A papermaker's tale of a patent

Evans's dual enculturation in scholarship and industry provides an apt starting point to trace the social resources that informed his flint work. Aged sixteen and self-effacing, with a passion for ancient coins, he was apprenticed to his uncle's paper mill in 1840. His daughter and biographer described the move from a Leicestershire farming town to Nash Mills as from ‘a world formed in the closing years of the eighteenth century [to] the industrial world of another and more material age’. If unhappy, he was at least fascinated. His exasperated family noted how his talk had become ‘larded with technicalities’, while letters home reveal long days in the mill and a young man preoccupied with machines and with skill and its supervision.Footnote ¹⁹ In Market Bosworth, Evans's father had been a schoolmaster, at Nash Mills, he gained a second father in the form of his uncle and later father-in-law, John Dickinson. The old papermaker not only owned Nash Mills, but was a fellow of the Royal Society, ‘recognized in scientific circles … as a man of notable inventive ability’.Footnote ²⁰ For Dickinson, academic and industrial interests were intertwined. Assisted by Evans, his ‘chief preoccupation’ was scientific inquiries into the mill's water supply. On Dickinson's behalf, Evans performed geological surveys and experiments to monitor and improve irrigation, work that gave rise to lectures for the Royal Society. In general, Evans's role was menial and manual, a ‘handy nephew [when Dickinson] wanted a neat drawing made or an exact record kept’.Footnote ²¹ His wife told a friend that when Dickinson spoke at the society or ‘exhibited a curious model [Evans] helped as showman’.Footnote ²² Historians have understood the union of scientific and commercial interests in exhibits as ‘the business of successful performance’, noting that exhibitions ‘made science's place in consumer culture materially explicit’.Footnote ²³ At the mill, Evans learnt showmanship that made the place of industry in scientific culture tangible.Footnote ²⁴

In the 1850s Evans and Dickinson faced legal action over an envelope-folding machine devised by Warren de la Rue, astronomer, photographer and rival papermaker. De la Rue is remembered for his scientific status, yet at this conjuncture he and Dickinson, both Royal Society fellows, were embroiled in the guardianship of intellectual property and industrial interests. Though Dickinson's and de la Rue's ‘machines were quite different … their basic principles were not dissimilar; and a change was coming over the interpretation of patent laws, that made a patent cover a principle as well as its interpretation’.Footnote ²⁵ The final 1857 ruling went against Dickinson and Evans. They were fined and ‘compelled to destroy or render useless’ their envelope machines deemed to violate ‘the plaintiff's patent rights and privileges’.Footnote ²⁶ The change was too much for Dickinson; he retired and Evans took over. Business flourished and alongside it Evans's boyhood enthusiasm for coin collecting burgeoned into numismatic expertise. By the 1860s Evans was respected for his discernment in manufacturing techniques of both ancient artefacts and industrial output. He was heir to two traditions – scholarly and industrial virtuosity from the school and the mill.

It was not until a Bordeaux business trip in 1859 that Evans's marginal interest in ancient stone implements became a central preoccupation.Footnote ²⁷ Boucher de Perthes conducted most of his excavations in Abbeville in Picardy, where he was based. It was here he claimed to have discovered human artefacts in situ with long-extinct animals. Drawn by the opportunity to evaluate at first hand, and under Prestwich's instigation, Evans travelled to Abbeville. The two men had met as lobby opponents in a dispute over a hydrological survey: Evans representing industrialists, Prestwich speaking as a geologist. Despite their ideological and disciplinary boundaries, they had become friends.Footnote ²⁸ Nathan Schlanger has shown how Prestwich and Evans applied business acumen to Abbeville such that artefacts ignored under Boucher de Perthes's theories were lauded as a result of Evans and Prestwich's accountant-like ‘audit’.Footnote ²⁹ Though not their original discovery, their improvements on Boucher de Perthes's testimony defined Abbeville's significance.Footnote ³⁰

Prestwich and Evans's Abbeville experience distinguished worked from natural flints by ‘evident marks of design’.Footnote ³¹ Further, it led Evans to see a ‘difference in … character’ within these products of ‘human manufacture’.Footnote ³² In his discernment of flints, Evans adopted the exact language of the 1857 patent dispute. De la Rue's patent detailed the ‘peculiar character’ of his invention. The case hung on whether apparatus that ‘varied in form’ shared this ‘character’ such that the Dickinson machine was ‘substantially the same apparatus as that described’ by de la Rue.Footnote ³³ The requirement defined leaps of technical ingenuity through difference in character. Subjected to this scrutiny in 1857, Evans applied the discernment to flints just two years later. Subsequently, Evans cited Abbeville as the moment when ‘the necessity of subdividing what had until then been regarded as the Stone Age into two distinct stages, an earlier and a later, [was] universally recognised’.Footnote ³⁴ Yet, as Schlanger has shown for Evans's numismatic work, the resources and techniques involved in this recognition preceded the Abbeville moment in Evans's own development: they came, rather, from industry.Footnote ³⁵

