Sir Lowthian Bell, 1st Baronet - Industry

Industry

Further information: Losh, Wilson and Bell

Bell's industrial life is complex as he was involved in up to three different partnerships at the same time, and his allegiances to each of these varied over the years. His role as entrepreneur began when he took over the Walker ironworks on his father's death in 1845.

In 1850, at Washington, County Durham, Bell established a process for manufacturing lead oxychloride. His partners and co-founders of the Washington chemical company were his brother-in-law Robert Benson Bowman and his father-in-law Hugh Lee Pattinson, inventor of a process for separating silver from lead that bears his name. Under an 1850 Indenture, Charles Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, Hugh Lee Pattinson and Bell declared themselves "chemical manufacturers and co-partners in trade". Bell decided that this partnership would be incompatible with his continued involvement in the running of Losh, Wilson and Bell. In September 1849 he wrote to Losh and Wilson informing them that the partnership with Pattinson "would necessitate my relinquishing the office I at present hold in your firm".

Also in 1850, with Robert Stirling Newall, Bell set up the first factory in the world with machines able to manufacture steel rope and submarine cable.

In 1852, with his brothers Thomas Bell and John Bell, he established a major iron works at Port Clarence, Middlesbrough on the north bank of the river Tees. In 1853 three blast furnaces were built there, each with a capacity of just over 6000 cubic feet, making them the largest in Britain at the time. The works produced iron for bridges and steel rails for railways across the British Empire including the North Eastern Railway company, of which Bell was a director from 1864 onwards, and deputy chairman from 1895 until his death in 1904. The Bell brothers' company operated its own ironstone mines at Normanby and Cleveland, and its own limestone quarries in Weardale, employing about 6000 men in mining and manufacturing. By 1878 the firm was producing 200,000 tons of iron per year. Bell was a professional metallurgist and industrial chemist, constantly pioneering processes such as the recycling of heat from escaping flue gases, and trialling many process improvements.

1n 1859 Bell opened Britain's first factory able to manufacture aluminium, a metal which had been as costly as gold because of the difficulty of chemically reducing the metal from an oxide. On the day it opened at Washington, Bell toured Newcastle in his carriage, saluting the crowds with an aluminium top hat. The plant used the new Deville sodium process. Bell described how critical it was to make aluminium pure in The Technologist:

Now, it happens, that the presence of foreign matters, in a degree so small as almost to be infinitesimal, interferes so largely with the colour, as well as with the malleability of the aluminium, that the use of any substance containing them is of a fatal character. Nor is this all, for the nature of that compound which hitherto has constituted the most important application of this metal — aluminium-bronze — is so completely changed by using aluminium containing the impurities referred to that it ceases to possess any of those properties which render it valuable. —Isaac Lowthian Bell

In 1863, Bell exhibited "several pounds" of the recently-discovered element thallium when the British Association met in Newcastle that autumn. The metal was obtained from the flue deposits (mainly lead sulphate) from the manufacture of sulphuric acid from pyrites, one of the products of the Washington works. Bell gave all credit to his researcher, Henri Brivet, who was "chief" of the laboratories at Washington, and who experienced the "languor and headache" then known to be caused by breathing thallium fumes.

The Cleveland ironstone had been considered inferior for steelmaking, as it contained a relatively high percentage of phosphorus at 1.8 to 2.0%, weakening the resulting iron. Bell directed large-scale experiments at a cost of up to £50,000, resulting in a basic steel process which produced steel rails containing no more than 0.07% phosphorus. His obituary in The Times of 1904 noted, as a sign of the progress that Bell himself had brought about, that Bell could recall "seeing wooden rails in use on the tramroads by which coal was brought down to the river Tees".

In 1882, Bell successfully drilled for salt at Port Clarence, finding an exploitable salt bed at a depth of 1200 feet. He used the salt for making soda, but the borehole was sold to the Salt Union in 1888.

In 1875, Bell began to move out of working in industry by retiring from his partnership with Robert Benson Bowman and Robert Stirling Newall, leaving the two of them to continue to run the chemical works until 1878, when Newall bought Bowman out. He continued to own shares in Bell companies and the North Eastern Railway. In 1901, at age 85, after a long period of difficulty for heavy industry and with fears of worse to come as manufacturing grew in Germany, America and Japan, he made a decisive move to guard the family's wealth. He sold his railway interests to the North Eastern Railway company, and the sale of a majority holding in his manufacturing companies to the rival Dorman Long was completed in 1903. From the fortune thus released, he gave £5,000 to each of his many nephews, nieces and grandchildren.