John Brown (industrialist)

Sir John Brown
Sir John Brown with Mayor's Chain. Portrait in Sheffield Town Hall
Born	(1816-12-06)6 December 1816 Sheffield
Died	27 December 1896(1896-12-27) (aged 80) Bromley
Nationality	British
Occupation	industrialist

Sir John Brown (6 December 1816 – 27 December 1896), British industrialist, was born in Sheffield. He was known as the Father of the South Yorkshire Iron Trade.

He was born at Sheffield in Flavell's Yard, Fargate, on 6 December 1816. He was the second son of Samuel Brown, a slater of that town. He was educated at a local school held in a garret, and was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to Earl, Horton, & Co., factors, of Orchard Place, In 1831, his employers engaged in the manufacture of files and table cutlery, taking an establishment in Rockingham Street, which they styled the Hallamshire Works. Nonetheless he did take over the company's factoring business with the help of a loan for £500 thanks to the backing of his father and uncle and for several years travelled the country selling goods. He started his own company John Brown & company in 1844 manufacturing Steel at a small foundry on a site at what is the now Orchard Square Shopping centre. The business prospered so well that he sold his factoring firm and moved to larger premises on Furnival Street. In 1848 Brown invented the conical steel spring buffer for railway carriages which he sold to the London and North Western Railway as well as other railways throughout the UK. On 1 January 1856, Brown opened his new Atlas Works in Brightside in an effort to centralise his workshops and workforce in one place, the works originally were on a 3-acre (1.2 ha) site but within three years had grown to 30 acres (12 ha). By 1859 Brown was producing rails for the quickly expanding railway industry using the Bessemer process.

Brown's great achievement was the development of armour plating for war vessels. In 1860, he saw at Toulon the French ship La Gloire. She was a timber-built 90-gun three-decker, cut down and coated with hammered plate armour, four and a half inches thick. This contrivance occasioned the English government so much uneasiness that they ordered ten 90- and 100-gun vessels to be similarly adapted. Brown, from a distant inspection of La Gloire, came to the conclusion that the armoured plates used in protecting her might have been rolled instead of hammered. He was at that time mayor of Sheffield, and he invited the premier, Lord Palmerston, to inspect the process. Palmerston's visit was followed in April 1863 by one from the lords of the admiralty, who saw rolled a plate twelve inches thick and fifteen to twenty feet long. The latter visit was the subject of an article in Punch (18 April 1863). The admiralty were convinced of the merits of Brown's methods, and the royal commission on armour plates ordered from his works nearly all the plates they required. In a few years, he had sheathed fully three-fourths of the British navy.