The Early Pioneers Fred Dibnah's Age of Steam

First of all there was water and wind,

the earliest forms of power to drive machinery.

Then came steam.

In the 18th century Britain led the world

in harnessing the power of coal, water and steam to drive engines that revolutionised transport

and made mass production possible.

The steam engine really is a fascinating thing.

When it's running it comes alive.

It has an unbelievable smell, for a start.

When people come in here near me boiler...

An old guy of 80-odd came in the other day and he was sniffing away.

He said, "That brings back memories from my youth."

The smell of oil and steam is like a smell all of its own.

They say if you could bottle it you could sell it - it's that good!

The first engines were developed for the draining of mines.

Throughout the 18th century, one invention followed another.

Manufacturers could increase their output to make Britain prosperous

on a scale that no-one else could match.

By the 19th century, steam power was being adapted to provide a new means of transport.

Britain saw the development of the world's first railway.

It's only within my lifetime that steam locomotives stopped operating on Britain's railways.

In this series, I'll be looking at the development of the steam engine

from the very earliest, right up to streamlined locomotives like this.

But what exactly is a steam engine?

A steam engine is really a simple thing.

There are two main principles.

The expansion of steam in a cylinder pushing a piston connected to a crankshaft or a connecting rod.

The second principle is the condensation of steam

which creates a vacuum in the cylinder,

making it easier for the steam to push the piston along the cylinder.

When you mention steam engines to people today,

they think steam is something from the past, but that's not true.

It's still with us today.

It generates electricity, in order to drive a train like this.

The age of steam is not yet dead.

When industry and transport demanded more and more electricity

it is still the steam turbine that provides the power right up to this present day.

Three power stations, Ferrybridge, Eggborough and Drax over there

are capable of supplying 15% of the country's needs for electricity.

These three great power stations are here because there's plenty of the stuff that makes them go.

Number one - water from the River Aire.

And number two - coal. There are plenty of coal mines in the area.

Coal and water raise the steam that turns the huge turbines in here.

These turn the electromagnets that generate the electricity.

If it wasn't for steam we'd have no electricity.

Steam turbine isn't only used for generating electricity.

It serves dozens of purposes in the world of industry.

The first steam engine came about 2,000 years ago

when we have the first recorded use of steam power.

They were done by a Greek mathematician

called Hero of Alexandria.

This is a model of Hero's...

I call it steam whirligig!

He did drawings in the 1st century AD for this creation.

Nobody knows whether he made one or whether or not it would work.

We thought we'd make a model and prove that it works.

In some ways it's a turbine without an outer casing.

We'll give it a whirl and see what happens.

MACHINE HISSES

HE CHUCKLES

He disappeared in a cloud of steam!

Hero's model had a boiler down at the base of two vertical pipes with a fire underneath it.

When the water boiled, the steam came up the pipes

and came out into the sphere.

Then it came out of the two vent pipes, causing it to... causing it to revolve.

I'll just give it a little bit more steam.

HISSING INTENSIFIES

LOUD BANG, HE LAUGHS

That's incredible! I knew that would happen!

Where's the copper pipe bit?

Well, that rules out any more demonstrations with the whirligig!

What a shame!

In the ancient world, experiments were carried on as a novelty.

It was another 1,500 years before anybody

tried to carry out any serious investigations into steam power.

But they only had limited success.

The development of the world's first successful steam engine

took place in what seems today to be an unlikely place.

When you think of Cornwall you think of scenic beaches like this.

Cliffs and all nice things.

For centuries it was the world's leader in mining tin and copper.

As the demand for tin and copper grew it meant that the miners had to go further and further down,

which left them with a big problem.

Water.

The problem of underground seepage plagued management and miners alike.

It cut into profits, stopped production and took lives.

Especially when shafts were sunk on the cliff edge near the coast.

The workings washed out for over a mile, like this one at Botallack.

A blacksmith from Dartmouth who made tools and bits and pieces

for mines in the South West,

saw what was going on and decided to do something about it.

When he did, he set in motion one of the most crucial developments

of the industrial revolution.

Between 1710 and 1712,

Thomas Newcomen invented a brand-new type of steam engine

which was designed solely to pump water from deep mine shafts.

The first was installed here in Staffordshire at a colliery.

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

It was used near here at Dudley Castle

for pumping water out of the many coal mines in the area.

There are only two Newcomen pumping engines left.

At the Black Country Living Museum they've built a full-size replica with a beautiful engine house.

When it's in steam it gives you a chance to go back to the beginning of the steam revolution.

You can see the great beam sticking out of the engine house

which works the pump rod down the shaft.

That's attached to the pumps in the bottom of the mine shaft sump

which forces water up a rising main and down to a pond to get rid of it.

-Hello, Rodger! All right?

-Not too bad thanks, Fred.

This is Rodger - the chief engineer of this wonderful creation.

He's one of the few men who knows how it works!

Last time we come we had a bit of bother with it!

-Shall I stop it while we talk?

-Yes.

-Is that the brake?

-It is, yes, and the starting handle.

You don't seem to turn taps off to stop it.

It's different to a steam engine.

When Newcomen made it there was no boiler technology.

There was only a giant kettle from the brewing industry.

That's literally what this is.

It had a copper bottom and lead top which often melted. The cylinder is mounted above that with a valve.

You turn the steam valve off and inject water. The cold water condenses and the cycle begins.

-It looks a bit technical but it's quite simple.

-It IS simple.

It's hard to keep going. Most of the work is keeping the fire right.

It has no other controls, no valves.

If the fire is wrong it stops quickly.

Rodger is now going to activate the engine.

That's what it's all about!

In 1712, this were the cutting edge of technology. Before then...

LAUGHTER

I do have a water problem at times.

Believe it or not, this engine was a breakthrough.

The only other ways of raising water from mine workings

were either by buckets propelled by horse gins and things like that,

or wooden pipes with chains and bits of rag on.

So really this were quite something.

It enabled the miners to go much deeper to get rid of the water.

It was called an atmospheric engine

because it used the pressure of the atmosphere to move the piston.

This is a drawing of Newcomen's atmospheric mine-pumping engine.

It's an interesting thing really.

This bit here is a boiler.

It's a simple sort of boiler. A haystack boiler.

The early ones were made of lead. There wasn't much pressure in them.

When you open this valve here, the steam filled the cylinder.

The cylinder was made of brass.

From the tank here, the cold water - the "header" tank

as you'd say, like in a central heating system,

came down the pipe and it came through this cock here

and rushed into the cylinder,

condensing the steam and making a vacuum.

Then the atmospheric pressure pressed the piston to the bottom,

activating the great beam pulling up the pump rods in the mine shaft.

The weight of the rods went down, working the pump at the same time.

And that's basically how it worked.

In spite of Newcomen's unbelievable success

and worldwide acclaim for these engines, it had many weak points.

They only worked on a few pounds per square inch

and reputedly burned as much as 12 tonnes of coal in a day.

When you took it away from the coal fields it wasn't efficient.

What was needed was a more efficient engine.

This is where James Watt came on the scene.

As a young man he was given a model of a Newcomen engine to repair. He decided to improve on it.

In 1769, James Watt came up with the answer.

He put together all the existing technologies known at the time

and come up with a revolutionary design.

This earned him the name - Father of the Steam Engine.

One of the best things he came up with was a separate condenser.

In the Newcomen system, every time cold water was injected into the cylinder it cooled it all off.

When Watt moved it outside... it doesn't look important...

But the smaller of the two cylinders there is Watt's outside condenser.

When the stroke had finished,

the exhaust comes down the pipes here into the condenser

and turns back into water again.

This had the effect of keeping the cylinder hot all the time.

He also made the cylinder "double active".

He had a power stroke each side of the piston. One squeezed it down the other shoved it up.

