Education for manufacturing

 Oxford and Cambridge Universities, unlike the Scots, French and Germans, rather looked down on manufacturing preferring to teach the classics and didn't offer science degrees until after 1870. Cambridge had offered lectures on pure mathematics, but not on anything applied.

Eric Hobsbawm in his book, The Age of Revolution makes the point that none of the inventions which enabled the early industrial revolution was really high tech. He is then scathing on the subject of the English education system, which in his view was only saved by the presence of Scots from their schools and universities, and he lists James Watt, Thomas Telford, Loudon McAdam and James Mill as some of their success stories. The French had their Ecole Polytechnique and the Germans Bergakademie, but the English stuck fast to classical education at Oxford and Cambridge, fearing, he suggests, the genie of science.

Yet, the British middle classes had developed an appetite for science and there sprung up around the country series of lectures on new and not so new discoveries which would attract good audiences. In the nineteenth century, and earlier in some places, voluntary Literary and Philosophical Societies were formed where interested people could meet to discuss matters of arts and sciences; the modern divide between arts and sciences hadn't yet fossilised. During the period often referred to as ‘the long 19th century’ (c.1780-1914), Lit & Phils could be found all over England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Speakers would attract large audiences on a whole range of subjects.

There was a genuine concern for the education of manual workers and, for these, Mechanics Institutes began to emerge to offer teaching in science. There seems to have been no overall pattern with credit being given to George Birkbeck for the London institute, to John Anderson for Glasgow and for a Birmingham establishment also staking a claim. Whilst the avowed purpose was to give relevant education to manual workers, it is suggested that the outcome was to support clerical and more highly skilled manual workers.

Colleges also began to appear with curricula aimed at vocations.

This was far from the whole story. The string upon which Charlotte Bronte's story of Shirley hangs was the revolution taking place in industry, where machinery was massively increasing the productivity of men and also removing low-skilled jobs and replacing them with those demanding of higher skills. The workers in Shirley didn’t see it that way; they believed that machines were robbing them of their jobs.

The Mechanics Institutes and equivalent bodies around the country had, for twenty years or so, been giving working men the opportunity to learn the skills that they would need in the new industrial world. The Working Men’s College was different. It didn’t lecture; it taught. FD Maurice believed that if ‘knowledge and culture, science and literature are any good, that good is apart from any trace of utility’.

In 1854 F.D. Maurice, who was then the Chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn and Dean of King’s College, conceived the idea of The Working Men’s College, first at Red Lion Square and then in Great Ormond Street, largely through the means of evening classes, which would bring education within the reach of working men.

The booklet produced on the foundation of the college notes that the Reform Act of 1832 had done nothing for working men and it was only the subsequent reform in 1867 that broadened the suffrage to include householders who rented rather than owned their property. There had been a great deal of agitation for a clear voice for the working man.

Those offering education at the college included John Ruskin but also Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burn Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Lowes Dickinson, who, the booklet states, taught there for some sixteen years. One of Dickinson’s many portraits was of Maurice. Of Ruskin’s involvement, the author of the booklet writes, ‘It helped the enterprise as a whole by letting the world know that one of the greatest Englishmen of the time was in active sympathy with it’. It is clear that Ruskin was thoroughly active in the project. He taught sketching and mentored a number of his students, one of whom (George Allen) would, much later, become his publisher. A further name that appears in the Working Men’s College is that of Charles Kingsley, then a clergyman, he who would go on to write Alton Locke and also The Water Babies with all its Darwinian imagery.

I explore below some of the towns which had institutions and societies tracing something of a history.

Aberdeen

Marischal College (the page image) was founded in 1593 as Aberdeen's second university; Kings College having been founded in 1495. The merchant, Robert Gordon, was educated at Marischal and in 1729 founded Robert Gordon's hospital for sons and grandsons of burgesses who were too poor to maintain them at school.

In 1824, a Mechanics Institute opened and in 1884 this transferred to what was then Robert Gordon's College. In the twentieth century, Robert Gordon's became a technical college and then much later a university. I write in this blog of how Alexander MacRobert was both educated there and later taught.

Birmingham

Osborne in his book Iron, Steam and Money in is full of praise for the English inventors who discovered their advances through years of practical experience. In the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s the new patents in cotton spinning numbered fifty-one, eighty-six and 156 respectively.

A further aspect can be seen in groupings such as the Lunar Society in Birmingham. Here, manufacturers like Wedgwood, Boulton and Watt came together with scientists including Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and, on occasions, Benjamin Franklin and Richard Arkwright to explore new ideas.

A Lit & Phil Society was formed in the 1790s which spawned the Brotherly Society which became a Mechanics Institute.

Josiah Mason's Science College was founded in Birmingham in 1875. It became part of the University of Birmingham which had a specialism of Metalurgy.

Yet even the University of Birmingham was resistant to embrace manufacturing. There is the story of the University of Birmingham being offered £120,000 to set up a production engineering degree. The University powers-that-be couldn’t quite stomach something so close to the shop floor that they eventually accepted the money but for a chair of Engineering Production.

Bristol

A Lit & Phil was formed in the 1790s

Edinburgh

A Lit & Phil was formed in the 1790s and the first -real' Mechanics Institute in 1821 as the Edinburgh School of Arts.

Glasgow

Professor John Anderson made a bequest in 1796 which enabled the founding of an institution aimed at natural philosophy and its applications in industry with Dr Thomas Garnett as its first professor. It became the Glasgow Royal Technical College. The Glasgow Mechanics Institute was formed in 1823.

Leeds

University textiles and dyeing chemistry"…………

Leicester

A Literary and Philosophical Society was established in 1835 and still offers annual public lectures. A Mechanics Institute functioned in the city for about forty years from the 1830s.

The School of Textiles in Leicester celebrated its centenary in 1983-84 with the publication of a short history. The focus was on knitting, and the founding of the college was initiated by yarn merchants witnessing the quality of continental competitors which benefitted from formal technical education. In the second half of the twentieth century the focus moved to artificial fibres, machinery capable of producing whole garments, and textile and knitwear design.

Liverpool

A Mechanics and Apprentices Library and Reading Room was formed in 1823.

London

The Royal Institution, still loved for its Christmas lectures, was founded by Count Rumford in 1799 and later appointed Dr Thomas Garnett from Glasgow as its professor. A London Mechanics Institute was formed in 1824 in Chancery Lane and attracted Dr Birkbeck as a lecturer; it did later take his name and moved to its present site.

Manchester

A Literary and Philosophical Society was established in 1781.

A Mechanics Institute was formed in 1824 with founders including machine tools inventor Richard Roberts, engineer William Fairbairn and John Dalton later known for Atomic Theory.

Owen's College for the teaching of engineering science was founded by a group of Manchester engineers including William Fairbairn and Joseph Whitworth who were both strongly committed to making education widely available.

Newcastle

The Lit & Phil had been meeting since 1793 in various locations around Newcastle to discuss and debate the matters of the day, the collection of books grew and artefacts and curiosities gathered. By the early 19th century it had become a home for inventors, pioneers and visionaries and a focal point for the industrial revolution.

It officially opened its handsome neoclassical home in 1825. George Stephenson demonstrated his ‘miners safety lamp’ to the Society in 1815 and Joseph Swan lit a public room with electric light for the first time here in 1881.

Past presidents include 1855–1859: Robert Stephenson and 1860–1900: William, Lord Armstrong

In the late nineteenth century John Hancock became secretary of the society and, with his brother Albany a celebrated naturalist, arranged for the purchase of land at Barras Bridge to house the society’s growing natural history collection. This is now known as the Great North Museum.

Sheffield

A Mechanics and Apprentices Library was formed in 1823.

York

It was not a great hub of manufacturing like Sheffield or Birmingham, yet it was chosen as the venue for the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at the invitation of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. York then had little industry, but it did have a community passionate about discovery, whether of the city’s history or the world around.

Further reading

• https://www-historytoday-com.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/archive/feature/extraordinary-rise-and-inexplicable-decline-lit-phils
• Kelly, Thomas. “The Origin of Mechanics’ Institutes.” British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1952, pp. 17–27. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3119430. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.

William Fairbairn - the doyen of Manchester engineers

 William Fairbairn was a Scot, born in Kelso in 1789.

At the age of sixteen, he was apprenticed to Percy Main Colliery, near Newcastle-on-Tyne. In 1811, he moved to London, where he worked for Rennie and Penn.

In 1817, he launched a mill-machinery business in Manchester with a former shop-mate, James Lillie. The business was successful and in the 1830s he expanded into locomotive building. In 1836, fearing that London yards were getting all the work for iron steam ships, he borrowed heavily to set up the Millwall Yard. This survived until 1847 when it was taken over by IK Brunel and John Scott Russell where Brunel built his famous but financially unsuccessful Great Eastern.

Fairbairn had long been interested in education for working men and championed the Mechanics Institute movement; he had been party to setting up the Manchester Institute in 1824. He was frustrated by the lack of national co-ordination; there were eventually some 1,200 such institutes. In 1835 he decided that a magazine would help drawn the movement together and launched The Workshop with Naysmith who, whilst talented and a good communicator, did not have feel for the working man.

The magazine failed and this drew Fairbairn to the self educated Joseph Whitworth and the two became close friends and collaborators, both becoming part of the Manchester Lit & Phil. Fairbairn would become president from 1855-1860.

Henry Maudslay would become, in the eyes of William Fairburn, 'one of the six engineers who completely dominated the profession between 1790 and 1830, the year before he died. The other five were John Rennie, Thomas Telford, James Watt, Joseph Bramah and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I write of Maudslay in the context of London machine tool makers.

At this time the Institute of Mechanical Engineers was a thing of the future and William was a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and indeed some of the work for which he is renowned is what we would now know as civil engineering. Fairbairn worked with Robert Stephenson on the Britannia and bridge over the Menai Strait and the nearby Conway bridge. He went on to work on cotton mills and then steam engines. He made a huge contribution to the design and construction of Salts Mill, which is widely regarded as his mill-building masterwork

William Fairbairn was much concerned with the lot of the working man, his eduction and his safety in the workplace. William served as President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1854.

Further reading

https://rchs.org.uk/product/william-fairbairn-the-experimental-engineer/

James Watt and Matthew Boulton - steam powered manufactories

 James Watt was a Scot, born in Greenock in January 1736. His father was a skilled carpenter employing quite a number of people working mainly on ships. He was successful and respected; he owned shares in some of the ships he worked on. He married an equally respectable woman. The family story was tragic with three of five children dying in childhood with a further child losing his life on one of his father's ships. This left James as the surviving child.

James was not a strong child and lived his life with extended periods of ill-health. His mother and father taught him at home. When he eventually went to school he did not excel and suffered because of his delicate nature. However he was a wonderful story teller and mastered mathematics. He had played with wood and tools from early childhood and had excellent craft skills.

With this background a career as a mathematical instrument maker beckoned.

I tell of Watt's crucial role in the development of steam power in the context of three places: Glasgow where he started, Falkirk where he nearly succeeded, Birmingham where he found the right partner in Matthew Boulton

Matthew Boulton was born in 1728 son Matthew Boulton (senior) a silver stamper and piercer based in Birmingham. Matthew (junior) was educated in Deritend until he needed to join his father in the business. In spite of a rudimentary education, Matthew developed a passion for classics and through his work an interest in mechanics and science. In reaching the age of majority, his father took him into partnership and its wasn't long before Matthew was running the business.

Birmingham had many craftsmen like Matthew (senior) making 'toys' objects of delight for the middle classes. Over the years these objects had become increasingly gaudy and Matthew set his sights on producing well made objects of good taste. He invented the inlaid buckle. He worked with Huntsman of Sheffield on steel objects. He explored the work being produced by the French and copied it. He borrowed fine objects and had his craftsmen copy them. He went into clock making achieving success with both design and taste. He was selling to royalty and the aristocracy not only in England but across Europe. The death of his father provided a fine inheritance and a good marriage to Ann Robinson added to this. Samuel Smiles suggests he could have retired.

