V. Arthur James Moxham, Ironmaster
Catherine Morgan was one of twelve children in the family of John Morgan and Elizabeth Pritchard in Collena, Glamorganshire, South Wales. Though only of moderate means, both the Morgans and the Pritchards proudly traced their ancestry back to the Welsh kings generations before. Born in 1816, Catherine remained unmarried until the age of thirty-five, when she eloped with a painter and some-time inventor Egbert Moxham from Glouchester, who was seven years her junior.
The marriage was somewhat of a disappointment to her family, since Moxham had a far less prominent family background and no stable living. They first settled in Neath, South Wales, where their first three children, Florence, Arthur and Evangeline were born. Egbert apparently spent these years as an itinerant inventor and practical engineer, associated to some degree with a number of patents recorded during that time and, by family lore, the design of the Crystal Palace.
From there, Moxham moved his family to Bruges, Belgium around 1857 to indulge his interest in painting. It was there that his other two children, Evan and Edgar were born. In the early 1860s, they returned to Greenwich where Moxham continued to paint and pursue his piecework engineering career. When Egbert died in September 1864, Catherine moved the family to Clapham, London, and with the assistance of one of his father's associates James Wansboro, young Arthur was enrolled in the Clapham Orphan Asylum, a day school.
Arthur's education was thorough and exacting, and he took to his studies with great facility, finishing at the head of his class a year earlier than normal and graduating (at the age of fourteen) in 1869. Later that summer, on the occasion of a visit by his mother's widowed sister Dora Coleman from Louisville, the two older children Florence and Arthur were offered the opportunity to travel to America, Florence for a visit and Arthur to remain and begin a career in the iron mills owned by the Coleman family.
They made the long trip by paddle wheel steamer in August of 1869, and Arthur settled into his Aunt Dora's large house on Walnut Street. Dora's eldest stepson Thomas Cooper Coleman, President of the Louisville Rolling Mill Company, arranged to take the boy into the Brook Street mill as an office boy while he apprenticed as an ironmaster. Arthur had just turned fifteen.
For a brief time, he worked in the mill offices on Main Street with another ward of the Coleman family, Tom Johnson. Johnson was half a year older than Moxham and was living with his own aunt Dullie, wife of Thomas Cooper Coleman. But while Tom had little taste for the iron mill and jumped at the opportunity to work for Coleman's business partner Bidermann du Pont at his newly-acquired horse car line, Arthur thrived in the mill atmosphere and immersed himself in all aspects of the business. He learned the intricate craft skills of the puddlers and rollers on the mill floor while attending to the bookkeeping in the office, and studying long hours into the night on his own.
By the end of 1871, his salary had grown to $28 a month, much of which he sent to his mother and her remaining three children, who had all moved back to Neath. He also saved toward passage back to England to visit his family, which he accomplished in June of 1872 while the mill was closed for the summer season. Upon his return in late August, he again threw himself into his work, punctuated only by weekend visits with his Aunt Dora to the Coleman's country residence The Meadows. It was there that he not only reacquainted with Tom Johnson, but became gradually enamored with Thomas Cooper Coleman's sixteen-year old daughter Helen. Three years later, when he was twenty-one and making $83 a month, they would become engaged but decided to delay their marriage until he made further progress in his career.
The next spring, Arthur again booked passage to England, this time because of the serious illness of his mother. While he was en route, Catherine passed away, and Arthur spent the next several months in Neath settling family affairs. Upon his return, he and Helen were married on July 3, 1876, the anniversary of his own parents' wedding, and settled in a small house in Louisville on Broadway where their first son, Thomas Coleman Moxham, was born the next summer. On Saturday evenings, they would take the Bardstown line from the L&N station on 10th Street to the Colemans' private landing near the Meadows to spend the weekends with family and friends.
Despite his hard work and ambition, the slowing of demand for iron products in the years following the Panic of 1873 frustrated Arthur's desire to enter the skilled dimensions of the industry. With operations yielding fewer hours for rollers, the skilled craftsmen tended to share turns at the mill and were not encouraging to young Moxham's desire to enter their highly-paid ranks. The opening of a second rolling mill on Clay Street in 1875 offered some enticement, if only because it signaled the move of the Louisville Rolling Mill Company into a greater concentration on the rolling of iron rails for local railroads and tramways.
