The Machines That Changed the World Fred Dibnah's World of Steam, Steel and Stone

One of my earliest memories of industry as a small boy is actually

coming along this very canal when I were about seven or eight, with my father, on a bicycle.

Now, I've never been able to swim, you know, I used to ride along the

edge of this here tow path or the actual curve on the edge

and it's a wonder I never fell in, you know.

And it were a strange place, you know, it's amazing that's really its survived all the, you know...

50 years, it's still here and all.

The thing is it were like a time warp, you know?

There were the remains of old workings,

wooden pit head gears, and bits of old jib cranes that had all fallen down.

And it were all very sad in a way, you know, but it never left me mind,

you know, it got me my first interest in industry going in a way.

The Industrial Revolution was a time when Britain invented machines that were to change the world.

It was one of the most important periods in our history,

but Fred felt it had never really had the attention it deserved.

Fred was very passionate about engineers and machinery from the past;

it was a love affair with Fred.

When I first came here Fred showed me all round the

garden and explained all about the machines here,

all the steam engines, and he was like somebody who was explaining like a proud father would about a child.

What each little item of machinery consisted of, what it did, how it had been made.

A lot of it went over my head a lot of it was technical and I couldn't

understand what he was saying,

but the passion was there...

and I think most people tapped into that passion, he was able to communicate that very well.

Through this passion for Britain's industrial past and the machines of a bygone age,

Fred reminded us of a time when Britain led the world.

Between 1710 and 1712,

Thomas Newcomen invented a brand new type of steam engine, the atmospheric engine,

which was designed solely for one purpose, to pump water from deep mine shafts.

The first one was installed here in Staffordshire at a colliery

and it proved to be the world's most successful steam engine.

Of course, it were used near here at Dudley Castle for

pumping water out of the many coal mines that were in the area.

There's very few Newcomen and pumping engines left, and here

at the Black Country Living Museum they've built a full-size replica

with a beautiful engine house.

When it's actually in motion you can, like, step back in time to 1712.

On the end of the beam, of course, you can see the pump rod which disappears down the mine shaft

to the pumps in the sump at the bottom.

This, of course, forces up the water up the rising main and...

and they let it run away wherever they can.

For a long time, never understood why,

people didn't really appreciate Britain's industrial heritage.

And I suppose it started 40 or even 50 years ago in places like this and Beamish and Ironbridge,

began to get an interest in it but it needed popularising.

One of the things that Fred did was bring it to the TV audience,

which increased it hugely and got more and more people interested.

-We've got to be very grateful for all he did there.

-Hello, Roger.

You all right?

-Yeah. Not so bad, thanks, Fred.

-Yeah, this is Roger who is the chief engineer of this wonderful creation.

He's going to tell me how it works, he's one of the few men who actually knows how it works.

Shall I stop it, while we're talking?

-Is that the brake?

-That's a bit of string and the nail!

You don't seem to turn any taps off, do you...

-to stop the thing?

-Well, we've got a very simple boiler.

When Newcomen conceived of this engine, there was no boiler technology,

the only thing there was was like a giant kettle from the brewing industry and that's what this is.

The original had a copper bottom and a lead top, which occasionally would melt,

and the cylinder is mounted directly above that with a valve.

It's quite simple, really, isn't it, how it works?

It is simple, but it's a very, very difficult engine to keep running.

Most of the work is in keeping the fire right,

as you say, no valves or anything, so, if the fire's wrong, it just stops and it'll stop very quickly.

Industrial history had got...

almost a little bit, sort of academic, in some ways.

It had started off with volunteers and then had become a little more professional, a little more academic

and I think Fred's programmes have actually brought the whole thing back more into the public realm

and allowed just the normal person to become...

to feel they are able to get more involved in industrial history.

Well, Roger is now going to activate the engine. Aren't you, Roger?

-That's what it's all about.

-Yeah.

In real way, in 1712, this were the cutting edge of technology you know, before then...

Shall we carry on?

I hope you got that.

Fred had a real talent for raising awareness in the areas that he personally was interested in,

Great at telling stories and great at condensing

the years of politics and finance and engineering and technology

into a digestible story.

A good example of this is the way Fred tells the story of Richard Trevithick

and the early development of the steam engine in Cornwall.

Richard Trevithick was a brilliant engineer and inventor and he never really got true

recognition for his contribution to the development of the steam engine.

He was a larger than life character who, sort of, were famed for his bare knuckle fighting

and he had this wonderful ability to solve problems that

perplexed better engineers, more well-educated engineers like...

A bit like me, sort of semi illiterate, but yet

he had this brilliant touch of solving these unbelievable problems.

He made a fortune and lost a fortune, he went off to South America to the silver mines there

and came back a, sort of, broken man, you know?

The thing is that, after all them important things that he did for the

development of the steam engine, you know, he died a pauper and nobody really knows where he's buried.

