History of steam engines 3 hrs long compilation of 6 videos into one video

[Music] first of all it was water and wind the earliest forms of power to drive machinery [Music] then came steam and in the 18th and 19th centuries britain led the world in harnessing the power of coal water and steam to drive the engines that revolutionized transport and made mass production possible [Music] the steam engine really is a fascinating thing and it's actually running it so it comes alive in a strange way it has a an unbelievable smell for a start about it even people who come in here now when they go near me boiler they're an old guy coming over there 80 odd years old and he was sniffing away and he said that brings back you know you memories from the youth the smell of sort of oil and steam is a is like a smell all of its own it has been said if you could put it in a bottle and caulk it up you could sell it well it smells that good the first engines were developed for the draining of mines and as the 18th century progressed one invention followed another allowing manufacturers to increase their output to make britain prosperous on a scale that no other country could match by the 19th century steam power was being adapted to provide revolutionary new means of transport and britain saw the development of the world's first railway it's only within my lifetime that steam locomotive stopped operating on britain's railways in this series i'm going to be looking at the development of the steam engine from the very earliest right up to streamline locomotives like this but what exactly is a steam engine the steam engine really is is a fairly simple thing there's two main principles the expansion of steam in a cylinder pushing a piston which is connected to a crankshaft or a connecting rod and the second principle of course is the condensation of steam which creates a vacuum in the cylinder which makes it easier for the steam to push the piston along in the cylinder when you mention steam engines to people today you think that steam is something from the past and that's not really true it's still with us today because what is it that provides the power to generate electricity to drive a train like this the age of steam isn't dead yet when industry and transport demanded more and more electricity it's still the steam turbine that provides all the power right up to this present day these three power stations furry bridge egg bra and drax over there are capable of supplying 15 of the country's needs for electricity the reason these three great power stations are here is there's a plenty of the stuff that makes them go number one water from the river r and number two coal which there's plenty of coal mines in the area coal and water raised the steam that turns the huge turbines in here and these turn the electro magnets that generate the electricity so if it wasn't for the steam we'd have no electricity the steam turbine isn't only used for generating electricity it serves dozens of purposes in the world of industry creating a very new idea really that the first steam engine came about 2 000 years ago when we had the first recorded use of steam power and they were done by a greek mathematician called hero of alexandria this is a model of heroes i call it steam whirligig but he actually did drawings in the first century a day for this creation nobody really knows whether he made one or whether it whether it would work so we thought we'd make a model and prove that the thing works and in some sorts of ways it's actually a turbine without an outer casing so we'll give it a whirl and see what happens whoa he disappeared in a cloud of steam [Laughter] right basically on hero's model it had a boiler down at the base of the two vertical pipes with the fire underneath it and when the water boiled the steam came up the pipes and it came out into the sphere and then of course it came out of the two vent pipes on on each end causing it to causing it to revolve i'll just give it a little bit more steam [Laughter] that's incredible i knew that it happened you know [Laughter] where's the copper point bit well that rules out any more demonstrations with heroes whirligig what a shame in the ancient world experiments like this were carried on more as a sort of novelty than anything else it was another 1500 years before anybody tried to carry out any serious investigations into steam power but they only have limited success the development of the world's first successful steam engine took place in what today would seem the most unlikely place when you think of cornwall you think of scenic beaches like this and cliffs and all nice things but for centuries it was a world leading place for mining tin and copper as the demand for tin and copper grew this meant the miners had got to go further and further down which of course left them with an unbelievable problem water the problem of underground seepage playing the management and the miners alike cutting into profits and stopping production and claiming lives especially when the shafts were sunk on the edge of the cliffs near the coast and the wookens went out under the water for more than a mile like this one here at metallic a blacksmith from dartmouth who made tools and bits and pieces for the mines down here in the southwest saw what was going on when he put it into his mind to do something about it and when he did he set in motion one of the most crucial developments of the industrial revolution between 1710 and 1712 thomas newcombe invented a brand new type of steam engine which was designed solely for one purpose to pump water from deep mine shafts the first one was installed here in staffordshire uh to collary and it proved to be the world's most successful steam engine and of course it will use near air at dudley castle for pumping water out of the many coal mines that were in the area there's actually very few newcomen pumping engines left and here at the black country living museum they built a full-size replica with a beautiful engine nose when it's in steam it gives you a chance to go back to the very beginning of the steam revolution i mean when you look at it now you know you could see the great beam sticking out the end of the engine house which in turn works the pump rod down the shaft and of course that's attached to the pumps and the bottom of the sump of the mine shaft which forces the water up the rising main runs away down the stream or wherever they could get rid of it yeah this is roger who's the chief engineer of this wonderful creation uh what time how it works he's one of the few men who actually knows that it works last time we'd come we had a bit of bother with it so i stopped it while we're talking all right there you go is that the brick that's the brake yes and the starting handles yeah you don't seem to turn any taps off do you want to stop the thing you know it's totally different to them yeah yeah when you come and conceived of this engine there was no boiler technology the only thing that was was like a giant kettle from the brewing industry and that's literally what this is the original and a copper bottom and a lead top which occasionally would melt yeah and the cylinder is mounted directly above that with a valve we turn the steam valve off and inject water and the cold water condenses the steam and the cycle begins it's really even though it looks a bit technical it's quite simple really until oh it works it is simple but it must be very very difficult yeah engine to keep running most of the work is in keeping the fire right because you've got no other controls you say no valves or anything so if the fire's wrong it just stops and it'll stop very quickly well roger is now going to activate the engine aren't you roger that's what it's all about yeah yeah really in 1712 this were the cutting edge of technology and before then i don't have a water problem at times i have to say believe it or not this engine really was a breakthrough the only other ways the adding raising water from mime workings were either by buckets uh propelled by oceans and things like that or wooden pipes with chains and bits of rag on so really this were quite something when it came along 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 and it's quite an interesting thing really how it works this bit here of course is a boiler which is a simple sort of a boiler like an air stack boiler and the early ones were made of lead and there weren't the very great deal of pressure in them and what transpired were the steam when you opened this valve here filled up this cylinder the cylinder of course will be made of brass then from this tank up here the jet the cold water of course the header tank as you might say like in a in your central heating system at all came down the water pressure came down the pipe and he naturally came through this here and rushed into the cylinder condensing the steam which made a vacuum and then the atmospheric pressure pressed down the piston to the bottom activating the great beam pulling up the pump rods in the mine shaft and of course when it got to the end of the return straw the weight of the rods went down working the pump at the same time and that's basically how it worked in spite of newcomers unbelievable success and its worldwide plan for these engines they had a lot of weak points they've only worked on a few pounds per square inch and of course reputed to burn as much as 12 tons of coal in a day so when you took it away from the coal fields it weren't very efficient at all what was needed was a more efficient engine and this is where james what came onto the scene as a young man he was given a model of a newcomer engine to repair and he decided that he could improve on it in 1769 james what came up with the answer he put together all the existing technology that were known about the steam engine at the time and come up with the revolutionary design you know that of course earned him the name of the father of the steam engine one of the best things that he came up with really with the separate condenser before in the newcomb system every time the cold water injected into the cylinder cool the thing off straight away but when what moved it outside i mean the thing don't look very important but it's the smaller of the two cylinders down there is what's outside condenser what happened when the stall could finish the exhaust comes down these pipes here into the condenser and turn back into into water again which had the effect of keeping the cylinder locked all the time and the other great improvements they made the cylinder double acting that meant that they'd had a power stroke each side of the piston right one for squeezing it down and one for shoving it back up somewhere in it served as much as 70 percent on the call bill which must have been incredible meanwhile back here in cornwall the unbelievable increased efficiency of the bolton watt pumping engines soon made it that there weren't a newcomer atmospheric engine left here in the mining areas we did another wonderful thing if you took off the pump rod and put a connecting rod in a crank on you could make it into a rotary engine whereby you could wind the men a lot get them done to work a lot faster and of course bring up the ore as well this was particularly good news for the miners themselves look down into this great chasm here you can see various flights of storm steps coming up the cliff side and now in the olden days before the days of steam winders of wire ropes and cages the miners had to get down the face of the cliff far down