Edward Hutchins

Edward Hutchins research papers discuss the biographical information of this liberal member of Parliament and of the Freemasons in the 19th Century. Have Paper Masters custom write on any Freemason or member of Parliament you need.

Edward John Hutchins (1809-1876) was born in Briton Ferry, Glamorganshire. He was the son of Edward Hutchins and Sarah Guest. His mother's brother was Sir Josiah John Guest who was a Member of Parliament and iron founder. Hutchins attended school at the Charterhouse School and then went on to study at St. John's College, Cambridge.

Hutchins Later Life

After college, Hutchins worked with his uncle running the Dowlais Iron Works, a family business. Later in his life he became the Chairman of the Rhymney Iron Works, which made wrought iron rails. He also acted as director of the London and South Western Railway.

In January of 1840, Edward Hutchins was elected to Parliament for Penryn and Falmouth.

• In 1841, he ran again, this time he was defeated by his conservative opponent, Mr. Carne.
• Hutchins ran again for Parliament in the 1841 general election, but was unable to obtain the seat.
• Hutchins tried again in 1847, but again was unsuccessful.
• Finally in April of 1850, he returned to Parliament for Lymington.
• Hutchins held this seat until he retired in 1857.
• While in Parliament, Hutchins joined the Catholic Lobby group and their work on an education bill.
• From 1870-1873 he was on the London School Board.
• Hutchins was also a member of the Freemasons.
• From 1848 - 1856 he acted as Provincial Grand Master of South Wales. Hutchins died in February 1876 from an illness.

The Iron and Steel Industry

The iron and steel industry has been properly credited with helping fuel the fires of the Industrial Revolution, and its contributions to modern production can be traced back to the first primitive blast furnaces in the 1700s. The industry's major shift - from the burning of charcoal to that of steam-driven equipment to forge iron bars and steel - helped lead to today's integrated, capital-intensive factories and systematic management methods. Steel pioneers from August Thyssen in Germany to Andrew Carnegie in the United States took advantage of new processes and technologies to change world manufacturing and challenge the existing order.

It can be argued that no industry was transformed by the Industrial Revolution as much as was iron and, later, steel. "The iron industry is rightly regarded as one of the leading sectors in the British Industrial Revolution," writes Peter King. Iron led to the mass production of steel, and that also made iron a leading sector of the Industrial Revolution on North American shores too. Steel became the supplicant for many other industries, including modern railroads and Henry Ford's early automotive plants.

The industry's historical roots could date to the time of Henry VIII in England. A 1999 article in Discover magazine argues that the British royal unwittingly shut down the first blast furnaces when he closed a monastery in 1538 after breaking from the Church of England. That furnace, found later by archaeologists, showed a break from more-primitive methods of using charcoal to manually extract iron ore. The monks' furnace, used to create iron bar, melted the iron at a higher temperature to remove the ore than was customarily used.

To understand the manufacturing changes that later took place in steel during the Industrial Revolution requires knowledge of earlier use of coal to produce that steel. When steam-powered equipment using iron and cobalt replaced coal in England as the fuel for steel mills, a propulsive change occurred in production, write Brooke Hindle and Steven Lubar (1986). "Not until industrial needs increased and became more complex, calling for large quantities of differing sorts of iron, were the English improvements in iron production introduced (in the United States)," they write. That moved forward the work of Andrew Carnegie and America's version of that manufacturing revolution.