Bell — Bob Richmond

Molly Trevelyan, Elsa Richmond, Hugh Bell, Gertrude Bell, at Mount Grace Priory, c. 1907

Losh, Wilson and Bell, later Bells, Goodman, then Bells, Lightfoot and finally Bell Brothers, was a leading Northeast England manufacturing company, founded in 1809 by the partners William Losh, Thomas Wilson, and Thomas Bell.

The firm was founded at Newcastle-upon-Tyne with an ironworks and an alkali works nearby at Walker. The alkali works was the first in England to make Soda using the Leblanc process; the ironworks was the first to use Cleveland Ironstone, presaging the 1850s boom in ironmaking on Teesside.

The so-called discoverer of Cleveland Ironstone, the mining engineer John Vaughan, ran a rolling mill for the company before leaving to found the major rival firm Bolckow Vaughan. The other key figure in the company was Lowthian Bell, son of Thomas Bell; he became perhaps the best known ironmaster in England.

As Bell Brothers, the firm continued until 1931, when it was taken over by rival Dorman Long.

The firm's origins can be traced back to 1790 when Archibald Dundonald, with John and William Losh, experimented on how to produce soda from salt. In about 1793 they opened a works at Bells Close, near Newcastle. Dundonald sent William Losh to Paris to study Nicolas Leblanc's process for making soda from salt. In 1807, the Loshes opened an alkali works at Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland. It was the first in England to use the Leblanc process. Dundonald left the partnership and the business continued as Walker Alkali Works.

Losh, Wilson & Bell's first ironworks was founded in 1809 at Walker, beside the alkali works, carrying out a mixture of engineering work but not building steam engines. By 1818, George Stephenson's original wooden wagonway was completely relaid with cast-iron edge-rails made in collaboration between Stephenson, who owned the patent, and Losh, Wilson and Bell. Around 1821, George Stephenson was briefly a partner in the Walker Ironworks.

In 1827 a rolling mill capable of 100 tons of bar iron per week was installed at the Walker Ironworks; in the same year, Losh, Wilson and Bell's Walker foundry was listed in Parson and White's gazetteer of Durham and Northumberland as a steam engine manufacturer. In 1833, the iron puddling process was installed at Walker. In 1835, while working as an inspector of construction on the Whitby & Pickering Railway, Thomas Wilson noted the presence of ironstone in a railway cutting at Grosmont, and arranged for drift mines to exploit the find; the new railway carried the ore to Whitby. In that year, at the age of nineteen, Thomas Bell's son Lowthian Bell entered the firm's Newcastle office under his father. In 1836 he joined his father at the firm's ironworks at Walker.

In 1838, a second mill for rolling rails was added, run by the engineer John Vaughan (who went on to found Bolckow Vaughan); he strongly influenced Lowthian Bell to become an ironmaster. In the same year, The Athenaeum Journal reported that the Losh, Wilson & Bell works was manufacturing tin and iron plate in large quantities, along with iron bars for making railway-carriage wheels. The firm's adjacent alkali works was one of several such operations on the Tyne that were collectively producing more than 250 tons of crystallised soda and about 100 tons of soda ash weekly. The journal called William Losh "the father of soda-making on the Tyne" and described him as the head of the firm (although it was a partnership).

In 1842, the shortage of pig iron persuaded Bell to install its own blast furnace for smelting mill cinder; this was a key decision, enabling the firm to expand. Only two years later, in 1844, the firm installed a second furnace at Walker for Cleveland Ironstone from Grosmont, six years before the boom in Cleveland iron when Vaughan and Marley discovered ironstone in the Eston Hills in 1850. From 1849, Losh, Wilson and Bell were subcontractors on the Newcastle-Gateshead High Level Bridge, responsible for constructing the bridge approaches.

Losh, Wilson and Bell constructed the approaches for the Newcastle-Gateshead High Level Bridge, c. 1852.

On 25 January 1851, Lowthian Bell left the partnership with William Losh, Thomas Wilson, Catherine Bell, Thomas Bell and John Bell. The business at that time was described in the London Gazette as "Iron Manufacturers, and Ship and Insurance Brokers, under the style or firm of Losh, Wilson, and Bell". He went on to have a career in chemistry and politics, becoming a member of parliament among many other distinctions.

Bells, Goodman: From 1869 at the latest, the company owning the Walker Engine Works was Bells, Goodman & Co. In that year the firm made the tunnelling shield and iron castings to line the Tower subway tunnels. In 1871 the firm made pumping and winding engines for Seghill Colliery. In 1875 it made machinery to condense smoke and gases for Clyde Lead Works of Glasgow.

Bells, Lightfoot: In 1875, the Bells, Goodman partnership was dissolved when Alfred Goodman retired. The firm became known as Bells, Lightfoot & Co. In 1876 it supplied a 90" Cornish beam engine for Springhead Pumping Station near Anlaby in the East Riding of Yorkshire; it had an unusual box-section wrought iron beam, and continued running until 1952. On 30 November 1876, Thomas Bell Lightfoot, Managing Partner, was granted a patent for his developments on machines for squeezing metals into shape. However, on 28 August 1883, Thomas Bell moved to Bilbao, Spain, where he continued to describe himself as an Ironmaster, and by mutual consent his partnership with Henry Bell and Thomas Bell the younger was dissolved. The deed was witnessed on 7 December 1883.