Following Abbeville, Evans emphasized the difference in range and complexity of technical ability exhibited by surface and drift implements, and took these as physical markers of a chronological division within the Stone Age. Banker and close friend John Lubbock provided the terminology for these divisions, designating the earlier and later Stone Age as the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic respectively.Footnote ³⁶ Evans claimed that technical ability in the Palaeolithic was limited to ‘chipping only’ and that such a restricted technique only gave rise to hand-held implements. He related deeper deposits to greater antiquity, and associated these with a prevalence of ovate flints. For Evans, shape was the indicator of hand use; from pointed tip the flint splayed out and curved to fit the hand. More superficial deposits were considered more recent and, Evans argued, the flints they yielded exhibited greater finish and variation. His Neolithic represented a proliferation in materials and technical skills, such as grinding, polishing and pressure flaking.Footnote ³⁷ Evans read diversity as traces of intention to fit the flint to a handle and saw the finish, adaptation and extension of hafting as significant in ‘denoting stages of civilization’.Footnote ³⁸ Discerning intention and action from the flints' form, he divided the Stone Age by technique. Evans's account of prehistory was one of many – contemporaries such as William Boyd Dawkins, James Geikie and Lubbock all contributed explanations.Footnote ³⁹ Yet Evans's differed in privileging technical discernment.

Evans's subdivision of the Stone Age was preoccupied with a concept since coined the ‘property of skill’, a notion of technical ability loaded in labour history with the dual significance of ownership and authorship.Footnote ⁴⁰ More than metaphor, technical skill was the resource and substance of Evans's criteria.Footnote ⁴¹ In particular, he focused on the quality of the flints' ‘edge’. It was the edge's ‘characteristic’ properties that provided the basis of his ‘general classification’.Footnote ⁴² The decisive moment of the de la Rue patent dispute came on 27 January 1857 when Chancery agent Robert Hawkins inspected and compared the Dickinson and de la Rue apparatuses. For the patent lawyer, whether the two differed in character depended on the nature of the envelopes' ‘edge’ and the mechanism by which ‘the cam surface & its edge gives the final creasing by pressure’. These emphases are in the original, pencil annotations on the formal ink of ‘Mr Hawkins's Opinion’. Lines erupt into outraged scholia in a hand resembling Evans's own: ‘No! The folding is accomplished by the Edges’. Edges as tools, as products, and above all as points of discernment for technique and invention, became salient to Evans in the patent tribunal, two years before Abbeville.Footnote ⁴³ The mechanics of his Stone Age subdivisions were redolent with the industrial dispute.

Evans confronted the underdetermination of the flints and the ambiguities of the Victorian patent wars in the same way. Patent abolitionists challenged whether an invention could belong to a heroic individual or was determined by social development. Further, they argued that industry itself developed through the free movement of intellectual property.Footnote ⁴⁴ As a patent holder, Evans agreed with hagiographers that innovation derived from individual skill, but as a competitive industrialist he thrived on the freedom to adopt and adapt his rivals' inventions. The abolitionist argument looked to separate the individual person, and so technical skill, from the invention. The flints were underdetermined because their context, the skilled manual craft of their manufacture, was lost. Together, Evans's flint knapping and papermaking expertise provided a surrogate. Through his performative analysis, Evans was able to act out the questions of the patent crisis that emerged at that same moment.

The ambivalence of Evans's position is explicit in a draft lecture on the invention of the steam engine. Histories of the steam engine and hagiographies of James Watt were the stuff of mid-nineteenth-century patent disputes, designed to be read as interventions for and against patentees' rights.Footnote ⁴⁵ Evans's lecture sustains both narratives simultaneously. The ‘remarkable inventive genius’ of the heroic individual weighs against the inevitability of socially determined development. One candidate for authorship of the steam engine in its present form is balanced by discussion of the ‘same discovery’ made elsewhere. A line describing James Watt as ‘the greatest benefactor to this nation that ever existed’ was struck out. Instead, the description credited Watt with ‘the first grand step towards the improvements of the engine’. For Evans, the realization of Watt's ideas was delayed and frustrated by ‘[t]he want of those mechanical appliances now so common, the want of capital, & the necessity of secrecy to prevent his inventions being pirated’. In the same breath as crediting the social dependence of invention, he made the case for the patent protecting individual and national interests. From ‘[t]he earliest claimant of modern times’, through every ‘next inventor’, the hagiography of each named individual and contribution is situated relative to the next ‘improvement’ or ‘improved form’. The patents accrued by the Dickinson firm were dominated by ‘Improvements to’ and ‘Improvements in the Manufacture of Paper’, as was de la Rue's patent specification.Footnote ⁴⁶ ‘Improvement’ projected the ambiguities at stake: while the term was used to protect the intellectual property of the heroic individual, it always pointed to the longer history of the technical development.