Though he had risen to the position of assistant superintendent in 1877 and was primarily involved in the business end of its operations, Moxham spent a great deal of time on the rolling floor and had become something of an accomplished ironmaster. The rolling of the often custom-designed and odd shapes of T-rails and tram rails, and the forging of crossings and curves, excited both his ingenuity for design of the rolls and roll sequences (still a black art among the ironmasters of the day) and his curiosity about the different compositions of wrought iron that could hold the unique shapes, a consideration understood by few in an industry still relatively naive to the complexities of the chemical compositions of forged metal.
By late 1876, he had designed (and later patented) unique puddling and rolling sequences for heating and squeezing puddled iron (or, in some cases, scrap iron) that subjected the homogenized balls of wrought iron to hydraulic pressure rather than the usual bar rolling techniques that required welding together piles of bars before rolling and followed by several reheatings of the metal. Moxham's hydraulic compaction process not only saved on production costs associated with reheating but also rendered an iron bloom of greater density because the metal was not formed from welded piles (or muck bars as they were called) before reheating and final rolling. Wrought iron blooms achieved by his process were of greater purity and strength than wrought iron produced by traditional methods, and were cheaper to manufacture.
When Bidermann du Pont decided to build the Birmingham Rolling Mill in 1879, Moxham readily accepted the challenge to help design the plant. The next summer, he took over as its superintendent, and moved his wife and small son into a small frame cottage near the mill site where they lived a rather primitive existence in the not-quite-developed new mill town of Birmingham. It was there, in August of 1881, that Moxham's second son, Egbert, was born.
The first years of the Birmingham Rolling Mill were difficult indeed. For months, Moxham was forced to experiment with materials and mixtures in the puddling process in an effort to deoxidize the Alabama ores being used. By early 1881 he had overcome the problems of metal composition and the mill was consistently making a high grade of merchant iron. While Moxham continued his experimentation with different types of red ores from the region, his friend from Louisville, Tom Johnson, came for a visit with an intriguing problem. Now heading a railway operation in Indianapolis, Johnson had designed a street railway girder rail that combined the structure of the standard railroad T-rail with the market advantages of some of the odder-shaped strap rails commonly used on horse car lines. The resulting amalgamation of shapes, a T-rail with offset head flanges, was practical in design and immensely marketable. Because of its rather unique rail profile, rollers referred to it as the Jaybird. The question that remained was whether the offset design could be produced at reasonable cost in a rolling mill.
Moxham was perplexed. The wrought iron railroad T-rail had been a standard product of rolling mills for over thirty years, and was produced in multiple weights by both the Clay Street mill (by then known as the Louisville Iron and Steel Company) and the Birmingham Rolling Mill. So also were tram and strap rails, which varied from the simple to the most complex of shapes. The rolling of Johnson's unique rail design required difficult lateral drafting of the metal to form the long, offset flanges.
Wrought iron had been the standard rolling material for rails of the early railroads and horse-drawn street railways since the 1830s. The metal used was essentially a carbon-free, laminated composite of layers of pure iron and slag. Produced by puddling techniques, wrought iron was never reduced to a liquid or homogenized state, but rather was compressed and welded together in piles (muck bars) before heating and rolling into blooms or rails. The rolling process exposed the heated metal to longitudinal stress, compressing and elongating the metal along the length of the pile on same line as its grain structure. In fact, the compression and elongation required to form the rail was also counted on to strengthen the metal's grain structure and give the rail greater wear life.
In mid-1881, Johnson traveled to Birmingham to collaborate with Moxham on the development of a workable design that could be manufactured in a rolling mill. Johnson was a street railway man, not an engineer or an ironmaster, and needed Moxham's practical expertise to bring his design to production. Through collaboration, Johnson's design ultimately adopted features, such as the unique shoulder and the location of the flange offset over the web, that reflected production rather than market considerations.