nearer to the sea as they could and then enter by an addict that met the main chap going down and then continue the journey for 1800 feet on ladders with various platforms down the shaft and then if they've got to go for a mile underneath the ocean before they actually started work there must have been someone special men there man but the steam winder changed all that this behind me is the mine at levant and it went more than 1800 feet down and then more than a mile under the atlantic ocean quite an incredible feat really and in the little engine house they've got a winder that i can't wait to have a go on anywhere yes certainly what's first job take the break yeah take a break all right how many turns this engine but what were known as the fast winder it's based on the james what beam engine principle that were built by arvis avail in 1840 and he wound skips of oil from the shaft 1800 feet deep in five [Music] up minutes you can see the the great beam rocking up and down i think it's a bit unusual because the the pumping engines are after beams sticking outside into space this one's all inside the engine hose [Music] down below though that's the condenser you know which of course makes the vacuum to to make the piston warp and down a lot easier there's approximately 14 pounds per square inch less uh pressure you know against the steam you know that next it was much more economical that's why cornish beam engines were very economical james what might be regarded as the father of the steam engine but it was a cornish man called richard trevithick who made some of the greatest advances in the 1790s and early 1800s trivitic was born at ilogan near camboy but his family soon moved to this cottage here nearby and his father was the manager of the wheeled chance copper mine trivitates penned his childhood here and went to the village school with the headmaster uh description of him he's a law firm inattentive and and sort of very slow a bit like me in a way and he he didn't do well at all you know even his old father said he would a law fir you know but he spent his time wandering around looking at the tin mines and the machinery of that existed at the time he amazed his superiors and so-called men of better education by his unbelievable ability for solving mechanical problems just by his own intuition by 1790 at the ripe old age of 19 years he'd already procured quite a few jobs as an engineer at various pits and his father uh apprenticed him to watts assistant murdoch who at that time were erecting all the great pumping engines around the tin mines and of course you you've got to rather think that that murdock taught him all he knew you know which gave him a good grounding for the beginning of his great career as an engineer his greatest advance was to design engines that would work at a much higher pressure than what if you've got 100 pounds pressure per square inch pushing on a piston rather than about 15 which the earlier engines had it was going to make the engine much more powerful and efficient while he was looking at the wonderfully named ding dong mines in penzance he developed his first high pressure steam engine which in the long run led to the development of great big pumping engines like this one here at cornish engines in pool the main market for the steam engine at this time was industry and down here in cornwall there was a huge demand for engines for the mines other engineers took up trivitix application of high pressure steam our cornish engines became famous the world over and during the course of the 19th century they got bigger and bigger and this is the blast of the line of cornish pumping engines on the taylor shaft and it was erected in 1924 and it represents like the ultimate in in mind pumping engineering which started way back in the days of newcomer it ran on a three-shift system with a team of three engine drivers day and night i mean the ginormous size of it it burned 50 tons of call a week and it's got a 90 inch diameter cylinder and it's got a 10 foot stroke that's incredible the majority of these great engines were actually made here in cornish boundaries by people like allman brothers and harvey's avail who made this very engine by the early days they were exporting them all over the world and of course the cornish engineers went out and erected the things and quite often stayed there to work the mines as well another great idea that richard privithick came up with was the chimney of course which improved the draft on the boilers and eventually became quite common in all industrial areas on the skyline the advances richard trevithick made in pooping engines and winding machinery definitely gave cornwall an unbelievable prosperity in between about 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 and sometimes it was the steam engine itself that made it dangerous this is the actual shaft head that had the man engineer at levant basically there were one great wooden pump rod that went right down to the bottom of the shaft and if the engine had a 10 foot stroke it had platforms on and two handles that you could get over and then level down the side of this pump rod there were platforms all the way down at 10 foot centers and a man stood on the platform holding onto the handles and as the pump rod descended when it went down 10 feet he jumped off onto a platform at the side all this in the pitch dart with a candle stuck on top of his head the thing is here in 1919 at on this very spot terrible accidents happen the man who were in charge of the man engine complained to the management about the fact that there was something wrong with the engine and if they didn't do so much about it a bit quick he would leave their employ anyway they didn't do anything about it and he left their employ and a bit later on the engine the beam broke something happened and the rods went down the shaft with all the men on and 36 of them died you know got smashed to bits with the timber and the bits of iron and everything that were coming down and it took four days to dig them all out so this really is a very sad spot here at levant the wall industrial landscape in cornwall is a bit sad really just about all derelict now with little trace of the work of trevithick who was one of the greatest pioneers of steam but his development of the cornish engine wasn't the only thing that made him one of the giants of steam for the thing he never really got true recognition for his contribution to the development of the steam engine not only in mining but steamrolled transports and railways as well because it was his invention of high pressure or a strong steam as he called it that led to the development of some of the world's first steam-powered locomotives and his first was designed to run along the road [Music] trevithick's use of strong steam meant that you could build an engine that weighed about 10 tons that would do the same work as an engine that weighed 650 tons and he soon realized that the engine was quite small enough to transport itself along the road and here at cambo and they've built a reproduction of the puffin devil which is a quite interesting piece of machinery the engine was pretty simple a mixture of wooden iron and all blacksmith made the only drawback was the boiler was too small and the steam couldn't be kept up for long when the locomotive was underway but it was the first successful high pressure engine constructed on the principle of a moving piston which was not only raised but repressed by the steam [Music] on christmas eve in 1801 we rang this up a hill of several hundred yards with a few people hanging on it a bit like this but unfortunately it burnt out while trevithick and his mates were having a bit of a boozled to celebrate their success in a nearby inn this concrete you know it's bad news this first carriage he built was a bit mad looking but it worked and encouraged by his success he went on to build another one that was even madder looking in 1803 richard trevithick built a second road carriage which he drove around the streets of london but he soon realized like the state of the road surfaced that the vehicle weren't really up to it so he abandoned it you can't help but wonder what would have happened if the road surfaces have been like they are today the history of road transport would have been unbelievably different this magnificent engine has been made by mr tom brogdon sort of a chapel i've known for some time a lot of and he's constructed this engine more or less on his own from very few drawings you know when it actually runs to me it's a wonderful creation but what made you decide to construct such a wonderful thing well my wife ruth gave me a birthday card which is of a picture that uh the science museum in london had painted or what they believed this vehicle was like it intrigued me i didn't believe everybody could drive such a vehicle yeah and that set me going and then i looked researched it i went to the paintings office and found the painting joints we don't really claim it we claim it's built it's the travail that carries built to his patent and i dare say richie to visit here now he demanded royalty from me but but he did carry eight people across london from holmen to uh to paddington in 1803 and brought them back the same day yeah yeah which was so they refused to go with him again but a bit of an early ride the carriage will only run forwards this engine is a high pressure simple expansion which uses a water pump to supply the boiler with water we're moving a bit now yeah can i put some on i know it's blowing off but as soon as you're going there well we'll only put a bit on just keep it alive then come off the front a bit hey trevithix industrial engines run at around 100 pounds per square inch but he only ran this at about 30 because he was worried about it blowing up on the road anyway i'll climb up into the uh the driving position ah [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey i really enjoyed that but you can imagine what it must have been like in in the olden days in 1803 when all the roads were full of deep roots from horse-drawn traffic i mean it's all right here on this nice smooth car park but you can see why mr trivitic abandoned it you know maybe you've got to put up with them sort of conditions so trivitic turned his attention to developing the steam locomotive that will run on rails [Applause] well you don't have to wait long to find out more we're back with fred and more amazing machines in just a moment here on bbc2 [Applause] [Music] [Music] steam power brought about a revolution in transport it was one of britain's greatest contributions to the industrial world in the age of steam the railways moved everything and everybody they changed society forever interest in railway started at a very early age now we're born in a in a collection of charist houses somewhat similar to coronation street all clustered together and there's a little lab from the back bedroom window i could loot down an alleyway and see the signal box on the main line from manchester through bolton on the moonlit night you know you could hear the whistleblowing as they were approaching bolton and he'd bash across the end of this guinea with the viral door oh and you could see two characters on the footplate crouched in position that's really what inspired me and got me interested in steam engines then i got really lucky sat on the end of the platform at night with a penny platform ticket in the pouring rain and the guy would come in with a locomotive and stop it dead level with me at the