A lithograph in Evans's dispute papers shows de la Rue's machine at the Great Exhibition in 1851 (Figure 1). The event had brought debates over invention and ownership to prominence and catalysed the patent reforms which struck Dickinson and Evans in 1857.Footnote ⁴⁷ Exhibition visitors were forbidden from making their own drawings in an effort to protect intellectual property. Instead, they could purchase lithographs such as this. While the image conceals the machine's construction and mechanism, the assistant's outstretched arms make it evident the machine is in action. These authorized images worked like patents – showing apparatus in use they enforced a dynamic shift from possession of the machine to its operation. The innovation of de la Rue's exhibit was a peculiar mechanical ‘finger’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The child pointing, digit outstretched, forms the focal centre of the image. Showing the machine in operation extended de la Rue's patented operating principle, while the child's finger highlighted, without revealing, its peculiar character. The lithograph and its staging helped bind technique and intellectual property to the machine. To authenticate the antiquity of the Abbeville flint finds, Evans needed to establish their stratigraphic position beyond doubt. His and Prestwich's use of photography (Figure 2) is now considered ‘unprecedented’ and the labourer pointing as key to convincing contemporaries that the flint finds lay in their original context.Footnote ⁴⁹ The seemingly casual image was the result of careful staging to bind the artefact to the moment of discovery and make layers of earth a witness of time.Footnote ⁵⁰ Images were tools that could reify intellectual property for science and industry alike.

Figure 1.

‘Copy of the picture of the [Warren de la Rue] invention from Great Exhibition of 1851, held at the Crystal Palace’. Litigation, Legal Records, John Dickinson Company Limited, 1856–1857, Hertfordshire Archive & Local Studies (HALS), DE/Di/1/4/17/3.

Figure 2.

A labourer points to an axe embedded in the earth, apparently the first of the dig. Photograph taken by French antiquarian Charles Pinsard for Joseph Prestwich, 27 April 1859, Album Pinsard, Mss 43 Bibliothèques d'Amiens Métropole, Ms 1370.f.33.

Of international import, talking guns and flints

Historians of nineteenth-century science have shown how business matched polite conversation in forging and maintaining expert networks.Footnote ⁵¹ As his friendship with Prestwich has indicated, Evans was an exemplary case. Copenhagen linguist George Stephens corresponded with Evans on coins, ancient runes and investing in Swedish pulp works. A variety of pulping processes competed in the contemporary market. Stephens sought Evans's opinion on the most promising technology for investment.Footnote ⁵² In business and scholarship, Evans's expertise was in situating and assessing mechanical skill and contrivance. His technical discernment could secure speculation in both science and commerce. Stephens was just one of a notable group of Scandinavian linguists in correspondence with Evans over antiquarian matters. In 1868 Lubbock translated the Lund zoology professor and comparative anatomist Sven Nilsson's major work on Scandinavia's primitive inhabitants. This indicates its significance, but Evans did not need his friend's translation. He read Swedish, as well as ‘mastering’ other European languages, and was already in direct correspondence with Nilsson. Together with coins and flints, Evans collected contacts, society memberships and positions of responsibility.Footnote ⁵³

Yet while Evans's social world was global, British artefacts dominated his collection. Despite his international network he published exclusively on British material.Footnote ⁵⁴ His scholarship reinforced and defended a British type to be extended to an international field. Such an argument has been shown in the case of Evans's contemporary, Roderick Murchison, and the imperialist expansion of his geological system.Footnote ⁵⁵ Where Murchison was motivated by militant empire-building, this paper is concerned with the resources Evans mobilized to extend his typology, resources drawn from his industrial culture. On 9 October 1863, Evans presented a paper at an Edinburgh meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science titled ‘On the manner in which the British paper manufacturer is affected by foreign legislation’. A copy is held in the Ashmolean Museum among Evans's personal papers.Footnote ⁵⁶ His concern was the impact of the Treaty of Commerce with France on the import of European rags, on which British papermaking depended. Evans argued that the treaty not only protected foreign manufacturers against British competition in foreign markets, but also aggressively supplanted the British papermaker in his own market. The treaty was implemented in 1860; Evans's argument, laden with statistics, took 1859 as the crucial point of comparison to show the impact. He gave as ‘a general rule’ that ‘a manufacture once driven abroad could never be restored’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the same year that Evans and Prestwich diverted their business trip to Abbeville, the significance of the British home market as a strong base for foreign export became salient for Evans. The defense and export of a British type was an industrial concern that Evans acted out in his scholarly mode of working.

