Читать книгу Lighthouses - Peter Williams - Страница 9

The workmanship was not characterised by any degree of finish – a fact in its favour, as any great degree of finish, or adoption to ornament, would involve an increased outlay of capital without compensating advantages.

Report of the Great Exhibition jurors on James Chance’s first lighthouse lens, 1851

The use of light to guide the mariner as he approaches land, or passes through intricate channels has, with the advance of society and its ever increasing interests, caused such a necessity for means more and more perfect as to tax the utmost powers both of the philosopher and the practical man in the development of the principles concerned, and their practical application.

Michael Faraday, 1860

The lens rose 20ft (6m) above the exhibition floor, standing aloof, its green tinge giving no hint of the power of the light it was designed to emit. Four hundred and thirty prisms held in place by a gun-metal framework formed a complex array of glass and steel weighing four tons, at whose function visitors to the exhibition could only wonder. As they strolled past and looked up, faces contorting into expressions of curiosity and non-comprehension, one man stood in the background bearing a more knowing countenance. To him it was a miracle the lens was even there. He had conceived of the notion of building it six years earlier but put it off for a further five years, such was the technical challenge. In England only two or three firms had made the attempt, but had given up in the face of the punitive excise duties on glass and the superiority of French competition. James Chance, though, was a determined man and had the backing of the greatest glass manufacturer in England, as well as the moral support of men of science, who bore a heavy grudge against their French rivals.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was the ideal stage on which to unveil his brainchild. Eight million people from all over Britain walked through the maze of halls that displayed the products and inventions – more than half of them British – of countless workshops and factories around the world. Most of them had never been revealed to the public before, and Queen Victoria herself was amazed at the ingenuity of her subjects. Writing in her journal on the evening of the opening on 1 May 1851, she described her feelings of elation:

The tremendous cheering, the joy expressed in every face, the vastness of the building, with all its decoration and exhibits, the sound of the organ (with 200 instruments and 600 voices, which seemed nothing), and my beloved husband, the creator of this peace festival ‘uniting the industry of all the nations of the earth’, all this was moving indeed, and a day to live for ever.

James Chance was proud of his lighthouse lens, as his uncle Lucas Chance was proud of the building that housed it. Under his direction, the firm of Chance Brothers of Birmingham had, in less than six months, manufactured the 300,000 glass panes that gave their name to the building that Punch had scoffingly christened ‘the Crystal Palace’. As W.A. Thorpe wrote in his authoritative 1961 book English Glass, the ‘Crystal Palace was the greatest work of glass we have ever possessed, and unequalled as an architectural use of the material’. The scale of both achievements was symbolic of the age. Chance’s mass production of the glass proved it was possible for industry to ratchet up production to meet the huge demand generated by population growth and exports to an expanding empire. The lighthouse breakthrough came just at the time when steam ships swelled world trade and the Admiralty needed safer waters through which the Royal Navy could sail to protect this trade and pursue the country’s military adventures.

In 1851, James Chance was 37 years old and senior manufacturing partner at Chance Brothers. He had little experience of the sea, having taken the short trip across the English Channel but half a dozen times, and had never even imagined taking an ocean-going voyage. But something gripped his imagination and mathematical inclinations, and he devoted the next 30 years of his life to the science of lighthouse optics, engineering and manufacture. During this time he was consulted by eminent men such as Michael Faraday, Sir David Brewster, Charles Babbage, Sir George Airy, Sir James Douglass and the lighthouse Stevensons. His contribution to the work of the Royal Commission on Lighthouses, Buoys and Beacons between 1858 and 1861 helped restore England’s position at the forefront of lighthouse design and engineering, which it had lost to France in the 1820s. In 1901, a year before his death, he was awarded a baronetcy in Queen Victoria’s birthday honours list for services to the seafarer. By 1951, when Chance Brothers celebrated its centenary at a glittering dinner at the Savoy Hotel, the company had supplied more than 2,400 lighthouse lenses and hundreds of complete lighthouse structures to nearly 80 countries.

But no family, and especially no family business, is without its tensions, squabbles and sometime irreconcilable differences. Lucas Chance, James’s uncle – impetuous, irascible and driven by an obsession to outwit his rivals – was the undisputed front man at Chance Brothers from 1822, when he founded the business, until close to his death in 1865. He brought his younger brother William, James’s father, into the business when the firm was expanding and needed an injection of capital. William had built a successful trading business in Birmingham and was High Bailiff of that town in 1830, but Lucas needed him to bolster the family presence within his firm.

James, William’s eldest son, was likewise compelled to join the firm, not through his inclination for business, but rather because he felt it his duty to support his father and uncle. It was only once he realized the glass business held the promise of scientific and engineering experiment that he found his own niche in the lighthouse works. Lucas was continually looking for ways to expand the business and always had an eye for the bottom line. James was more interested in the scientific and engineering aspects of glass manufacture, and for much of its life the Chance Brothers lighthouse business was more of a drain on profits than a contributor.

Two of the chief motivators for businessmen in the 19th century were economic gain and patriotism. In James’s case, he chose in lighthouses a product that paradoxically brought little of the former but satisfied the latter in great measure. Lighthouses were intrinsically ‘good’ and fitted well with James’s character of uncompromising integrity and reliability, combined with his desire for truth, to do good works and to leave a legacy for the community. What is incontestable is that the lighthouse works was the embryo that spawned the plethora of innovations and products which, by the early 20th century, had given Chance Brothers a reputation for excellence.

Perhaps James Chance’s greatest legacy to the firm and to British industry was his unswerving commitment to the application of science and engineering to manufacturing. In the commemorative volume Mirror for Chance, published in 1951 to celebrate the centenary of his founding of the lighthouse works, the index of products made in the Chance factory reads like a compendium of British ingenuity and innovation. From antique glass, airport beacons and ashtrays to Britannia domestic glassware, deep-well pumps, fluorescent lighting, fog signals and laboratory tubing, to microscope slides and lenses of every description, lighthouse optics, petrol-pump globes, stained-glass windows, television tubes and X-ray bulbs, there was nothing the firm could or would not attempt to invent, build or improve on in the pursuit of engineering innovation and perfection.