Bell Brothers: By 1873, Bell Brothers owned 9 coal mines in County Durham and Yorkshire. There were 10 mines in 1882; in 1888 the "Clarence Salt Works" was also recorded. In 1896 and 1902 the company had 11 mines. In 1914 there are 12; in 1921 there are 14. The 1881–1891 Arts and Crafts classical style Bell Brothers office building at Zetland Road in Middlesbrough was designed by architect Philip Webb; it was his only commercial development. According to English Heritage it is architecturally the most important building in Middlesbrough.

Bell Brothers was recorded in the Colliery Year Book and Coal Trades Directory of 1923 as having an annual output of 600,000 tons of coal for coking and manufacturing. Sir Hugh Bell was chairman and managing director; Arthur Dorman and Charles Dorman were directors. That same year, Bell Brothers, described in the Sydney Morning Herald as "owners of coal and ironstone mines and blast furnaces and rolling mills", was finally merged completely with Dorman Long.

Hugh Lee Pattinson FRS (25 December 1796 – 11 November 1858) was an English industrial chemist. He was also an entrepreneur, sharing the risk of major industrial developments with famous ironmaster Isaac Lowthian Bell and cable manufacturer Robert Stirling Newall.

Although known in his time for his 1833 patent "An improved method for separating silver from lead", a process that bears his name, he is best remembered for his daguerreotype photographs taken in 1840. Among these is the earliest known photograph of the Niagara Falls.

Pattinson was the son of Thomas Pattinson, a shopkeeper in the country town of Alston, Cumberland, and his wife Margaret Lee; they were Quakers. He was educated at local private schools. He was interested in science from an early age, doing experiments with electricity when he was 17, and also studying the chemistry of metals.

He began his working life by helping his father in his shop in Alston. In around 1825 he worked for Anthony Clapham, a soap maker in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In 1825 he became assay master (a tester of the purity of gold or silver coins) to the Greenwich Hospital Commissioners, back at Alston. In continuing experiments in metallurgy, he discovered the basis of his method of separating silver from lead in 1829, but had too little money to go any further. In 1831 he became works manager at Thomas Wentworth Beaumont's lead works. The greater income allowed him to continue his experiments on silver refining until he had a workable process.

In 1834 he resigned from Beaumont's works, and with John Lee and George Burnett, set up a new chemical works at Felling, near Gateshead. It employed around 300 men.

Pattinson patented his process for enriching silver bearing lead in 1833. It exploited the fact that in molten lead containing traces of silver the first metal to solidify out of the melt is lead, leaving the remaining liquid richer in silver. Pattinson's equipment consisted basically of nothing more complex than a row of about 8–9 iron pots, which were heated from below. Some lead, naturally containing a small percentage of silver, was loaded into the central pot and melted. This was then allowed to cool. As the lead solidified, it was skimmed off and moved to the next pot in one direction, and the remaining metal which was now richer in silver was then transferred to the next pot in the opposite direction. The process was repeated from one pot to the next, the lead accumulating in the pot at one end and metal enriched in silver in the pot at the other. The level of enrichment possible is limited by the lead-silver eutectic and typically the process stopped around 600 to 700 ounces per ton (approx 2%), so further separation is carried out by cupellation.

The patent process, known as pattinsonisation, earned Pattinson £16,000 in royalties. The earlier process of "cupellation" had required at least 8 ounces (250 grams) of silver per ton of lead to be economic. Cupellation involved removing the lead from a silver-rich alloy by oxidising the lead to litharge, leaving the silver behind. Pattinson's process was economic with as little as 2 to 3 ounces (about 75 grams) of silver per ton.

Felling Chemical Works, shown at top of Ordnance Survey map of 1862

Works established in 1833 by John Lee, Hugh Lee Pattinson, and George Burnett, as John Lee and Co, where the Pattinson process of de-silverising lead was carried on.

By 1848 The site had grown to 17 acres. The works were lit by gas from the firm's own coke ovens and there was an associated iron works and a brickyard. There was also a company school for children of employees.

Products are soda ash, refined alkali, soda crystals, bi-carbonate of soda, and bleaching powder, produced by Weldon's and Deacon's processes. The works produce about 14,000 tons of soda ash and 6,000 tons of bleaching powder per year. About 650 men and 150 boys are employed.

In about 1840, Pattinson travelled to Canada in the hope of setting up a mining business, stopping at the Niagara Falls long enough to make the earliest known photograph of the falls, a daguerreotype which survives (2009) in the collection of Newcastle University.

It was once believed that the small figure standing silhouetted with a top hat was added by an engraver working from imagination as well as the daguerreotype as his source, but the figure is clearly present in the photograph. Because of the very long exposure required, of ten minutes or more, the figure is assumed by Canada's Niagara Parks agency to be Pattinson himself.

The image is left-right inverted, and taken from the Canadian side. Pattinson made other photographs of the Horseshoe Falls as well as of Rome and Paris. These were then transferred to engravings to illustrate Noël Marie Paymal Lerebours' Excursions Daguerriennes (Paris, 1841–1864). Aside from being the first known photograph of the Falls, Pattinson's image is also the earliest known surviving photograph of any part of Canada, which wouldn't become a nation for another 27 years.

Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell, 1st Baronet, FRS (18 February 1816 – 20 December 1904) was a Victorian ironmaster and Liberal Party politician from Washington, County Durham, in the north of England. He was described as being "as famous in his day as Isambard Kingdom Brunel".

Bell was an energetic and skilful entrepreneur as well as an innovative metallurgist. He was involved in multiple partnerships with his brothers to make iron and alkali chemicals, and with other pioneers including Robert Stirling Newall to make steel cables. He pioneered the large-scale manufacture of aluminium at his Washington works, conducting experiments in its production, and in the production of other chemicals such as the newly discovered element thallium. He was a director of major companies including the North Eastern Railway and the Forth Bridge company, then the largest bridge project in the world.

He was a wealthy patron of the arts, commissioning the architect Philip Webb, the designer William Morris and the painter Edward Burne-Jones on his Yorkshire mansions Rounton Grange and Mount Grace Priory.

Bell was the son of Thomas Bell, one of the founders of the iron and alkali company Losh, Wilson and Bell, and his wife Katherine Lowthian. He was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and educated at Dr Bruce's academy in Percy Street, Newcastle, followed by studying physical science at Edinburgh University and the Sorbonne University, Paris. He gained experience in manufacturing alkalis at Marseilles before returning to Newcastle in 1836 to work in his father's Walker iron and chemical works.

Bells, Goodman: From 1869 at the latest, the company owning the Walker Engine Works was Bells, Goodman & Co. In that year the firm made the tunnelling shield and iron castings to line the Tower subway tunnels. In 1871 the firm made pumping and winding engines for Seghill Colliery. In 1875 it made machinery to condense smoke and gases for Clyde Lead Works of Glasgow.

Bells, Lightfoot: In 1875, the Bells, Goodman partnership was dissolved when Alfred Goodman retired. The firm became known as Bells, Lightfoot & Co. In 1876 it supplied a 90" Cornish beam engine for Springhead Pumping Station near Anlaby in the East Riding of Yorkshire; it had an unusual box-section wrought iron beam, and continued running until 1952. On 30 November 1876, Thomas Bell Lightfoot, Managing Partner, was granted a patent for his developments on machines for squeezing metals into shape. However, on 28 August 1883, Thomas Bell moved to Bilbao, Spain, where he continued to describe himself as an Ironmaster, and by mutual consent his partnership with Henry Bell and Thomas Bell the younger was dissolved. The deed was witnessed on 7 December 1883.

Bell Brothers: By 1873, Bell Brothers owned 9 coal mines in County Durham and Yorkshire. There were 10 mines in 1882; in 1888 the "Clarence Salt Works" was also recorded. In 1896 and 1902 the company had 11 mines. In 1914 there are 12; in 1921 there are 14. The 1881–1891 Arts and Crafts classical style Bell Brothers office building at Zetland Road in Middlesbrough was designed by architect Philip Webb; it was his only commercial development. According to English Heritage it is architecturally the most important building in Middlesbrough.

Bell Brothers was recorded in the Colliery Year Book and Coal Trades Directory of 1923 as having an annual output of 600,000 tons of coal for coking and manufacturing. Sir Hugh Bell was chairman and managing director; Arthur Dorman and Charles Dorman were directors. That same year, Bell Brothers, described in the Sydney Morning Herald as "owners of coal and ironstone mines and blast furnaces and rolling mills", was finally merged completely with Dorman Long.

Portrait Hugh Bell, with Gertrude Bell aged 8, by Edward Poynter, 1876

Thomas Hugh Bell, 2nd Baronet, CB, JP, FSA (10 February 1844 – 29 June 1931) was mayor of Middlesbrough three times – in 1874, 1883 and 1911 – High Sheriff of Durham 1895, Justice of the Peace, Deputy Lieutenant of County Durham, Lord Lieutenant of the North Riding of Yorkshire. He joined his family firm, Bell Brothers, and became director of its steelworks at Middlesbrough. Sir Hugh was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in the 1918 Birthday Honours.

Bell was educated at Edinburgh, the Sorbonne university in Paris, and in Germany. When he was 18 he was obliged by his father to work at the family's Bell Brothers Ironworks at Walker, Newcastle. He was then made the director of the family's other large factory, the steelworks at Middlesbrough.

Bell was, like his father, a director of the North Eastern Railway, and had a private platform on the line between Middlesbrough and Redcar at the bottom of his garden at his house Red Barns. His daughter, Lady Richmond, recalled saying goodbye to her father at King's Cross. He stayed with her on the platform to chat until the train left. When the train did not leave on time they went on talking, until at last a guard came up to them and said "If you would like to finish your conversation, Sir Hugh, we will then be ready to depart."