William Bridges Adams

Personal life

Adams spent his early years in Woore, Shropshire, near Madeley, Staffordshire, and got his schooling at the Madeley School. His father, whose own father was a yeoman farmer in Woore, moved to London and rose from journeyman coachbuilder to master tradesman, running a leather-supply shop for coachmakers on Dean Street in Soho. Adams himself apprenticed with Baxter & Pierce, a well-known coachbuilding firm on Long Acre, London; while there, Napoleon's travelling carriage arrived after Waterloo, and Adams sketched it.

On 30 November 1818, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, he wed Elizabeth Place, daughter of reformer Francis Place. The couple sailed for Valparaíso, Chile, in 1820, where Adams managed Lord Cochrane's estate for £200 yearly. Their son William Alexander Adams arrived in 1821, and the family lived through the Valparaíso earthquake on 19 November 1822. Elizabeth died on 8 August 1823 while giving birth to a second child, who also died.

Adams returned to England with his son by crossing the Andes to Buenos Aires and then sailing to London via Falmouth, reaching home in 1826. After a trip to the United States, he settled in London and joined Hobson & Co, Coachmakers. He married Sarah Fuller Flower Adams in 1834, and they lived at Sunnybank, Woodbury Hill, in Loughton, where a blue plaque now honors them both. Following Sarah's death in 1848, he wed Ellen Kendall, and they had a daughter, Hope Bridges Adams.

Adams died at Cuthbert House in Broadstairs, Kent, at age seventy-five, and was buried at St Peter's Church in that town.

Railway engineering

Unhappy with scarf joints used for iron track, Adams teamed up with Robert Richardson, a junior engineer under Peter Bruff on the Eastern Counties Railway, to patent a railway fishplate in 1847—an unbolted wedge that fit between adjoining chairs. The design sold to the Eastern Counties Railway and others, but money troubles forced Adams to give up the patent, and James Samuel of the same railway soon improved it with a bolted version. Earlier, Adams had patented 'bow springs' for road carriages, which also worked on railway carriages, and manufacturing them turned a profit.

The business, run under his uncle Samuel Adams's name, started at the Currier Factory in Drury Lane and Parker Street, Soho, then moved in 1842 to three acres next to the Eastern Counties Railway at Fair Field, Bow, trading as Adams & Co. In 1843, he set up the Fairfield Locomotive Works in Bow, East London, focusing on light engines, steam railcars, and inspection trolleys, selling them to railways across Britain and Ireland—including the Fairfield steam carriage for the broad-gauge Bristol and Exeter Railway and the Enfield for his biggest customer, the Eastern Counties Railway.

He also supplied a 2-2-0 well tank to the Roman Railway. The company was declared bankrupt on 10 August 1850. In 1863, James Cross and Company used Adams's radial axle box and spring-tyred driving wheels on the White Raven, a 2-4-2 tank locomotive for the St Helens Railway; the setup worked well on tight curves at first but was swapped out after two years because it caused too much oscillation. Though his inventions and writings gained fame, his locomotives had little impact, and the engineering business eventually failed, by which time Adams had moved into clothing design and journalism.

Confusion with William Adams

William Adams, the locomotive superintendent who created the Adams Bogie, previously ran the North London Railway's Bow depot. Later, at the London and South Western Railway, he made wide use of a rival's axle-box design. That rival was William Bridges Adams, inventor of the radial axle box.

In 1865, the Society of Engineers in London tested both designs on the North London Railway, finding William Adams's laterally sprung bogie superior. Yet when William Adams moved to the LSWR, he chose Bridges Adams's axle box for his locomotives. The engines called Adams Radials are named after the superintendent, but their fame comes from the axle invented by William Bridges Adams.