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Charles Cammell was born in Hull on 10th January 1810. He was the fourth son of
Scottish shipmaster. Apparently Charles' firs encounter with iron and steel was
during apprenticeship to an ironmonger in Hull. In 1830 he moved to Sheffield to
continue his professional carrier. About 1832 he took a position of commercial
traveler with file and cutlery business of Ibbotson Brothers, Globe Works.
The industrial career of Charles Cammell had begun in 1837 when he joined two
brothers, Thomas and Henry Johnson, and started a firm at Furnival Street as steel
and file manufacturers, under the name of Johnson, Cammell & Co.
Johann C. Fisher, a Swiss industrialist and steel maker of the era, described
Charles as "extremely industrious, hard working, plodding, and pushing."
During 1830s and 1840s the railway systems of England, the Continent, America and
elsewhere were undergoing great changes and were being developed with marvelous
rapidity, thereby putting within the reach of iron and steel manufacturers such an
opportunity of extending their business as had never before occurred.
The firm took advantage to the full of the changed order of things, and their
undertaking expanded with extraordinary rapidity. Increased accommodation became
absolutely necessary, and experience had already shown the importance of being in
touch with the local railway systems and through them with the outer world, so that
the raw materials might be more readily and economically received, and the finished
work more easily and promptly dispatched.
In early 1840s their business expended significantly and premises on Furnival Street
became insufficient. A plot of land covering eleven acres was secured in Saville
Street, adjoining the Midland System, and upon it the now far-famed Cyclops works
were erected. They were entered upon in 1845, and with increased facilities for
production the scope of the firm's operations rapidly extended.
In 1852 Mr. Johnson died, and Mr. Edward Bury, then locomotive engineer of the
London and Birmingham Railway, was received into partnership as his successor.
Three years later Mr. Bury retired and the firm became "Charles Cammell & Company."
One of the greatest industrial marvels of Sheffield is the Cyclops Steel and Iron
Manufactory on Saville Street of Messrs. Charles Cammell and Co., producers on a
truly colossal scale, of every description of steel used for machinery, engineering,
locomotive, railway, and other purposes.
This vast establishment comprises almost a small town of factories, the premises
occupying an area of upwards of fourteen acres of ground, and affording employment
to over 1200 persons, the amount of whose annual wages exceeds the revenues of many
a foreign principality. The premises being intersected by the Midland Railway,
within a few hundred yards of its Sheffield terminus, and having sidings and lines
traversing every part of the works, merchandise is conveyed to and from with great
facility. ...