Proving-Master Adam Thirl

Master of the Collegium’s proving rooms at Cambridge, where materials are broken on purpose so that they do not break by accident elsewhere. His treatise Of Failures and Their Uses (4583 A.C.) is taught even at Oxford.

The proving rooms are the physical heart of the Collegium’s method. There materials are loaded, heated and stressed until they fail, so that failure is understood before anything is put into service. The rooms keep a register of their own, four centuries of recorded failures setting down what was loaded, how, what it did and when it ceased to do it, and it is the most valuable technical asset the Collegium holds. It is consulted before every novel assay, which is why Cambridge can examine a material it has never seen with some confidence. Proving-Master Adam Thirl presides over the rooms and the register both.

His treatise of 4583 A.C., Of Failures and Their Uses, is the standard commentary on that register and the one Cambridge book the Oxford schools teach without complaint. He writes and speaks drily. He is not sentimental about Cambridge, which he describes as a town of measure rather than a peaceable one, where the quarrels are about measurements and men have died over a sixteenth part of an inch. He is said to keep a fractured specimen on his desk from each decade of his tenure, and to ask visitors which of them failed first.

Companies meet the Proving-Master when something has broken in service that should not have: a beam, a boiler part, a length of machine-stone. The proving rooms want the fragment, the circumstances and an honest account of the load, and they will pay for the carriage of all three.

In person

Adam Thirl is tall, thin and slightly stooped, with thin white-grey hair swept back from a narrow, deeply lined, clean-shaven face, a long nose, pronounced cheekbones and pale-blue eyes faintly reddened at the rims. A thin old scar runs beside his mouth, and one fingertip is damaged. He wears a dark Collegium working coat with reinforced cuffs, an old leather apron and protective spectacles when working, and is usually surrounded by test sheets, callipers, gauges, a small hammer and fractured samples. His composure is complete, and entirely analytical.