Patents and the birth of materials informatics

At 99 Southwark Street in London, a few streets from the River Thames and tucked behind the Tate Modern, is a Victorian Warehouse that is home to the Kirkaldy Testing Museum. Volunteer-run, and open a few days a month, it is possible that some people who are not materials science nerds (and maybe even some who are…) have not yet heard of this Materials Mecca. A doorway bearing the epigraph ‘FACTS NOT OPINIONS’ leads to a workshop housing David Kirkaldy’s Universal Testing Machine. Completed in 1865, this huge hydraulic apparatus weighing over 100 tonnes can apply a battery of different failure tests to almost any sample you could imagine, and it remained in use until the 1970s.

The warehouse was specially-built to house the machine. Two large doors on each side could be thrown open to allow huge steel components to protrude from the sides of the building during testing. Some of these components were destined for engineering feats like the original Wembley Stadium and the iconic Skylon building – others were failed components from engineering disasters, such as the 1874 Tay Bridge collapse, or the 1954 explosion of BOAC flight 781.

Kirkaldy started his career at the Napier Foundry Works in Glasgow in 1843. With the Industrial Revolution in progress, he witnessed the development of exciting new engineering materials, including ‘steel’, which was replacing cast and wrought iron in engineering structures. Its properties and capabilities were not yet properly explored, and Kirkaldy realised that to exploit this new material fully, engineers would need to understand it properly. He also realised that if he could develop rigorous testing methods and machinery, then he could make a profitable business offering services in steel and materials testing.

In 1861, Kirkaldy left Glasgow for London, where he set up his own testing works. Here, he developed and built the Universal Testing Machine. The machine’s key asset was its versatility: a great variety of different tests including tensile, compressive, torsion and bending could be applied to samples of all shapes and sizes. It could apply huge forces and measure huge strains, but could do so with a high sensitivity.

Recognising its value, Kirkaldy patented the machine in 1863 (patent no. GB2970) under what was then a recently and radically revised patent system: the first that bore any real resemblance to the ‘modern’ patent system of today. The Patents Act of 1852 had finally established a single UK patent (they were previously separate in England/Wales, Scotland and Ireland), and had set up what is now the UK Intellectual Property Office, so that patents no longer needed to be issued in person by the Monarch. These changes made the patent system simpler and less costly, so that it was accessible to inventors like Kirkaldy as industry and innovation grew with the industrial age.

Kirkaldy’s testing machine is a fantastic piece of Victorian engineering, full of everything you would expect from the industrial age: heavy steel components, hydraulics, weights and counter-weights, the smell of oil and the sounds of moving gears and pistons. The patent gives an excellent feel for this (though of course there is no substitute for a trip to the workshop in Southwark Street).

However, Kirkaldy’s most important invention was perhaps not the patented machine, but something that feels more at home in the modern world than the 1860s, something that is captured in that epigraph above the workshop door. It is the very idea of gathering and processing data, learning systematically and objectively from both failures and successes, and, most contemporary of all, to commoditise that knowledge. Kirkaldy was a pioneer not just in materials engineering, but also in the power of data.