Driving the Wheels of Industry Fred Dibnah's Age of Steam

STEAM HISSES

This is my back garden.

Everything's driven by steam. I don't need electricity.

The boiler produces the steam to drive three steam engines that work all of my workshop.

But the drawback, as against an electric motor, is the fact

that you can't just press a button and start it off.

It takes me roughly a day to get the whole place going.

With belt-driven machinery, just at the crucial moment, the belt breaks

and the job's stopped - but it's very cheap.

At one time it was all steam engines round here, driving cotton mills, engineering works and the likes.

Now this must be the only steam-powered works in all of Bolton.

For nearly 200 years, steam drove the wheels of industry, making Britain

the greatest industrial nation in the world.

But it hadn't always been the case.

Steam power didn't really cause the Industrial Revolution,

but it played a very important part in it.

The factory system developed from the textile industry

a long time before the steam engine became fully developed.

Quarry Bank Mill at Styal is hidden away behind Manchester Airport.

When the mill was first built, in the latter half of the 18th century,

they used water power to drive the revolutionary spinning machinery.

It is, without a doubt, one of the best places

where you can see steam and water power working together.

The original water wheel was designed and built

by Sir William Fairbairn of Manchester,

who was very famous for his what they call "suspension" water wheels.

They put the first segment in the bottom of the water wheel pit

and anchor it to the spokes so it's suspended,

move it round one and put another in, move it round one and put another in.

Eventually, it would end up round.

When this water wheel was installed, steam engines were well developed.

But they were a bit unreliable.

This thing runs for nothing, with no breakdowns, coal and all that.

It still was a formidable source of power.

You can see, with the size of it, working through these reduction gears,

it could drive all the machinery in the mill.

WATER TRICKLES

Even today, the weaving shed takes its power from the water wheel.

This is part of the transmission.

A great, vertical shaft comes up through three floors to this level, where the weaving shed is.

The bevel gears, the horizontal shaft, then the counter-shafts, and then the looms proper.

These things always caused trouble.

The great weight of a vertical shaft,

especially in spinning mills, which were four and five storeys high... the problem was

getting the weight of each length of the shaft equalised on thrust bearings.

They could never quite get it right and it always got hot at the bottom, and the whole mill had to stop.

Basically, the transmission from the water wheel

comes up the shaft - the vertical shaft - then it's transmitted

into these long ones, which are called wind shafts.

In reality, these are not very long.

When the torque started at one end, the other end didn't move for a bit,

so it actually twisted the shaft, there was such great weight on them.

They started off at the driven end quite thick. By the time they'd gone the full length of the weaving shed,

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

It became quite an art, setting up wind shafts.

CLACKING These things are called looms,

for spinning cloth with.

The noise levels are terrific.

Can you imagine what it must have been like

in a room with 1,500 of these things

all going at the same time

for 16 hours a day?

CLACKING OF INDIVIDUAL LOOMS ADDS UP TO RHYTHMIC CRASHING

Water wheels 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.

They had to bring in another way to drive the machines.

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

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

In 1810, Samuel Greg, the mill owner,

installed a beam engine,

not to be the main source of power but to help the water wheel in a drought.

In 1836,

Mr Greg replaced his original engine

with a Boulton and Watt beam engine of all of 20 horsepower.

By the end of the 18th century, Boulton and Watt

had taken the lead in steam engine technology.

Up to this time, all the early engines,

including Watt's, could only pump water.

But in the 1790s, because of the introduction of machines like these to the textile industries,

a new type of engine was needed to power them.

The early steam engines had been built using quite primitive methods.

The blacksmith had done everything by eye.

But all this was to change.

Boulton and Watt worked everything out in advance with measured drawings,

architectural-style, for all the machines and parts.

It was really the beginning of the engineering industry as we know it.

Birmingham City Libraries have a collection of Watt's papers and drawings,

including some relating to an engine

built for a Manchester cotton mill.

This is an agreement between James Watt and Matthew Boulton and their customer,

Peter Drinkwater, a Manchester cotton mill owner.

While Drinkwater was having the engine built, he obviously decided

he needed more power. He originally asked them to build a 6hp engine.

But he changed his mind, so they had to change the specification to eight horses.

-The change was incorporated into the agreement.

-"Eight good horses"!

Not eight weak horses, but eight good horses!

James Watt introduced the term "horsepower" into engineering usage.

Boulton and Watt were very keen to define

exactly what their engines were being used for, so this sets out

that the engine's being used for preparing and carding cotton.

-Drinkwater has to apply to Watt and Boulton for their consent.

-Yeah.

-He were pretty strict on all this tackle.

-He was. It was all to protect his patent.

This is the actual drawing

for the Drinkwater engine for Manchester.

All the alterations are marked on in red.

The interesting bit is, where they decided to change it from 6hp to 8hp,

-they've put another couple of inches in the diameter of the cylinder.

-Yes.

They've crossed out the original 14 inches and increased it to 16.

On the beam,

they specify the wood - "seasoned, straight-grained, young oak".

The spring beams, across the top, are made out of deal, much softer than oak.

The steam engine had arrived and it had a massive impact.

The rapid rise in manufacturing completely altered the whole skyline.

Pithead gears like this one, at Beamish Open Air Museum, sprang up all over the skyline.

It wasn't long before the mine owners realised that, as well as pumping water,

steam engines could be used to lower men down to get to the work quicker,

and, of course, bring up the end product -

cage after cage of coal.

This is one of the earliest types of this winder.

They were quite common in the north-east of England - the vertical steam winding engine -

which, in its time, will have brought up millions of tons of coal

in, no doubt, a cage with two decks and two tubs in each deck.

There'd be five or six hundredweight in each tub every time.

And it would wind the men up and down as well,

but a bit slower than what they wound the coal.

The engine driver here's got to get the coal coming up as fast as he could for the management.

Coal production soared and shafts got deeper, which enabled the manufacturers

to install more steam engines and burn more coal

and it's really what made Great Britain great.

By the middle of the 19th century,

the steam engine had been harnessed to nearly every industry.

It were cheap to run, it made manufacturing much easier

and the Industrial Revolution had arrived.

And it had a massive effect on the lives of ordinary working people.

They began to move from the country to the new industrial cities.

These were springing up close to the coalfields and transport links

that brought raw materials to them.

This is the Etruscan Bone and Flint Mill in Stoke-on-Trent.

You might be wondering what a bone and flint mill is.

Well, crushed bones and flints are ingredients of bone china.

Here in Etruria, it was a centre of crushing bones and flints up

to put fine bone china on the tables of the gentry.

Inside, there's the trusty old beam engine.

This one is a copy of a Boulton and Watt engine

made in Salford in the 1820s.

The drive shaft goes

through a hole in the wall to drive the machines.

This is the other side of the hole in the wall.

It's called the gear room and you can see why, with these cog wheels.

What happens here is it spreads out

the rotary motion of the beam engine into two long, horizontal shafts.

Then, through these big bevel gears,

it drives vertical shafts to the mixing pans upstairs.

The vertical shafts came up from down below in the middle of these great pans

and turned round these big paddles and mixed up the flint and the bone.

Before being put in the pans, they were burned in two kilns downstairs and they added all the lot,

poured in the water and set the thing in motion.

And the stones and the paddles, turning all the lot round, ground it into a beautiful, white, fine slurry.

To make it all work, they had to have an efficient way of raising steam.

This is what's known as a Cornish boiler,

reputedly invented by Richard Trevithick in Cornwall - that's why it's called a Cornish boiler.

Basically, it's quite a simple thing.

It's an iron tube with two end-plates. There's another iron tube, of a smaller diameter,

which is this, termed the fire tube, which goes from one end to the other.

And at the front end of this tube,

a fire is lighted on the grate and the products of combustion

go round the end of the back of the boiler up there and along the sides,

and, finally, up the chimney.

They utilise as much of the heat as they can from the products of combustion.

They only have a fire in here a few times a year.

But, at home, I've got steam up most of the time. It's important to know

where the water level is.

This is the water gauge. When you open the valve,

the steam pressure inside fires the water down.

When you shut the valve, it's forced in at the bottom

by the water pressure and you can see it rise up again.

A bit higher up is the pressure gauge,

a clock with a steel, spiral tube inside it.

When it gets up to pressure, or its pressure's rising,

it works a quadrant and a rack

and it registers on a needle the pounds upon the square inch that's in the boiler.

The steam at the back

is not the boiler leaking - it's the safety valve.

Without that, it would blow up!

People don't realise, really, the power of steam.

This boiler looks peaceful and it's not making any funny noises,

and there's only 75lb per square inch in it.

Other than it being very hot,

it's like a potential bomb, in a way.

This is like a demonstration of what's inside - you know.

ROARING HISS

HISSING CONTINUES

SILENCE

Yeah.

You see - all that pent-up power inside.

Of course, we all know, in the olden days,

there were lots and lots of boiler explosions when things went wrong.

One day, a newspaperman came with his cameraman.

And the cameraman said - he were getting on a bit, the cameraman -

he said, "When I were a lad and I worked for the Chorley Guardian,

"the editor said, 'Go to the weaving shed. There's been an explosion.'"

He said, "I set off with me camera and arrived at this weaving shed,

"to be greeted by an unbelievable scene of carnage and disaster."

In the weaving shed, which was mainly run by women,

all the machinery started going round at 1,000 miles an hour.

The whole works looked like it would fall down.

The governors on the engine had gone wrong. Revolutions built up.

Two of them in the engine room.

One says, "I'll get the women out. You see the engineer about getting the engine stopped."

The guy going to the engine house was halfway across the mill yard

when the whole thing exploded and he ended up dead.

But the man in charge of the engine, who was turning the stop valve off,

had just got it shut when the whole thing blew apart and all it did was break his arm - he survived.

But bits of the engine were going

through Coronation Street-type rooftops 500 yards down the road.

And that were quite late on - 1956, or something like that.

But in spite of the dangers, it was still a very efficient way of driving the wheels of industry,

especially as steam engine technology moved on.

By the mid-19th century, Boulton and Watt's rotating beam engine began to give way to this thing -

the horizontal steam engine.

The man who had the idea of connecting the cylinder to the crankshaft

is reputed to have been Richard Trevithick.

He and a gentleman in Leeds, Matthew Murray, developed the horizontal engine.

There were thousands of engines like this made,

from little, teeny ones, 3ft long,

to the biggest one on record, made by Hick Hargreaves's of Bolton.

Reputedly, the cylinder were ten feet long.

The horizontal steam engine was much easier to manufacture in all sizes

and it didn't need a great big, tall engine room.

To build an engine like this, all you needed was a big lathe,

a shaper and a good iron founder,

and you could make it in a shed in the back yard. I've more or less done it myself, once or twice.

That's the cylinder. That's the connecting rod.

That's the crank pin. There's no bending or forging involved in it.

The crankshaft is an iron bar. The disc is cast.

And the flywheel is cast in two halves.

It was a very efficient way of driving machinery.

And as these engines got bigger and bigger,

they could drive literally hundreds of machines

on four or five floors of a factory.

When steam began to replace water power, two things were needed -

plenty of coal and a good transport system.

Here in Wigan, where coal stuck out the floor five foot thick nearly everywhere,

it fast became a boomtown.

I suppose it was like anywhere else.

In winter, you wouldn't be able to see for the smoke coming out of the great chimneys.

All the mill owners and pit owners lived in country mansions

built out of the ill-gotten gains of the lads down below.

The earliest factories only employed 20 or 30 people.

But by the mid-19th century, they'd built great places like this behind me,

which could do many different processes and employ hundreds of people.

This is Trencherfield Mill at Wigan Pier,

and it houses one of the world's biggest surviving mill steam engines.

William Woods built his mill here in 1907.

It was a state-of-the-art spinning mill -

fireproof floors, five storeys high,

and room for 1,000 employees.

And now I'm going to see if they'll let me play with the engine.

This great engine behind me

once drove all the machinery on five floors.

It were built by John and Edward Wood's of Bolton about 1907.

I'm going to have a do at making it go.

You've got to turn this great valve.

If all the connecting rods are in the right shop, it'll set off.

Here we go. HE GRUNTS

Hmm.

Bit stiff on the valve. STEAM HISSES

WHEEL SQUEAKS

CLATTERING

This engine is what's known as a "tandem cross compound".

Triple expansion - it's got four cylinders.

In the small ones comes the high-pressure steam.

It's exhausted into a receiver

and then it goes into the low-pressure ones - the big'uns.

And when it had the grand opening,

each side of the engine were christened.

They're called Rina and Helen - the daughters of the engineering company that built 'em.

It's 2,500 horsepower.

METAL CLATTERS AND STEAM HISSES

It's fantastic, in't it, really, the size of the bits and pieces?

You know, you think about your Mamod at home,

and you've got a connecting rod here which must weigh about three tonnes.

An incredible piece of tackle!

They did things in a grand style.

This particular part of the building is called the rope race.

The reason for that is obvious - the ropes are all racing round!

There'd be as many as four or five to each floor,

and altogether, on the drum,

I think there's 55 grooves and the drum weighs 70 tonnes - that's one hell of a wheel, innit?

In the days when these things were run commercially, this were quite a frightening place to be.

There's daylight shining in now,

but when it was full of rope all going in different directions, it were quite frightening.

The only time they could mend them was in the middle of the night.

The rope splicer came at night -

they didn't do many night shifts at cotton mills - to splice a new piece.

Two inches' diameter.

Made of cotton.

The industrialisation of the great cities

put a terrible strain on the antiquated water and sewage systems.

Many new reservoirs had to be built

and, to pump water to them, many new pumping stations had to be built.

This is one of the more ornate.

Papplewick, built in 1884,

pumped water to the city of Nottingham all the way through till 1969.

These are the six Lancashire boilers that made the steam to drive the pumping engines.

They were made in Manchester by W & J Galloway.

Mr Galloway improved the Lancashire boiler by inserting vertical water tubes at the end of the fire tubes,

which greatly increased the steaming capabilities.

They used to burn five tons of coal a day on three of them.

The others were on standby. They did that at waterworks, just in case.

The pressure's getting a bit low now.

-Come on, Geoff.

-I've done one side, Fred, so if you'll fire this side...

-Right.

These two double-acting beam engines

are thought to be the last two that James Watt and Company ever made.

They pump 1.5 million gallons of water a day

from a well 200 feet deep,

and then a further elevation of another 100 feet,

and then it went by gravity all the way to Nottingham.

Although these engines were built in 1881,

they still use the old-fashioned Cornish principle, which proves how successful and economical

the Cornish beam engines were,

and how they lent themselves to pumping water.

It's interesting that,

by this time, James Watt and Company

had reverted to using high-pressure steam.

James Watt himself once said

that Richard Trevithick should be hung for using high-pressure steam because of its danger.

RHYTHMIC CLATTER AND HISSING STEAM

That lovely noise takes me back a bit!

I remember, as a lad of about 16 or 17,

rather fearful, climbing the engine house steps

and looking at the thing going round through the window and seeing the engine minder in an easy chair.

But he wouldn't be asleep -

he'd be listening for any strange change

in the pattern of noise coming from the thing, denoting something wrong.

CLACKING AND CLICKING

These great beams transfer the power from the piston rod

to the pump rods down the well, or the shaft.

They weigh 13 tonnes apiece. Ever wondered how they got them up here?

There were no fancy cranes then! Pictures exist,

showing great piles and baulks of timber.

They were basically jacking up the beam as the engine room came up.

They slid them in, over the central beam that they pivot on.

The hangers in the roof weren't for lifting the whole thing up.

They were for lifting one end up and maybe replacing a bearing.

The engines and the building were finished well under budget.

And with all the money they had left over,

they made embellishments like stained glass and terracotta bits outside

and fish and birds and everything.

It's sad that the general public

never saw any of this - it was only the waterworks superintendent

and maybe some of the operatives, you know.

But it shows how proud the Victorians were of their engineering achievements.