end of the platform have a quick look up and down see if there were anybody of any authority about and then give me a wave to run and jump on the engine and then we went 20 miles through the night it was quite exciting that would have been around 1950 a time when locomotive engineering was at its peak here at the bluebell line in east sussex they have the largest collection of ex-southern region locomotives in the country the very last steam locals were withdrawn from british rail services in 1968 but here you can still see them steaming away this one is a bullied light pacific blackmore veil and was built in 1946. the reason for its name bullied is it's actually named after its creator oliver vaughn snell bully he introduced a lot of new things like electric welding on his locomotive building to keep the weight down and of course put this beautiful characteristic streamlining up to cut the resistance down flight more veil was one of the last bullied pacifics to run a british rail right steve it's like the ultimate that's in it in uh the refinements you know and i know that mr bully did a lot of welding and all of that but what else is there you know i've noticed there's some other fancy bits well they kind of make things easier for the crew yeah for example the steam operator doors which on the main line when you're kind of doing 80 90 mile an hour a great boost because there's a very big draw on the fire yeah so if you can open the shutter doors quickly helps keep uh the heating the other thing was electric lighting to light up things like the daily tips and see where the water level is in the boiler see where the reverser is when it's dark i'm just looking at it though things would have done kind of 18 nice mile now on the main line but here on this preserved railway where all me i won't do 25. probably it's a 25 mile an hour that's just feels like about to take off and you've got to start holding them back very straight yes anybody who's never had a ride on a locomotive going fast he's never lived the pacifics were like the supreme end to the steam engine i remind you of when steam engines the king of all the rails and british rail were the envy of the world basically under all the fancy green paints and the the lagging there's one of these you know the locomotive boiler when it comes into station and you look at it there's the cab of course with the two windows in each corner and near to them is this is this big square bit you know sticking out and then the boiler barrel this is the round bit goes along to the funnel end and this bits here is called the firebox and of course all these are screwed stairs that go through this outer plate here through two and a half inches of water and through the firebox proper which is on the inside and of course if these stairs weren't here when you got the pressure up to 150 pounds per square inch it would soon end up like a great beer barrel so it's gonna have all these stairs which are very important and around the back this of course is if we were if we were steaming along the railway on the railway now the footplate will be about here and of course much wider maybe six feet wide or seven feet wide and there's against this two foot wide and then of course you you know you open the door and i'm flinging the wood and right at the far end you can see all the tubes which of course stevenson's rocket with the first locomotive to have it like this all them tubes go through from the firebox to the small box at the other end you know and and of course the products of combustion and the eagles through almond tubes boiling the water a lot faster than great single fluid boilers you know like the early locomotives that they made and it's time we put some more wood on to get the water boiling right here we go locomotive engineering reached its peak between the 1930s and the 1950s it was the time when the great passenger express locals were built but the earliest railways were very primitive for fires basically just all strong wagon waves their early history is quite checkered and confusing the first railways were developed and get called from the colories down to rivers in the sea and of course this here is the tanfield wagon whale or white railway which shows us a lot really although early railways were developed opened in 1725 it's reputed to be one of the oldest in the world when it first started it was actually always drawn in the 18th century it was the biggest thing that moved coal in all of england you know possibly all the world this wagon here is a it's an original one it's a replica of the type of wagon that we're using on here with wooden rails and of course you can see even wooden wheels it's basically all wool apart from the few iron spikes wooden rails and wooden wheels had lots of disadvantages it only lasted about 12 months before the rails were actually worn away and they had great trouble with the track setting on fire when they break the the wagons they come up with some rather ingenious gimmicks though like they did an actual double row of wooden track so as the top length of it wore away they could take sections out and put it back in without disturbing the sleepers and this lasted right up until the 1830s when the actual track were replaced by metal by this time the first steam-powered locals designed to run on metal tracks that appeared on the scene and the pioneer as with so many things associated with steam was the great cornish engineer richard trevithings [Music] travitic's first steam locals were built to run on the roads the states of the roads were so bad they decided to have a go at one to run on rails in 1804 he was asked to build a small locomotive for a south wales mining an iron company which you call the penny darren and this is it this is a replica of it and it were actually the first real steam locomotive to actually work for a living and it's rather a ponderous thing as you can see the penideren actually pulled the lord of 10 tons of iron ore and 70 men for a distance of some 10 miles at five miles an hour it won richard trevithick a prize of 500 pounds for being the first man in the world to build a successful locomotive penny durham was the first attempt to adapt the steam engine to work on the railroad but there were a lot of problems with it the main one was getting sufficient grip for smooth wheels to run along the smooth track trevithick abandoned his experiments but other engineers worked away at the idea and in the early 1800s one place led the world it's northumbria you've got to come through to discover the early days of the railways here on the puckly wagon where in the beamish opener museum and recreated what the railways of the period actually look like inside this shed there's a collection of locomotives from the very earliest days of the railways this magnificent locomotive is a full-sized looking replica it's so old it's got a wooden chassis and it's called the steam elephant and when you study it like you look at the funnel it's almost like obviously where it got its name from you know it's just like an elephant's trunk originally built in 1815 by chapman and buddle for the walls and cory and it worked from 1815 to 1840 and then it mysteriously disappeared these early locals like the steam elephant were all built the coal mines in the northeast and it was in these mines that the most famous man in railway history works when he was a young man stevenson was engine right at killing with pit so he would have been familiar with law calls like the steam elephant stevenson wasn't the inventor of the locomotive but he played a leading part in turning it into a practical means of all in call and transporting passengers over long distances it was the beginning of the railways as we know them many people think railway history started in september 1825 when george stevenson's locomotion number one pulled a train of 38 wagons from shieldon to darlington and then on to stockton and the wall train weighed 90 tons and it went to the unbelievable speed of 12 miles an hour it had two cylinders which drove beams and connecting rods the driver his position is stood on the side on a plank which is rather precarious so he works all the levers on the valve gear and puts the steam into the cylinders on the first run george stevenson actually drove the locomotive and his brothers acted as firemen it must have been quite exciting really being an airline pilot in 1925 incredible had no break like to stop the thing the fireman had to actually jump off and pin down the brakes on the on the coal wagon fighting early occupation yeah the unbelievable speed of 12 miles an hour after the success of the stockton and darlington line stevenson landed the job a principal constructing engineer for a new line between liverpool and manchester as it neared completion they had to sort out what sort of multi-power was to be used for the line some of the directors wanted horses and some thought stationary engines will be better stevenson was about the only one who backed the local and he managed to persuade the directors to all the competition which became known as the reynolds trials to decide on the best design rockets entered by george stevenson and his son robert was the most successful machine there it outperformed the other competitors with a top speed of 24 miles an hour here at the national railway museum they've got a cutaway replica of rocket that shows the innovations that made it so successful stevenson went way off track and came up with a brand new revolutionary design which of course incorporated the fire tube boiler and which really is is the prototype for all modern locomotive boilers that we know today the thing is in relation to its weight and the power it had you know it went much faster than any other locomotive that had been built before you know it did away with all the beams and the levers of the earlier locomotive this at the time was a revolutionary boiler that had never been done before the fact that the actual shell had 25 copper tubes going from one end to the other and the way to transfer the heat from the fire into these tubes were this creation eel which of course was the beginnings of the true firebox it would have worked much better than just a single fire tube into the boiler of the earlier models the other wonderful thing was the blast pipe which of course when the piston had gone up and down and turned the wheels around the the escaping steam from the valve chest went along that copper pipe and into the base of the funnel where of course it created a vacuum in the bottom which drew the fire with an unbelievable degree of violence the other wonderful thing were the connecting rod which of course connected the piston rod directly to the crank pin on the orb of the front wheels which of course led to nice smooth running and wooden front wheels and springs a lot of the earlier engines didn't have any springs in a rather clever way so the front axle can oscillate and rock about the actual crank pins are like as big as a tennis ball inside there instead of it being parallel it's a round steel ball on the end of the crank pin and the brasses are rolled out like an internal sphere so wherever in relation to the piston rod were the connecting rod the the thing will never bind up as you might say the brilliant idea of using many tubes in the boiler instead of one bigger nor two big ones were a good idea that stevenson didn't invent a a man called booth did a bit of a drawing you know back of a fat bucket and uh or a bit of paper similar size and uh of course mr stevenson