Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University have solved the mystery of how the Crystal Palace in London, which at the time was the world’s largest building, was constructed in only 190 days.
The study, led by Professor John Gardner, has discovered that the Crystal Palace was the first building known to have made use of a standard screw thread – something that’s now taken for granted in modern construction and engineering.
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Completed just in time for the start of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crystal Palace was a powerful symbol of Victorian Britain’s industrial might. More than 560 metres long and with an enormous glass roof supported by 3,300 cast-iron columns, it was so large that it would expand by up to 30 centimetres on a warm day.
However, with the successful design for the Crystal Palace only approved in July 1850, historians have puzzled over the speed of its construction. That question has now been answered by the new study, which revealed that the Crystal Palace is the earliest known building to use Whitworth screw threads, later known as British Standard Whitworth (BSW), the world’s first national screw thread standard.
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The Crystal Palace was originally constructed for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, in the centre of London, before being dismantled and rebuilt in south London in 1854, where it remained until it was destroyed by fire in 1936. The researchers discovered the use of Whitworth screw threads at the site in Sydenham, south London, both in the remains of the building and the nearby south water tower, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and built to power the fountains in front of the Crystal Palace.
A column bolt from the building was found to correspond to the BSW measurements. A nut and bolt from the water tower was soaked in oil before a combination of heat, hammering and force revealed measurable screw threads, which again were found to have been made to BSW measurements.
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Prior to Joseph Whitworth’s invention, no two screws and bolts were alike. As they weren’t made to a standard measurement, it made construction time consuming, as lost or broken screws and bolts were difficult to replace. The Crystal Palace had 30,000 nuts and bolts, and the researchers believe that the standard thread of these is what allowed the building to be constructed to a remarkably tight schedule.
‘During the Victorian era, there was incredible innovation from workshops right across Britain that was helping to change the world,’ said Professor John Gardner, who carried out the research as part of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship to investigate connections between engineering and literary cultures. ‘In fact, progress was happening at such a rate that certain breakthroughs were perhaps never properly realised at the time, as was the case here with the Crystal Palace.
‘This research started out as a question – how was it built so quickly? – and thanks to Ken Kiss, curator of the Crystal Palace museum, who I carried out this research with, we were able to able to answer this. Ken had excavated original columns from the Crystal Palace site at Sydenham and from these we were able to take measurements,’ he continued. ‘I manufactured new bolts to British Standard Whitworth and demonstrated that they fitted the original nuts. Standardisation in engineering is essential and commonplace in the 21st century, but its role in the construction of the Crystal Palace was a major development.
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‘The Great Exhibition of 1851 was organised to showcase the best of engineering excellence. It was visited by around six million people, which was a third of Britain’s population, and attracted some of the most famous people of the day, including Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday,’ Gardner concluded. ‘Ironically, Joseph Whitworth was awarded a Council Medal for his displays at the exhibition inside the Crystal Palace, but his important role in the construction of the building itself hasn’t been recognised until now.’
The research has been published in the International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology.