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.

On our bed: a hundred and fifty horses at sixty-four revolutions, and a duty above a hundred and forty millions.

One of the cabinet’s specimens, each ready for the test bed.