Matthew Boulton had other ideas; his passion was for business and he needed more space and built the iconic Soho Manufactory (page image with thanks to the Wellcome Collection). In this fine building, getting on for 1,000 craftsmen worked on buttons, clasps, watch chains and metal wares; candle sticks, urns and brackets; clocks and silver plate. It was the workshop of the world. He was a good employer keen to offer opportunity to young men of poor backgrounds. As I tell in my blog on London, he opened an outlet in Inner London as did his friend Josiah Wedgwood who produced in ceramics beautiful objects which would sit well alongside the Soho production. We do of course not remember Boulton for any of this. It was his championing of James Watt that transformed manufacturing.

The site of the Soho Manufactory had running water sufficient to power two water mills used largely for polishing. However in summer the water levels dropped and alternative horse power had to be found and was never really satisfactory. Boulton explored the inventions of Savery and Newcomen to pump water up to fill ponds to power the mills. The cost proved prohibitive. He then corresponded with Benjamin Franklin and his friend Erasmus Darwin on the design of steam engines. Good fortune led to Dr Roebuck in Falkirk inviting Boulton to invest in the Carron Iron works and this lead to Boulton eventually meeting Watt. They took an instant liking to one another.

I tell of their developing relationship in my blog on Birmingham but more so St Austell and Camborne where Watt struggled for acceptance of his inventions by the stuck in the mud Cornish. Watt also faced endless legal arguments over patents, but with Matthew's support won through. It wasn't only Watt's inventions, the addition of steam power to manufacturing enabled Matthew to take on the Royal Mint in mechanised coin production. Once again the struggle was not technical but for acceptance. Like so many entrepreneurs Matthew struggled as his demand for capital for ever exceeded its supply. His tenacity time and again won the day.

The original partnership of Boulton and Watt was dissolved in 1800 on the expiration of the reciprocating engine patent. James Watt was sixty four and exhausted; Matthew Boulton was eight years older and with ideas still occupying his brain, not least the Soho Mint which was his pride and joy. James Watt enjoyed nearly twenty years of retirement, dying in 1819. Matthew Boulton had died ten years earlier.

James Watt is commemorated through a statue in Westminster Abbey, a seated figure in Glasgow's George Square, and the Watt Memorial Engineering & Navigational School in Greenock. He is buried at St Mary’s Church, Handsworth, Birmingham.

Further reading:

Samuel Smiles, Lives of Boulton and Watt (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2007, first published 1865)

Thomas Telford and John Smeaton - fathers of civil engineering, and John and George Rennie - civil and mechanical engineers

The Rennies were a Scots family that epitomises the connectivity of civil and mechanical engineering. 

I begin, though, with the father of civil engineering, John Smeaton, who is best known for rebuilding the Eddystone Lighthouse during which he discovered that the property of hardening whilst submerged in water was linked to the clay content of the cement. In 1824, a Leeds stonemason, Joseph Aspdin, took this a stage further and invented a method of making from limestone and clay a cement which he called Portland Cement given the similarity in colour between it and Portland stone.

Smeaton, born in 1724 in Austhorpe near Leeds, began as a mathematical instrument maker, as did James Watt. Smeaton then went on to design some sixty water and wind mills. He pioneered the use of cast iron pipes. His civil engineering projects included canals and bridges. He founded the engineering society which became the Institution of Civil Engineers.

Thomas Telford was younger born in 1757 near Lockerbie. He began as a stone mason working on Somerset House in London and then a number of restoration projects. He is know for many civil engineering masterpieces.

The Menai suspension bridge

The Caledonian canal

He built some 1,200 miles of well drained roads in Scotland. He built the Ellesmere canal and worked on many harbours and bridges. He championed the use of Roman cement, the forerunner to Portland.

John Rennie senior was born in East Lothian in 1761 and was soon fascinated by all things mechanical. He worked for Andrew Meikle a millwright who invented the mechanical thresher. He attended the University of Edinburgh and then set off to explore canals. He was introduced by his university professor to James Watt and went to work for Boulton & Watt, his first project being the installation of steam engines at the Albion flour mills in Southwark. From there he set up his own business making food manufacturing machinery.

