Worthington-Simpson Ltd
J. Simpson & Co. factory at 101 Grosvenor Road, Pimlico, 1860
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| Industry | Pump manufacturing |
|---|---|
| Fate | Acquired |
| Successor | Studebaker-Worthington |
| Founded | c. 1785 |
| Founder | Thomas Simpson |
| Defunct | 1969 |
| Headquarters | United Kingdom |
Worthington-Simpson was a British pump manufacturer. Many of their pumps were used in municipal waterworks in Great Britain.
The company has its roots in a steam engine workshop founded by Thomas Simpson around 1785. His sons took over the workshop and founded James Simpson & Co., which became Worthington Pump Co. through a merger in 1903, renamed Worthington-Simpson in 1917. It continued as an independent pump manufacturer until 1969, when it became a subsidiary of Studebaker-Worthington. A series of mergers and divestitures followed. The successor company as of 2013, formed through a number of mergers, is Flowserve.
In 1785 Thomas Simpson, an engineer, set up the Lambeth Waterworks. At first a small company, it supplied water to parts of Southwark and Vauxhall from pumping works on the south side of the River Thames. Simpson was engineer to this company for the next forty-one years. He also became engineer of the Chelsea Waterworks Company. Simpson set up a workshop for repairing and maintaining the recently invented steam engines used by his company. The workshop would be taken over by his sons and developed into a large steam engine and pump manufacturing business. In 1799 Simpson was engineer of the Liverpool and Harrington Waterworks Company, which combined with the Bootle Waterworks Company with Thomas Telford as engineer to provide general water supplies to Liverpool. At first the Bootle works had just one 2 hp steam engine forcing the water through wooden tubes.
When Simpson died in 1823 his son James Simpson (1799–1869) succeeded him as Engineer at the Chelsea Waterworks Company and the Lambeth Waterworks Company. These were both part-time jobs, and James Simpson had time to operate an engineering consultancy, one of the first. In 1828 James Simpson built the first slow sand filter bed in London for the Chelsea waterworks. By the 1830s James Simpson was devoting most of his time to his engineering consultancy. He provided designs of waterworks for the cities of Bristol, Copenhagen and Aberdeen. He designed a long pier at Southend and a new west dock at Hartlepool among other works.
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