Joseph Maudslay, born on the 17th September 1801, was the son of Henry Maudslay (1771–1831), mechanical engineer.
Apprenticed as a shipbuilder to William Pitcher of Northfleet, he subsequently joined his father's engineering business at Lambeth and took a prominent position in it. An improved oscillating steam engine, which he patented in 1827, dispensed with a beam or slide-guides by allowing the cylinder to rock on trunnions with each stroke. He was elected a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1833; and with Joshua Field he took out a patent in 1839 for a double-cylinder marine engine, which was widely adopted.
He took a great interest in marine propulsion, and in 1841–2 the firm made the engine for Rattler, the first screw-propelled steamship built for the Admiralty, which was used for trials of various forms of screw propellers. He also invented the direct-acting annular cylinder screw engine, which formed the subject of a paper read by him to the Institution of Naval Architects in 1860. He died on 25 September 1861 at 21 Hyde Park Square, London. He was survived by his wife, Anna Maria Stamp Maudslay, and they had at least one son.
Date
1827-1856
Scope and Content12 patents relating to steam engines, propellers, propelling, boilers and breech-loading cannon.
Maudslay Sons & Field Ltd, mechanical and marine engineers and boilermakers
Maudslay Sons & Field Ltd originated in 1798 when Henry Maudslay founded Henry Maudslay and Co. Henry's Sons joined as well as Joshua Field so in 1822 Maudslay, Son and Field was founded. In 1831 Henry Maudslay died and his sons Thomas Henry Maudslay and Joseph Maudslay continued the business with Field, the company becoming Maudslay, Sons and Field in 1833.
In 1889 the company took limited status for the engineering business of Westminster Bridge Road. In 1894 the company built the 'Gigantic Wheel' at Earl's Court. The same year they
Walter H. Maudslay is chairman and managing director of the company in 1895 until his retirement in 1899. Field also retired, in 1898, just before the company was in financial trouble and closed down in 1900.
Their engine works site was located at Lambeth Marsh, London
Joshua Field was born at Hackney, Middlesex in 1787 and in 1794 he was sent to Harlow boarding-school in Essex. In 1803 he began an engineering pupillage at Portsmouth Dockyard under Simon Goodrich, as a draughtsman in the office of Sir Samuel Bentham, and later transferred to the Admiralty at Whitehall. Block-making machinery for the dockyard at Portsmouth was then being made at Henry Maudslay's workshop in Margaret Street, off Oxford Street, London, and when Maudslay requested a naval draughtsman for the work, Field was sent there in 1804.
In 1810 Field moved with Maudslay to new works at Lambeth and in 1812 he became partner of the firm H. Maudslay & Co. The firm's name changed to Maudslay, Son and Field in 1822, they specialised in making marine engines, stationary steam engines of various patterns, machinery for flour, sugar, and rice mills and saw mills, equipment for minting coins, machine tools, waterworks pumping machinery, railway locomotives, and fixed haulage engines for railway inclines. It made the tunnelling shield for M. I. Brunel's Thames Tunnel. The first set of ships' machinery the firm built was for the Thames vessel the Richmond (1813), and its first naval contract was for HMS Lightning (1825).
In 1816 Field was one of the founders of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and he served as vice-president in 1837 and president in 1848 and 1849. He delivered a number of papers at the institution, and in 1821 spent several months making a tour of engineering works in the midlands. Field's illustrated diary of the trip has survived. In 1862 he became a member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. As a consultant engineer, Field advised the Atlantic Telegraph Company when laying the Trans-Atlantic cable.
He advised Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the machinery for his steamships, and was one of the committee appointed to deal with the metropolitan local committees of the Great Exhibition. He patented in 1824 a method of reducing the concentration of salt in marine boilers, but this was superseded later by the widespread introduction of the surface condenser.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 3 March 1836 and was also a member of the Society of Arts. Field died at his residence, Balham Hill House, London, on 11 August 1863, and was buried at Norwood cemetery on 18 August.
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