Vickers Limited

Successor: Vickers-Armstrongs
Founded: 1828
Defunct: 1927
Headquarters: Vickers House, Westminster, London
Subsidiaries: Metropolitan-Vickers Wolseley Motor Company Whitehead & Company John Brown & Company

Please refer to the overview article Vickers for other companies known by this name

Vickers, Limited was a famous British engineering conglomerate that merged into Vickers-Armstrongs in 1927.

History

Early History

Vickers was formed in Sheffield as a steel foundry by the miller Edward Vickers and his father-in-law George Naylor in 1828. Naylor was a partner in the foundry Naylor & Sanderson and Vickers' brother William owned a steel rolling operation. Edward's investments in the railway industry allowed him to gain control of the company, based at Millsands and known as Naylor Vickers and Company. It began life making steel castings and quickly became famous for casting church bells. In 1854 Vickers' sons Thomas and Albert joined the business. In 1863 the company moved to a new site in Sheffield on the River Don in Brightside. The company went public in 1867 as Vickers, Sons & Company and gradually acquired more businesses, branching out into various sectors. In 1868 Vickers began to manufacture marine shafts, in 1872 they began casting marine propellers and in 1882 they set up a forging press. Vickers produced their first armour plate in 1888 and their first artillery piece in 1890. It bought out the Barrow in Furness shipbuilder The Barrow Shipbuilding Company in 1897, acquiring its subsidiary the Maxim Nordenfelt Guns And Ammunitions Company [1] at the same time, to become Vickers, Sons & Maxim. The yard at Barrow became the "Naval Construction Yard". With these acquisitions, Vickers could now produce a complete selection of products, from ships and marine fittings to armour plate and a whole suite of ordnance.

In 1901 the Royal Navy's first submarine, Holland 1, was launched at the Naval Construction Yard. In 1902 Vickers took a half share in the famous Clyde shipyard John Brown and Company. Further diversification occurred with the purchase of the car building activities of the Wolseley Sheep-Shearing Machine Company in 1905, which was set up as the Wolseley Tool and Motor Car Company. In 1911 a controlling interest was acquired in Whitehead and Company, the torpedo manufacturers. In 1911, the company name was changed to Vickers Limited and expanded its operations into aircraft manufacture by the formation of Vickers Ltd (Aviation Department). In 1919, the British Westinghouse electrical company was taken over as the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Company; Metrovick. At the same time they came into Metropolitan's railway interests. Wolseley was sold to the Nuffield Organisation in 1926.

Merger with Armstrong Whitworth

In 1927, Vickers merged with the Tyneside based engineering company Armstrong Whitworth, founded by W. G. Armstrong, to become Vickers-Armstrong, Ltd.

Businesses

Armaments

Vickers manufactured and sold the Maxim machine gun forming a partnership with its inventor. They later took over the company and improved the design as the Vickers machine gun, which was the last major design Hiram Maxim himself worked on. It became the standard machine gun of the British Empire and Commonwealth, serving for some 50 years in the British Army. Vickers produced the machine gun in literally dozens of different cartridge sizes and sold it all over the world. They even scaled it up to larger calibres, particularly for the Royal Navy as a 0.5 inch model).

Picture - Vickers' 75mm mountain gun (1900)

Vickers & Maxim also introduced one of the first cannon to have an hydraulic recoil absorbing mechanism. In 1900 they produced a small 75mm cannon that used two cylinders mounted alongside the barrel.

Vickers was involved in the production of numerous firearms. The British tested John Pedersen's design for a semi-automatic rifle between WWI and WWII. Vickers made British version of the rifle, and their version of the Pedersen rifle usually goes by the name "Vickers Pedersen Rifle".

In the interwar period Vickers worked on several tanks designs. Medium Mark I and Mark II were adopted by the British Army. The Vickers 6-Ton tank was the most successful; being exported or built by other nations under licence. The Vickers A1E1 Independent tank design was never put into production but credited with influencing other nations. During the Second World War Vickers built large guns and tanks; the Valentine tank was a design that they had developed privately that was taken up

Airships

Vickers began work on Britains first rigid airship (for the Admiralty) in mid-1909 in Cavendish Dock, Cumbria. Through a lack of experience HMA No. 1, then the largest airship, broke up on its second trip out of a floating hangar on the evening of 23 September 1911. Further designs and difficulties followed although non-rigid machines including "Sea Scouts" (popularly called blimps) proved generally less troublesome than the larger rigid examples.

For their second attempt at rigid airships, a team was formed with H B Pratt as "Chief Draughtsmen, Airships". Pratt had left Vickers in 1912 to work for J. Samuel White at Cowes. When he was persuaded to return to Vickers, he brought with him a colleague, Barnes Wallis, to be his assistant. The pair worked incognito from London where they were supplied with the latest intelligence on German rigid airships, such as the LZ.216, and information freely provided by the German manufacturers of non-rigid airships. Some models featured floating cars slung beneath them. Much experience in mooring techniques and swivelling motors was gathered despite the pressures of wartime. The last airship built at the Walney Island hangar was a small non-rigid reconnaissance machine for the Japanese government that first flew on 27 April 1921.

A subsidiary called the Airship Guarantee Company Limited was formed under Sir Dennis Burney from 29 November 1923 (lasting until 30 November 1935) specifically to participate in the building of a massive six-engined experimental airship, the R100 in competition with the government built R101 as part of the Imperial Airship Scheme. Their buildings were at Howden in Yorkshire. Barnes Wallis and Nevil Shute Norway were on the design team. The R100 flew initially on 16 December 1929 and achieved some trans-Atlantic flights before the airship scheme was stopped following the disastrous crash of the R101 in France. The R100 was scrapped in November 1931 by Elton, Levy and Company.

No. 9r
23 class airship
No. 23r
R26
SS class blimp
R80
R100

Aircraft

Vickers formed Vickers Ltd (Aviation Department) 1911 and produced one of the first aircraft designed to carry a machine gun, the FB5 (fighting biplane) Gun Bus. During World War I it produced the Vimy heavy bomber. An example of the latter became the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic Ocean non-stop, a converted Royal Air Force bomber (See 1919 in aviation.) The Vimy was later developed into the Virginia, a mainstay in the RAF during the interwar years. Vickers was a pioneer in producing airliners, early examples being converted from Vimy bombers.

Like many other British manufacturers, an enterprise in Canada was set up; Canadian Vickers Limited. This company ceased operations in 1944. Canadair was founded shortly after by former Canadian Vickers employees and now absorbed into Bombardier Aerospace.

Shipbuilding

Vickers entered naval shipbuilding with the purchase of Barrow Shipbuilding Company in 1897, forming the Naval Construction Yard at Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. This yard later passed into the hands of the nationalised British Shipbuilders in 1977, was privatised as Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Ltd in 1986 and remains in operation to this day as BAE Systems Submarine Solutions.

Basil Zaharoff, former director and chairman
Vickerstown, a planned estate built for workers of the Barrow shipyard

Anon (1898), Vickers, Sons and Maxim Limited: Their Works and Manufactures, Reprinted from "Engineering", London
Scott, J.D. (1962), Vickers: A History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.

Vickers Limited Pictures and Vickers Limited for Sale.

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Source: WikiPedia