鈥淔acts, not opinons.鈥� A stern, didactic slogan. You can picture it inscribed in pokerwork or embroidery on a wall plaque in the drawing room of a headmistressy great aunt. In reality you can see it carved into the stone lintel of a Victorian building in London鈥檚 Southwark Street, just a few steps from the Thames. The building housed-indeed still houses-a universal testing machine: a mammoth piece of equipment designed by Scotsman David Kiekaldy in the mid-19th century. It was intended for 鈥減ulling, thrusting, bending, twisting, shearing, punching and bulgin.鈥�
In pursuit of facts not opinions, Kirkaldy鈥檚 outsized machine tortured bits of metal from engineering companies around the world. But obsessive determination and unshakeable self-belief don鈥檛 necessarily win you friends, as Kirkaldy found out when he worked for the commission of inquiry set up after the Tay Bridge disater in 1879.The commission served up some of his facts, but garnished them with other people鈥檚 opinions鈥�
FACT: the night of 28 December 1879 was about as foul a night as you could imagine. A ferocious gale was blowing straight up the Firth of Tay, roaring through the struts and girders of the latest local landmark-the Tay Bridge. Fact: the 85-span bridge, still less than two years old, was regarded as one of the greatest feats of Victorian engineering. But, as the evening train from Edinburgh to Dundee steamed across it, the central section collapsed. The train and its 75 passengers plunged into the icy waters below. No one survived.
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The Tay Bridge Disaster remains Britain鈥檚 worst structural engineering failure. As William McGonagall, the famously bad Scottish poet anticipated in his dreadful poem about the tragedy, that last Sunday of the year would 鈥渂e remember鈥檇 for a very long time鈥�.
A Board of Trade inquiry into the disaster opened in Dundee in January 1880, adjourned in March, and resumed work in London on 19 April. The team of three chosen to sit in judgement included the president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, William Barlow. The inquiry鈥檚 principal functionary, a Mr Henry Law, was instructed to 鈥渟elect specimens of the cast and wrought iron, also portions of the bracing and fastenings, and of the connecting bolts of the columns, &c. to be subjected to test at Mr Kirkaldy鈥檚 establishment in Southwark鈥�. But who was Kirkaldy? And why was he chosen for this important task?
David Kirkaldy was born in 1820 near Dundee into a family of merchants. He began his working life in his father鈥檚 office-but at the age of 23 he left for Glasgow to become an apprentice in a foundry run by the firm of Robert Napier. His skill in engineering drawing and his meticulous attention to detail earned him a job as Napier鈥檚 chief draughtsman.
In the late 1850s the company moved into boilermaking: this was a risky enterprise because any weakness in its metal put a boiler at risk of exploding. Kirkaldy, obsessed by facts and a diligent collector of data, was put in charge of materials testing. He had found his vocation. Before long, he decided to go it alone and quickly became the country鈥檚 leading man in the field.
Kirkaldy had no patience with namby-pamby testers who鈥檇 be content with cutting out a small chunk of the structure to be tested. He thought big. If your con rod was ten feet long, if your iron supporting strut measured 20 feet, well, test the whole thing.
The machine Kirkaldy designed and patented for 鈥減ulling, thrusting, bending . . . etc鈥� was 47 feet 6 inches long and weighed 116 tons. Pressure was applied by a hydraulic ram which could generate a pull of almost 450 tons. Despite its massive proportions, the machine could measure the load on specimens with exquisite accuracy.
Right from the start, engineering firms around the world were queuing up for the firm鈥檚 services. The first big job came from builders Cubitt and Carr, who requested test reports on the cement, bricks, granite, iron and timber being used to construct the nearby Blackfriars Bridge across the Thames. Within two weeks, Kirkaldy had his first foreign order-from Germany鈥檚 foremost arms manufacturer, Krupps of Essen.
Kirkaldy quickly found that not everyone shared his respect for facts-and his outspoken criticism of others earned him a reputation as a prickly and difficult character. The first major row came when he was asked to assess the strength and durability of steel, a relatively untried material in the mid-1800s. A committee of five-including Barlow-persuaded 10 manufacturers to put up 拢250 each and provide samples of their steel. Mr Kirkaldy鈥檚 鈥減erfect testing machine鈥�, as the Mechanics鈥� Magazine called it, was chosen to carry out the work.
Kirkaldy performed 203 tests on 29 samples. For some reason Barlow questioned his findings. The committee published them anyway-but introduced so many errors into its report that Kirkaldy was furious. He fired off a couple of angry letters to the committee, then refused to cooperate any further. The committee had all subsequent measurements carried out on a cable-testing rig at Woolwich Dockyard. The report of its results was described by the journal Engineering as 鈥渢he most wonderful combination of blunders that were ever put forward in a standard work鈥�. The affair delayed the widespread adoption of steel by several years, and left a mountain of bad feeling between Barlow and Kirkaldy.
The Tay Bridge inquiry was a rerun of the steel committee affair. Kirkaldy was not asked to inspect the bridge itself, advise on what tests needed to be done, or select suitable samples. The first load of material sent to him wasn鈥檛 suitable for testing. Bizarrely, he was not invited to give evidence to the inquiry himself; his findings were presented-or, as he saw it, garbled-by Henry Law. For whatever reason, Law chose to criticise some of the evidence he was putting forward, and cast doubt on its validity.
To suggest that the board was prejudiced against its own star witness would be to speculate beyond the evidence. But it鈥檚 difficult to avoid that suspicion. Kirkaldy鈥檚 findings revealed that the iron used to build the Tay Bridge wasn鈥檛 up to the job. This was perhaps not surprising given that it came from temporary foundries built on the river bank. In the event, the inquiry placed the blame firmly on the bridge鈥檚 designer, Thomas Bouch, who was accused of failing to take high winds into account. Engineers are still debating the justice of the verdict.
Kirkaldy, once again infuriated, covered the margins of his copy of the inquiry鈥檚 report with angry jottings. But still bruised from the steel incident, he decided against public protest. 鈥淜irkaldy was the terror of so many persons that it is probable that at one time he was the best hated man in London,鈥� commented one fellow engineer. But however difficult he was, it鈥檚 clear that he鈥檇 been shabbily treated by officialdom.
Neither affair damaged his reputation or his business in the long term. Kirkaldy died in 1897, but the family firm continued under his son and grandson until it was sold in 1965. By that time its testing credits included the Sydney Harbour Bridge, London鈥檚 Hammersmith Bridge, the Festival of Britain鈥檚 Skylon, and some of the wreckage from the 1954 Comet air crash.
Kirkaldy鈥檚 equipment remained in working order to the end but more modern testing techniques have now made it redundant. In a world of flawed men and dishonourable motives, at least the great machine could be relied on to give him what he needed: facts, not opinions.
David Kirkaldy鈥檚 workshop is open to the public once a month. For details telephone 01322 332195.