According to his son, Richard Bissell Prosser, the principle was later revived and found numerous applications. In 1847 the family moved to High House, a large residence with sixty acres of farmland in the village of King's Norton, Warwickshire, from where Prosser could commute by rail into Birmingham. On 29 February 1848 Sarah died from puerperal fever; their child survived her by only two months. Her sister, Hannah Somerton Potter (bap. 1817, d. 1904), who was probably already living with the family, became Prosser's second wife in Edinburgh in October 1850, in defiance of the statutory prohibition of marriage to a deceased wife's sister. Within a year, he was chair of the Birmingham branch of the Marriage Law Reform Association, campaigning for the law's repeal. Prosser was already campaigning to reform the patent laws, conducting an extensive debate with leading patent agents in the Birmingham Gazette. As a member of the Society of Arts' distinguished committee for the legislative recognition of the rights of inventors, in 1850 he subscribed to its written submission to the House of Lords' select committee on patent reform; he subsequently appeared before the latter, complaining chiefly of the expense of patents and the lack of any regular system for consulting specifications. In November 1852, to celebrate the Patent Law Amendment Act's 'emancipation of inventors', he organized a public dinner in Birmingham, at which he spoke of the need for further reform, including another drastic reduction in cost. He continued to collaborate closely with Bennet Woodcroft, superintendent of specifications at the new Patent Office, to achieve the prompt publication and indexing of new specifications and the abridged specifications by subject classes (all retrospectively to 1617). Prosser devised a printed questionnaire to solicit the views of inventors and patentees on the desirability of depositing a complete specification at the time of applying for a patent. One positive reply was from Maria Bentham, the widow of Samuel Bentham whose case for having been the principal inventor of the wood-working machinery at the heart of the Portsmouth dockyard's block-making system and the so-called American System of Manufactures Prosser strongly supported. His expertise in manufacturing iron tubes prompted his being called to testify before the House of Commons' select committee on small arms, in February 1854, on the feasibility of mass-producing rifle barrels on the American model or, he insisted, 'the Russian plan', since a Birmingham firm had equipped the Russian government's armoury at Tula with the necessary machinery in the 1810s. At Woodcroft's invitation he began drafting the introduction to the abridgement volume on firearms and printed several lithographs to illustrate it. He also opened negotiations to supply the British army with rifle barrels. Prosser died on 21 May 1854, at High House, from acute hepatitis, and was buried beside Sarah at Holy Trinity Church, Camp Hill, in Aston. By his will, dated 10 October 1850, he had appointed Hannah his executor and guardian of his children, authorizing her to sell his property to settle outstanding debts and invest the remainder as she saw fit. Although he died insolvent, the sale of the machine tools from his well-equipped engineering workshops at 42 Cambridge Street, Birmingham, and his library of over 1300 books, journals and prints helped to fend off the creditors. Another 707 volumes, many of great historical value and hitherto on loan to the new Patent Office Library, were purchased by the patent commissioners. At probate, his estate was valued at £7000. Hannah opened a school at High House but, by 1861, was working elsewhere as a governess, residing finally with her niece, Marianne Prosser (1842–1918), the wife of Alexander Ellis. A memorial window to Richard and Sarah Prosser was installed in St Nicholas's Church, King's Norton, about 1870. Woodcroft commissioned a portrait of Prosser, painted from a plaster death mask, to add to his projected National Gallery of Inventors, which he began installing in the Commissioners of Patents Museum when it opened in South Kensington in 1857. Giving testimony to the select committee on the Patent Office Library and Museum in 1864, Henry Cole expressed his