STONE, BENJAMIN (fl. 1630–1642), sword-maker, was an enterprising cutler of London who about 1630 established on Hounslow Heath, on the site now occupied by Bedfont powder-mills, the earliest English sword factory of which anything is known. He employed English workmen under the direction of foreigners, probably Flemings, paying by the piece and finding workshops, tools, &c., as usual in the trade until recent times. His grindstones and polishing wheels were turned by a water-wheel, this being in all probability an innovation. His establishment was on a scale that enabled him to produce about a thousand swords a month. His blades were of exceptional quality. On one occasion three of his blades which were falsely represented by a rival cutler to be of Toledo manufacture were purchased by Robert South, formerly cutler by appointment to James I, who, despite fifty years' experience, did not detect the false pretence. Stone's persistent condemnation of the work of contemporary London cutlers converted them into personal and bitter enemies. Their opposition and the remote site of his factory, combined with the popular belief in the superiority of imported blades, served in course of time to ruin Stone's business, and in 1636 he was in danger of arrest for debt. He appealed to the king for protection and assistance, and was appointed blade-maker to the office of ordnance. Subsequently, upon the occasion of a contract for four thousand swords being given to his rivals, Stone attempted to claim a monopoly of supply to the royal stores; but the influence of Captain William Legge [q. v.], master of the armoury, was cast against him, and the attempt failed. The withdrawal of Charles I and the flight from London of the chief officers of ordnance, with the rest of the nobility, left Stone without protectors and with a stigma of ‘malignancy’ upon him in the midst of enemies. The parliamentary party was too poor to encourage the making of new swords, and when Waller and Hesilrige in 1643–4 appealed for two hundred horsemen's swords of Stone's Hounslow make, the appeal was met by public subscription in kind. After the civil war the factory passed to other hands, and was removed to a point lower down the river. The industry languished and ceased in the eighteenth century. The Duke of Newcastle testified both in his ‘Truth of the Sword’ and his ‘Country Captain’ (act i. scene 2) to the surpassing excellence of Hounslow blades, at a time when the mill was probably under Stone's management.
[State Papers, Domestic; Ordnance Office, Declared Accounts and Journal (Harl. MS. 429); Glover's Survey of the Hundred of Isleworth.]
STONE, EDMUND (d. 1768), mathematician, was the son of a gardener in the employ of John Campbell, second duke of Argyll [q. v.], at Inverary. In a letter by Andrew Michael Ramsay [q. v.] in the ‘Mémoires de Trévoux’ for 1736, it is stated that Stone was eighteen years old before he learned to read, but that afterwards he made extraordinary progress. The Duke of Argyll, one day seeing a copy of Newton's ‘Principia’ lying upon the grass, supposed it be his own and directed it to be carried to the library. It was, however, claimed by Stone, and a conversation ensued in which the duke learned to his surprise that the young man without teachers had acquired a considerable knowledge of mathematics, besides having mastered the rudiments of the Latin and French languages. The duke, delighted by his ability and knowledge, placed him in a position which afforded him opportunity to pursue his studies.
In 1723 Stone published a work on ‘The Construction and Principal Uses of Mathematical Instruments, translated from the French of M. [Nicolas] Bion, to which are added such instruments as are omitted by Bion, particularly those invented or improved by the English’ (London, fol. 2nd edit. with supplement, 1758), and a translation of de L'Hôpital's ‘Traité Analytique des Sections Coniques’ (1720), entitled ‘An Analytick Treatise of Conic Sections’ (London, 4to). On 22 April 1725 he was admitted a fellow of the Royal Society (Thomson, Hist. of Royal Soc. App. p. xxxvi), and in the same year he published ‘A New Mathematical Dictionary’ (London, 8vo; 2nd edit. 1743). In 1730 he issued a treatise on ‘The Method of Fluxions, both direct and inverse, the former being a translation from … de l'Hôpital's “Analyse des Infinement [sic] petits,” and the latter supply'd by the translator, E. Stone’ (London, 8vo). The latter part, on the integral calculus, was translated into French in 1735 by ‘M. Rondet, Maître de Mathématiques.’ In 1736 Stone communicated to the Royal Society ‘concerning two species of lines of the third order not mentioned by Sir Isaac Newton nor Mr. Sterling’ [see Stirling, James] (Phil. Trans. xli. 318). These two forms complete the seventy-eight different varieties of cubic curves. They had, however, already been discovered—one by Nicole in 1731, and the other by Nicolas Bernoulli about the same time. Stone seems to have suffered by the death of his patron, the second Duke of Argyll, on 4 Oct. 1743,
