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Tuesday, 9th February 2010

 
JOHN DICKINSON, THE MAN

Garden of the Cottage at Apsley Mill

AFTER close on 200 years, the firm of John Dickinson has moved away from Hemel Hempstead.
Without the industry he established, bringing the industrial revolution to paper making and Apsley, it’s doubtful Hemel Hempstead would ever have become more than a smallcountry town.

For much of that 195 years the mills were the mainstay of the area’s economy and in many ways its social and leisure life.
But who was John Dickinson?

He was born on March 29, 1782, the eldest son of Captain Thomas Dickinson RN - the superintendent of the Ordnance Transports at Woolwich - and his wife Frances.

The family lived in London and young John was educated at private schools before at the age of 15 he started a seven-year apprenticeship as a stationer with Messrs Harrison and Richardson in London.

Why did he chose such a career? Probably through his mother’s influence. Her father had been a French silk-weaver in Spitalfields and she introduced young John to the world of commerce.

Having served his apprentice-ship he was admitted to the Livery of the Stationers’ Company in 1804 and began to trade, selling paper in the city.

At this stage paper was made by hand, sheet by sheet, but the quest to find a way of making a continuous roll of paper had begun and the young Mr Dickinson was determined to be in that race.

He had already shown his inventiveness by producing a newkind of paper for cannon cartridges, which unlike the paper ordinarily in use did not smoulder and constantly cause accidental explosions! His invention, probably through his father’s influence, was taken up by the army and was said to have been of immense value in the Duke of Wellington’s battles against Napoleon.

The race to find a way for the continuous manufacture of paper was won by Henry Fourdriner. His machine was not at first successful, but an improved machine was erected and set to work at Frogmoor Mill.

But Dickinson was not far behind and 1809, after he had gone into partnership with a financier George Longman, was a significant year. He patented a new type of machine for producing paper and his ambition of owning a mill of his own came to fruition when he bought Apsley Mill -
It had originally been a flour mill and Dickinson bought it from a man called John Stafford who ran it as a paper mill and had sold Dickinson supplies of paper.

To his new mill Dickinson introduced the machine he had patented in 1809.

In this process a perforated cylinder of metal, having a closely fitting cover of finely woven wire, was made to revolve in a vat filled with pulp, the water from which was carried off through the axis of the cylinder, leaving the fibres of the pulp on the surface of the wire in the form of a continuous sheet of paper which was carried off by means of an endless web of felt passing through what was known as a “couching roller” lying upon the cylinder.

As the web of paper merged from the pulp it was consolidated by suction, a partial vacuum being maintained within a portion of the cylinder by means of an air pump.

And so the endless web was born at Apsley...

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