Sir Joseph Whitworth (1803-1887) had a life long desire to improve on existing technology. By the time of his death, his interests and efforts had amassed him assets worth more than £150 million.($300 million) in today's money and a large manufacturing complex in Manchester, England.
En route, Whitworth had produced pretty much everything from road-sweeping machinery to firearms. Moreover, by absorbing the ideas and philosophies to which he was exposed while working at the renowned Henry Maudslay works at Lambeth Marsh, London, and rejecting the often shoddy standards of the day, this perfectionist had established himself as the father of precision engineering.
One Whitworth contribution to the modern world that underpinned so many others, and one that would keep his name on the lips of mechanics and engineers alike for many years, was the Whitworth Thread, which he proposed in 1841. Known subsequently as the British Standard Whitworth (BSW) Thread, it featured the first standardized thread pitch for all the various sizes of nuts and bolts in its range—in other words any BSW nut would fit precisely any BSW bolt of the same size. This sounds pretty obvious now, but prior to Whitworth, in an age when machines were still evolving, nuts and bolts of the "same" size were custom-engineered to fit each other, as a pair; they were not interchangeable, and a nut of a given size from one source would not necessarily fit a bolt of the same specified size from elsewhere. The BSW thread is now effectively redundant, having been superseded by "Unified" and "Metric" types.