I think industrial history and the whole

understanding of our industrial past is a bit of a Cinderella in historical terms

and people have

tended to go for... for kings and queens and high flown lives and people in very fancy costumes

but actually I think Fred helped people to understand that there is

something very special, very heroic about the Industrial Revolution

and about the...

lives that it influenced and about the things and places that it produced.

Trevithick was born at Ilogan, near Cambourne,

but his family soon moved to this cottage here, nearby, and his father

was the manager of the Wheel Chance Copper Mine.

He spent his childhood here and went to the village school, but the headmaster's

description of him were, "He's a loafer and inattentive and...

"and, sort of, very slow."

He spent his time wandering round looking at the tin mines and the machinery that existed at the time.

He amazed his superiors and so-called men of better education by his unbelievable ability

for solving mechanical problems without the aid of arithmetic.

Just by his own intuition, you know?

You felt that he knew more than you did but not much, that he'd discovered it minutes

before you switched on your TV and he couldn't wait to tell you about it.

Trevithick's use of strong steam meant that you could build an engine that weighed ten tons

that would do the same work as an engine that weighed 650 tons.

All of Trevithick's early engines were designed to run along the road, you know, and here at Cambourne

they built a reproduction of the Puffing Devil, which is a quite interesting piece of machinery.

And the lads on top here are...

one of them is going to tell me how it all works and all about it.

So much unlike... sort of, slick television presenters, which I thought was great.

I mean, I don't... not many TV presenters

wear overalls and mean it, if you see what I mean, or cloth caps.

They'd wear it because their stylist told them to.

And... and... but that wasn't the case with Fred at all.

You knew he was wearing a cloth cap for real, which was fantastic.

Passion and enthusiasm are hugely important in trying to get people involved in their heritage.

I think that Fred did a great deal,

especially in industrial heritage, which has been an area, although it's been expanding

over the years, that has very much been misunderstood by many people.

Whilst he was working as the engineer at the wonderfully named

Ding Dong Mine in Penzance - super name that, innit?

He developed his first high pressure engine which,

of course, led to these great monsters like this one here at Cornish mines.

You know, I mean, this is a super engine, innit, biggest one I've ever seen.

The advances Trevithick made in pumping engines and winding engines

definitely gave Cornwall an unbelievable prosperity

in between about 1800 and 1870.

Another great idea that Richard Trevithick came up with was the

chimney, of course, which improved the draught

on the boilers and eventually became quite common in, all industrial areas, on the skyline.

The engineers and manufacturers of Cornwall started to build their own engines, their own pumping engines,

like the Allman Brothers and Harveys,

eventually became world famous in the field of pumping engines.

This behind me is the mine at Lavant and it went more than 1,800 feet down

and then more than a mile under the Atlantic Ocean towards America.

Quite an incredible feat... If you look down into this great chasm

you can see various flights of stone steps coming up the cliffside.

Now, in the olden days, before the days of steam winders and wire ropes and cages,

the miners had to get down the face of the cliff,

far down nearer to the sea as they could, and then enter by an "addit" that met the main shaft going down,

then continue the journey for 1,800 feet on ladders with various platforms down the shaft.

And then, of course, they'd got to go for a mile underneath the ocean before they actually started work,

you know? They must have been some special men.

This engine here were what were known as the fast winder

and, of course, it's based on a James Watt beam engine principle,

but it were built by Harveys of Hale in 1840.

And it wound skips of ore from a shaft 1,800 feet deep in five minutes.

-Right, Dick, are you going to let me have a go?

-Yeah, certainly.

-What's first job? Take the brake off?

-Yeah.

Right. How many times?

Wait a minute.

-Is that enough?

-It's OK.

-Give her a bit of steam.

-Yeah, about there.

-Ah, wonderful.

-I think Fred's contribution was enormous because his

passion and interest wasn't for a single subject or a single machine.

It was... his passion was for steam engines in their context.

Whether it was on railways or in factories, it didn't really matter,

so I think his programmes had such a wide appeal

because it wasn't just one machine after another, it was looking at places and people.

Yeah, of course.

Up there you can see the great beam racking up and down.

The thing is, it's a bit unusual because the

pumping engines have half the beam sticking outside into space.

This one's all inside the engine house.

A bit different. I suppose the man who did the winding would be here all day, you know,

he wouldn't like ocean and the wind blowing.

Down below there, that's the condenser, which,

of course, makes the vacuum to make the piston go up and down a lot easier.

You know, with... is approximately 14 pounds

per square inch less pressure, you know, against the steam, you know,

that makes it much more economical.

That's why Cornish steam engines very economical.

It'd be a feat of engineering just getting the engineer

on the edge of this great plate.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Yeah.

-No heavy lifting gear or anything like that.

-No, no.

