Andrew Handyside and Company
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| Ltd | |
| Industry | Foundry |
| Founded | 1848 |
| Defunct | 1920s |
| Headquarters | Derby |
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Key people
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Andrew Handyside |
| Products | Ornamental Cast Iron, Bridges, Structural components |
Andrew Handyside and Company was an iron founder in Derby, England, in the nineteenth century.
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1805, Handyside worked in his uncle Charles Baird's engineering business in St. Petersburg before taking over the Brittania Foundry in 1848. It had first been opened around 1820 by Weatherhead and Glover to cast ornamental ironwork, and had achieved a high reputation, partly from the skill of the workers, but also because of the quality of the local moulding sand. By the 1840s it was diversifying into railway components. Among the early customers was the Midland Railway's Derby Works for which it supplied cylinder blocks and other castings.
Although cast iron ornaments were going out of fashion, until the advent of steel there was an increasing demand for engineering and for iron framed construction. He concentrated in improving the strength of the material, which, when tested at Woolwich in 1854 proved to have a tensile strength of between 20 and 23 tons per square inch, against a norm of about seventeen. He also retained the artistry that had gone before and improved upon it.
His output ranged from garden ornaments to railway bridges. He produced lamp posts for the new gas street lighting (one of which still exists on Silk Mill Lane in Derby) and was one of the first to produce the new standard Post Office letterboxes. Nearly two thousand different window frames designs were produced. The company even supplied a dome to the steel maker Henry Bessemer for the roof of his conservatory.
When one considers the small area occupied by the works, on the bank of the River Derwent, hemmed in by the slope behind, its output seems remarkable. Between 1840 and 1846, for instance, it produced four hundred bridges for the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway.
In time, the works also produced rolling mills, hammers, forges and presses, at first for its own use, then for others, including the new steel mills.
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