Sharp, Roberts & Co. (Manchester)

Sharp, Roberts and Co. was a Manchester engineering firm founded in 1823 by Thomas Sharp and the mechanical engineer Richard Roberts, operating the Atlas Works at Great Bridgewater Street — a partnership between a businessman and one of the most inventive mechanical engineers of the early industrial era. Roberts's contributions to British engineering extended well beyond railways: his self-acting mule for cotton spinning transformed the Lancashire textile industry, and his turret lathe and other machine-tool innovations established Manchester as a centre of precision engineering manufacture. The firm's railway involvement was therefore a relatively minor part of a broader engineering practice.

Sharp, Roberts built one of the locomotives for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway's stock in the early 1830s and participated in the early locomotive market, but Roberts preferred to concentrate his energies on the machine-tool and textile machinery work that was commercially dominant. The firm split in 1828 when Roberts separated the machine-tool business, with Thomas Sharp continuing the locomotive side as Sharp Brothers and Roberts taking the machine-tool operation. The locomotive manufacturing tradition thus passed entirely to Sharp Brothers, while Roberts's machine-tool business established Manchester as a centre of precision engineering whose influence on the subsequent development of industrial machinery was arguably as important as any locomotive manufacturer's.