were very good at weighing up what were the best on the market and if you don't think patented using it himself and of course it turned out really successful the rockets run for quite a few years after its initial trials at rain hill but the cylinders were too wide up the wall thing was top heavy and when you opened it up it it used to rock about but the rocket really is without a shadow of a doubt the forerunner of the modern steam locomotive as we know it today alongside rocket they've got another of the competitors built by timothy atwood who was locomotive superintendent on the stockton and darlington railway timothy atworth built the sans per eye to enter in the rain hill trials and it were really stevenson's only real rival the sans paranoia were quite old technology for the time it had the usual shell with the usual flu in it and one or two other oddities that the driver were at one end and the the firemen were at the other after a promising start disaster struck one of the cylinders split from top to bottom and of course the water pump failed and they nearly run out of water which would might have caused an explosion but it must have been very difficult for atwood to build a locomotive because he didn't even have a workshop he got to get all the parts manufactured outside by independent contractors and the main parts the cylinders were actually done by his rival george stevenson and of course he were rather bitter because the word sabotage come into it at the end ruined his chances of winning the reynolds trials i don't really think it could have ever won because the rocket really is the engine that were far superior with its fire tube boiler much better steamer altogether [Music] the immediate success with stevenson's rocket finally established what malted power was going to be used on the liverpool to manchester railway and it was immediately equipped with locomotives stevenson got the contract to build them the work was done by his son robert at his fourth street locomotive books in newcastle which soon became the leading locomotive manufacturer in the world by 1830 around 100 locomotives have been built in britain stevenson introduced the planet class for work on the liverpool and manchester [Music] but other railways are different ideas the steam locomotive didn't take over overnight even after the success of the stockton and darlington and the liverpool to manchester railway there were still other forms of railways being built it was a combination of all the horsepower and new horsepower and it seems a bit of a convoluting and a notch watch method to do things but it must have worked because that's what the idea of the cramford and high peak railway in derbyshire when the entrepreneurs wanted to build a canal from the cromford canal to the ip canal it proved to be far too expensive to cut and build locks over these great hills so they settled for a system of inclined planes and flat parts though on the flat parts horses were the motor power but on the incline planes they had double action winding drums and engine hoses wire also went around this wheel and it went all the way down the to the bottom of the round another wheel it would have been away an endless raw polish system the full ones came up the hill that would think there'd be 10 tons of limestone in them and the empty ones came down as a sort of counterbalance originally there were nine of these winding engine hoses and this is the only one left and it actually still works this is it this is the winding engine at the top of the incline built in 1829 by the buttery iron company just down the road basically it's two single steam engines joined together by a common crankshaft with them here as you can see behind me the flywheel in the middle and of course the raw drums disappearing with the raw boat through the wall in the days of light raw fairly low pressures they needed more pressure it were quite common to build two engines and place them side by side like this raw ballage railways like this were quite common and they continued to be built well into the 19th century mainly to paul call this is the boers railway near gateshead which continued to operate right up until 1974 but this sort of thing never really took off for passenger railways and as the railway network spread across the country it was the locomotive that won the day between 1830 and the end of the century massive progress was made in locomotive design this one at the national railway museum is based on a design that robert stephenson first came up with in the 1830s it's amazing what progress was made in such a short time back here on the bluebell line they've got a couple of engines in steam that go back to those early days only 1870s the size of london was exploding and they needed reliable little locomotives for what we now know as commuting services penn church was one of the locals designed for the job this locomotive behind me fenn church is what's known as ataria which of course were like a very small locomotive and very popular in the southern counties and on the rural little lines designed by mr strobely in the 1870s and they made quite a lot there's a lot of nice interesting bits on it like the exhaust can be converted from going up the funnel or diverting into the into the water tanks which of course pre-heats the water and saves a bit of water that would normally condense in the atmosphere i mean considering it were made in 1872 and it's still here it's quite a credit to mr strongly brought the development of the railways wasn't straightforward especially when the great engineer isn't barred kingdom brunel was involved while britain's railway network could develop with a four foot eight and a half inch gauge brunell's great western railway was built with a completely different seven foot and a quarter inch cage when brunel got the idea for his railway he already thought that george stevenson and his son the railway four foot eight and a half were far too narrow and that's why he sent settled on seven foot wide like this you see and of course already enough of england were covered with four foot eight and a half railways and it didn't seem dawn on him that it'd be a bit awkward he rather thought that there won't be much trouble you know getting off a train that only had four foot eight and a half and then getting on another one that was seven foot why for a time they have bought systems the four foot eight and a half and the seven foot gauge running together but as you can see in this little bit here it must have got very complicated when they come to a junction or a crossover no if you get to the outside of a great railway station what's just got four foot eight and a half outside paddington with both sets must have been an unbelievably complicated affair which i think really is the reason that they did away with mr brunel's extra line on the outside a bit of a shame really because i think if the anna's still been seven foot wide it'd have been a lot smoother and maybe a lot faster and and everything but mr stevenson won with his four foot eight and a half the sad thing is that in the 1890s they did completely aware with the broad gauge all the locomotives that couldn't be converted to four foot eight and a half were all given the chop so there are no original great western broad gauge locomotives around today see what they were like replicas about to be built this is iron duke which i'd arrived on when i was at the national railway museum and here at the didcot railway center they are constructing a replica of a broad gauge firefly class locomotive they've got the frames the cylinders the the cranks the wheels and everything or the framing of the running gear now the boiler's been tested and all they've got to do is get the boiler into the frames and connect it all up and then they can go for a little ride outside on a on a section of seven foot gauge track that they've built in spite of losing the battle of the gauges the great western rail area went from strength to strength and in 1902 the appointed george jackson churchward as the locomotive superintendent and he produced a range of designs which were far ahead of the time and very successful the work that was begun by church ward was continued by cb collet who took over from him in 1922 its kings and castles have become a benchmark in the design of passenger locomotives and by the 1930s the great western railways engines were amongst the most famous in the land [Music] here at the didcot railway center you get the feeling of what steam locomotion was like on the great western railway per turn of speed this time yes sir so basically maximum we can do is 25 miles an hour but it's quite straightforward and comfortable yeah what were the big improvements on these particular things well there's a low boiler and also they have as a four-cylinder arrangement there's two sets of motion to drive each pair of cylinders yeah from bred somewhere they they've got to get from london to bristol a mile a minute one of the requirements and they certainly achieved that they could go faster but i think uh with 100 an hour was a little bit pushing them yeah how many of survived of this particular eight i believe there was originally about 171 what lines did things run on the great western lines radiated from paddington so they used to do is going west country to bristol on the more direct line through extra plymouth and also on the lines of south wales and up to birmingham [Music] by the 1930s when this was built steam locomotive come a long way from the first primitive efforts they've been making just over 100 years earlier between 1804 and 1971 britain built an incredible 000 steamworker motors without a doubt the development of the railways have been one of the greatest technical developments in british history [Applause] or from steam trains to the channel tunnel next on bbc2 alan titchmarsh reveals how you can walk to france in a natural history of the british isles [Music] this is my backyard everything's driven by steam i don't need electricity the boilers produces the steam to drive three steam engines that work all of my workshop but the drawback that is against an electric motor is the fact that you know you can't just press a button and start it off takes me roughly a day to get the wall place going [Applause] the only thing awful about belt driving machinery is just at the crucial moment the belt breaks and the job stops but it's very cheap [Applause] at one time it was full of steam engines around here driving cotton mills and engineering workers and the likes now this must be the only steam powered works in all of bolton for nearly 200 yards steam rolled the wheels of industry making britain into 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 were developed from the textile industry all this were done a long time before the steam engine became fully developed quality bank mill at style is hidden away behind manchester airport when the mill was first built in the latter half of the 18th century they use water power to drive the new revolutionary spinning machinery and it is without a doubt one of the very best places where you can see the steam engine and water power looking together the original water wheel was designed and built by sir william farber of manchester who were very famous for his what they call suspension water wheels which of course i rather think comes from the fact that they put the first segment in the bottom of the water wheel bit and anchor it to the spokes and it'll be suspended move it round one and put another