high regard for Prosser: 'he invented more things, I believe, than almost any man of his day.' (p. 129). Sources Birmingham Journal (6 Aug 1836); (27 May 1854); (6 Nov 1854) The Spectator (27 May 1854) Google Preview WorldCat R. B. Prosser, Birmingham inventors and inventions (1881) Google Preview WorldCat Birmingham Gazette (1834–54), passim Google Preview WorldCat Mechanics' Magazine (1831–53), passim Google Preview WorldCat R. Prosser, patents, 1831–53 Warwick assize ledger, summer 1835, TNA: PRO members' subscription book, 1840–50; reports of the committee on the legislative recognition of the rights of inventors [proofs], 1850–52, RSA Report and minutes of evidence taken before the select committee of the House of Lords appointed to consider on the bill, intituled ‘an act further to amend the law touching letters patent for inventions’, Parl. papers, Cmd 486 (1851) Google Preview WorldCat Report from the select committee on small arms, Parl. papers, Cmd 236 (1854) Google Preview WorldCat Woodcroft file for Richard Prosser; Fire Arms file, BL, Business and IP Centre J. Hewish, Rooms near Chancery Lane: the patent office under the commissioners, 1852–1883 (2000) Google Preview WorldCat J. Roderick, Sale at the Chunk Engine Works, Coventry Road. Catalogue of machinery, tools, etc. [the property of Richard Prosser] which will be sold at auction, 4 Feb 1840, proof copy with MS corrections and notes by R. B. Prosser, 1840, Library of Birmingham Catalogue of the machinery and effects at the Cambridge Street Works, the property of Richard Prosser, sold by auction Dec 12–20, 1854, [Chesshire and Gibson], 1854 The late Mr Prosser's library, etc. Catalogue of the valuable library, [also] minerals and ancient porcelain, etc., which will be sold at auction April 10–11, 1855, [Chesshire and Gibson], 1855 Catalogue of the library of the Great Seal Patent Office (1857) Google Preview WorldCat L. F. W. Jewitt, The ceramic art of Great Britain, from pre-historic times, 2 vols. (1878) Google Preview WorldCat J. M. Blashfield, ‘Prosser's process of making bricks, tiles, and tesserae, from a new material’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Arts, 54 (1843–4), 179–80 Google Preview WorldCat T. Prosser, ‘Manufacture of porcelain buttons’, Journal of Mining and Manufactures (1851), 111–12 Google Preview WorldCat E. MacRory, Reports of cases relating to letters patent for inventions (1855) Google Preview WorldCat Repertory of Patent Inventions, 13 (1849), 46–61 Google Preview WorldCat Patent Journal and Inventors' Magazine, 4 (11 Dec 1847), 61–3 Google Preview WorldCat R. Prosser, Patent Law Amendment Act, 1852: suggestions as to the form of printing the past and future specifications of letters patent for inventions (1852) Google Preview WorldCat T. Prosser, advertisement, American Railroad Journal (29 Sept 1848) Google Preview WorldCat Report from the Select Committee on the Patent Office Library and Museum, Parl. papers, Cmd 504 (1864) Google Preview WorldCat The Times (1847–51), passim Google Preview WorldCat W. L. Tizard, The theory and practice of brewing illustrated (1843) Google Preview WorldCat S. Timmins, ed., The resources, products, and industrial history of Birmingham, and the midland hardware district (1866) Google Preview WorldCat A. Ure, Dictionary of arts, manufactures, and mines, 4th edn, 2 vols. (1853) Google Preview WorldCat London Journal of Arts and Sciences, 1 (1832), 379 Google Preview WorldCat Worcestershire Journal (7 April 1836) Google Preview WorldCat Pigot's Directory of Birmingham (1835) Google Preview WorldCat Wrightson's Triennial Directory of Birmingham (1839) Google Preview WorldCat White's Directory, or Gazetteer of Birmingham (1850) Google Preview WorldCat probate, 26 Oct 1854, TNA: PRO, PCC census returns, 1841, 1851, 1861 m. cert. d. cert. Archives Library of Birmingham, sale catalogues with MS notes by R. B. Prosser, obit. notice BL, Business and IP Centre, Woodcroft file for R. B. Prosser, Fire Arms file Sci. Mus., slide rules by R. B. Prosser, with notes Likenesses miniature, 1842, priv. coll. silhouette, 1845, priv. coll. A. Wivell, oils, 1854, Sci. Mus., London Wealth at Death £7000: will See also Prosser, Richard Bissell (1838–1918), patent examiner and historian of technology Oxford University Press