End of industrial era as last munitions factory shuts Armstrong mopped up a number of local companies to consolidate his business to become Armstrong Whitworth, added more shipbuilding capacity downstream at Walker, while engaging in ­philanthropy and installing the world's first hydro-electricity system in his beloved Cragside estate. The Armstrong business era stretched from 1847 until his death in 1900 but the Elswick and Scotswood factories continued to produce weapons of war until 1982 and what was "Armstrong's works," celebrated in Blaydon Races, the Geordies" national anthem, was left as the country's biggest and last remaining maker of armoured vehicles. Vickers took over Armstrong in 1927 and post-war saw its aircraft and steel businesses nationalised. It bought Rolls-Royce Motors and Cosworth Engineering before being broken up, with Rolls-Royce and BAE picking up the most attractive pieces and burying the Vickers and Armstrong names in the process. BAE has concentrated its tank-building business at Elswick but defence cuts means there is no future for the last bit of William Armstrong's empire. Guns and armour for the first tanks and armoured cars came out of the Elswick factories as far back as 1902. As a man, Armstrong typified the Victorian entrepreneur with a mixture of commitment, endeavour and enterprise. However, there was nothing charismatic about the young Armstrong, son of a corn merchant who became mayor of Newcastle and wanted his offspring to be content with a legal career. Instead there was an engineer and scientific curiosity hidden behind the reserved facade of a man who was refused insurance as a child because he was regarded as too frail. Watching a waterwheel led him to design a water-powered rotary engine and then a piston version when his initial technology failed to excite. Then it was on to the hydraulic crane, the end of his legal career and buying 5.5 acres of land at Elswick to start W.G. Armstrong & Company and build an average of 100 cranes a year until his death. Armaments were added to the portfolio in 1854 after the inquisitive Armstrong, hearing about the plight of British soldiers dragging heavy field guns around the Crimea, invented the breech-loading gun. The design set him on his way to become the "great gun-maker" in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara. He surrendered the patent to the Government in return for a knighthood, added naval guns and warships to the portfolio and had royalty beating a path to his door. Visitors to his Cragside estate included the Shah of Persia, the King of Siam, the Prince and Princess of Wales and the prime minister of China. Armstrong was never a dominating personality but a shrewd judge of people. He assembled a team of skilled engineers from the boardroom to the shop floor. Andrew Noble and George Rendel, the designer of the cruiser, were among the best in a workforce who benefited from Armstrong's largesse in providing schools and leisure facilities but harboured resentment when he led the opposition to cutting engineers" working week. He faced criticism for supplying both sides in the American civil war but had Ulysses S Grant, wartime leader and president, visit during a world tour. A worse-for-wear ex-president was also due to lay the foundation stone at a new museum in Sunderland but the audience had to be content with an arm waving out of a coach door with the result that the inscription said the building had been opened by the mayor in his presence. Armstrong rarely moralised over the arms trade but would have found himself at home in the energy debate today. He was a renewable energy enthusiast, supporting the development of solar power and hydro-electricity and back in 1863 predicted that coal production in Britain would end within two centuries.