Canal mania caught up with him and he produced magnificent civil engineering structures including the Caen Hill flight of locks on the Kennet and Avon canal. He went on to design docks including the East and West India docks and bridges including Waterloo and Southwark bridge.

His son George took over the mechanical engineering side of the business eventually becoming fascinated by the mechanics of the screw propellor and he built a number of ships so powered for the navy

The civil engineering business was left to his son John who completed his father’s projects including London Bridge. He went on to design major drainage projects and was involved with railway building. He became president of the ICE in 1845 and received a knighthood for his services.

Both sons were part of the G and J Rennie shipbuilding yard at Greenwich.

John senior’s youngest son was named Matthew Boulton Rennie perhaps underlining the connections.

Further reading:

https://www.ice.org.uk/what-is-civil-engineering/meet-the-engineers/

Abraham Darby - iron master

 Iron ore was smelted by burning charcoal in the Weald and as forests were denuded, smelting spread to other forested areas. Eventually it became clear that an alternative to charcoal was needed. The Earl of Dudley's son 'Dud' claimed to have smelted iron ore with coal but there is no evidence of this. Dud was born in 1599 and Abraham Darby in 1678 both close to Dudley Castle. Abraham's father was a nail-maker and locksmith and so it is almost certain that Abraham would have been aware of Dud's experiments. He was certainly aware that an alternative to charcoal had to be found.

Abraham was apprenticed to Jonathan Freeth, a maker of malt mills in Birmingham. Of great significance the fuel used to make malt mills was coke which provided the heat of coal but without the impurities. Once free, Abraham made his way to Bristol where he set up as a malt mill maker where he soon joined forces with a fellow Quaker to form the Bristol Brass Wire Company where he further advanced his metal casting skills.

Possibly because of his Quaker upbringing, Abraham had a strong social conscience and he would see possibly most of the population of Bristol too poor to buy the pot bellied cooking vessels he cast from brass. Something cheeper was needed. There started his experiments smelting iron ore with coke. I tell more in my piece on Coalbrookdale where he established his business. His cooking vessels became very popular as did his much larger vessel for heating quantities of water, known as coppers after the material from which they were first made.

Why is that the English struggle so to embrace change? It was clear to Abraham that one reason for Dud's failure was the resistance of smiths to pig iron smelted with coal. Abraham found that pig iron smelted with coke was met by the same resistance. He was blessed with wisdom and decided not to fight the smiths, but rather to focus on casting, where his skills lay. The core business was the casting of cooking pots of all sizes for which he made a variety of moulds. In time the more adventurous smith would take his pig iron and find that it was entirely suitable. It would not be until Henry Cort at Fareham and his puddling process that production of wrought iron really took off.

Abraham Darby died at the age of thirty-nine in 1717. There followed a succession of Darbys for the next one hundred and fifty years. Abraham Darby had unlocked the industrial revolution now that large quantities of iron could be produced. In time wrought iron would be perfected and in due course be super-ceded by steel. Iron enabled the building of steam power, railways, bridges and so much more.

A Newcomen engine was erected near Dudley in 1712 and by 1716 'fire engines' as they were known were at work in Warwick, Stafford and Flint. Coalbrookdale cast their first iron pipes in 1718 and their first cylinder four years later. Iron cylinders were cheaper than those made of brass and could be much bigger. A large cylinder was cast for Killingworth High Pit where George Stephenson worked. James Watt used Coalbrook cylinders as did Trevithick who also benefitted from cast iron rails. Thomas Telford was inspired by Coalbrook casting and Dr Roebuck at Carron modelled his works on the Coalbrookdale example.

Further reading

L.T.C. Rolt, Great Engineers (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1962)

The railway men - George and Robert Stephenson

George Stephenson was born in 1781 into a mining community just inland of Newcastle near Wylam on the Tyne where his father worked as a fireman at the colliery. They lived with George's mother, Mabel the daughter of a dyer, and two younger brothers and sisters in Street House only yards from the wagon way which transported coal from the pit. He was thus attuned to the unremitting life of mining families. The family moved from place to place as was the life of coal as mines were sunk, exploited and exhausted.

