History of Henry Cort
Henry Cort was born in Lancaster in 1740. His links with Hampshire date from 1774, when his wife inherited business interests in the County, including Funtley ironworks, from her uncle, William Attwick. This gentleman also had a contract with Portsmouth Dockyard for the supply of mooring chains and other iron naval stores. The ironworks at Funtley had been in operation for almost 200 years by this time, having been initially the property of the Earl of Southampton.
Henry Cort made major improvements to the works, even considering changing the power source from a water wheel to a steam engine, although this did not prove practicable. He undertook experiments in an attempt to improve the quality of wrought iron, which in England was of poor quality at this time, and to find a way of producing it cheaply. The processes which he patented were for "rolling" (1783) and for "Fining" (or "puddling") (1784), and related the passing of the metal through grooved rollers and refining it in a reverbatory furnace. These inventions proved enormously successful, and were quickly adopted all over the country. Soon the navy stipulated that all iron produced for their use had to meet Cort's standards, trials having proved it of superior quality to that available from other sources for the making of such items as anchors, mooring chains and tackle hooks.
Before Cort developed his processes, England imported massive quantities of wrought iron, mainly from Sweden and Russia. Within a decade of his patents, England became a major exporter of the product. Given that 1793 marked the start of the Napoleonic Wars, with its demands for large quantities of iron, and its problems in importing items from abroad, the significance of Henry Cort's work should not be underestimated. It can be argued that, but for what happened at Funtley ironworks in the early 1780s, the course of history could have been very different.
[Text provided by Mrs Pam Moore]
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