Wilkinson
Son of little William, the northern patronymic that bored Watt's cylinders.
- Origin
- Yorkshire & the Humber, England
- Famous bearer
- John 'Iron-Mad' Wilkinson (1728-1808), iron master, patentee of the cylinder boring machine
- Register
- English family
CoreHistoric reach
The seat of Wilkinson
Seat vacantChief
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Current mission
No shared goal set yet. Once Wilkinson has leadership, it sets the public focus: a restoration, a gathering, a real-world project that helps its own.
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Help rebuild the Wilkinson clan →What does the Wilkinson name mean?
Son of Wilkin, a Middle English diminutive of William (William + the affectionate -kin suffix that also gave us Jenkin from John, Watkin from Walter, Hodgkin from Roger). The northern -son patronymic took the diminutive form rather than the bare first name (whence Wilson takes the bare William), giving Wilkinson its concentrated northern distribution from Yorkshire across to Cumbria and down the Pennine flank. The Wilkin/Wilkes/Wilcock family of diminutives belongs to the wave of affectionate name-shortening that swept English Christian-name usage in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, frozen into hereditary surnames by the fifteenth.
The history of Wilkinson
Wilkinson is the northern English patronymic in its diminutive-plus-son form. Densest across Yorkshire (all three Ridings), Lancashire, Cumbria, and down the Pennine spine through Derbyshire to north Staffordshire, it shares with Wilson the William root and divides from it by taking the affectionate Wilkin form before the -son ending. The hereditary form is recorded continuously from the West Riding parish registers of the late fourteenth century onwards.
John Wilkinson (1728-1808), the Cumbrian-born iron master known to his contemporaries as 'Iron-Mad' Wilkinson, was the pivotal industrial figure of the early Industrial Revolution: founder of iron works at Bersham in Denbighshire (1761), New Willey in Shropshire (1763), Bradley in Staffordshire (1767) and Brymbo in Denbighshire (1792); patentee in 1774 of the precision cylinder boring machine that, alone of any machine then in existence, could bore an iron cylinder true enough to hold the steam-tight piston of James Watt's separate-condenser engine; partner in the Coalbrookdale Iron Bridge of 1779; builder of the first iron barge (the *Trial*, 1787), and the man buried, by his own instruction, in an iron coffin in his iron foundry chapel at Bradley. Without Wilkinson's boring machine, Watt's engine would not have worked; without Watt's engine, the second half of the Industrial Revolution would have run on a different chronology.
Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson (1921-1996), Todmorden-born chemist, shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his foundational work on organometallic sandwich compounds, the chemistry of metal atoms bound between flat aromatic rings (ferrocene and its descendants), the basis of large parts of modern industrial catalysis. Norman Wilkinson (1878-1971), the Cambridge-born marine painter, invented dazzle camouflage in 1917, the disruptive geometric paint scheme applied to Royal Navy and merchant vessels during the U-boat war to confuse the range-finding optics of German submarine periscopes; over two thousand Allied ships carried his patterns by the end of the war.
Notable bearers of the Wilkinson name
- John 'Iron-Mad' Wilkinson (1728-1808), iron master, patentee of the cylinder boring machine
- Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson (1921-1996), Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 1973
- Norman Wilkinson (1878-1971), marine painter, inventor of dazzle camouflage
- Jonny Wilkinson (b.1979), England rugby union fly-half, 2003 Rugby World Cup winning drop-goal