George grew up wiry and muscular and worked on a farm before becoming assistant fireman to his father. There is no evidence of much formal education, but George was gifted with things mechanical. At age seventeen he was given charge of a pumping engine erected by Robert Hawthorne, later a famous railway engineer. Here George became friendly with William Locke whose famous engineer son Joseph would be one of George's later apprentices.

George married Frances Henderson in 1802 and a year later their only child Robert was born. George was now a brakesman at Willington on Hawthorn's recommendation. Here he met William Fairbairn and took on clock repairs in his spare time. Tragedy stuck when Fanny died soon after childbirth in 1805.

George was intent on improvement and took arithmetic at night classes. His chance came when the pumping engine at Killingworth was failing to clear the pit. George quickly identified the problem and his offer to try to rectify it was accepted. Success built George's reputation and he was appointed engineer at Killingworth and he gained ad hoc worked from many nearby pits. He was earning well and invested in Robert's education.

We now come to the inventions attributed to both father and son. The story is though the same as elsewhere in the history I have tried to write, no single person can claim or indeed should claim the whole credit. This is not the picture of a scientist in a laboratory crying eureka, but of engineers working day in day out on the machinery used in daily work. It is natural that the more inventive will come up with ideas for ways to 'do things better'. We can think of spinners and weavers of wool. With George Stephenson, one such was the practical challenge of having light underground that did not ignite escaping gas. The eminent scientists Humphrey Davy had been sent off to his laboratory to work out a solution. George took a candle and something that looked like a table lamp down into the most dangerous part of the most dangerous mine and by trial and error eventually found a lamp that seemed to work safely. To cut a long story short, they both emerged with a solution at about the same time; Davy's became the better known. The term Geordie, is attributed to George and his lamp.

I have written elsewhere of the challenge of pumping mines clear of water, with the names Newcomen and Watt; indeed I have also described one of George's successes with such machinery. Now George Stephenson had his sights set on locomotion powered by steam. It was hardly surprising that others were exploring the same challenge which all mine owners faced and it was the mine owners who would pay but only if they saw a clear benefit.

In 1804, Richard Trevithick attempted locomotion on the Merthyr Tydfil railway in the South Wales coalfield. He used a single piston and flywheel, but found that the power produced was insufficient to cope with the weight of the engine.

Problems remained to be solved. Locomotives were too heavy for the existing oak rails and did not promise enough benefit for them to be replaced. So yet more power was needed and weight needed to be reduced or at least more widely distributed. Bogies were added with some success.

In 1811, John Blenkinsop patented a mechanism something akin to a rack and pinion. He engaged the engineering firm of Fenton, Murray and Wood, and used steam engines with two cylinders working cranks at right angles to each other. It was a success. Blenkinsop wrote that, ‘an engine with two eight-inch cylinders weighing five tons, drew twenty-seven waggons, weighing ninety-four tons, up an ascent of two inches in the yard; when lightly loaded, it travelled at ten miles an hour, did the work of sixteen horses in twelve hours, and cost £400’.

Blenkinsop was followed by other inventors exploring variations on his theme, and Blenkinsop himself installed his engines at a number of collieries including at Wylam, the 'Dilly'.

George was working with the installation of static engines and had been experimenting with differing boiler set ups. The problem remained a lack of power. Where Stephenson advanced on the work of Blenkinsop was that the railway was laid with cast iron edge rails and the locomotive, the Bulcher, had flanged wheels with power direct to them rather than for example to a rack and pinion.

The Northumberland coalfield was well served by the Tyne and the pit railways running to it. Not so the Durham field and so attention turned to a possible canal, iron plated tram route or railway from Darlington through to Stockton. The pit owners favoured the latter, after all the fuel would be free. They approached George Overton who had worked with Trevithick at Merthyr Tydfil. He in turn sought to work with the Newcastle Iron masters who had build Stephenson's locomotives. The project stalled and Stephenson was approached by the Middlesborough businessman Edward Pease. They, together with George’s son Robert, still onlt twenty, put forward a scheme to Parliament which received approval. Work began. The project lacked an iron master to build locomotives and this gave birth to Robert Stephenson & Co which produced the four vehicles needed. In addition there were two static engines to pull the trains up two steep inclines; there was also to be a section where horsepower was used.