In particular, it was the contemporary gun flint industry that Evans recruited and deployed to stage flint knapping as a form of British manufacture and to extend his British typology. The following sets out how Evans reframed as an industrial archetype an experience that was formative for Nilsson. At the 1868 International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology in Norwich, Evans knapped without the aid of metal tools to demonstrate that flint implements could be both prehistoric and man-made. Though there are few existing accounts of Evans giving such a public demonstration, flint knapping was a passion of his as early as 1859. He even ‘celebrated his birthday’ making ‘a pretty good flint axe’.Footnote ⁵⁸ It was Nilsson who had inspired Evans to the hobby and method, and helped launch the tradition of flint knapping to explain prehistory.Footnote ⁵⁹ In his introduction to The Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia, Nilsson suggested that the development of the human race was best represented as the ages of man, and described ‘the so-called savage state’ as ‘the childhood of the human race’. Youth facilitated a temporal shift such that, when Nilsson went on to describe his own childhood experience of knapping to make gun flints, he could argue that this experience enabled him ‘to recognise in these stone hammers the instruments by means of which the flint weapons had in ancient times been made’. According to the Swedish zoologist, it was not just useful but crucial ‘in order to be able to form a clear idea of the degree of civilisation of the people by whom these articles were made’.Footnote ⁶⁰ For Nilsson, equating childhood with early man, recalling his youth framed gun flints and flint knapping, and enabled him to access prehistoric culture and technique. Though Evans was influenced by Nilsson to knap and study the manufacture of gun flints, he emphasized the role of the proxy and techniques of demonstration, description and draughtsmanship, rather than shared reminiscence.Footnote ⁶¹ His work thus retained the instrumental focus of Nilsson, but adopted a patent lawyer's emphasis on the scrutiny of analogues to comprehend originals. Gun flints were presented as ‘instruments of similar character [produced by] what we must judge to be a somewhat similar state of culture’. Evans went so far as to argue that ‘there can be no doubt that the manufacture of gun flints … is best calculated to afford instruction [as to the] method of production of implements formed of siliceous materials’.Footnote ⁶²

It was the gun flint that reified the temporal shift that Evans demanded from his readers and audience, the claim that the experimental knapping of a Victorian papermaker could recover the intentions and actions of a prehistoric people. While Nilsson described gun-flint knapping as a preoccupation of his earliest youth, and so suggested that the art could inform understanding of early man, Evans presented the industrial history of their manufacture. As Evans explained, percussion caps had long since superseded flintlocks in the ignition of firearms, with the British army transitioning to percussion-primed muskets in the early 1840s.Footnote ⁶³ Gun-flint manufacture persisted in Britain almost entirely for export, in particular to Africa and Brazil. ‘Strike-a-light’ flints, exported from Britain ‘to the East and to Brazil’, were judged by Evans to be knapped ‘in precisely the same manner’ as they had been by prehistoric humans and likely to be the older, ‘pre-existing art’. Nonetheless, gun flints were his focus, described by Evans in patent lawyer's terms as ‘a modification and extension’ of strike-a-lights.Footnote ⁶⁴ From the 1840s, the major developments in small firearms shifted from the priming technology or ignition system to the cartridge-and-bullet complex.Footnote ⁶⁵ The most significant of these was the Minié rifle, Captain Claude-Etienne Minié's adaptation of a rifle designed by fellow French officer Henri-Gustave Delvigne. The breakthrough of the Delvigne–Minié rifle system was the bullet and its relation to the cartridge. In 1849 the Board of Ordnance began trialling the Minié. Their investigations gave rise to the Enfield, or Pattern 1853 rifle, itself a further adaptation of the Minié. The paper cartridge was a crucial component of the rifle's system.Footnote ⁶⁶