Moxham's early attempts to roll the design from wrought iron were made at the Birmingham Rolling Mill that year, but his rolling experiments were interrupted by a gradual deterioration in his wife's health after the birth of their second son in August. In early October, he took his wife and two children back to Louisville where they moved into one of the small cottages at the Meadows and could be looked after by the Coleman family. Moxham returned to Birmingham alone to continue his work, but in late fall resigned his position and returned to be with his family. He spent the winter at the Meadows, teaching himself chemistry and working in a makeshift laboratory in a spring house on the grounds. By the following spring of 1882, he began further rolling experiments with the Johnson design at the Clay Street mill, backed by the financial support of Fred du Pont.
Du Pont's faith in Tom Johnson's market and business sense was already quite high. He had watched Johnson develop two insignificant and unprofitable horse-drawn street railways (his own Louisville line and the Indianapolis line backed by his brother Bidermann) into solid money-makers and high-return investments. He himself had backed Tom Johnson's purchase of a suburban railway line in Cleveland just two years before. Backing Johnson's rail design was somewhat of a risk, but a risk du Pont could well afford.
Moxham's experiments with roll design and sequences at the Clay Street mill were laborious and costly, but in the end proved successful. That is not to say that the Johnson Rail was successfully rolled from wrought iron. On the contrary, Moxham learned from his lengthy experiments that the metal composition of wrought iron could not hold the Johnson design. Six months of rolling, re-machining of the rolls, and rolling again convinced him that wrought iron could not withstand the lateral stress necessary to draft metal into the extended flanges of the Johnson design. As the metal was drafted laterally, i.e. across its grain structure, it cracked and split at the welds or at points where slag deposits still resided in the metal.
This was not common knowledge at the time, for even by the mid-1880s, most ironmasters considered iron the most malleable metal for rolling complex shapes. As an experienced ironmaster, Moxham discovered by the summer of 1882 that during hot rolling, wrought iron became relatively unworkable when exposed to lateral stress. Few shapes produced by rolling mills at the time required lateral stress in drafting, and none the degree of stress required by the Johnson design. Moxham's experiments demonstrated that the Johnson design simply could not be rolled from wrought iron.
To Moxham however, the experiments had been very successful. He was confident that both the roll design and the sequence of rolling were ready for production. As an ironmaster, he had come to recognize that it was the composition of the metal, not the roll design, that prevented the production of the Johnson rail. Intuitively, and perhaps in part due to his chemical experiments at the Meadows in early 1882, he concluded that the rail design might be rolled from steel rather than iron. Though considered by ironmasters more brittle (and therefore less workable) than iron because of its carbon content, steel as a metal had a cleaner and more homogeneous composition. During hot rolling, such a metal might then withstand the lateral stress required by the Johnson design to fill out the wide offset flanges. If the design could be rolled from steel with the strengthening dimension of its carbon content, the resulting rail would have a wear life of perhaps thirty-to-forty years, more than ten times the optimal life of a wrought iron rail.
Events moved quickly from that point. With Moxham's assurances that the rail could be rolled from steel, Johnson filed an application in September 1882 for patent protection on his rail design, and the patent was issued early the next year. Confident his rolling process design would produce the Johnson girder rail from steel, Moxham in turn applied for patent protection on his rolling process in December 1882. What remained was the question of how to proceed with actual production. From his own experience, Moxham knew that neither Louisville Iron and Steel nor the Birmingham Rolling Mill had the capability to roll steel rails. In fact, less than a dozen steel mills in the country had that capability, including three in Pennsylvania with close ties to the Pennsylvania Railroad: Pennsylvania Steel in Harrisburg, Cambria Iron in Johnstown, and the relatively new Edgar Thompson Works in Pittsburgh.
If Johnson and Moxham were to move into production of the Johnson girder rail quickly, they would require significant private financial backing and a contract with one of the major steelmakers to roll the complex design. As before, the backing was secured from Fred du Pont. To roll the Johnson design, Moxham contracted with the Cambria Iron Company of Johnstown, Pennsylvania in the fall of 1882. With all the critical elements in hand, Moxham and Johnson secured a charter under the laws of the State of Kentucky for the Johnson Steel Street Rail Company on March 7, 1883.