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Samuel Bentham was the younger brother of Jeremy Bentham, the famous philosopher and social reformer. Though he never achieved his brother’s level of fame, Samuel’s contributions to the history of machine tools cannot be overlooked. At the age of 14, Samuel apprenticed himself to a shipwright, eventually becoming a naval engineer and working for the Russian nobility as a shipbuilder.
Bentham found a shortage of skilled labour in Russia, and as a result he started pondering the possibility of machines that could do the work of skilled craftsmen. When he returned to England in 1791, he registered his first patent for woodworking machines. His designs for sawing, planing and block-making machines earned him the job of Inspector General of Naval Works.
In 1793, Bentham registered the patent for a mechanized process of making woodworking blocks. At the time, pulley blocks were one of the most important naval supplies. Bentham had built a factory for manufacturing these blocks, when he met Marc Isambard Brunel, a French inventor who was also working on a concept for block-making machines. Bentham recognized Brunel’s designs (which included the invention of the circular saw) as superior to his own, and persuaded the British Admiralty to commission Brunel to work with him. Bentham and Brunel’s machines could be operated by 10 unskilled men, and turn out a product that previously required 110 skilled craftsmen to create.
Besides his contributions to machine tooling, Samuel was known for his concept of the Panopticon, a design he devised for his employer in Russia. Bentham was working on the problem of training and supervising unskilled workers, and the Panopticon was a sort of "inspection house" that would allow a foreman to supervise all workers at once from a central vantage point. His brother Jeremy developed this idea further, advocating the building of prisons on this model. However, Jeremy's Panopticon model was never built.
Sources:
Bradley, Ian. A History of Machine Tools. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Model and Allied Publications Ltd., 1972.
GSN Machine Tools Group. “Pioneers of the Machine Tool Industry: Samuel Bentham and Marc Isambard Brunel.”
http://www.gsn.uk.com/benbru.html
Pease-Watkin, Catherine. “Jeremy and Samuel Bentham: The Private and the Public.” Journal of Bentham Studies.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/journal/cpwsam.htm.
Werret, Simon. "Potemkin and the Panopticon: Samuel Bentham and the Architecture of Absolutism in Eighteenth Century Russia" Journal
of Bentham Studies. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/journal/nlwerret.htm.
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