It saved as much as 70% on the coal bill which was incredible.

Meanwhile, back here in Cornwall,

the increased efficiency of the Boulton & Watt pumping engines

meant there were no Newcomen engines left in the mining areas.

It did another wonderful thing.

If you took off the pump rod and put a connecting rod and a crank on

you could make it into a rotary engine to wind men down to work faster and bring the ore up too.

This was very good news for the miners themselves.

Look into this great chasm here.

You can see flights of steps coming up the cliff side.

In the olden days before steam winders and ropes and cages,

the miners had to descend the cliff face as near to the sea as possible.

They entered by an adit that met the main shaft,

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

Then they had to go for a mile beneath the ocean

before they started work.

They must have been special men, them men.

The steam winder changed all that.

Behind me is the mine at Levant. It went more than 1,800 feet down,

then more than a mile under the Atlantic Ocean.

Quite an incredible feat!

In the engine house they've got a winder I can't wait to have a go on!

-Can I have a go?

-Certainly!

-Take the brake off.

-Take the brake off.

This engine is what were known as the fast winder.

It's based on a James Watt beam engine principle built by Harvey's of Hayle in 1840.

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

MACHINE CLUNKS

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

It's unusual because pumping engines had half the beam poking outside.

This one is inside the engine house.

Down below is the condenser, which makes a vacuum,

which makes the piston go up and down easier.

It's about 14lbs per square inch less pressure against the steam

so it works more economically.

That's why Cornish beam engines were very economical.

James Watt might be regarded as the father of the steam engine,

but it was a Cornishman named Richard Trevithick

who made great advances in the 1790s and early 1800s.

Trevithick was born at Illogan near Cambourne.

His family soon moved to this cottage nearby.

His father was the manager of the Wheal Chance copper mine.

Trevithick grew up here attending the village school.

The headmaster described him as being a loafer

and inattentive and very slow.

Bit like me, in a way!

He didn't do well. Even his father said he were a loafer.

He spent his time wandering around looking at 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 to solve mechanical problems - just by his own intuition.

By 1790, at the ripe old age of 19 years,

he had already procured quite a few jobs as an engineer at various pits.

His father apprenticed him to Watts' assistant - Murdoch.

They were erecting all the great pumping engines round the tin mines.

You've got to think that Murdoch taught him all he knew

and gave him a good grounding for his great career as an engineer.

His greatest advance was to design engines that would work at a much higher pressure than Watts.

If you got 100lbs pressure per square inch pushing on a piston,

rather than 15lbs, which the earlier engines had,

it would make the engine much more powerful and efficient.

He was working at the Ding Dong mines in Penzance

when he developed his first high-pressure steam engine,

which in the long run led to the development of big pumping engines

like this one at Cornish Engines in Poole.

The main market for the steam engine at the time was industry.

Down in Cornwall there was a huge demand for engines for the mines.

Other engineers used Trevithick's application of high-pressure steam.

Cornish engines became famous the world over.

During the course of the 19th century, they got bigger and bigger.

This is the last of the line of pumping engines on the Taylor Shaft.

It was erected in 1924.

It represents the ultimate in mine-pumping engineering,

which started in the days of Newcomen.

It ran on a three-shift system with three engine drivers working day and night.

The ginormous size of it!

It burned 50 tonnes of coal a week and has a 90-inch diameter cylinder.

It has a ten-foot stalk. It's incredible!

The majority of these great engines were made here in Cornish foundries by people like Allman Brothers

and Harvey's of Hayle who made this engine.

They exported them all over the world. Then the Cornish engineers went out and erected the things.

They stayed to work the mines too.

The idea that Richard Trevithick came up with was the chimney.

It improved the draft on the boilers

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

The advances he made in pumping engines and winding machinery

gave Cornwall an unbelievable prosperity between 1800 and 1870.

But in spite of the great advances that had been made,

the steam engine didn't change the fact that mining was still a difficult and dangerous business.

