Josiah Wedgwood
Industrial pioneer of ceramics.
Josiah Wedgwood created one of the first modern factories and sold Neoclassical ceramics all over Europe. He was also active against the slave trade.
Josiah Wedgwood was born in 1730 in Burslem in Staffordshire, an area of the English Midlands that lived by pottery. He was the youngest in a large family of potters. As a child he caught smallpox, which weakened one of his knees so that he could not work the potter's wheel properly. The leg was eventually amputated in 1768. He was apprenticed to his elder brother and then worked for some years in partnership with the potter Thomas Whieldon, where he began experimenting with glazes.
In 1759 he set up on his own. His first great success was a pale, durable earthenware, creamware. After an order from Queen Charlotte it was named Queen's Ware. In 1769 he opened the Etruria factory near Stoke-on-Trent with his partner Thomas Bentley. There the work was divided into many specialised stages, making the factory an early example of industrial production. In 1773–74 the Russian empress Catherine the Great ordered the so-called Frog Service of over 900 pieces, painted with British landscapes. It is now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg.
Wedgwood was a tireless experimenter and carried out thousands of trial firings. He developed black basalt ware and, around 1775, jasperware, a fine, uncoloured stoneware body that could be stained blue, green or lilac and decorated with white reliefs in the Neoclassical style. Towards the end of his life he made copies of the Roman Portland Vase in jasperware. He also invented a pyrometer for measuring kiln temperatures and was elected to the Royal Society.
He was a shrewd businessman who used showrooms, catalogues and royal commissions to market his wares. He promoted the building of canals so that transport would be safer. Wedgwood was committed to the campaign against the slave trade and in 1787 had a medallion made showing a chained African with the words Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, which became a symbol of the movement. He was the maternal grandfather of Charles Darwin.
Wedgwood died in 1795. The company lives on, and his collection and archive are in the Wedgwood Museum in Barlaston, now managed with the support of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He is regarded as one of the great entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution and as a pioneer of both mass production and modern marketing.