I think Fred had really quite a big influence in popularising

the Industrial Revolution and the history of machinery.

Fred obviously has a passion for machinery and that, I think, comes over in every programme.

And he particularly loved the golden age of engineering, the golden age of mechanical engineering.

I mean, in the 1700s and before that, machinery

is stuff that people have to work quite hard to make work at all

so it tends to be iron and black and with big pieces of wood in it.

In spite of Newcomben's unbelievable success and the worldwide acclaim for these engines,

they had a lot of weak points, you know? Like this particular bit here

is the injection cock for condensing the steam inside the cylinder,

and, of course, what happened were every time, every stroke,

the cold water going in cooled off all the cylinder,

so part of the next lot of steam had to warm it all up again, you know?

It were all right if you had lots of fuel, but places like Cornwall

where, you know, they've got to bring it a long way...

It's reputed that there were one company in Cornwall that actually owned a thousand horses

to get the coal from the sea what had come from South Wales down into where the tin mines were.

And, of course, reputed to burn as much as 12 tons of coal in a day, you know?

So when you took it away from the coalfields it weren't very efficient at all.

And they were also quite dangerous, like the type of boiler they had

were a pretty flimsy affair, you know?

Some of them were of iron plate, some of them top part were lead,

and, of course, it's not noted for its great strength

and, of course, there were frequent explosions even though they only used very low pressures, you know?

The only pressure they needed were a few pounds to make the thing work.

The other thing, of course, that were wrong with it in a way were,

it only produced a reciprocating motion, which means up and down,

which meant it could only be used really for pumping coal mine shafts out, getting the water up.

What really were needed were a few improvements in it

and some form of turning it into a rotary machine, you know,

that could drive the new machines in textile mills and iron workses

that were springing up all over the place at this period in our history.

By the early 1800s and through to the early 1900s, that's the golden age of mechanical engineering.

Those very, very beautiful machines which you can see running,

and you can just look at them and they are, sort of, logic expressed in metal.

That golden age of mechanical engineering, Fred really helped to bring that to life for people.

Because the Industrial Revolution really is the only time

when this island has been centre stage in terms of world history.

This is the time when Britain led the world - it's its big contribution to the world, really.

Reputedly, the man who decided to connect the cylinder up to the crank shaft is Richard Trevithick.

Along with a gentleman in Leeds called Matthew Murray,

they developed the horizontal type of engine,

and there were literally thousands of engines like this made, from little teeny ones three foot long,

to the biggest one on record were made by a company in Bolton called Nick Hargreaves's,

and reputedly the cylinder were ten feet long.

It had ten foot stroke on it, you know, an incredible machine, you know, and all.

I don't know how many hundred horsepower, but it's supposed to be

the biggest single cylinder horizontal steam engine ever made.

I've got some drawings of it in a book at home.

You've only got to look at some of the work that Fred did

when he's looking at some of the great mill engines or the like

and going almost overboard about them, to realise that

he appreciated the skill and quality that went into them

and that that comes over and people stop to think about it.

Not everything the Victorians did was great or good quality by any means,

but he tended to pick the really good things and put over exactly how important it was to get things right.

The horizontal steam engine was much easier to manufacture in all sizes and, sort of,

you didn't have to have a great big tall engine room to keep it in.

And so they made hundreds and hundreds of them, everywhere.

Really, to build an engine like this all as you needed were a big lathe, a shaper and a good iron founder,

and you could make one in a shed. I've more or less done it myself once or twice.

Industrial history and industrial archaeology is a relatively new area

and is greatly misunderstood by many people.

They see a...like a load of angle iron rusting away in a corner, not realising the importance of that.

And so, through bringing it to television and bringing it to life,

Fred has been hugely important in making people, the wider population,

understand the importance of our industrial heritage.

Britain's industrial heritage is absolutely unique.

The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, this is where it all started.

We can't lose these wonderful buildings and wonderful monuments

to that age of utter ingenuity and great, great expansion.

So Fred has been extremely important in putting that on television

and getting people, and therefore getting politicians,

the ones who have the power of life and death over these great monuments, to understand what it's all about.

Steam power didn't really cause the Industrial Revolution

but it played a very important part in it.

The factory system, of course, were developed from the textile industry

and, of course, all this were done a long time before the steam engine became fully developed.

Quarry Bank Mill at Styal is hidden away behind Manchester Airport

and it is, without a doubt, one of the very best places

where you can see the steam engine and water power working together.

The original water wheel was designed and built by

Sir William Fairburn of Manchester who were very famous for his...

what they call suspension water wheels which, of course,

I think comes from the fact that they'd put the first segment in the bottom of the water wheel pit

and anchor it to the spokes so it'd be suspended,

move it round one and put another in, move it round one and put another in, and it'd end up round.

The thing is that the original one was so far gone, you know, and rotten...

they found this one at a place called Pateley Bridge in Yorkshire

and, of course, they'd obviously done a heck of lot of work on it.