Sometimes it was the steam engine itself that made it dangerous.

This is the shaft head of the man engine at Levant.

There was a great wooden pump rod leading to the bottom of the shaft.

As the engine had a ten-foot stroke,

it had platforms and handles to hold.

Level down the side of the rod were platforms at ten-foot centres.

A man stood on the platform holding the handles.

The pump rod descended ten feet and he jumped on a platform at the side.

All this in pitch dark with a candle on his head.

Here in 1919, on this spot, a terrible accident happened.

The man in charge of the man engine complained to the manager that there was something wrong with it.

If they didn't do summat quick he would leave their employ.

They didn't do anything and he left their employ.

Later the beam broke and the rods went down the shaft with the men on.

36 of them died. They were smashed to bits by timber and iron.

It took four days to dig them all out.

This really is a very sad spot, here at Levant.

The whole industrial landscape in Cornwall is a bit sad really.

It's just about all derelict now.

There is little trace of the work of Trevithick, one of the greatest pioneers of steam.

His development of the Cornish Engine wasn't the only thing that made him one of the giants of steam.

He never got true recognition for his contribution

to the development of the steam engine.

Not only in mining but in steam road transport and railways too.

His invention of high-pressure, or "strong steam" as he called it,

led to the development of the first steam-powered locomotives.

His first was designed to run on a road.

Trevithick's use of strong steam meant you could build an engine, weighing about ten tonnes,

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

He realised that the engine were small enough to transport itself along the road.

Here at Cambourne they've built a reproduction of the Puffing Devil.

It's an interesting machine.

The engine was pretty simple.

A mixture of wood and iron, it was blacksmith made. The only problem was the boiler was too small.

The steam couldn't be kept up for long when it was under way.

But it was the first successful high-pressure engine

constructed on the principle of a moving piston which was raised and depressed by the steam.

On Christmas Eve 1801, he ran this up a hill of several hundred yards

with a few people hanging on it a bit like this!

Unfortunately it burnt out when Trevithick and his mates

had a booze-up to celebrate their success in a nearby inn!

This concrete is bad news!

This first carriage was mad-looking but it worked.

Encouraged by his success he went on to build another one.

It was even madder-looking!

STEAM HISSES

In 1803, Richard Trevithick built a second road carriage

which he drove around the streets of London.

He realised by the road surface that the vehicle wasn't up to it, so he abandoned it.

You can't help wondering what would have happened if the roads were as they are today.

The history of road transport would be different.

This magnificent engine has been made by Mr Tom Brogden, a chap who I've known for some time.

He's constructed this engine more or less on his own from just a few drawings.

It's a wonderful creation.

What made you decide to construct it?

My wife gave me a birthday card from the Science Museum in London.

It was a picture they'd had painted to see what this would be like.

It intrigued me. It got me going so I researched it.

I got the patent drawings.

It's a Trevithick carriage built to his pattern.

If he was here now he'd demand royalties!

He carried eight people from London, from Holborn to Paddington, in 1803

and brought them back the same day!

-What an achievement!

-They refused to go again!

-A hairy ride!

The carriage would only run forwards.

Its engine is a high-pressure, simple expansion engine.

It uses a water pump to supply the boiler.

..Yes. Shall I put some on?

INAUDIBLE

We'll put a bit on. Just keep it alive.

Where there are holes - fill the front holes.

Trevithick's industrial engines ran at 100lbs per square inch.

He only ran this at about 30 because he was worried about it blowing up on the road.

I'll climb up into the driving position.

Ah!

HE CHUCKLES

I really enjoyed that! You can imagine what it was like in 1803!

The roads were full of deep ruts and horse-drawn traffic.

It's all right on a nice smooth car park but you can see why Mr Trevithick abandoned it!

If you've got to put up with them sort of conditions!

So Trevithick developed a steam locomotive to run on rails.

Subtitles by BBC Broadcast - 2003