Richard Tangye

Sir Richard Trevithick Tangye(24 November 1833 – 14 October 1906) was a British manufacturer of engines and other heavy equipment.

Biography

Richard Tangye was born at Illogan, near Redruth, Cornwall, the fifth son in a family of six sons and three daughters of Joseph Tangye (1798-1854), a Quaker miner of Redruth, later a small shopkeeper and farmer, and Ann, née Bullock. As a young boy he worked in the fields, but when he was eight years old he was incapacitated from further manual labour by a fracture of the right arm. His father then determined to give him the best education he could afford, and young Tangye was sent to the Quaker Sidcot School in the Mendip Hills near the village of Winscombe, Somerset, where he progressed rapidly and became a pupil-teacher.

Career

Tangye disliked this role, and through an advertisement in The Friend obtained a clerkship in a small engineering firm in Birmingham, where two of his brothers, skilled mechanics, subsequently joined him. Here Richard Tangye remained four years, obtaining a complete mastery of the details of an engineering business, and introducing the system of a Saturday half-holiday which he had supported on its introduction by John Frearson, the radical Birmingham Engineer. It was subsequently adopted in many English industrial works.

Tangye Ltd

In 1856, Tangye started business in a small way in Birmingham as a hardware factor and commission agent. His first customers were the Cornish mine-owners in the Redruth district.

In March 1857, Richard Tangye, with brothers James and Joseph, started a manufacturing business in Mount Street under the title of James Tangye and Bros. Principally manufacturing hydraulic appliances and particularly lifting jacks, on 31 January 1858, their jacks were successfully employed in the launching of Brunel's steamship SS Great Eastern. Tangye said of the project: