reporting upon it, but he made a journey through the industrial districts of the United States, and published upon his return, in conjunction with George Wallis (1811–1891) [q. v.], ‘The Industry of the United States in Machinery, Manufactures, and Useful and Ornamental Arts,’ London, 1854, 8vo. Whitworth's share consisted of the twelve short but interesting opening chapters devoted to machinery.
In 1856 he was president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and at the Glasgow meeting delivered an address in which his favourite projects were ably set forth. He deplored the tendency to excessive size and weight in the moving parts of machines and the national loss by over-multiplication of sizes and patterns. He contemplated the advantage that might be derived from decimalising weights and measures, a subject which led in 1857 to his paper ‘On a Standard Decimal Measure of Length for Engineering Work.’ His papers, five in number, each one of which signalises a revolution in its subject, were collected in a thin octavo as ‘Miscellaneous Papers on Mechanical Subjects, by Joseph Whitworth, F.R.S.,’ London, 1858. Whitworth had been elected to the Royal Society in 1857; he was created LL.D. of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1863, and D.C.L. Oxford on 17 June 1868.
In the meantime, as a consequence of the Crimean war, Whitworth had been requested by the board of ordnance in 1854 to design and give an estimate for a complete set of machinery for manufacturing rifle muskets. This Whitworth declined to do, as he considered that experiments were required in order to determine what caused the difference between good and bad rifles, what was the proper diameter of the bore, what was the best form of bore, and what the best mode of rifling, before any adequate machinery could be made. Ultimately the government were induced to erect a shooting-gallery for Whitworth's use at Fallowfield, Manchester, and experiments began here in March 1855. They showed that the popular Enfield rifle was untrue in almost every particular. In April 1857 Whitworth submitted to official trial a rifle with an hexagonal barrel, which in accuracy of fire, in penetration, and in range, ‘excelled the Enfield to a degree which hardly leaves room for comparison’ (Times, 23 April). Whitworth's rifle was not only far superior to any small arm then existing, but it also embodied the principles upon which modern improvements have been based, namely, reduction of bore (.45 inch), an elongated projectile (3 to 3½ calibres), more rapid twist (one turn in 20 inches), and extreme accuracy of manufacture. This rifle, after distancing all others in competition, was rejected by a war office committee as being of too small calibre for a military weapon. Ten years later, in 1869 (that is, just twelve years after Whitworth had first suggested the .45 calibre), a similar committee reported that a rifle with a .45 inch bore would ‘appear to be the most suitable for a military arm’ (the Lee-Metford arm of to-day has a .303 bore).
The inventor found some consolation for the procrastinations of official procedure in the fact that at the open competition promoted by the National Rifle Association in 1860 the Whitworth rifle was adopted as the best known, and on 2 July 1860 the queen opened the first Wimbledon meeting by firing a Whitworth rifle from a mechanical rest at a range of four hundred yards, and hitting the bull's-eye within 11/4 inches from its centre. The new rifle was adopted by the French government, and was generally used for target-shooting until the introduction of the Martini-Henry, a rifle in which several of Whitworth's principles were embodied.
In the construction of cannon he was equally successful, but failed to secure their adoption. In 1862 he made a rifled gun of high power (a six-mile range with a 250-lb. shell), the proportions of which are almost the same as those adopted to-day. But this gun, despite its unrivalled ballistic power, was rejected by the ordnance board in 1865 in favour of the Woolwich pattern, whereby the progress of improvement in British ordnance was retarded for nearly twenty years.
It was after the termination of this ‘battle of the guns’ that Whitworth made the greatest of his later discoveries. Experience had taught him that hard steel guns were unsafe, and that the safeguard consisted in employing ductile steel. A gun of hard steel, in case of unsoundness, explodes, whereas a gun of ductile steel indicates wear by losing its shape, but does not fly to pieces. When ductile steel, however, is cast into an ingot, its liability to ‘honeycomb’ or form air-cells is so great as almost to neutralise its superiority. Whitworth now found that the difficulty of obtaining a large and sound casting of ductile steel might be successfully overcome by applying extreme pressure to the fluid metal, while he further discovered that such pressure could best be applied, not by the steam-hammer but by means of an hydraulic press. Whitworth steel, as it was styled, was produced in this manner about 1870, and its special application to the manufacture of big guns was described by Whitworth in 1875 (Proc. Inst.
