The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Epochs #242 ｜ The History of Steam Power with Alex Masters： Part III

00:00:00.000 what you get then which is 1829 is the famous rainhill trials and this is

00:00:28.780 george again wants to run this railway entirely with steam engines so it's dotting darlington

00:00:36.300 public railway some people use steam engines some people use horses it's all a bit of a mess

00:00:42.600 he wants this to be absolutely 100 steam train hauled or locomotive hauled so they set up a

00:00:52.680 competition on a completed piece of the track at rainhill and you know set up a bunch of

00:01:01.660 conditions it's got a haul five times its own weight and got to go faster than 10 miles an

00:01:06.320 hour and all the rest of it for a 500 pound prize which is not an inconsiderable amount of money

00:01:10.800 um five people get there i think they have quite a lot of interest um but only five actually turn up

00:01:21.540 one of them is called cyclopede which is actually a treadmill with a horse on it

00:01:29.540 uh which immediately gets disqualified because it's not steam engine

00:01:34.060 uh one of them is called perseverance and is built by a chap from edinburgh uh it never works he spends

00:01:41.940 the entire weekend in the workshops trying to get it to go and it just doesn't um one of them is called

00:01:48.900 song son paris and is built by timothy hackworth the chief mechanical engineer of the stockton darlington

00:01:55.720 one of them is called novelty and is built by a swede called john erickson who is currently uh down in

00:02:06.580 london building fire engines is that the erickson the john erickson right okay yeah the guy who goes on to

00:02:14.380 invent the screw propeller and build the uss monitor for the us navy in world war in the in the civil war

00:02:20.700 he did loads of stuff no very famous man yeah really fascinating chap i think he dabbles with

00:02:26.140 submarines at one point as well yeah i think so yeah um so yeah this is 1829 so he's quite young

00:02:32.740 and fresh-faced i was gonna say he must have been young then it's just a just a nipper i think it was

00:02:36.940 yeah it must have been in his mid-20s interesting um and then there is from robert stevenson the rocket

00:02:44.320 which is the famous yellow one uh george's son george's son estranged still

00:02:50.020 no that's they've got a professional working relationship now um interestingly rocket is

00:02:58.640 delivered to rain hill because obviously it's got to get over across the country it's delivered by

00:03:04.680 pickford's right which is the same pickford's as in the removals company right um so it turns up in

00:03:13.400 liverpool and they line them up and they have the uh they have the competition novelty is a fascinating

00:03:20.460 little engine it's called it's sometimes called the first tank engine and it's a flat um operating

00:03:28.220 space you know platform on top of four wheels there's a water tank underneath it and then it's

00:03:36.540 got a t-shaped boiler so you've got this big sort of coffee pot thing that comes out of the floor

00:03:42.600 in front of you there's a hatch on top that you can put coal in and then there's a there's a thin

00:03:49.060 barrel that runs under the under the floor and then there's a sort of little um exhaust pipe at the end

00:03:56.640 which goes up the back there's in two cylinders mounted um towards the back and a sort of bucket

00:04:03.860 shaped thing and the two cylinders act on or act on a bell crank which then drives the wheels but the

00:04:10.260 bell crank also has bellows in it and the bellows provide draft into the bottom of the fire to heat

00:04:18.440 it up it's very much like a blacksmith's stove okay um that's that's the operating principle it's it

00:04:25.360 looks like one of his fire engines because actually the fire engines were essentially that but it instead

00:04:31.040 of driving the wheels it was just horse drawn and then the two cylinders operate pumps which would

00:04:36.300 be where your water tank is um it's very pretty it's got a flagpole um it's the press's favorite

00:04:45.440 it's very very fast but you know 18 19 miles an hour um but the bellows blow on day two and it can't

00:04:55.120 finish so you've got these two bellies doing this all the time and the wet the leather wears out 0.71

00:05:01.100 somperet is built by timothy hackworth it's a derivative of engines that he's been building for

00:05:07.300 a long time where it's it's like the best of the first generation so he's got a return flu

00:05:12.580 boiler two cylinders on the side pointing directly down at the wheels

00:05:18.180 with direct coupling but the driver stands on a platform at one end up quite high with the

00:05:26.400 cylinders and the fireman stands on the platform in the tender at the other end