The line was opened to huge crowds and much anxiety on 27 September 1825. Thereafter it did its job but not without challenges.

A name comes into the story, now, which is perhaps lesser known, that of Timothy Hackworth ‘an ingenious mechanic’. He was manager of the works department of the new line and was thus in the perfect position to see problems as they arose and then fix them. Railways were always going to progress by learning on the job. In due course Hackworth persuaded the directors to allow him to develop an engine ‘after his own design’, which was, inevitably, a variation on the existing themes.

The new engine soon made those of Blenkinsop and Stephenson redundant, but still did not satisfy demands. The final twist in the early story of steam railways came with the Liverpool and Manchester railway, and it was the demands of cotton traders, led by corn merchant Joseph Sandars, that brought George Stephenson back into the picture. Manchester mills were transporting tons of cotton goods to the port of Liverpool by canal which took some thirty-six hours and which was expensive. What was needed was a steam railway.

Robert Stephenson left England for Columbia perhaps following in the footsteps of Richard Trevithic who spent some years in Peru working for mining companies because the English had banned his his pressure boiler as being too dangerous. Robert's absence left his father without his right hand man and when a Manchester to Liverpool railway was mooted, the directors turned to the Scot Rennie. Rennie was not a team player and his proposal fell apart. Other engineers were tried and eventually George was appointed.

George Stephenson planned the rail route to Liverpool, which included sixty-four bridges and viaducts along thirty-five miles of track. Without Robert by his side, the project faltered. Eventually, Robert returned but with his focus on his locomotive building company. George struggled especially with money where his lenders expressed their dissatisfaction by withholding funds. They apppointed Thomas Telford to report to them on the state of the project. George, for ever a proud man, reluctantly accepted the recommendations of Britain's top civil engineer and the project continued until it came to the choice of power.

The directors were far from convinced by locomotives and favoured static engines and ropes. This was where George's character came into play. He was convinced that the railway locomotive was the answer on many grounds which he argued patiently. Even when the directors eventually relented, they insisted on three alternative locomotives including one by Hackworth. The three competed over a tough test and George’s Rocket won easily.

It was thought more likely that his son, Robert, designed and built his “Rocket”, ‘by the happy combination of the multi-tubular boiler and the steam-blast, Mr Robert Stephenson succeeded in producing an engine far superior to any previously built in point of speed and efficiency.’ Heavy rails were laid at considerable cost and, with heavier locomotives, ‘the superiority of the railway system to every other mode of conveyance was placed beyond question’.

Following the ground breaking Manchester to Liverpool railway, a number of smaller lines were built, some by the Stephensons. Robert Stephenson & Co were busy building locomotives for use on the growing number of railways across the world. It was far from plain sailing as landowners, coach operators, road builders and canal operators all opposed the iron beast. It was though here to stay.

The London Birmingham railway was the next major project and there were differences between the London committee and that of Birmingham, in addition to the opposition ranks already mentioned. The route also had challenging geology. What it didn't have was poor project management. George had lobbied hard for his son to be appointed and Robert had learnt from Thomas Telford and Locke, and from his father's mistakes, the importance of planning and clear delegation. The line was divided into four each with its own engineer reporting to Robert. The grand entrance to Euston Station was an appropriate monument to northern grit as displayed by the Stephensons.

Robert did have a further legacy in mind. As is apparent, railways are about much more than locomotives. Bridges are not only vital components but works of genius in their own right. Robert’s bridge over the Menai straits is a classic example. There were to be two bridges one at Conway and one rather longer a mile from Telford's suspension bridge. Robert had learnt a painful lesson from the Dee Bridge disaster after which he abandoned cast iron in favour of wrought iron sheets brought together to make long rectangular tubes through which the trains would run. These were both cumbersome and heavy and had to be fabricated on site and then floated adjacent to the pillars on which they would sit and then lifted into place by hydraulic presses. Sounds easy. Add currents and wind and the task becomes monumental.