and move it round one and put another in and eventually it would end up round when this water wheel were first installed steam engines were quite well developed but they were a bit unreliable and of course this thing runs for nothing and all the trouble with breaking down and bringing coal and all that it still was a formidable source of power as you can see with the size of it he's looking through these reduction gears behind me a lot of power there to drive all the machinery in the mill even today the the weaving shed takes its power from the water wheel and this is part of the transmission this great vertical shaft that comes up through three floors up to this level where the weaving headers and of course the bevel gears and then the horizontal shaft and then the counter shafts and then the looms proper but these things were always this great source of trouble the great weight of a vertical shaft especially in a spinning mill which nearly always were four and five stories high the great problem we're getting the the weight of each length of the vertical shaft like equalized on like thrust bearings and they never could quite get it right and they always got hot at the bottom and of course once it got off the wall mill had to stop basically the transmission into the from the water wheel comes up the shaft up the vertical shaft then of course it's it's transmitted into these long ones which are called line shafts in reality these are not very long you know i mean some of them in the olden days when the torque started at one end the other end didn't move for a bit until it actually twisted the shaft there was such great weight on them and of course they started off at the driven end quite thick and by the time they'd gone the full length of the weaving shed they kept stepping down a bit in diameter you know because of the twisting action it became quite an r setting up line shafts these things are called wounds spinning cloth with the noise levels are terrific can you imagine what it must have been like with in a room with 1500 of these things all going at the same time but 16 hours a day the great problem with water wheels they were very economical to run and all of that life but there were one big problem in times of drought the work stopped and everybody out warm so they have to bling in another way to drive these machines steam power was only introduced really to help out the water wheel all wood thinking mill owners soon realized that it was 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 just to help out the water wheel in times of drought in 1936 mr greg replaced his original engine with a bolton and watt beam engine the ball of 20 horsepower by the end of the 18th century bolton of what had taken the lead in steam engine technology up to this time all the early engines including watts could do nothing but 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 have been built using quite primitive methods the blacksmith had done everything by eye as he banged away on his anvil but all this was to change bolton what worked everything out in advance with measured architectural style drawings for all the machines and the parts it was really the beginning of the engineering industry as we know it and in the archives of birmingham city libraries they've got an interesting collection of watts papers and drawings including some that related to an engine they're built for a manchester cotton though this is an agreement made between james watt and matthew bolton you can see there they've signed this this is made with their customer a man called peter drinkwater who was a manchester united cotton whilst drinkwater was having the engine built and having the agreement drawn up he obviously decided that him he needed more power for his cotton mill originally he asked them to build him a six horsepower engine but he changed his mind and decided he wanted more power so they had to change the specification to eight horses and you can see where they've incorporated the change into the agreement yeah eight good horses absolutely yes not not eight weak horses good horses and of course james what was the man who who introduced the term horsepower into engineering usage and bolton what were very keen to define exactly what their engines are being used for so up here it sets out that the engine is being used for the purposes of preparing and carding cotton drinkwater has to apply to the said james watts and matthew bolton for their consent yeah you were pretty s 20 on all this tattle like he was it was indeed 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 and the interesting bit is were they decided to change it from a six horsepower one to an eight horsepower one they put another couple of inches in the uh diameter of the cylinder yes you can see they've crossed out the original dimension of 14 inches and increased into 16 on the beam they were even telling you what sort of wood to make it out of it seasoned straight grained young oak and you can see here in the in the the spring beams across the top made out of rather broke so it's so much softer the steam engine had arrived and it had a massive impact the rapid rise in manufacturing completely altered the wall skyline pits headgears like this one at the shortner museum sprang up all over the skyline and it won't very long that the mine owners and the core owners realized that as well as pumping water the steam engine could be used for lowering men down fast to get to the work quicker and of course bringing up the end product cage up to cage your call yeah this is one of the earliest types of of this winder they were quite common in the north east of england so box turned with a vertical steam winding engine which of course in its time it'll brought literally millions of tons of coal from the bowls of the earth in north outer cage with two decks and two subs in each in each deck you know maybe five or six hundred weight in each tub every time and of course it would wind the men up and down as well but sort of uh a bit slower than what they want to call the engine driver he's gonna get the call coming up as fast as he could for the money's been called production sword and gas got deeper and this enabled the manufacturers to install more steam engines and burn more coal and of course it's really what made great britain great by the middle of the 19th century the steam engine had been honest to nearly every industry that were around it were cheap to run it it made manufacturing much easier and of course the industrial revolution had arrived and it had a massive effect on the lives of all new working people as they began to move from the countryside to the new industrial cities these were springing up close to the coal fields and the transport links that could get the raw materials to them [Music] this is the etruscan ball and flint mill here in stockholm trent and you might be wondering really what a and flintmill is well crushed up bones and flint so one of the main ingredients in fine born china here in itruria it was a center 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's a copy of a bolton and watt engine made in salford in the 1820s the drive shaft goes through the hole in the wall from the engine room to drive the machines this is the other side of the all in the wall and it's called the gear room you can see why with these big wheels and what happens in here really it just spreads out the rotary motion of the beam engine on the other side into two great big 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 of course turn around these big paddles and mixed up the flint and the ball but before they could be put in the pans they had to be 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 pebbles turned in all the lot room ground it into a beautiful white spine slowly to make it all work they have to have an efficient way of raising steam this is what's known as a cornish boiler reputedly invented by richard trevithick in cornwall and that's why it's called the cornish boiler and basically it's quite a simple thing it's a it's an iron tube with two end plates in and then there's another iron tube of a smaller diameter which is this one here which is termed as the fire tube which goes from this end right through to the other end and at the front end of this tube behind these doors the fire is lighted on the grit and the products of combustion go down the end of the back of the boiler up there and along the sides and then finally goes up the chimney so they utilize as much of the heat as they can out of the products of combustion on the fire only have a fire in here a few times a year but at all i've got steam up most of the time it's very important to know where the water level is and of course this particular bit of it here is the water gauge and when you open this valve at the bottom the steam pressure inside fires the water down and of course when you shut the valve it's forced in at the bottom by the water pressure for all the steam and you can see it rise up again a bit higher up of course is the pressure gauge you know which is a a great clock with a steel spiral tube inside it that when it gets up to pressure or its pressures rising it works a quadrant and a rack in it and it sort of registers on a needle the pounds upon the square inch that's in the boiler the steam at the back that you can see issuing is not that the boiler is leaking it's the safety the hole so we haven't got that they do a blow yeah people don't realize really they like the power of steam the this boiler looks peaceful and tranquil and not making any funny noises and there's only 75 pounds per square inch in it other than being very hot it's uh it's like a potential bomb in a way uh this is like a demonstration of what's inside you know 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 where things went wrong one day newspaper man came in here and with his cameraman you say and uh and the cameraman said you know he said he were getting on a bit the camera man he said when i would have land and i worked for the choily guardian he said the editor said you get off to such a bodies we've been chat there's been an explosion and he said i'll set off down the road with my camera and arrived at this weaving chair to to be greeted by an unbelievable scene of carnage and disaster on the in the weaving chair which of course was mainly run by women all the machinery and the lion shaft and started going around it's a thousand miles an hour and everything was shaking the wall works looks as though they want to fall down the governor's on the engine have gone wrong the engines building up revolutions and going really really fast and two of them in the engine room one of them says i'll go and get the women out of the engine out of the weaving chair you go and see the engineer about getting the engine stopped and the guy who we're going to the engine house halfway across the mill yard when the thing the wall thing gets falling and he cooked his life he ended up dead but the the man in charge of the engine he was turning the stop valve off on the engine and he just got it down to shut when the wall thing blew apart and all as it did would break his arm you know he survived but bits of the engine were going through like coronation street type rooftops 500 yards away down the road you know unbelievable and that would quite weigh it on about 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 middle of the 19th century bolton and watts rotated beam engine began to give way to this thing the horizontal steam