Technology and Culture

E xhibit R eview s STE E L M E TR O P O LIS: A V IE W O F SH EFFIELD IN D U STR Yzyxwvutsrqpo A T K E LH A M ISLA N D IN D U STR IA L M U SE U M GEOFFREY TWEE DALE Steel was central to 19th-century industrialization, yet museums that cover this industry in anything approaching sufficient depth are a rarity in both Europe and America. It is appropriate, then, that one of the most comprehensive displays of the history of steel and its allied crafts is situated in Sheffield, the city where the industry began. The need for such a museum was recognized as long ago as 1850, when a local man, William Smith, argued that there should be a permanent Museum of Local Industry to exhibit Sheffield’s crafts­ manship.1 His plea went unheeded, though interest in Sheffield’s industrial heritage stirred again in 1935 when the Abbeydale Works of Tyzack Sons & Turner (a scythe and edge-tool manufactory) was donated to the city for development as a museum. After restoration by the Council for the Conservation of Sheffield Antiquities, it was eventually opened to the public in 1970. The 7-acre site on the outskirts of Sheffield contains the world’s only fully operable crucible Dr . Tw e e d a l e is a Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Department of History, Sheffield University, currently examining the 20th-century history of the city’s steel industry. He is the author of Sheffield Steel and Am erica: A C entury of C om m ercial and Technological Interdependence, 1830-1930 (Cambridge, 1987). He is grateful to Peter Smithurst, curator of Kelham Island Industrial Museum, for discussing the museum’s development during his visit in May 1991. 'W. Smith, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, December 14, 1850. Smith had argued that Sheffield’s productions for the Great Exhibition would form the perfect basis for such a collection. Efe added: “There is perhaps no town in England, with the exception of Birmingham, where there are such ample materials for the formation of a Museum of Local Industry as Sheffield; a fact which all will admit when they consider the extent and variety of useful and ornamental articles manufactured in its locality, the great majority of which, unlike some of the great staple trades of the country, are not absolutely dependent upon machinery for their productions, but are of such a nature requiring great mechanical skill in their construction, and admitting of great artistic knowledge in their proper development, thus absolutely demanding a superior class of skilled artizans for the full development of its resources.”© 1992 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/92/3302-0003$0 LOO 328 Sheffield Industry at K elham Island Industrial M useum zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihg 329 s teel furnace, preserved within an integrated 18th- and 19th-century edge-toolmaking complex.2 Yet the much larger story of Sheffield’s later industrial history remained untold. A chance to remedy this deficiency came in 1976 when the city’s Museums Department acquired an old electric gener­ ating station at Kelham Island, a manufacturing district within a mile of the city center. The electric depot, built to provide power for Sheffield’s electric trams, which began operating in 1899, was con­ verted into the present industrial museum. The old buildings house the displays, stores, and workshops—all at ground-floor level—and adjacent to the entrance are temporary exhibition areas, a café, and library. The museum approach is along a short stretch of water, a “goit” (or millrace), which originally created a man-made island. The goit, probably constructed in the 12th century, diverted water from the River Don to gristmills and then later to grinding workshops and is an apt reminder of the antiquity of Sheffield industry and of one of its early sources of power. Outside the entrance to the museum proper, however, the first exhibit strikes a very different note. A giant Bessemer converter greets visitors (fig. 1): it melted the last Bessemer steel in England in 1974 at the Workington Works of the British Steel Corporation. Once...