The stone structure of Stephenson’s bridge is still in use

Following a substantial fire in 1970, the tubular girders were removed as they were deemed to have become structurally instable due to the heat of the blaze. The bridge was reconstructed and now features two decks, the lower one still allowing trains to cross the Menai Strait, while the top carries the A55 road.

Further reading:

L.T.C. Rolt, George and Robert Stephenson - the Railway Revolution (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1960)

West Country engine builders- Newcomen and Trevithick

 The West Country, Cornwall in particular, was where deep mines were first sunk, in search of metals rather than coal. The problem with depth was the water table which meant that mines would flood. To begin with, pumps were powered by animals or water and windmills. Something more powerful was needed and in stepped first Savery and then Newcomen.

Thomas Newcomen was born in Dartmouth in 1663. He became an iron monger, the title given to anyone making and selling iron goods. Some of his customers were quite probably Cornish tin miners and he saw at first hand the challenge presented by flooding. He would probably have seen the crude pump produced by Thomas Savery, a fellow Devonian, which had been nicknamed the 'miner's friend'.

In 1712, Thomas Newcomen made the vital breakthrough of the invention of the atmospheric steam powered pump which meant that mines could go even deeper. The Newcomen engine did not rotate in the way we think of steam engines on railways for example; it was static and relied on the production of a vacuum, under a piston sliding in the cylinder, to raise the water using atmospheric pressure. We can visualise this by thinking of some of the massive beam engines that have been preserved. These engines were soon employed in many mines.

Newcomen's engine relied upon atmospheric pressure and the cooling of the piston between strokes. James Watt made the vital step forward by adding a separate condenser meaning that the piston had no need to cool, thereby saving fuel.

Richard Trevithick was born near Camborne in Cornwall in 1771 just two years after Watt's invention of the condenser. His father, also Richard, was a mine 'captain', that is the mine's manager whose responsibilities included pumps which would have comprised some Newcomen and an increasing number of the more efficient Watt versions. Either way they were all beam engines. The young Richard had attended the local school but excelled neither in ability or enthusiasm; Richard loved the mines and their machines. He was an engaging man and physically extremely strong. As I tell in my blog on Camborne, the Cornish mine owners resented the need to pay Watt royalties for his invention and so many sought ways round the use of the condenser. It was Richard who found it in the 'high pressure' engine.

At the age of only nineteen, Richard was working with pumps in Cornish mines and was discovering improvements. These led him to London and the patent office where he met Davies Gilbert, a scientist, who would become a lifelong friend and collaborator. It was to Gilbert he took his invention of the high pressure engine, but it was Gilbert who found that the engine could power a locomotive on land. The issue was whether wheels would slip; Gilbert believed that friction would largely prevent this. Consequently Trevithick built at Camborne a locomotive powered by his high pressure engine in 1801; it was the first such in the world. A successor engine was tried on iron rails at Penydaren in South Wales in 1804 and a further version was on public display in London in 1808.

For Trevithick this was but a part of his prodigious output. He was also boring brass cannon, crushing stone, powering the bellows of blast furnaces, rolling mills and forge hammers. He adapted his engine to power the paddle wheels of a barge. I wrote of the Thames Tunnel in relation to Brunel. Trevithick was one of those first attempted the project. Although he didn't succeed he left the legacy of the idea of tunnelling using iron cylinder sections. In relation to steam engines he invented the Cornish boiler and building on this the Cornish engine. In both cases he continued to pursue the goal of efficiency.

In 1816 Trevithick sailed for Peru where miners were finding that atmospheric engines didn't work at altitude. The time he spent in South America although eventful was not productive and in 1827 he returned to Cornwall a poor man. He was as inventive as ever but the world had moved on. Stephenson's Rocket was soon to set the standard for steam locomotives. Other engineers were becoming more businesslike. Trevithick's final project was the design of a 1,000 ft iron tower to mark the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832. Sadly it was never built. Richard died at Dartford on 22 April 1833. His widow who had supported him through thick and thin survived him by therty years.

Further reading:

James Hodge, Richard Trevithick (Princess Risborough: Shire Publications, 1973)