engine and it's reputed that the first man to come up with the idea connecting the cylinder to the crankshaft in this fashion was richard trevithick and along with a gentleman in leeds called matthew murray they developed the horizontal type of engine and there were literally thousands of engines like this made from little teeny ones three foot long to the biggest one on record were made by a company in bolton called the car grieves and reputedly the cylinder were 10 feet long the horizontal steam engine was much easier to manufacture in all sizes and you didn't have to have a great big tall engine room to keep it in to build an engine like this all that you needed were a big lathe a shaper and a good iron founder and you could make one in a shed shedding by yeah i'm more or less doing myself once or twice we all know that's the cylinder that's the connecting rod that's the crank pin there's no bending or forging involved in it it's a big iron bar for the crankshaft the disc is a cast in and of course the flywheel is casting two arms 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 mill or a factory as steam began to replace water power there were two things that were needed like plenty of coal and a good transport system and of course here in a place like wigan where the coal stuck out the floor five foot thick nearly everywhere it was the ideal place and it first became a boom tone i suppose it'd be like anywhere else during winter you won't be able to see for the clouds of smoke that came out of the many great chimneys and all the mill owners and the pit owners all lived in country somewhere in a nice mansion that they built out of the ill-gotten gains of the lads down below the earliest factories only employed 20 or 30 people but by the middle of the 19th century they built great places like this behind me which of course could do many different processes and employ literally hundreds of people this is trenchifield mill at wigan pier and he knows is one of the world's biggest surviving mill steam engines william woods built his mill here in 1907 was a state-of-the-art spinning mill fireproof floors five stories high and room for a thousand employees and now i'm gonna see if they'll let me play with the engine this great engine behind me once draw all the machinery and on five floors and it were built by john and edward woods of bolton about 1907 and i'm going to do making it go you know you've got to turn this great valve and hopefully all the connecting rods will be in the right shop and it'll set off here we go bit stiff on the valve this engine is what's known as a tandem cross component triple expansion it's got four cylinders and in the small ones comes the high pressure steam and of course it's exhausted into a receiver and then it goes into the wall pressure ones which are the biggest and when it had the grand opening each side of the engine were chris and alongside gold leaner on one side called ellen and they were the daughters of the engineering company that built them and it's 2 500 horsepower it's rather fantastic into it really the size of the bits and pieces you know like you think about your mama did all and you got a connecting rod like that which must be about way about maybe three tons uh incredible piece of tackle they did things in a grand style this particular part of the building is called the rock race and of course the reason for that is obvious that the ropes are all racing around and there would be as many as four or five to each floor and all together on the drum i think there's 55 grooves on the drum ways 70 tons that's one hell of a wheel in it in the days when these things were run commercially this place were quite a frightening place to be because there's a lot of daylight now who's shining in here but when it was full of raw paul going in different directions and bouncing you know it were quite quite frightening the only time they could mend them were in the middle of the night you know the rope splicer had to come in the middle of the night because they never did many night shifts at cotton mills and splice a new roll from newport two inches diameter bed of cotton the industrialization of the great cities put a terrible strain on the antiquated water and sewage systems many new reservoirs had to be built and of course to pump water to them many new pumping stations had to be built this is one of the more ornate papal work built in 1884 pump 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 and 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 and down here they used five tons of coal a day on three of them the other three were on standby they always did things like that at waterworks is just in case and the pressure's getting a bit lower now so come on jeff well i've i've done one side fred so if you're this side right [Music] [Music] these two double acting beam engines are thought to be the last two that james watt and company ever made and they pumped 1.5 million gallons of water a day from a well 200 feet deep and then a further elevation of another london feet and then it went by gravity to all the way to nottingham although these engines were built in 1881 they still use the rather old-fashioned cornish principle which of course proves what how successful and economical the cornish boom engines were and how they lent the south to pumping water it's interesting that by this time james what am company related to using high precious steam and of course something that james what himself once said years before that richard trevithick should be on for using high pressure steam because of its danger that lovely noise takes me back a bit i remember as there's a lot of about 16 or 17 rather full of fear climbing up the engine oh steps and looking at the thing going wrong through the window and seeing the engine minder in an easy choice snoozing but he won't really be asleep he'd be listening for any strange change in the pattern of noise that were coming from the thing which of course demanded something we're going wrong these great beams transfer the power from the piston rod to the pump rods down the down the well or the shaft they weigh 13 tons apiece have you ever wondered how they got them up here because there were no fancy cranes in them days there's lots of lovely old-fashioned pictures exist with great piles of great box of timber and they're basically jacking up the beam as the engine room came up and then you slide them in over the top of the central beam that they pivot on and the angles in the roof really weren't for lifting the wall thing up they were just for lifting one end up and maybe replacing a bearing when the engines of the building were finished they were well on the budget and with all the money they had left over they did all these wonderful embellishments like the stained glass windows and the character bits outside and the fish and the birds and everything it's rather sad really that general the general public never saw any of this you know really like the waterworks superintendent and maybe some of the operatives you know but it really shows you how proud the victorians were of their engineering achievements from the industrial revolution back to the stone age in alan titchmarsh's natural history of the british isles next on bbc2 [Music] my greatest loves of my steamroller which i've been running for over 30 years now and my tracking engine which i've been working on for about the same amount of time it's funny really that it takes so much time to restore them when engines like this weren't around for very long it was only from around the middle of the 19th century until the first world war things like this were on the walls by the 1920s steam was losing out to diesel and petrol engines and by the 1940s steam vehicles were heading for the scrap yard in the thousands fortunately some of them were saved by men who like these magnificent machines as much as i do and in this program i'm going to be meeting some of them looking back to a time when our roads were full of engines like this one of mine about 30 odd years ago i bought a steamroller and i think i will ripped off a pair 175 pound for it you could buy a steamroller about that time for about 60 pounds just beat the scrap man anyway time went by and this steamroller were an incredible wreck the back wheels leaned in on each other and if you went over a manhole cover the road wheel banged on the edge of the rim of the flywheel and it made the most unbelievable noise that you could ever imagine so painstakingly slowly but surely made a new one when people think about steam vehicles on the road they think of great big heavy things like this one of mine that weighs around 12 tons but the earliest vehicles to travel on the roads weren't like this at all this is a replica of a road steam carriage that was built by the cornish engineer and inventor richard trevithick in 1803 and it's quite light and elegant looking really on the first steam vehicles that were built to run on roads continuing like this for some time by the 1820s all sorts of people were trying to manufacture steam carriages not for their own private use but for to transport the pain public the thing is that a gentleman called walter hancock seemed to do quite well he built quite a few and this one here is is a replica of one of his the enterprise which he built in 1833 and of course tom brogden who's actually recreated this masterpiece is here tell us a bit about it in that right that's right yes walter hancock in my opinion walter hancock was the best of these early players he built some magnificent machines and this was the middle of the range he built yeah and it's a powerful fast base compared with anybody else 20 miles an hour he was doing for the roads what the stevensons were doing with the railways with rockets so this is a contempt but a contemporary of rocket i know he had a bit of bother didn't he they ended up with an explosion yes one of these boilers exploded but his borders weren't terribly uh so they weren't the best part of it they were like seven modern house central heating radiator just bolted it with bolts through yeah with the final yes and as you can imagine that the radiator is soon burst although yeah yeah yeah the metal burst even one in your house friends me sometimes so that was certainly a weakness of hancock i mean silence really would be very important wouldn't it to gain sort of the friendship of the authorities because of not frightening horses and things like that he said that the machines his machines were so quiet the horses come and looked in the cab to see how they worked and then of course the stagecoach men were very jealous and tried sabotage didn't they rolling big rocks in his way i think that actually finished him off didn't it he ran out of money as well yeah yeah but there's certainly a lot of antagonism all right and then yeah explain all the all the pedals we have a steering wheel yeah yeah there is nothing that looks like a brake here but it's to release the steering so you can turn the steering wheel it took three people to uh operate it with one person here and one person in the middle and usually a guy on the back i'll have a quick say around the campus [Music] [Applause] do [Music] [Music] steam carriages like this proved to be an efficient form of transport but they were badly let down by the state of the worlds and they never really took off in the way that railways did what we got instead was the tracking engine and in the second half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th rare big