Fairbairn remedied this by the introduction of wrought-iron shafts, driven at double or treble the speed, and by improving and standardizing the design of pulleys, hangers and couplings. In the course of a few years a revolution was effected, and by 1840 the shafting speeds in textile mills had risen to from 300 to 350 revolutions per minute. William Fairbairn’s influence was felt in many ways. His treatise on “Mills and Millwork” and numerous papers before the learned societies were authoritative for many years. He improved the design of waterwheels, and was one of the first to undertake iron shipbuilding as a special industry. He established a plant at Millwall, on the Thames, “where in the course of some fourteen years he built upwards of a hundred and twenty iron ships, some of them above two thousand tons burden. It was, in fact, the first great iron shipbuilding yard in Britain.”[70] To facilitate the building of his iron ships he invented, about 1839, improved riveting machinery. With Robert Stephenson he built the Conway and Britannia Tubular Bridges. Probably no man in England did so much to extend the use of iron into new fields, and his formulæ for the strength of boilers, tubing, shafting, etc., were standard for years. Like Nasmyth, William Fairbairn has left an autobiography which gives a full account of his career. It is not, however, so well written or so interesting. He died in 1874, at the age of eighty-five, loaded with every honor the nation could bestow. [70] _Ibid._, p. 394. His younger brother, Sir Peter Fairbairn, of Leeds, was apprenticed to a millwright while William was a journeyman mechanic in London. A few years later he became foreman in a machine shop constructing cotton machinery, and for ten years he worked in England, Scotland and on the Continent, wholly on textile machinery. In 1828 he came to Leeds, in the first flush of its manufacturing prosperity. Mr. Marshall, who had helped Matthew Murray, gave him his start and encouraged him to take over the Wellington Foundry, which, under Fairbairn’s management, was for thirty years one of the greatest machine shops in England. To the manufacture of textile machinery he added that of general machinery and large tools for cutting, boring, rifling, planing and slotting. He had a great reputation in his day, but his work seems to have been more that of a builder of standard tools than an originator of new tools and methods.