User:Thatch43/William Reynolds (industrialist)

William Reynolds (1758 – 1803) was an English industrialist who has been described as 'one of the most inventive geniuses of the Industrial Revolution' (John Randall, 1880) and 'having an intellectual stature and scientific imagination unmatched by any other ironmaster' (Barrie Trinder, 2000)

Biography

Early life

William Reynolds was born on 14 April 1758 at Bank House, Mossey Green (a hamlet of Ketley, Salop), the eldest son of Richard Reynolds of Bristol and Hannah Darby (1735-1762), the eldest daughter of Abraham Darby II of Coalbrookdale.

Iron master

Like his father, William had substantial shareholdings in the works and collieries of Ketley and the neighbourhood, including those of the Coalbrookdale Company and Earl Gower. In 1796, William and his half-brother Joseph relinquished their shares in the Coalbrookdale Company, gifted to them by their father Richard; together, they formed their own enterprise, William Reynolds & Company, and in 1797 took over The Madeley Wood Company. Then in 1802, Earl Gower formed a new partnership; The Lilleshall Company; and William sold his interest in Earl Gower & Co. to John Bishton.

Canal Builder

William Reynolds devised a successful method of raising canal boats from one level to another by means of rail-tracked inclined planes that, with improvements designed by Shropshire engineers John Lowden and Henry Williams, subsequently came into general use elsewhere on the Shropshire Canal. Canal inclined planes are a method of transporting barges between two sections of a canal where the terrain is too steep to support locks.

For Reynolds in Ketley, the greatest problems for canal design were the hilly nature of the East Shropshire coalfield and the lack of a plentiful water supply for lockage. The first successful inclined plane of the kind using cradles was constructed on the Ketley Canal that opened in 1788; this inclined plane was described and illustrated by Thomas Telford in a chapter contributed to Joseph Plymley's ‘General Report on the Agriculture of Shropshire,’ published by the Board of Agriculture in 1803. Reynolds continued to build or promote more local tub-boat canals in Shropshire, with inclined planes that incorporated the design improvements suggested by Lowden and Williams.

Later, in conjunction with Telford and 'Iron Mad' John Wilkinson, Reynolds would construct a cast-iron aqueduct, opened in 1797, to carry the Shrewsbury Canal across the River Tern at Longdon-upon-Tern. Thomas Telford adopted this technique in the design a similar iron aqueduct, the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct opened in 1807, using iron supplied by William Hazledine from his foundries at Shrewsbury and nearby Cefn Mawr.

Inventor

In 1799 Reynolds obtained a patent (No. 2363) for preparing iron for conversion into steel by the use of manganese. Although it was of no practical importance at the time, after his death it was put in evidence during the proceedings in the great patent trial of Heath v. Unwin in 1842 and following years.

Potter

Reynolds was involved in developing and operating the china factory at Coalport.

Developer

Reynolds planned to house factory workers in Coalport.

Obituary

Reynolds died at the Tuckeys, near Broseley, Shropshire, on 3 June 1803, and was buried at Coalbrookdale. His portrait was painted by Hobday, engraved by Sharp, and reproduced in the ‘Hardware Trade Journal,’ 30 Sept. 1895.