William was born on February 23, 1839 in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, United States. He was the son of the Rev. John G. Jones who came to the United States from Wales in 1832. The father's calling took the family from Pittsburgh to Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and finally Hazleton, Pennsylvania.
Owing to his father's poor health, the boy began to work at the age of ten as an apprentice to the molder's trade at the Crane Iron Company in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania. Passing from foundry to machine shop, he was receiving at the age of fourteen the customary wages of a journeyman machinist.
Upon learning the trade, he left Catasauqua and entered the employ of James Nelson at Janesville. The years preceding the panic of 1857 being very unfavorable to manufacturing, he went from place to place and job to job - to Philadelphia and the machine shop of J. P. Morris & Company, to Tyrone, working as a lumberman, as raftsman, and as farmhand. In 1859 he was employed at the Cambria Iron Company in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The following year, as master mechanic, he went to Chattanooga, to erect a blast furnace, but the menace of secession caused his return to Johnstown.
On July 31, 1862, he enlisted as a private in Company A, 133rd Pennsylvania Volunteers. During the nine months for which he was enlisted, he became a sergeant and took part in the campaigns at Fredericksburg and Chancellors-ville, serving with distinction and refusing to leave the regiment, though he was badly wounded at the crossing of the Rapidan.
His term of enlistment having expired, he returned to Johnstown, but reënlisted during the Gettysburg campaign. He raised Company F, 194th Pennsylvania Regiment of Emergency Men, and became its captain July 31, 1864. He was finally mustered out June 17, 1865. His commanding officer, Gen. Lew Wallace, said of him that he had one of the best-disciplined and best-drilled companies in the service.
With the close of the war, Jones returned to Johnstown and in 1872 became assistant to the general superintendent of the plant. When the superintendent died, he went to Pittsburgh as a master mechanic for the Edgar Thomson Steel Company and helped in the erection of the steelplant and rolling-mills at Bessemer. In 1875 he was made the general superintendent of this company at Braddock, Pennsylvania, a position which he held until his death. In 1888 he became consulting engineer to Carnegie, Phipps & Company.
His royalties each year amounted to some fifteen thousand dollars, and, coupled with the "thundering big salary" of thirty-five thousand dollars which he chose in preference to an interest in the company, made his income tremendous for those days. He was a member of the leading technological societies and contributed frequently to their publications, but would never read a paper at a meeting nor accept an office.
During the great strike at Braddock, it is said that he attended a meeting of the men and after reading his proposition to them, said: "There it is for you now, you can do what you please with it. I am going to Pittsburgh to the ball game. "
His high regard for others and his qualities of leadership were notably manifested during the Johnstown Flood, which caused the death of over three thousand people. At the first news of the flood, which followed the breaking of a dam ten miles from the city, Jones loaded and delivered three box cars of provisions. In addition he gathered three hundred men and took them to Johnstown to aid in the rescue work. Later, when hundreds of other volunteers arrived, he assumed the task of feeding them and directing their activities.
He was fatally injured, in September 1889, by the explosion of a furnace which he was helping his men to repair, and two days later he died in the Homeopathic Hospital at Pittsburgh.
William Richard Jones was sucessful general superintendent of the Edgar Thomson Steel Company, consulting engineer to Carnegie, Phipps & Company. Among the devices and processes he himself patented were: a method of operating ladles in the Bessemer process; improvements in hose-couplings; designs for Bessemer converters; washers for ingot molds; hot beds for bending rolls; apparatus for compressing ingots while casting ingot molds; feeding appliance for rolling-mills; the making of railroad bars; apparatus for handling, setting, and removing rolls; and, most important of all, the Jones mixer (1889), for mixing molten iron from the blast furnaces for the converter. It has been said that he gave ten thousand dollars a year to charity. His work won for him a lasting name in Johnstown and the city held a memorial meeting after his death.
Jones's preëminence as a steel-mill superintendent was due in part to his inventive genius and engineering skill, but primarily to his ability as a manager of men. Himself a master of all the details in the steel-making process, he was quick to recognize exceptional work.
Quotes from others about the person
According to Bridge, Jones "probably the greatest mechanical genius that ever entered the Carnegie shops".
An unusual tribute was paid him in the resolutions of the Carnegie Company to the effect that never had it lost "an officer whose services were more valuable, or to whom it was more deeply indebted for the success which has attended its operations. "
Jones married on April 14 1861. His wife was Harriet Lloyd and four children were born to them.