00:05:30.780 right so and it goes backwards it pushes its tender along so the fireman faces backwards and

00:05:38.580 the driver looks over the whole lot as it as it goes along it's very powerful

00:05:43.420 it's quite hard on its fire so its economy goes down um but the big thing is that one of its

00:05:52.000 the water pump packs in and one of its cylinders bursts right the hackworth family

00:05:59.680 claim sabotage because the cylinders were actually bored by the stevensons so cylinders were made at

00:06:10.300 robert stevensson works do you think there's anything in that just personal opinion on that

00:06:14.840 i don't think there is because apparently because we've still got like invoices for it

00:06:20.180 they cast about six cylinders and then hackworth himself picked out the ones that were going to go

00:06:26.680 on the engine right okay um because they had a they had a weird way of um doing them where you get

00:06:34.040 the approximate shape by what they call a floating core so the cylinders are made of cast iron

00:06:39.460 but you don't cast a block you cast a tube to roughly the right dimensions and then all you

00:06:46.060 have to do is bore out the excess you know so you don't end up having to drill a hole

00:06:49.480 but when it's it's a floating core so you you make up the core box with a hole in it and then the core

00:06:57.400 that's going to be where the cylinder bore is just sits in the correct place the problem with

00:07:04.120 that is is as you pour the molten iron in the core has a nasty tendency of like moving because you're

00:07:10.020 pouring it in at one end and the gas is trying to get out the other so and it sort of you know

00:07:13.540 knocks one way or the other so with a floating core it's almost impossible to get it perfectly

00:07:19.980 parallel right okay and then when you bore it out you bore it out yeah you want it in the middle

00:07:25.480 but obviously if you're if the core's off center and you're trying to bore you might end up with

00:07:30.940 one side has gone really deep and then the other side is still rough so you bore as centrally as you

00:07:37.680 can it's not precision engineering really not yet as we know it as we would understand it no but it's

00:07:44.560 it's as good as they can do okay rocket is painted yellow um which apparently means it attracts wasps

00:07:52.520 um even to this day uh the cylinders should have painted it red should have things always go faster

00:07:59.260 when they're red we know this they move the cylinders down to a 45 degree angle on the back

00:08:05.180 of the boiler but the two big inventions on rocket are the fire box has now come out of the boiler and

00:08:14.020 is an is a separate box and that's got a water jacket around it right so it's got over the top

00:08:22.480 of the box is a is a sort of two inch water wall and obviously you've got the fire in there absolutely

00:08:29.560 white hot so that sucks a lot of the heat out so you get a really really efficient strong uh

00:08:36.260 way of raising steam the other thing it's got is a multi-tubular boiler so through the barrel section

00:08:44.100 instead of having one big tube or one big youtube it's now got 25 i think it is two inch diameter

00:08:53.120 copper tubes right the heat transfer is much better and the rate at which you can transfer the heat is much

00:09:02.160 higher so you can make much more steam much quicker you've also got as a slight a slight advantage is

00:09:12.480 that you've actually got less water in the boiler because more of it's made up of tubes which then

00:09:16.360 means the boiler responds faster to whatever you do with it because there's less water to get boiling

00:09:21.700 in the first place rocket is the only engine that is able to complete the weekend's trials right

00:09:30.800 and apparently when the other two are broken down stevenson just sends it up the track

00:09:35.800 like engine just to give the crowd something to look at um and it's at that point she gets up

00:09:41.660 north of 30 miles an hour you know which is which means that she's the first machine we've ever made

00:09:47.640 that can go faster than a horse yeah with people on it certainly much faster than a man could run

00:09:54.300 yeah um again so one of those moments in time really yeah where you feel like it's hard not to

00:10:01.160 look back at that that's a reason why it's famous right yeah because it's hard not to look back at

00:10:06.880 that and think like they would have known in real time at the time wow this is something this is like a

00:10:13.640 world changing game changing yeah the possibilities this is actually history happening yeah yeah looking

00:10:21.140 into the future we can obviously make this even better even more efficient even but like the world's

00:10:26.360 the the sky's the limit with this thing yeah um like the age of the horse yeah but it's done we've

00:10:35.100 been in the age of the horse since the dawn of civilization yes this is something new yes right here