engines like this were the common sights on the roads and in the countryside broad locomotives provided the heavy haulage of the day and steamrollers were developed to build the roads they ran on in the fields traction engines were used for plowing and thrashing and shurman's engines all fur ground rides around the country and provided the power to operate them an engine like this could weigh anything up to 20 tons basically they were very similar to railway locomotives this bits of course on a locomotive is the main bit you know the firebox this plate here is what's known as the throat plates it joins the square bit up to the round bit and this is the boiler barrel which is the round bit and inside there there are 32 two inch diameter tubes that come from holes in the top of the firebox right through to the front tube plate which of course is hiding underneath here behind here where they all pork out and that's just a big void called the smoke box and of course the products of combustion come from the firebox through the tubes to the front and then i blasted up the chimney by the exhaust pipe it's turned into the base of the chimney forming a vacuum inside the rear end this is the back axle and the reason for this moon shaped oil here it's not worth that it's the it's the amount of play that the the axle has on the springing gear this nice brass tap here is a very important bit you get your water from when you're making the tea out of it it's only for washing your hands you know i wouldn't recommend depends where you fill it up of course you know i won't recommend really brewing tea out of it but the earliest ones were nothing like as big as this and the first ones couldn't even get round under their own steam when it would realize that some sort of power had got to be introduced into agriculture the steam locomotive on the railway were already fairly well developed and they the locomotive boiler you know with the obvious thing to pick and of course they put a wheel on each corner and a pair of ice shafts on the front and called it a portable and of course it would have very handy machine you know it were it sort of you could take it from farm to farm and work the thrashing machine you could put it up to great saws you could put it up to rock crushing machinery you can make it what pumps in industrial areas like pumping building works out they even made some called semi-portable which were a portable with no wheels they get it there on wheels and then take them off there's a lovely example here built by mr rawlby of lincoln and it's a beautiful piece of tattle here at the olikum steam collection you can see all manner of steam engines portables and traction engines that were used in agriculture right up to the middle of the last century even long after traction engines had been established there were it was still like a great market for things like this the semi-portable you won't believe it really but it's a portable engine it's just vaulted onto the top of the boiler like the richer farmers who had enough money can have a static engine room driving all this tackle whereas the farmer who were less affluent he had the thrashing man come in with his flashing box and his uh traction engine this one here were built by raubis of lincoln in 1915 it drives a great thing called a raxor with a five-foot blade on it that of course it's salt great trees into planks and wood for making boston rail fences and all that type of stuff the semi-portable was good for jobs like running a sawmill where the wood could be brought to the engine but they also needed engines that could get around the farm under their own steam [Applause] by far the largest of all traction engines though were the ones that were built for plowing right these two here behind me at oligom steam museum and of course in 1940s when they first put the idea of using steam power for plowing he had various different systems that weren't a great deal better than horses but then a man in leeds called john fowler came up with the right idea to put the blinding drum underneath the boiler and have two engines one on one end one and one on the other and and then he put a lot of thought into the plow and when the thing we're going across the field to the other engine you dumped the throw into the ground in the back when it got to the other end you lifted it up on the other end you've pulled it back which were quite a good successful way of doing things if you go to lincolnshire and you see the feels all lovely and flat and big and i think that mr fowler really were responsible for that with a bit of godzilla very beautiful and level the world locomotive very similar to an agricultural traction engine but it had a few refinements uh number one they were always a few horsepowers more in in power it had three gears most of them had three gears uh it had an extra tank under the boiler for extra water so it could get a bit further and here there's a beautiful example of the fordham road locomotive pulling two of its brothers that haven't been finished off on a thrashing box at the bike well the engine itself is a very handsome piece of tackle you know and you can see it's got a beautiful finish on it and made in some batch by uh fordens who of course are still making modern wagons to this very day raw locomotives were in use for around 80 yards and there's no finer sight than a collection of engines all steamed up and ready to go this is the stumpjar steam museum in norfolk and the man who owns it is mr james king you have to tell me how it all started well my father he i think he was a deprived child and he didn't have a train set this is what originally started the whole thing off i think and then when we when combines first came out they used to combine the barley but the wheat used to be stacked and then crashed and they used to buy an engine drum an elevator every year a different one a different one because they'd buy the complete set for about 100 180 pounds ready to work yes and they'd thrash it and then at the end they strap them then one of the men on the farm said to them well why don't we paint one of these up because rallies were just sort of starting and that's what started the whole thing off oh yeah and then it sort of blossomed yeah you know how many engines have you got well i think with fraction engine shellmen vengeance rollers etc and stationary engines i think we've got approximately 30 but i never have counted them exactly it's very strange it's all gone in it i mean 30 years ago i paired 170 quid from this gimbal no they're asking like twenty thousand though a crap don't steamroller yeah you're very lucky now if you guys stephen because i bought that garrett there i had to buy it off my father's uh what i don't know what you call a lady friend or whatever oh yeah i don't know yeah i had to pay 35 000 for that yeah yeah that really hurt yeah it did happen it is a machine though yeah that's the only only seven horse piston valve left that one that's unique a little engine it's like driving a mini that's a lovely little thing and then we'll go on that one certainly have the little garrett traction engine there around the ride on we're a garage that's the only one you'll ride on like it because it's unique yeah the only one left the traction engine made a big difference to farm work the engineer could drive the traction engine toward it was needed for things like pulling down and all in big trees and for threshing corn or sawing timber [Applause] trees that have been fell not to be all wanted flat ground to be loaded onto carts the transport to the sawmills less manpower's needed and more work could be done in a day than ever before and it's only because of the time and money and cheer our graph put in by dedicated enthusiasts like some of the people who brought their engines here today that we can still see them all right it's really nice to see you know us here today doing like pulling lumps of wood about and look good engines really doing what they were supposed to do well now then i have a friend who's got a clayton and joshua is that right yeah yeah yeah yeah yes it's uh what year is this one 1919. have you had it long no only last july we got it oh you're finding it well we had to go on other engines before with friends yeah yeah and uh sort of been involved in other clubs just do your apprenticeship yeah yeah we had some good teachers you've got the wife and all the kids with them yeah they all take part in the engine and all have a little bit to do with it so passion we've got between us it really does take a lot of dedication to get them back into their original condition my tracking engine now is all coming together a bit like a mcconnell set i'm very pleased to say after about 27 years of uh bit of struggle and a lot of mistakes and whatever but we're nearly there and of course it's pretty self-explanatory really the the round bit underneath is the boiler and of course the bit with all the brass on at the end there is the cylinder block this is the brake of course which acts on the inside of the rims of the back wheels like disc brakes in a way this is like the equivalent to the gearbox on a car like sort of thing that's it that's in in bottom gear it's all such a good fit this bit is the uh special traction engine gauge the company is very nice they sent me the pamphlet with the original pricing seventeen and sixpence that's unbelievable now for the steamrollers the first one was built by thomas eveling in 1867 and basically it was a variation on the tracking engine they got a traction engine and put two conical shaped rollers instead of front wheels on it with a central pivot but the conical shape rollers sliding effects or they developed then a pair of front forks and two rollers for the differential movement on the dead axle through the through the bottom about 1930s they stopped making steamrollers and of course uh the steamrollers that they made in 1930s lasted up till 1960s they were so good you know i mean even today when you're going along motorway you know when kids are in car they say well a steamroller it's not a steamroller really it's a diesel roll but they're all still referred to as the steamroller a steamroller is a bit harder to handle than attraction engine and they can be quite dangerous things as i found out to my costs some years ago i got this job dismantling some beautiful victorian chimney stacks and the grand plan was to lower the stones down off the roof of the building onto the trailer and then go with the steamroller and bring them back home i got a phone call from a restaurant which is situated on top of a mountain outside of bolton and the man at the other end he said i believe you've got these stones with holes in i said all right would you how much will you sell as a wagon lord for i said give us 80 quid and he said yeah very good and then i thought oh you're going to get up the mountain the weather couldn't have been worse it was autumn the leaves were coming down things were terrible and we set off full evaporation and fear and we came to the bottom of the first big hill when it went line up the hill more trouble it took us about an hour to unload the stones off the trailer turn the engine round at the top of the hill and we're coming down there and all traction engines and steamrollers have a design fault there's no brakes we're about halfway down the mountain and it's going really fast we've got to do the casey jones job put the engine in reverse the wheels are going backwards but we're accelerating down the mountain the man from