From the early 1800s, the Dickinson firm were said to be the best makers of cartridge paper in England. Inspectors of the Board of Ordnance called on Dickinson to adjudicate in quality disputes with the East India Company.Footnote ⁶⁷ Further, Dickinson held significant patents for the manufacture of cartridge paper.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1857, the same year as the de la Rue dispute ruling, sepoys of the East India Company mutinied; Evans's brother-in-law, founder of the India Reform Society in 1853, claimed to be the first in England to hear the news. Cartridge paper was the focal point of the grievances leading up to the crisis; specifically, religious concerns over the particular animal origin of the grease that partially coated the cartridge. In the months leading up to the mutiny, sepoys refused percussion caps for their weapons because of the association with the greased cartridge.Footnote ⁶⁹ For British commentators writing on the mutiny, the flintlock predecessor to the Enfield rifle was a ‘relic of barbarism’.Footnote ⁷⁰ For both parties, cartridge paper was the successor to gun flints, while British commentators represented this succession as both a technological and a social hierarchy of development. Evans's daughter and biographer described 1857 as ‘an anxious and difficult year’ for the family business. Though it seemed the crisis might precipitate the collapse of the British cartridge paper industry, the opposite was the result. In a telling shift, recent attempts by the East India Company to move cartridge paper production to India were abandoned in favour of British manufacture.Footnote ⁷¹ Now under Evans, the Dickinson firm secured a major government contract for the supply of ‘Minnie paper’ in the spring of 1858. For sepoys and Britons, the transition from flintlock to rifle was synonymous with that from gun flints to cartridge paper. Further, British commentators saw the substitution of technology as the succession of barbarism by British imperial power. In this constructed hierarchy, Evans's cartridge paper occupied the apex of technical and social development.

The view that the manufacture of gun flints provided a direct link to the past enjoyed widespread support. In 1880 the anthropological section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science investigated the claim that Brandon gun-flint knappers ‘had been in continuous operation from Neolithic times to our own day’. The report concluded that ‘at Brandon there can scarcely be any doubt that we still possess examples of an early British race’.Footnote ⁷² These investigations were motivated by a paper ‘On the survival of the Neolithic period at Brandon, Suffolk’, presented to the British Association by geologist Sydney Skertchly the previous year.Footnote ⁷³ The introduction to Skertchly's fuller 1879 work, On the Manufacture of Gun-Flints, the Methods of Excavating for Flint, the Age of Palaeolithic Man, and the Connexion between Neolithic Art and the Gun-Flint Trade, cited Evans as one of the first to suggest a relation between contemporary gun-flint knappers and Neolithic man.Footnote ⁷⁴ In particular, Skertchly's assertions about Brandon were founded on the evidence of Canon William Greenwell's excavations of Grimes Graves in Norfolk, begun in 1868. Greenwell was not only one of Evans's closest friends and most frequent correspondents, but also one of his fiercest competitors for the purchase of flint finds.Footnote ⁷⁵

The prevalence of military culture within the sciences of earth history has been well established by historians, and was by no means peculiar to Evans. It has already been noted how Roderick Murchison employed the culture and techniques of militant imperial expansion in the extension of his geological system.Footnote ⁷⁶ Significantly influenced by Evans, Augustus Pitt-Rivers is retrospectively understood as an archaeologist, yet Chris Evans's recent study has demonstrated how Pitt-Rivers identified his ‘claim to recognition’ in his ‘Musketry Work’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Military culture offered the basic resources for Pitt-Rivers's archaeology, notably for his concepts of evidence and judgement. Pitt-Rivers himself cited ‘the experiments which led to the introduction of the rifle-musket [the Minié gun] into the army’ as the ‘foundation’ of his museum.Footnote ⁷⁸ For Evans's ally, the eminent palaeontologist Hugh Falconer, scholarly debate was military campaigning. Falconer wrote frequent tongue-in-cheek messages calling Evans to ‘go over and do battle’. He lampooned the ‘French Academician – like a French Marshall – “un maréchal de France ne se rend jamais!”’, ordered Evans to ‘lay on therefore and smite without mercy’, and pleaded with him that ‘unless you come Albion is consigned to mortification and defeat’.Footnote ⁷⁹

