Bartleby Teamwork and the Beatles

Corrugated iron is a child of the Industrial Revolution

write Adam Mornement and Simon Holloway in their terrific book on the stuff, “a material of the frontier”.

Consider its ubiquity. Water butts, bird hides, outside latrines, aircraft hangars, aircraft themselves, water towers, lighthouses, the abandoned whaling station of Grytviken on South Georgia and, most hauntingly, places of human internment, be they for refugees, prisonersofwar or the persecuted: corrugated iron has loomed large. In Mawsynram in northeast India, which receives the highest rainfall on Earth, buildings cannot be of wood, for they quickly rot; the sound of the Mawsynram climate, then, is the ratatattat of huge raindrops falling on “tin”, as the material is widely referred to. Tennessee Williams knew what metaphor he wanted for the enervated sexuality and jittery frustrations of Maggie, one of his bestknown protagonists, in a doomed marriage—“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”.

Corrugated iron is a child of the Industrial Revolution. The bestknown origin story starts at the Phoenix ironworks near Birmingham, when a sheet of metal serving as a guard protecting workers making rails worked loose and got pulled into the gears of the machine. While the workers fabricated a new guard, John Spencer, master of the ironworks, picked up the crumpled sheet. It did not flop around or bend under pressure as sheet metal usually did.

Spencer had stumbled upon how a linear pattern of ridges and furrows renders a sheet stiffer perpendicular to the axis of the corrugation. The scientific explanation for this lies in the, to laymen, nearly inscrutable Theorema Egregium (Remarkable Theorem) of Carl Friedrich Gauss, published in 1827 and concerning the curvature of surfaces. More intuitively, consider a common pizzaeating strategy: gently bending your slice before bringing it to your mouth obviates the risk of buckling and consequent mess.

Spencer envisaged a machine in which sheets were fed through a pair of grooved rollers. Thus was the barrel corrugator born, a thundering machine that served as the chief way to make corrugated iron until the second world war. But the earliest patent was registered in 1829 by Henry Palmer, an architect and engineer with the London Dock Company. Palmer's insight was that while possessing transverse strength, corrugated sheets can still be curved lengthways and then lapped and riveted to form a selfsupporting arch. Such a roof would be light. But in the same way that the shell of an egg represents impressive structural strength, it would be capable of bearing compressive forces present in all roofs as their weight bears down with gravity on whatever is holding them up. Up to a certain span a corrugated roof of selfsupporting sheets can arch across a given space with little or no recourse to the usual supports used to hold up roofs clad in slate or other heavy materials. Suddenly, sheds far larger than had previously existed became imaginable.

the world’s entrepot Towards the end of the 18th century, London was the victim of its own success. The River Thames was choked with vessels from around the world waiting for a limited number of wharves. Work on a new London Dock began in 1800. But by the time the 32yearold Palmer was hired in 1827, the London Dock was bursting. A new basin, locks and warehousing were needed. Palmer would oversee the work.

In 1829 he proposed a large and new type of structure, the 2,200 squarefoot (204 squaremetre) Turpentine Shed. It was the world’s first corrugatediron building. Its halfbarrel roofsoon became emblematic of building with the material. Admirers had no doubt of its radical nature. One, in the “Register of the Arts and Sciences”, deemed the Turpentine Shed’s roof to be “the lightest and strongest roof (for its weight), that has been constructed by man, since the days of Adam”.

Palmer’s largespan roofs found ready use on naval slipways, where ships had hitherto been constructed in the open. Corrugated iron also enabled the grand new termini of the burgeoning railways. None was more impressive than Paddington station, built in 1854 by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It remains unchanged, in essence, even today.

Rust was corrugated iron’s first problem. Galvanisation—coating it with corrosionresistant zinc—was the solution. By the mid19th century Britain’s galvanising industry was using 10,000 tonnes of zinc a year. When, in 1856, Henry Bessemer created a revolutionary furnace that blew air through molten iron to drive out impurities and create steel, the demand for galvanising grew further. Steel is more formable and ductile than iron, and stronger. It is also more prone to rust.

Around the middle of the 19th century, a more democratic impulse came to embody corrugated iron. It emerged, oddly, with a royal nudge at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations. One of the defining events of the time, it was held in 1851 in Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park. A third of Britain’s population flocked to it. The exhibition was intended to showcase the wonders of the industrial age.

Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, was the exhibition’s chief patron. Among all the exhibits, homely Albert was struck most by an emigrant’s corrugatediron cottage. He ordered something similar for Balmoral, the royal residence in Scotland. Just weeks later it had been fabricated, shipped and erected. Today, it serves the estate as a carpenter's shop.

Albert’s blessing spurred the trade in portable, timberframed, corrugatedclad buildings. Also helping were the early gold rushes of California (1848) and Australia (1851)—where this “universal material” really came into its own. Within a year of gold being found in New South Wales and neighbouring Victoria, 500,000 immigrants were scouring the land for new finds. British manufacturers rushed to provide shelter. Shipping firms exporting wool from Australia to Europe gladly took cargoes of corrugated iron on the return trip. Immigrants to Australia often shipped their own prefab homes with them. South Melbourne’s “Canvas Town”, a shanty encampment of prospectors and traders, acquired a more permanent air thanks to corrugatediron kits for cottagesand shops arriving on the quay.

Land dealings on the new frontiers of Australia and New Zealand were notoriously dodgy. In case of eviction, having a portable house was a distinct advantage—you did not lose everything. Thanks also to cheapness, portability and a relatively rustfree climate, “wrinkly tin” blazed across the frontier landscape of the Antipodes. From kennels to post offices and even the outdoor dunny, there seemed nothing tin could not do. In urban settings, tin cottages gave way to bungalows with verandahs, and then structures of two or more storeys. In New Zealand tin was given a new lease on life in 1936, with the fixing of a 40hour week and two days out of every seven for leisure. The