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One enormous Victorian testing machine, in the building David Kirkaldy put up around it, under the words FACTS NOT OPINIONS.
Also in Science & Engineering.
David Kirkaldy was a Dundee-born engineer who spent eighteen years as chief draughtsman at a Glasgow shipyard, at a time when nobody could say with any confidence how strong a piece of iron or steel actually was. Builders bought material on the word of the man selling it. Kirkaldy set out to replace that with measurement: he ran his own experiments, published them in 1862, and left to build a machine that could pull anything apart and record exactly what it took.
A Leeds firm delivered it in 1865. It is 47 feet long, weighs 116 tons, and can pull with a force of a million pounds — some 450 tons — using water pressure to do the pulling and a weight sliding along a beam to weigh it. In 1874 he opened a works at 99 Southwark Street built around the machine, and cut FACTS NOT OPINIONS over the door, which was his whole argument in three words: he would test for anyone, take nobody's side, and publish what the metal did.
The firm worked for a hundred years. It examined the wreckage of the Tay Bridge, which fell into the river in 1879 with a train crossing it; the ironwork of Hammersmith Bridge; the Skylon that hung over the Festival of Britain; and the metal of the Comet airliners that broke up in mid-air in 1954. It closed in 1974, and the machine, still bolted where it was set down and still able to work, is now the museum.
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