Peter Fairbairn

Sir Peter Fairbairn (1799–1861) was a Scottish engineer and inventor and mayor of Leeds, West Yorkshire.

Peter Fairbairn was the youngest brother of Sir William Fairbairn, born at Kelso in Roxburghshire in September 1799. He had little education, and his father obtained a situation for him in 1811 in the Percy Main colliery at Newcastle-on-Tyne. For three years Peter continued at Percy Main, until, at the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to a millwright and engineer in Newcastle. He walked every day from Percy Main to Newcastle. During his apprenticeship he made the acquaintance of Henry Houldsworth of Glasgow, a mechanic and constructor of cotton machinery, under whom he was placed as foreman, ultimately being appointed traveller to the firm.

In 1821 he left Houldsworth to take a situation on the continent. In France he stayed a year, acquiring technical knowledge; and after a period in the Manchester establishment of his brother William accepted a partnership with his former employer, Houldsworth.

In 1828 he left Glasgow and began business in Leeds as a machine maker. He had no capital; but Leeds was then in the first flush of its manufacturing prosperity.

Fairbairn had already devoted attention to flax-spinning machinery, which had been developed in Leeds by Philippe de Girard, a French inventor. Fairbairn suggested an improvement by which the process was simplified and a great saving effected. He proposed to use eighty spindles instead of forty, and to substitute screws for the old ‘fallers’ and ‘gills.’ John Anderson, a Glasgow workman, joined him in perfecting the machine, which was constructed in a small room in Lady Lane, Leeds.

John Marshall, a prominent local flax-spinner, promised to replace his old machines with Fairbairn's as fast as they could be turned out. Fairbairn said that he had neither workshop nor money; Marshall encouraged him to take the Wellington foundry at the New Road End, which was then to let. Fairbairn became in time independent of Marshall's support. Further improvements were introduced, and he constructed woollen as well as flax machinery. His improvement in the roving-frame, and his adaptation of what is known as the ‘differential motion’ to it, his success in working the ‘screw gill’ motion, and his introduction of the rotary gill, were all factors in the growth of mechanical efficiency.

...
Wikipedia