While others made use of militarism and gun flints to frame understanding of debates in earth history, it is Evans's particular application that is of note here. Militarism was also a resource for industrial culture. Evans used gun flints to bring paper into a hierarchy of technological development with ancient flints. This was a relation he even acted out within the firm, not only in the exhibition at Nash Mills, but in company rituals. Under Evans's management, a custom emerged within the papermaking firm that when an apprentice engineer completed training he would be ‘blown out of his time’. A pound of gunpowder was bought and a cannon loaded, ‘wads of paper being driven home with a copper drift and sledge-hammer’. It was the role of the apprentice ‘next out’ to fire the cannon on the stroke of noon, and mark the transition from apprentice to master. For his part the apprentice to be blown out would contribute ‘a nine-gallon cask of beer which did not last beyond noon’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Rituals of cartridge and shot marked the transition between stages of technical accomplishment and social advance. In late 1830 a troop of machine-breakers had marched on Nash Mills. Dickinson's response, to call on military aid, was typical of contemporary industrialists.Footnote ⁸¹ In science and industry alike, whether marking the end of an apprenticeship, defending the mill or defining scholarship, Evans and his peers resorted to guns.Footnote ⁸²

Historians of geology have shown how the sciences of earth history played on a working analogy between distance, time and depth, such that far away and deep down stood for long ago. Further, they have demonstrated how British typological classifications traveled through the extension of imperial ideologies.Footnote ⁸³ Evans represented British industry as a distinct locus of skill exported abroad, selecting, representing and distributing his flints the same way.Footnote ⁸⁴ In emphasizing gun flints, Evans privileged not only a British type, but, through the 1858 cartridge monopoly, also his type. The trajectory of the export, from Britain to far away, recapitulated Evans's own claim to travel back in time through attending to British manufacturing techniques. Using the operative analogy between distance, time and depth, the Abbeville photograph, with the labourer pointing to the axe still embedded in the deep cut of earth, testified to the age of the flint implement. In the same way, Evans used the British manufacture of gun flints for export to instantiate the idea that far away is long ago, and the coeval but technologically superior manufacture of cartridge paper to support his claim to access the past through his own actions.Footnote ⁸⁵

Body language

As the introduction set out, flint finds were hard to interpret. Evans's challenge was to construct standards against which the proper outcome of a judgement could be evaluated. His influential system used criteria carried over from patent culture to assess ancient flints for degrees of innovation and technical development. Recent and salient changes in patent legislation meant that a patent now extended beyond the invention to cover a principle: the idea and the mechanism of action. Patent culture enforced the dynamic shift of Evans's system that read technique from the surface of the static artefacts. Contemporary gun-flint manufacture formed the bridge between ancient flints and Evans's paper empire. The two industries shared a hierarchy of technical development in the manufacture of small firearms. The export of gun flints enabled Evans to build on the prevalent Victorian analogy between distance and time, in which Brandon knappers were seen to inhabit a different, earlier time.Footnote ⁸⁶ Through his experimental flint knapping, a skill Hugo Lamdin-Whymark has suggested Evans learnt from Brandon makers, Evans claimed to access the past and recover long-lost technique.Footnote ⁸⁷

The anthropologist Frank Cushing gave the first American demonstration of experimental flint knapping in 1878, ten years after Evans's performance at the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology in Norwich. Lewis Johnson argues that belated American interest in experimental knapping stemmed from the coeval stone-tool culture of indigenous Americans. There was no difficulty in understanding man-made flint tools found in America – the context to frame their interpretation was readily available in the culture of indigenes.Footnote ⁸⁸ By contrast, those who debated European drift flints made significant use of ethnographic studies, such as work by the artist and observer George Catlin on North American Indians. Salisbury's Blackmore Museum (Figure 3), and the central role Evans played in its formal opening in 1867, provide an apt example. The museum's principal patron, the solicitor William Blackmore, had close connections in western North America and was a ‘firm friend’ of Catlin, who had toured his collection of paintings across Europe three decades earlier.Footnote ⁸⁹ Blackmore had financed the purpose-built museum to house his collection of North American antiquities. He had purchased the collection whole with a view to drawing out comparisons between present-day North American Indians, ancient American implements and prehistoric relics found around Salisbury. In the course of building the museum, many local artefacts were uncovered. The opening ceremony prompted attendees to claim that nearby Stonehenge was a product of the ‘engineering skill’ of ‘ancient Britons’ and not, as had been claimed, the work of another, earlier race.Footnote ⁹⁰ This section pays close attention to Evans's particular use of language in reworking Catlin's observations and narrating his own expertise. Gun flints brought paper into a technical hierarchy with ancient flints, and together with patent culture provided the basis for the dynamic and temporal shifts of Evans's system. This section argues that Evans used the peculiar language of papermaking to focus these transformations. There was more than scholarship at stake. The language of Evans's performance points to the industrialist's struggle to mechanize against the artisan's monopoly of skill.

Figure 3.

