The Notre Dame Chapter would like to cordially invite you to our online technical presentation November 21st at 7 pm EST.
History is Written by the Winners: The Development and Use of Copper Sheathing andFastenings by The Royal Navy from the 1760s Onwards
Speaker: Dr. Peter NorthoverDate: Monday, November 21, 2022Time: Login 6:45 PM, Presentation 7:00 PMDuration: Approximately one hour; questions and answers to follow
Registration: Please contact Dave Guisbert at deguisbert@aol.com by November 20, 2022.Meeting login information will be sent to all who register.
Abstract:In 1761 HMS Alarm was experimentally sheathed with copper to protect her hull from shipworm.After a 2‐year voyage, much of it in the Caribbean it was readily apparent that the problem ofgalvanic corrosion between the copper, the iron fastenings of the vessel, and seawater was extreme.Further experimental voyages pointed to the solution, the use of copper rather than iron bolts.Following one successful experiment, systematic use of copper bolts began in 1777 on new buildvessels and by 1783 even the largest vessels with 100 guns were copper‐fastened, followed byretrofitting all older hulls. This meant a huge expansion in production which was mechanised byswitching from a swage and tilt hammer to a rolling mill with grooved rolls.This talk explores this process, first through the business archive of the Scottish coppersmith WilliamForbes who was the Navy's copper contractor, and the first to patent a rolling mill for copper bolts.There is a complete paper trail from Navy orders to bolts with a Forbes works stamp on them viainvoices, the payroll, furnace notebooks, weekly reports from the works' manager, all of which tell usabout a metalworks in the 1780s and what their empirical knowledge of copper metallurgy was.It also explores the copper bolts themselves through microanalysis, metallography, and textureanalysis with EBSD and neutron diffraction, to distinguish between different production processesand help track a bolt to a particular mill.And the winner – Thomas Williams, originally a lawyer in North Wales tried to corner the coppermarket, and also controlled the largest producer of copper for the Navy based on two patents of1783. He was questioned in Parliament in 1799 and completely failed to mention the work of Forbesin 1777‐83 and ever since the history of copper bolts has started in 1783.
About the speaker:Dr. Peter Northover has a BA and DPhil in Metallurgy from the University of Oxford, UK. He was bornin Oxford but grew up on the Isle of Wight. He started working on archaeological excavations whenhe was 15 and, after meeting parental opposition to reading archaeology at university, he moved tometallurgy.After completing his doctorate in stress corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement, he obtained a post‐doc position in 1974 to analyse all the Bronze Age metalwork in Wales, a project he is still trying tofinish. Since then he has continued to work in archaeometallurgy, almost always with non‐ferrousand precious metals.------------------------------
David Guisbert
Associate
Quality Associates Metallurgical Services
Niles MI
(574) 485-9359
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