John Wilkinson, who was denounced sardonically as lovably mad, and especially so because of his passion for and obsession with metallic iron. He made an iron boat, worked at an iron desk, built an iron pulpit, ordered that he be buried in an iron coffin, which he kept in his workshop (and out of which he would jump to amuse his comely female visitors), and is memorialized by an iron pillar he had erected in advance of his passing in a remote village in south Lancashire.
