Henry Cort

person · earth · Fontley, Hampshire, England

Navy agent turned ironmaster (1740–1800), who took out the patents for grooved rolling and for puddling in 1783 and 1784 at his works at Fontley in Hampshire, and who is a cautionary figure in two separate ways. Commercially he was ruined: his partner's funds turned out to have been embezzled from Navy pay accounts, the Crown seized the patents, and Cort died with little. Historiographically he has become the test case for how invention gets attributed, since the priority of his methods was questioned in his own lifetime and has been questioned again recently on quite different grounds. Whatever is finally concluded about origins, the diffusion is not in doubt: puddling and rolling spread through the British iron trade within twenty years and made wrought iron cheap enough to build with.