The Blackmore Museum, Some Account of the Blackmore Museum, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 1868, centrefold. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Evans, like many of his peers, reproduced observations by Catlin in his Ancient Stone Implements. However, in contrast to his contemporaries, Evans made a telling alteration. In Catlin's original text, it is stated,

Colleagues of Evans, such as Edward Stevens, curator of the Blackmore Museum, gave Catlin's exact words, as above.Footnote ⁹² In Evans's version, however, the words ‘chisel’ and ‘co-operator’ are omitted, leaving ‘punch’ and ‘striker’ as the key terms in the description of the action.Footnote ⁹³ Where his peers only used such expressions as examples of Catlin's parenthetical afterthoughts, these terms were instead the standard terminology for the tool, action and actor throughout Evans's text. The following sets out how such subtle, but significant, alterations were telltale traces of his investment in the particular manual skills of his industrial culture.

A punch is both a tool that, by repeated sudden impact, perforates a surface, and the machine where such a tool is the essential part. A strike was both the device and the action used to shape and finish a punch by impact. Such language was a feature of numismatics, Evans's other passion, precisely because it recalled a manual craft fundamental to many industries. As a papermaker, punch-work was integral to envelope production. In 1881, Evans employed ten ‘punchers’ to operate machines in the envelope department of Apsley Mill alone.Footnote ⁹⁴ An issue of the Mechanics' Magazine in 1872 described the firm's process of envelope manufacture on display at South Kensington's International Exhibition. The scientific weekly gave the apparatus an ‘especial commendation’ as ‘one of the most complete series of exhibits illustrating exhaustively some special process’:

Women tended the machines at the exhibit.Footnote ⁹⁶ As is typical of such accounts, their presence is effaced; their ‘skilful manipulation’ and ‘careful adjustment’ represented as a disembodied extension of the machine. The Mechanics' Magazine was founded by Joseph Clinton Robertson, a Fleet Street patent agent, in 1823; descriptions such as this worked like patents to tie the operating principle to the invention and inventor, and efface the embodied skill of the operator.Footnote ⁹⁷ The punch, denoting both the tool and the machine, focused the struggle of Victorian industrial culture between manual skill and mechanical process.

As the exhibition description indicates, punches required exact dimensions; a poorly made punch was quick to wear down and lose its shape. In the mid-nineteenth century, the best punches, those made with precision to withstand intensive use, were still made by hand. The craft was a monopoly restricted to a handful of artisans, whose skill historians have described as so ‘regular and precise as to appear machine-made’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet the manual craft preceded and surpassed the capabilities of machine production. As Raphael Samuel's work in industrial history has shown, machines struggled to attain the regularity and precision of the handmade. An interview published in an 1887 issue of the Paper Record and retained in Evans's personal papers illustrates Samuel's point. An anonymous artisan is asked to contrast the modern state of calendering with that of the early 1860s, with the response being quoted thus:

Mechanization was not pursued for consistent quality, but rather to break the artisans' monopoly.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In citing ‘wretched prices’ and the quality of work, the artisan spoke to the tensions of embodied skill. A thread of violence runs from the protests of machine-breakers, through the language of body techniques, to enforcement against patent violations.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Tensions over property of skill and of intellect were acted out through brutality and struggle. For Evans, as for his contemporary industrialists, guns resolved the violence of artisan protest. In his scholarship, Evans applied gun flints as the proxy for the flint work of prehistoric man, but also to discipline and order the peculiar physical language of his re-enactment.Footnote ¹⁰²

In a close monopoly that limited the expansion of Evans's paper empire, 1850s Britain boasted ‘fewer than a dozen punch-cutters’.Footnote ¹⁰³ By the late 1880s the process had been mechanized, the artisan monopoly broken. While Evans applied papermaking terminology to his flint work, the terms themselves were undergoing this transformation, increasingly vestiges of the skilled body subsumed into the mechanization process.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As a virtuoso flint knapper and papermaker, Evans worked to establish the significance of embodied skill; at the same time, as a competitive industrialist, he sought to separate technical ability from the artisan's body. Victorian industrialists experimented with ways of enforcing this displacement of ownership. Patents combined with exhibitions, photography and description to manipulate a dynamic shift that could bind operating process, and skilled technique, to the patent holder's invention. As both action and instrument, punch and strike embodied this shift and the displacement of the operator. However, the terms also recalled the stubborn bodily origins in the process Evans strove to mechanize. As such, they navigated a contradiction key to Evans's flint work. His explicit aim was to ‘recall into an ideal existence days long since passed away, to trace the condition of a previous state of things and, as it were, to re-people the earth with its former inhabitants’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The metonymy of the body in technical language enabled Evans to re-people the lost process. At the same time, it enabled him to enact the technical hierarchy of Victorian culture that, like the account in the Mechanics' Magazine, represented manual skill as long since past, displaced by the device.

The move between instrument and method, between human and object, is typical of Evans's description of flints:

The sentence slips interchangeably between hand and flint. We wince for our hands as the flint is ‘bruised’. In papermaking, bruising refers to the treatment of fibres in the beating process used to render vegetable matter such as esparto grass.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This was an experimental alternative to the principal material, cloth rags. Evans launched the British Paper and Board Makers' Association in 1872. It served to draw together ‘many of the mill owners of Britain in an affiliation’ to share ideas and lobby over manufacturing issues. The association's establishment coincided with the break-up of the artisan punch-cutting monopoly and the duty changes reported in the Paper Record interview. According to the association's centenary publication, ‘if John Evans had done nothing else for the British Paper Industry, his pioneering work on esparto grass alone would have earned him a place among the great creators’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While the association significantly overstated the impact of esparto on Victorian papermaking, experimentation with raw vegetable alternatives to rags, to circumnavigate import duty, preoccupied Evans for decades.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In 1854 he patented a process for papermaking from esparto; by the 1870s the ‘beater men’ at Evans's Croxley Mill were working twenty-four-hour shifts.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Multiple advertisements for esparto feature within the Paper Record issue retained by Evans.Footnote ¹¹¹ Simultaneously process and product, the bruise motivated the dynamic shift Evans's flint work required, and recalled the physicality of labour in the industrial process.

Within the text of Ancient Stone Implements, the language of body, pain and action was a tool, alongside Evans's drawings, to recapitulate technique and bind it to the object. The solitary flints in Figure 4 are dark, opaque, unintelligible. Only their alignment hints that they might not be accidents of nature. Over the page, the objects of Figure 4 are animated in Figure 5. In nineteenth-century hands, they become clear, transparent, diagrammatic representations of method. Evans exploited the ambiguity of the flints to make a visual transition from object to action that was reflected in his prose. Terms such as ‘flake’ and ‘chip’ slide innocuously between one form and another throughout. Flakes are achieved by flaking: ‘Every successive flake carries off some part of the traces of those previously struck off’. ‘A chip broken off from [a flint] by a sideways blow’ is the product of Evans's ‘chip’ at the core of the flint.Footnote ¹¹² As punch and bruise move between verb and noun, the language of action also defines the object, uniting the flint with the technique. Evans's peculiar language animated the temporal and dynamic shifts that his work proposed.

Figure 4.

Pyrites and ‘scraper’ found at Rudstone barrow. John Evans, The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons and Ornaments of Great Britain, London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1872, p. 284. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Figure 5.

Method of using pyrites and ‘scraper’ for striking a light. Evans, op. cit., p. 285. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Like Evans, American anthropologist Frank Cushing was committed to experimental knapping as ‘a manual–mental method of true divination concerning the lost [primitive] arts’. As Evans had, Cushing inferred intention from object and action, arguing, ‘the hand of man [was] intimately associated with the mind of man’.Footnote ¹¹³ However, as Lewis Johnson has noted, Cushing faced a different challenge to that of Evans.Footnote ¹¹⁴ While Evans drew on his industrial culture to provide a surrogate context for the interpretation of ancient flints, Cushing knapped and studied archaeological digs as a form of experimental empathy to access and record the dying cultures of American indigenes around him. Simply put, Evans drew on the vanishing present of manual craft to understand a lost past, while Cushing drew on a lost past to understand a vanishing present. For both, traces of the body in language mediated the transition. Cushing's 1892 paper on manual concepts argued that language and culture are marked by the inheritance of concepts derived from the human body. The anthropologist used striking diagrams to set out the bodily derivations of numeracy (Figure 6). The emaciation of the hands was an attestation of his empathic method, figured in response to the Zuñi culture he studied that was dominated by the threat of starvation.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Both Cushing and Evans saw their own performance as offering to access something lost or unattainable. The difference in their application of the experimental method highlights the situated and specific nature of the concerns that shaped their performance.

Figure 6.

Cushing used these diagrams alongside an etymology of Zuñi number words to show how they derived from descriptions of finger counting. For instance: ‘Seven, kwil’-li-lï-k'ya simply means two (fingers of the right hand) brought to and held up with the rest (of the left hand …).’ Frank Cushing, ‘Manual concepts: a study of the influence of hand-usage on culture-growth’ American Anthropologist (1892) 5, pp. 289–318, 295. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.