It was one of Britain’s greatest ever structures, constructed in just 190 days between 1850 and 1851 – in time for Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition.
Now, a study answers the mystery of how London’s 1,850-foot-long Crystal Palace – at the time was the world’s largest building – was ᴀssembled so quickly.
Researchers say the huge glᴀss building pioneered the use of identical nuts and bolts – made in bulk by machines to match one standardized size and shape.
Before this, nuts and bolts had been laboriously made by hand – and no two screws and bolts were built to be alike.
Designed by renowned English architect Sir Joseph Paxton, the Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park at a cost of £80,000 (nearly £10 million in today’s money).
What was the Crystal Palace?
It hosted the Great Exhibition of 1851 – a vast event showcasing sculptures, machinery, diamonds, telescopes and much more from around the world.
After the exhibition, the palace was relocated to Penge Common, near Sydenham Hill in south London, where it remained until sadly destroyed by fire in November 1936.
The new study, led by Professor John Gardner at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Cambridge, identifies the palace as the first use of these standardised nuts and bolts, which were devised by Victorian inventor Joseph Whitworth.
‘During the Victorian era there was incredible innovation from workshops right across Britain that was helping to change the world,’ said Professor Gardner, who has published his study in The International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology.
‘In fact, progress was happening at such a rate that certain breakthroughs were perhaps never properly realised at the time, as was the case here with the Crystal Palace.’
Completed just in time for the start of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crystal Palace was a powerful symbol of Victorian Britain’s industrial might.
At 1,851 feet (564 metres) long and with a giant glᴀss roof supported by 3,300 cast iron columns connected by 30,000 nuts and bolts, it was the largest building in the world at the time.
However, with the successful design for the Crystal Palace only approved in July 1850, historians have long puzzled over the speed of its construction.
Professor Gardner worked with Ken Kiss, curator of Crystal Palace Museum, who had excavated original columns from the Crystal Palace site at Sydenham.
Prior to Whitworth’s invention, no two screws and bolts were alike – meaning a nut made in one workshop and a bolt made in another workshop wouldn’t fit together.
And because they were not made to a standard measurement, lost or broken screws and bolts were difficult to replace – which made construction time-consuming.
On a bolt, the screw thread is the long notch that runs down and around in a loop – and is precisely matched with an accompanying nut, much like a key and a lock.
It was only when Whitworth’s screw threads – something that’s now taken for granted in modern construction and engineering – was manufactured in bulk that the structure could be put together in record time.
Despite being conceived a decade before the palace was built, Whitworth screw threads – later known as British Standard Whitworth (BSW) – weren’t adopted as a British standard until 1905.
Professor Gardner manufactured new bolts to British Standard Whitworth and demonstrated that they fitted the original nuts.
‘Standardisation in engineering is essential and commonplace in the 21st century, but its role in the construction of the Crystal Palace was a major development,’ he said.