00:10:41.280 right now we finally cracked and it's it's it's even more like important we finally cracked

00:10:47.060 mass land transport yeah because until then if a horse couldn't carry it you had to move it by water

00:10:57.320 which means civilizations happen either on rivers or around bodies of water so the roman world

00:11:04.800 is entirely dependent on the mediterranean sea that's why i have the troubles every if they go too far

00:11:10.880 away from the meds they've got because it's or rivers or rivers yeah you know the nile the indus

00:11:16.960 valley all these ancient civilizations right up until that time you know you could even say the

00:11:22.420 anglo-saxons are a sort of north sea civilization it's a civilization centered on the north sea

00:11:27.840 the first time ever you can actually have a land based civilization so the center of your world

00:11:36.300 moves inland for the first time ever and nothing goes faster than a horse the speed of information

00:11:42.300 is as fast as horses yeah not anymore no not anymore not anymore and you can move a lot of stuff

00:11:50.240 it's an incredible what's a time to have been alive yeah um the amazing thing though is that rocket

00:11:58.040 is already obsolete by the time the liverpool and manchester opened 18 months later there's

00:12:06.580 another quick thing to say just to point out just to stress is the idea that you instead of having

00:12:09.820 um you said there's 25 different steam pipes yeah going through the thing

00:12:16.280 again i'll just come back to the idea of an engineer with imagination it's like well why don't

00:12:24.880 we just do wait we can just do this can't we that would be way better wouldn't it oh yes it is

00:12:30.060 obviously it is yeah and then and once again the sky's the limit yeah you can just keep making it

00:12:36.300 better keep tweaking it keep and it's and it's amazing how there's a lot of things and it's not just in

00:12:43.060 it's not just in engineering you can see in politics and things like this is that often the

00:12:46.540 the initial tech or the initial idea goes as far as it can because it's just too complicated

00:12:53.000 and actually what then pushes it forward is a simplification building a building a pressure

00:12:59.560 tube that is that wide is actually quite difficult because you've got to build it out of plate and

00:13:04.300 rivet it and all the rest of it a tube that's this big can just be drawn so making tube this big is

00:13:11.280 actually much easier than making a tube that big and and yeah that's it the sky's the limit you've

00:13:17.840 you've you've changed the way you look at the problem which then means that the limitation in

00:13:23.040 the technology is gone and you can go and find the next one yeah um the next one the next one they

00:13:29.280 build is called northumbrian it's basically rocket the cylinders have gone flat the firebox is now

00:13:34.200 integral to the barrel it's got a proper smoke box they start playing with um with the reversing gear

00:13:40.200 as well to try and make them easier to drive that hauls the first train duke of uh the duke of

00:13:45.600 wellington's on that train uh in 1830 it's also where prime minister oh yeah it's where um huskisson

00:13:53.300 the mp for liverpool is unfortunately run over and killed is he the first is he the first

00:13:58.020 he's the he's the first celebrity death uh on a on a railway um yeah plenty of navvies and

00:14:05.520 you know nameless geordie engine men have been killed before them but uh but they've gone away

00:14:10.680 from that they then they then take the essentially in six months later they've taken northumbrian's

00:14:16.840 boiler put the cylinders inside because mechanical moving things are unsightly um and then have an

00:14:26.340 engine called planet and there's a replica of that at the manchester that's a very famous one

00:14:30.480 that's a very famous one why is that so famous do you think is there particular innovations on that

00:14:34.640 that were groundbreaking why is that it's it's the first steam and steam locomotive that looks like

00:14:42.840 a modern steam locomotive all right okay um before then they look there's a beam engines or wheels and

00:14:48.160 they look sort of gangly and a bit odd and a bit experimental planet is designed to run a railway

00:14:53.540 every day right she's not an experiment she is a commercial uh thing she there's also the planet is the 0.95

00:15:00.140 first of that type is like the first engine to run in russia it's the first one to run there's one of

00:15:07.540 them goes to the states um so they're mass produced not all that mass but they're mass produced mass

00:15:13.260 produced um a year later they then actually rivet a bonus a back axle onto it so now we've got three

00:15:21.000 axles instead of two um because what's that make a difference or you've got on planet the um firebox

