Researching Edward Ormerod

Edward Ormerod (sometimes Ormrod) was born on 2 May 1834 in the village of Church, near Accrington, in Lancashire, England. He worked as a mining engineer at Fletcher, Burrows and Company's Gibfield Colliery in Atherton, Greater Manchester, where he devised and tested a safety device. He was supported by chief engineering foreman, James Rothwell from Hindley. He married Betsy Hope in 1856 and had several children. He died on 26 May 1894 and is buried in Atherton Cemetery. A small memorial stone in front of his grave depicts and pays tribute to his invention.

Edward Ormerod developed and patented the "Ormerod" safety link or detaching hook, known in mining circles as a "butterfly". This elegant device was inserted into the winding rope in such a way that if the lift cage was accidentally overwound the link would be pulled into a bell through which the winding rope passed. This action would not only disconnect the cage from the winding rope but also prevent the cage from falling back down the shaft. The device was patented in 1867 and is manufactured today. It is believed that the lives of many miners have been saved by its use and it has never failed in service.

The design was awarded a gold medal at the Manchester Mechanical & Industrial exhibition of 1875 and a silver medal at the Franco British Exhibition in 1908.

He was born in London, the seventh of ten children of George Ormerod, the Cheshire historian and his wife Sarah Latham, eldest daughter of the physician, John Latham. His younger sister was Eleanor Anne Ormerod. He was educated at Rugby School until 1838, was a student at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London until October 1841, and then went up to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. There he was awarded a classical scholarship, and afterwards scholarships in anatomy and chemistry and graduated M.B. in 1846 and M.D. in 1851.

He returned to St Bartholomew's in 1846 to work in the post-mortem room as a demonstrator until health problems obliged him to move to Brighton in 1847 to practise as a physician. He was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and in 1851 delivered their Gulstonian Lectures on the subject of "Valvular disease of the heart". In 1853 he was appointed physician to the Sussex County Hospital.

During this time he published a number of papers on medicine and natural history. His publication of British Social Wasps in 1868 secured his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society on 6 June 1872.

He died in 1873 of disease of the bladder. He had married in 1853 Mary Olivia Porter, who died later the same year and in 1856 Maria Millett, with whom he had six children. One of his sons was the physician Sir Arthur Latham Ormerod, Oxford's first Medical Officer for Health.