John Brown (industrialist)

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This article is about the British industrialist; for other people named John Brown, see John Brown

Sir John Brown (6 December 1816 – 27 December 1896), British industrialist, was born in Sheffield. He was apprenticed at fourteen years old to a Sheffield firm manufacturing files and table cutlery.

In 1848 Brown invented the conical steel spring buffer for railway carriages. In 1860, after seeing the French ship La Gloire armoured with hammered plate, he went on to produce armour using a rolling process, eventually producing armour plate to protect three-quarters of the British navy. In 1856 Brown started the Atlas Works in Sheffield, which soon produced, beside armour plates and railway buffers, ordnance forgings, steel rails, railway carriage axles and tires. At its height, the works employed more than four thousand people. Besides supplying iron to the Sheffield steel trade, Brown himself successfully developed the Bessemer process.

He was knighted in 1867 and was Mayor of Sheffield in 1862 and 1863.

[edit] References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.