00:15:29.940 hangs over the back axle or is after the back axle at speed she starts to wobble okay she's not she's

00:15:37.960 not happy at high speeds and this is 35 miles an hour and also if you've got that overhang it limits

00:15:46.440 the size of your firebox okay so if you want to make if you want to make it more power you've got

00:15:50.620 to make the box deeper and that just means it steps too far back so but if you have a lengthen firebox

00:15:56.680 and then put a back axle on it to support that load okay um so now we've got a three axle machine

00:16:03.280 one in the middle's driven one on the front one on the back are there for stability you've now got an

00:16:09.740 engine which which they call the patent t um and is the first engine to run in germany first in

00:16:17.360 belgium in holland in italy in india this is this is the one that takes steam engine global right

00:16:23.960 um and that's like 1832 1831 um it's really and is the first on many many um railways a 222

00:16:36.000 um express engine like that they've also got the benefit of if you couple up two of the axles you've

00:16:42.060 got a general purpose engine and if you couple up all three you've got a goods engine

00:16:46.180 um so even right at the very start all traffic was just the same and it's within a year or so

00:16:55.640 they start going actually the passengers want to get there quickly and the goods are heavy you know

00:17:03.400 it's heavier than people so actually you want grunt to start moving the freight about and you want speed

00:17:08.640 to start moving the passengers about um so that differentiation starts to move off so you actually

00:17:16.840 want to design slightly different engines for different things actually get start getting

00:17:21.640 specialized designs right um the liverpool and manchester makes an enormous amount of money

00:17:29.040 i think that the average dividend is something like nine percent on the share price um and of course you

00:17:37.380 don't have to pay any dividend taxes or anything like that and a 100 pound share by the time it

00:17:42.240 gets absorbed into the um london northwestern railway zone is some 147 pounds so you've you've you

00:17:51.500 know made 50 percent back and it's been paying you nine percent a year um pretty good investment not

00:17:56.900 bad at all not bad at all the liverpool and manchester is also fascinating because it's it's the one where

00:18:01.520 they actually work out how to do being a railway um so they they have to work out signaling and um

00:18:10.240 proper jobs and like how do you do a intercity station and how do you do a goods yard and how do you work

00:18:18.420 out pricing and you know have proper locomotive facilities because even on stockton darlington it's a

00:18:26.760 freight line so you send an engine out every now and again and speed isn't an op isn't a priority

00:18:32.300 um timetables aren't a priority but when you're when you start dealing with passengers you're like no

00:18:38.080 the train leaves at 11 um and it will get there at this time um so are there also all sorts of issues to do

00:18:47.560 with uh not just gradients but like um going around curves yeah right they have to learn that's not

00:18:57.180 straightforward right that's that's actually as a whole and you have to understand various things in

00:19:02.540 order to it's one make sure you don't derail yeah it's one of the things even today um you get a lot

00:19:08.820 of realigning in britain's railways because they were built immediately after that in the 1840s 1850s

00:19:14.140 during the railway mania but they were built for engines that weighed 20 tons and were doing 15 miles

00:19:20.640 an hour now you're trying to run so you know they sneak like this you know and they're trying to not

00:19:26.560 use gradients wherever possible um in fact there were a lot of them were built like canals

00:19:31.880 where they you get you go as far as as you possibly can on the level and then you like a big steep bit

00:19:39.780 and then another level bit um which is a which is a way of building railways unique to britain

00:19:45.940 because a lot of the manpower the navis have been building canals that was that was what they knew

00:19:52.960 what to do and that was the the civil engineering brain at that time that was what they knew what to

00:19:58.920 do so they they could find the contours in the land and they could find where they needed

00:20:03.420 to put an embankment in or something like that but the french actually and a lot of the european

00:20:08.760 railways are built by the government and so what they do is there's an office in paris and they

00:20:12.140 just draw a straight line and then so you end up with railways that do this where it's it undulates

00:20:17.560 as the crow flies over hills whereas what the brits will do is is go around the hill to try and

00:20:23.640 not put the gradients in we hope you enjoyed that video and if you did please head over to

00:20:28.300 lotusseaters.com for the full unabridged video

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 21, 2025

PREVIEW： Epochs #242 ｜ The History of Steam Power with Alex Masters： Part III

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript