A Cabinet of Specimens
Real engines of the age, set to their recorded dimensions on the Works’ patterns.
The Dudley Castle Engine
Tipton, Staffordshire, 1712
The first useful steam engine in the world: Thomas Newcomen’s machine at Lord Dudley’s coal works, raising water from a hundred and fifty feet with the weight of the atmosphere. It ran night and day and asked nothing but coal and cold water, and for a colliery sitting on its own coal, that was as good as free. Every engine in this museum descends from it.
The original made about 12 strokes a minute — some 5½ horsepower — and nobody thought to measure the coal.
Smeaton’s Long Benton Engine
Northumberland, 1772
John Smeaton never invented an engine; he measured them. Armed with a test programme and a model boiler, he found the proportions the millwrights had been guessing at and nearly doubled the duty of the atmospheric engine without adding a single new part. Long Benton was his showpiece. The original bore was fifty-two inches — past the Works’ largest pattern — so our specimen is set to twenty-eight and the same discipline.
Smeaton logged 9.45 millions of duty from the original — the best figure the old engine ever gave.
The Lap Engine
Soho Manufactory, Birmingham, 1788
Boulton & Watt’s own works engine, polishing (“lapping”) buttons and buckles at Soho for seventy years — and the oldest surviving engine with a flyball governor and Watt’s parallel motion. She stands in the Science Museum in London to this day, the very machine, dead centre of the story of power. Our specimen is set to her recorded dimensions.
Eighteen and three-quarter inches of bore, four feet of stroke, about 21 revolutions — rated some 10 horses.
A Cornish Puffer Whim
after Trevithick, Cornwall, 1805
Trevithick’s answer to the mine that could not afford an engine-house: a strong-steam engine and its cylindrical boiler in one iron package, winding ore up the shaft and puffing its exhaust at the sky. Dozens were built and carted about the county; the name is the sound. No condenser, no beam, no ceremony — the shape of every portable engine to come.
A typical whim wound at whatever the kibble asked, on fifty pounds of steam, from a cylinder nearer a bucket than a hall.
A Cornish Pumping Engine
after Taylor’s practice, Gwennap, 1840
The duty champions of the world: strong steam cut off at a fifth of the stroke, expanded down onto a Watt vacuum, in engines the size of chapels kept by engineers who published their coal bills monthly. Taylor’s 85-inch at United Mines logged the figures every rival chased. The Works’ patterns stop at thirty-two inches, so our specimen keeps the practice, not the acreage.
The great Cornish engines logged over 100 millions of duty — treble anything the Watt patent ever managed.
The Centennial Corliss
Machinery Hall, Philadelphia, 1876
The engine that opened America’s hundredth birthday: forty feet tall, fourteen hundred horsepower, turning every machine in Machinery Hall from one shaft. President Grant and the Emperor of Brazil started her together with two hand levers, and the crowd — Walt Whitman among them — stood and watched an engine the way crowds watch a coronation. She ran the fair without missing a stroke, at exactly our governor’s setting: thirty-six revolutions.
Twin 40-inch cylinders, ten feet of stroke, 36 rpm, some 1,400 horses on demand — and almost perfectly silent.
A Lancashire Mill Compound
after Hick, Hargreaves & Co., Bolton, 1885
By the 1880s the Lancashire cotton trade ran on engines like this: a tandem compound on a hundred pounds of steam, its receiver breathing between a small hot cylinder and a great cool one, belting a mill of a thousand looms through ropes off the flywheel. Nothing about it is famous; everything about it is typical — which, for the machine that clothed the world, is the greater distinction.
A sound mill compound returned better than 120 millions of duty and ran fifty years on its original bearings.
A Stumpf Uniflow
for the electric light, Charlottenburg, 1909
Professor Stumpf’s one-way engine, built for the dynamo age: superheated steam in at the hot ends, out at the cold middle, and compound economy from a single cylinder with nothing to go wrong. It was the piston engine’s closing argument — brilliant, and too late. The turbine men bought tickets to the lectures and went home unworried.
Uniflows returned compound duty from one cylinder at dynamo speeds — the best of them near 11 lb of steam per horse-hour.
The Engines of the Titanic
Harland & Wolff, Belfast, 1912
The largest reciprocating engines ever put to sea: two four-storey triples flanking a low-pressure turbine that drank their exhaust — the piston age and the turbine age sharing one engine room. Each triple ran about seventy-five revolutions on steam at two hundred and fifteen pounds from twenty-nine boilers, fired by a hundred and seventy-six men. The Works’ patterns stop far short of her 97-inch low-pressure cylinders, so our specimen keeps her pressures, her revolutions, and her proportions — the practice, not the acreage. She needs no bar and no flywheel: three cranks at 120 degrees see to that.
Two engines of some 15,000 ihp each at 75 rpm, cylinders 54, 84, 97 and 97 inches on a 75-inch stroke — and a coal bill of six hundred tons a day.