KOSMOID
Why the Kosmoid name? Because, as you’ll see,
it’s a fascinating story. One you
can keep coming back to. There’s always
a piece of the jigsaw to explore, and an expert friend – David I. Harvie - to talk to about it. Another good tale is that of Alexander
Robertson (1846-1933) the Scots minister in
On
Here's
what David wrote:
"THE closure was recently announced of the Babcock and Wilcox plant at
Dumbarton, almost a century after its construction. This factory was the focus
of one of
"In January 1906 the Daily Express made a startling revelation:
'A mysterious looking document, apparently of American origin. reached the Express office for publication yesterday. It
stated that the secret of the Philosopher's Stone and the transmutation of
metals had been discovered by a young
"The affair embarrassed some of the most influential families in Scottish
engineering, shipbuiding, and commercial circles.
"'It is suggested that the real secret of Kosmoid
was not the method of making Cuferal. but the
transmutation of metals and declared that such eminent men as Lords Kelvin, Overtoun and lnverclyde, having
had ocular demonstration of the manufacture of gold, silver, and copper from
lead and iron, had become shareholders. The initials of the names of the
shareholders, said the document, form the word KOSMOID. They are Lord Kelvin,
Lord Overtoun, Dr Shiels,
GG Millar, Lady Overtoun, Lord Inverclyde and Denny
Brothers of Dumbarton. '
"Hopes and aspirations were raised and dashed an a
grand scale; a Parliamentary Inquiry collapsed in bitter recrimination; the
events were described in a novel which had a strange publishing history; and
there was an allegation of attempted murder. But how much was true?
"Alexander Shiels was born in 1865 at Earlston in Berwickshire. Having graduated in medicine from
"With his brother in law, William Elliot of Lanark (father of Walter,
later Secretary of State for Scotland) he developed a wide range of engineering
patents, registering more than a hundred British patents for a huge range of
engineering processes. He opened nursing homes at
"Shiels also led a double private life. In
December 1902 he married
"An American niece wrote home describing the lavish lifestyle in
"In
"During 1904, Shiels established three related
companies, Kosmoid Ltd., Kosmoid
Locks Ltd., and Kosmoid Tubes Ltd., with a combined
share value of about 8 million pounds at today's values. The companies were
established to exploit Shiel's 'special facility to
introduce patents'.
"The list of those who became directors or principal shareholders reads
like Scotland's industrial roll of honour: James, Peter, Archibald, John and
Leslie Denny of the Dumbarton shipbuilding family, William Donaldson ironmaster
and chairman of J&G Thomson (later John Brown's shipyard) Archibald Coats,
of the Paisley threadmaking family; AD Wedgwood, forgemaster of Dumbarton and Sheffield, Alex Walker, the
Kilmarnock distiller; Walter Brock and Daniel Jackson, eminent marine
engineers, and many other of the most significant individuals in industry and
commerce. Unquestionably, neither Lords Kelvin, Inverclyde or
Overtoun were ever involved in any Kosmoid venture.
"Shiels organised a secretive organisation to
control the companies. The Metallurgical Syndicate was a private association
with capital of about 1.5 million pounds at today's values. The 18 members
included Shiels, GG Millar (Art Publisher), Charles
"The principal object of this organisation was utterly astonishing. --'the
commercial development of the products of certain secret processes known to
Alexander Shiels, known respectively as the
Quicksilver Process and the Copper Process, by which quicksilver could be
produced from lead and copper from iron'.
"What did they think they were doing, these merchant princes? In a move
either of spectacular irresponsibility or naivete,
the syndicate members agreed that Shiels could
control finance, and any manufacture, or any buildings that might be erected
and any persons employed in their venture. It was confirmed that the members
would have 'no right of interference with or inquiry into the said process' and
that they would not visit any of the premises to he built. Why did they
abrogate their rights?
"The press reported the construction of a huge new factory being built on
53 acres of the Dumbuck estate at Dumbarton: '...the
new works will be put down on the American principle; its equipment of
machinery will be as near perfection as it is possible to make it; in fact, the
new concern will be quite novel and wonderful for these parts.'
