Armstrong, William George
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
William George (1810-1900), an English inventor. He is the inventor of many improvements in hoisting apparatus, and other heavy iron machinery; also of a heavy gun, for which he was knighted by the British government in 1858, and raised to the peerage in 1887. This gun is neither more nor less than a rifle of great strength and large caliber. Bars of wrought iron , about two inches in width, are raised to a white heat and then twisted, spirally, around a cylindrical steel core. A second layer of heated bars is then twisted outside of the others in an opposite direction; a third layer outside of this, and so on, until any desired thickness has been obtained. The whole mass is then heated to a white heat and forged with a steam hammer. Two or more sections of this sort, about three feet in length, are then sawed off square at each end, brought together under intense heat, and surrounded by large rings to secure the joint. The steel core within is then removed, and the barrel of the gun is bored smooth and rifled with forty spiral grooves. An Armstrong weighing ten tons throws a thirty-two pound bullet five miles. At a distance of two miles a gunner is expected to hit a target nine feet square nine times out of ten, not bad shooting for a rifle. The strength of this gun in proportion to its weight renders it possible to use heavy charges of powder without danger of bursting. See Artillery ; Rifle
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account is essentially a manufacturing description of the built-up coiled wrought-iron gun, with its praise for hitting a nine-foot target at two miles. That technology is long obsolete: modern artillery barrels are single forgings of alloy steel, strengthened by autofrettage rather than by twisting white-hot bars around a core, and Armstrong's own firm was absorbed into Vickers-Armstrongs in 1927 before its Elswick and shipbuilding works were broken up and largely closed in the later twentieth century. What has survived is the part the 1910 entry does not mention: Cragside, electrically lit from 1878 using water power, passed to the National Trust in 1977 and is now visited as the birthplace of domestic hydroelectricity. Armstrong is remembered today at least as much as an engineer-scientist and Tyneside benefactor as an armaments maker, and his role in the arms trade is treated far more critically than in 1910.
Written for this edition, 2026.