All the plating is all brand new, you know, the...

Some of the spokes are original, I think, they're quite rusty.

When this water wheel were first installed, you know, steam engines were quite well developed

but they were a bit unreliable, and, of course, this thing runs for nothing, you know?

And all the trouble with breaking down and bringing coal and all that,

it still was a formidable source of power, as you can see with the size of it, you know?

Looking through these reduction gears behind me,

a lot of power there to drive all the machinery in the mill.

These things are called looms, spinning properly.

The noise levels are terrific. Can you imagine what it must have been like with...

in a room with 1,500 of these things, all going at the same time

for 16 hours a day, you know?

Could see why it's all faded away. No wonder they were all deaf.

He could be your mate. You'd want to sit in a pub

drinking with Fred and listening to his tales,

and I think that's what... that was one of Fred's best points.

You could relate to him, he was a typical working man

and yet he'd got this fascination for the subject that he loved so much

and that really came over, and I think that's how people have become more interested in it.

Even today, the weaving shed takes its power from the water wheel, you know?

And this is part of the transmission,

this great vertical shaft that comes through three floors,

up to this level where the weaving shed is.

And, of course, the beveled gears and then the horizontal shaft

and then the counter shafts and then the looms proper,

well these things were always a great source of trouble.

The great weight of a vertical shaft, especially in a spinning mill

which nearly always were four and five storeys high,

they always got hot at the bottom and, of course, once it got hot, the whole mill had to stop.

He's put engineering history onto a higher plane than it was before,

and there must be many museums around the country that are grateful for it.

As to... As to people's understanding of engineering, I think that was also helped.

He was so careful to actually show you something and how something operated or how it was built.

Basically, the transmission, you know, into the...

from the water wheel comes up the shaft, up the vertical shaft.

Then, of course, it's transmitted into these long ones which are called line shafts.

In reality, these are not very long, you know?

I mean, some of them in olden days, when the torque started at one end

the other end didn't move for a bit til they'd twisted the shaft.

There were such great weight on them, you know, and they started off at the driven end quite thick,

and by the time they'd gone the full length of the weaving shed,

they kept stepping down a bit in diameter, you know, cos of the twisting action.

Quite an interesting... There's book upon book about mill shaft fixing

and mill writing that, you know, it became quite an art, you know, setting up line shafts.

Number one, they've got to be exactly dead straight and level.

If they're a bit bent, you know, it creates a lot of trouble.

The great problem with water wheels, they were very economical to run and all of that, like,

but there were one big problem.

In times of drought, the work stopped and everybody had to go home.

Steam power was only introduced, really, to help out the water wheel, you know,

but forward-thinking mill owners soon realised that it were a better form of power.

In 1810, the mill owner Samuel Greg

installed this beam engine, not to be the main source of power,

but just to help out the water wheel in times of drought and low water.

James Watt came up with a magnificent idea, you know?

He separated the condensing department from the cylinder, you know, separate unit altogether.

What happens in this case is this here is the valve chest, this rectangular shaped iron box,

this is the exhaust pipe and, when the steam is exhausted from the cylinder through the valve chest,

it comes down this pipe and goes into the condenser.

And on the other end of the beam the rod that goes down the well, that's pumping up cold water

and, of course, that goes through a pipe round the back here

and into the condenser and condenses the steam, you see, which of course helps the engine, you know?

The engine is not working against fifteen pounds per square inch of atmosphere, so it runs sweeter.

It became... The ending didn't just show you what was...

what was in front of you,

he would actually explain the pistons, the valves and never was he happier when

on the top of a beam engine or something like that, looking down.

Here we can see the beam in all its glory, you know?

This is, of course, the connected rod end which is connected to the crank shaft.

This bit here works the water pump that pumps the water, the cold water for the condenser,

and then, of course, James Watt's biggest and best thing, the parallel motion.

Watt came up with this wonderful system of levers

that does away with the arc that the end of the beam would strike -

if you just connected the connecting rod to the end of the beam,

at each stroke it would try and bend the connecting rod, which would be terrible for the cylinder and the...

and the connecting rod itself.

And this is it, the magical system of levers that keeps the piston rod in a straight line

while the end of the beam goes up and down.

Throughout his series, Fred's visited some of these...

the places that are trying to restore our industrial past.

And maybe the public didn't realise the work that was going on there.

When you look at some of the places Fred's visited,

even us at this site didn't realise that that was happening.

He really brought it home to people that people are trying to restore,

and that there are some fascinating things there for people to see.

The series of programmes that he did on television featured,

the machines of the Industrial Revolution, basically,

and our empire was based on that Industrial Revolution.

We exported engineers to the world and Fred brought that

back into the public eye through the series of programmes he did.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd 2006

Email: [email protected]