"One four-storey building attracted particular attention. The Fireproof
Stores had walls of two-feet thick concrete, clad with
armoured steel. The Burgh Council, especially the forward-looking Provost,
Robert McFarlan, took a keen interest in the new
development. Interest intensified when Kosmoid
promoted a Garden City of 6000 cottages, with schools, library, churches, and
public buildings. Dumbarton's
"Provost McFarlan urged the council to petition
Parliament for permission to impound the waters of
"In the autumn of 1904, Shiels's mother wrote to
her son Tom in
"INDEED it was. On the face of it, all was well. The three companies made
their headquarters in The Hatrack,
"Shiels signed deeds of partnership with John
Joseph Melville of Hampstead in
"The Kosmoid directors contracted with the Dennystown Forge Company in Dumbarton over experimental
processes. However, attitudes soon soured, and a forge director wrote to James
Denny that: 'I say without fear of contradiction that our friends are
romancing'.
"And Lord Kelvin, whom the legend improbably has steering the good ship Kosmoid, instructed his secretary to reply to a letter he
had received: 'Lord Kelvin has received Mr Shiels's
letter of June 15. He thinks you should not go on with your project as no
result could come from it.'
"The Parliamentary Inquiry into the
"Next came allegations that a senior Kosmoid manager, who was being treated by Shiels at his
"Whether he fell or was pushed is uncertain, but he decamped to a small
Northamptonshire village. The Kosmoid directors may
have connived at his disappearance in order to remove him from the scene of
their embarrassment and financial loss. Within a year, Shiels
suffered a stroke and died, leaving about 5,000 pounds --hardly the swag of a
man who had committed massive fraud.
"KOSMOID and Kosmoid Locks
were quickly dissolved, while Kosmoid Tubes was
reconstituted by James Denny before being restructured as the Dumbarton Weldless Tube Company, which in turn was subsumed by
Babcock and Willcox in 1915.
"The rather mysterious Metallurgical Syndicate went into limbo, and a
Judicial Factor for its sequestration was appointed by the Court of Session.
Followers of conspiracy theory will be delighted that the papers of this
process are missing from files in the Scottish Record Office.
"In 1910, 'The Gold Makers' by Nathaniel P. McCoy was published in
"The quirk is that 'Nathaniel P. McCoy' was apparently none other than
George Grandison Millar, Kosmoid
director and member of the Metallurgical Syndicate. His fellow directors
supposedly bought up and destroyed most of the print run of the book, copies of
which are rare.
"Did they really manufacture gold? It seems probable that they tried. John
Joseph Melville, Shiels's alchemist collaborator, had
a lifelong history of similar scandals. His first disgrace was in Tottenham,
where he tried to make tin and gold from lead. There were further public outrages
in 1923 in Battersea, and in 1928 in
"MELVILLE made endless spectacular claims, among which, in 1924, was that:
'Gold can be made in large quantities, not only from mercury, but also from
antimony, lead. copper, and silver, and I do not
hesitate positively to affirm that with relatively simple plant, our debt to
"There was confirmation of that extraordinary claim from a Kosmoid director and Metallurgical Syndicate member,
Charles W. Fulton of Paisley and Launceston Place, South Kensington, who
affirmed to the Daily Mail that: 'A special concrete building of four floors
was erected for Mr Melville's process, the exact nature of which was kept
secret. We in touch with him knew that he claimed to be able to produce copper
from iron and quicksilver from lead, to say nothing of gold and silver.'
"There is no evidence that
"Although the cobwebs will gather at the factory in Dumbarton before the
roar of the bulldozers, the '
"Perhaps there is an argument for the listing of the 'special concrete
building of four floors' as being of unique architectural and historical
interest. It is certainly unusual structurally, and there can be few equals in
the country as the location of twentieth century alchemy."
Did Shiels have some tacit state backing for
his Kosmoid venture, at least at the start? It’s more than plausible. As chemical
industry regulator, the Alkali Inspector R.F. Carpenter would almost inevitably
have been involved in the early discussions about the factory. A big investment like this couldn’t go
unnoticed, and the garden-city pretentions of the
promoters suggest something akin to the new naval township at Rosyth and the aluminium smelter town at Kinlochleven. Prime
Minister Arthur
Balfour was an enthusiast for scientific progress and was having
difficulties with the army's gun barrels at the time. No politician knew
Dumbarton and the metal futures business more intimately than the
Arthur Balfour, Andrew
Bonar Law and John Strutt (Lord Rayleigh)
Frederick
Soddy, the young chemist and future Nobel laureate who had spent some time
working with Ramsay on krypton at
Frederick Soddy and
his father-in-law George Beilby
Direct involvement of Lords Kelvin, Inverclyde and Overtoun is unlikely –indeed Kelvin was notoriously
difficult to convince of Ramsay and Soddy’s work on the transforming of
atoms. But any enterprise of this
magnitude would have gathered some initial establishment reference points,
however tentative, and some progress with potential scientific and banking
backers must have been made. It’s hard
to imagine that the local experts in the field like Beilby,
Soddy, Ramsay or Carpenter did not have some role, offering confidential
comment on the Kosmoid proposals, whether for or
against.
Kosmoid's coat of arms indicated that it saw itself as
essentially a chemical venture. There is no wonder that suggestions of magical
alloys and new materials like kryptonite might be in the offing; all wild
speculation, but fuelled by the prevailing spirit of the
Sir William Ramsay Campbell Swinton’s x-ray hand
As well as chemistry, Kosmoid saw themselves
as an engineering company. They may for a time have imagined a future
exploiting American patents inside the
Alexander Shiels
The village where Shiels hid
away -Earls Barton- was in cattle-rearing Northamptonshire, a county where his
livestock-dealing Elliot brother-in-law may have had interests and where the Buccleuch family -Scots Unionists like Balfour and Bonar
Law- were a local force. Shiels and his family lived
in a new house there, Grangefield.
As a
physician, Shiels was not without a few supporters
even after his fall, as papers deposited at the Royal College of Surgeons of
In
Details
from George Grandison Millar's elaborate
In
Shiels’nephew,
Walter Elliot –enthusiast for
school milk
Elliot’s protégé John Grierson
Alexander Shiels’ had raised
his talented nephew Walter
Elliot in his own household in Glasgow and the young man spent holidays in
Texas with his Shiels cousins there. Like his uncle
before him, Walter studied medicine at
Frederick Soddy –a Fellow of the Royal Society from
1910- moved on from his work in chemistry and radio-activity at
Kosmoid tube technology continued to be developed for many
years by Babcock & Willcox, initially in
association with the Denny Brothers.
Now a century away, the Kosmoid
story, with its prescient focus on tube alloys, its hints of new materials and
sources of energy, and its undertow of skulduggery, has the flavour of a John
Buchan novel about it –the thirty nine steps of transmutation perhaps. It was not long after these events (and a
year before The Thirty Nine Steps) that John Buchan wrote The Power
House in dedication to his friend and mentor Arthur Balfour. Here are the words that Buchan puts into the
mouth of the Balfour character, Andrew Lumley:
His face was perfectly serious. His light wild eyes
were intently watching me. "Take
one little instance," he said. "We are a commercial world, and have
built up a great system of credit. Without our cheques and bills of exchange
and currency the whole of our life would stop. But credit only exists because
behind it we have a standard of value. My Bank of
"Now,
suppose something happened to make our standard of value useless. Suppose the
dream of the alchemists came true, and all metals were readily transmutable. We
have got very near it in recent years, as you will know if you interest
yourself in chemical science. Once gold and silver lost their intrinsic value,
the whole edifice of our commerce would collapse. Credit would become meaningless,
because it would be untranslatable. We should be back at a bound in the age of
barter, for it is hard to see what other standard of value could take the place
of the precious metals. All our civilisation, with its
industries and commerce, would come toppling down…”
Roger
Kelly info@kosmoid.net
Sir George Thomas Beilby FRS (1850-1924)
NUMBER 13 of the 1
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