the restaurant still on the trailer at the back when he realized things weren't going according to plan he did his good day and jumped off over the wall into the middle you might be laughing no but 20 years ago i come down this hill and the road were only half as wide as what it is now and it were a one-way street being pushed by a trailer that weighed three and a half tons and the wheels of the steam roller weren't even going round you know it would just like a big sledge and by the time we reached this spot here we were doing about 40 miles an hour which is incredible for someone like a steamroller a retraction engine and of course i've got to do something because if we attempted to get run the 45 degree bend we'd never admit it and over there there's about a 15 foot drop into the back of an hospital and i have visions of dead old ladies and twisted national health bedsteads and maybe an explosion and a lot of steam but then i saw that pillar and i said aim for the pillar and we hit the pillar but it didn't stop the engine the engine proceeded to take off up into the sky with the back wheels somewhere on the top of the stump of the pillar i think you're a lot thicker and a lot wider and of course it's definitely been rebuilt because it's not damaged now at all the thing is that the real wheels were on top of the pillar and the boiler dug and all in the road about about 18 inches deep i just wrecked something that it took me 20 years to make it go anyway i managed to get it fixed so there weren't too much of a problem the trouble what steamrollers weren't really designed for raw dollarage if my traction engine had been finished and i'd about that to do the job i wouldn't have had any problems back here at oligum you can see another type of engine in action as well as providing power in the fields and for agriculture and raw knowledge it soon found its way onto the foreground to drive all manner of fire ground rides and of course generating electricity one of the interesting things about the showman's engines were all the wonderful embellishments you know the stars and the candy cross but the most important one was the sticking out of a dynamo on the front end to generate the electricity to provide all the music and to drive the roundabouts this wonderful ride was called a set of golden gallopers obviously the horses in the galton about steam were first introduced into the foreground about the 1870s but really it were a man called frederick savage in kingsland coming from like agricultural beginnings uh started to make roundabouts and eventually the engines in the middle you know the little engine in the middle that propels it all is called the center engine and of course the wall roundabout is built around that engine on a on a little trailer and they went from strength to strength and then all sorts of weird and wonderful program rides all powered by steve when you think most people only had oil lamps in their houses and electricity were a wonderful thing in itself and of course these fellas arrived in the village we were quite something to see all these lights blowing away [Music] i couldn't have a ride around on that one while it was driving the roundabouts but they had one that stumped you all that i was able to have a go on one of the first rides i ever had on the traction engine were on one of these i'm going to ask the driver if i can steer it down the road with him i think he'll let me um they're all right chris nice they made these engines and even more more and more beautiful and bigger and more grander and the very last that we ever made were made in 1930s all the old x army wagons even after last war in 1945 that there were lots of american ebiology wagons that pulled tank transporters and and of course straight away the program then jumped onto them and and made really the showman's engine obsolete just disappeared oh you can't really see a lot driving one of of course these golden days everybody got out of the way yeah yeah by 1940 the scrap yards were full of derelict shulman's engines in very sad sad condition you could purchase one for a few hundred quid and no it's like three hundred and thirty thousand a piece incredible you know i think some of them programmed men wish they'd have kept it in corner of appeal somewhere thank you for the ride i'll i'll see you around later on see you man really you can see that when these things were made although there weren't too many motor cars and they were basically king of the road you know sort of thing if anybody saw one coming they got out of where and they like here at strum show they've got a fine collection that you know more and more more most of them will run along the road and this thing here is is like the weirdest thing in modern technology in steam wagons it's a four and six tunnel over type steam wagon and i think pip the driver is gonna want me i'm gonna go in it so i'm gonna climb up and have a look around all right all right not so bad having an enjoyable day very good yeah yeah take a seat so i know what the basic bits are like that's the reversing lever yeah they're going forwards and backwards and this of course is the regulator that's right and this is the steering wheel yep all right and that must be the brake that's the handbrake yeah and also we look you have a flat brake on it as well how many gears are there three oh yeah we've got lots of three gears yeah i think really we'll start off in bottom vehicles what sort of speed does it do on the alt road but we can get up to about 18 19 miles an hour is the uh the very efficient um not bad these steam wagons were developed to a very ideal by 1936 around about then they were brilliant they made the diesel wagon and the early petrol wagons puny looping these steam wagons that do like 40 miles an hour with a trailer full of rolls of cloth which big rolls of cloth are really heavy and they just come down the middle of manchester road like an express train everything got out of way and would have safety balls blowing out itself and the driver hanging out the cab all black you know because of the rather strange way of putting coal on you know it's like a dust bit in the boiler inside the cow with the lid on top and when you let the lid off you know all the heat and the muck coming out in your face and they still beat the watts it off a petrol engine and then the men who sell the oil got a bit upset about it and they altered the road traffic act so the axle weights became very important and of course the weight of a steam wagon compared with a petrol wagon made it uneconomical to carry on with the steam wagon even though as efficient and powerful that it were they were slowly but surely abandoned the traction engine the foreground engine survived up till about 1949 in some cases about 1950 and then finally all gone you know but for the preservationists and the restoration men you know i'm afraid they have gone forever people don't realize there's nearly four thousand steam driven road vehicles in all of england it's incredible really so there's still plenty of them around today [Music] [Applause] and there's more from fred and the age of steam next this morning on bbc2 and the extraordinary changes it made to the shipping industry [Music] by the middle of the 19th century railway travel have made the world a much smaller place people and goods could be transported to length and breadth of britain at speeds that nobody could have imagined 50 years before then steam power was introduced to the oceans to make sea trouble between the continents faster sadly none of the big steam powered liners have survived unlike railway engines and traction engines they were just too big and costly to renovate and keep running once third time was up [Music] but you can still get a feel of what a steamship was like because there are still some of the smaller ones around this lovely old steamboat is the ss so walter scott built in 1899 by william denney of dunbarton and then there's nearly every scottish lock and some sort of steam ship company plying on its waters to supply the houses and farms from the edges when it were actually built it would it were no great shakes you know it was just another steam launch on one of the scottish locks but now because it survived it's quite unique but it's the only one left and one of the reasons it's survived is it doesn't do any polluting unlike a diesel engine that spits all sorts of stuff out into water the steam engine doesn't the water of what katrina is the actual drinking water of glasgow so they can't afford to muck it up by having diesel engines like on windermere and places like that there's nothing actually leaves the bolt and goes into the lake so let's have a look at the engine this is it this is what's known as a triple expansion marine engine and if you were really protected by an american called john elder in late 1880s and of course eventually it became to be the main units of propulsion in almost every ship they ever built and in my opinion it's not gone for any better i mean if you go in a modern ship and there's a diesel engine driving it it's rather an oil tank a little bigger than this but the noise it makes is incredible the man who looks after it isn't in lovely tranquil surroundings like what we are doing here he's in us in a soundproof box with earmuffs on because of the bloody knowledge you know in my opinion we've run backwards when it comes to looking at someone like this on the ss walter scott 100 years old and sweeter than that the triple x punching engine turns a screw propeller and it's this that powers the ship through the water very nice it is too [Music] but the first steam-powered ships were propelled by paddle wheels like this the first battle steamers were built in the early 1800s but like early locomotives they had a lot of limitations they weren't very seaworthy and the the great problem were keeping them supplied with coal because the boilers were only economical and of course when they rocked over you got one side out the water and all sorts of terrible things happened they were mainly used on rivers and very near the coastline so something else had to happen and it was one of my heroes ismart kingdom brunel who made the breakthrough the ss great britain was built by brunel and it was one of the outstanding engineering achievements of the victorian age it was the first big ocean going ship to be constructed from iron and powered by steam brunel's original plan had been to build the great britain with battle wheels but he knew that paddles weren't the best form of propulsion for crossing the ocean and by this time a new method of propelling ships was being developed which involved having a screw propeller attached to the stern of the ship belt or the water line brunel decided that this was a big advance on the paddle wheel so he made changes to his design the development of the screw propeller was one of the most important in the history of seafaring brunel went on to build an even bigger ship the great eastern which had paddles and the propeller but it was the propeller that went on to rule the waves within 25 years of the launch of the ss great britain massive advances have been made in the building of propeller-driven iron steamships and from the middle of the 19th century onwards all of the great trans-atlantic liners and propellers all the really big steam ships have gone but there's one or two small ones survived and this one behind me the ss shield all was built in glasgow in 1955 he had a rather different occupation when it were first built it was owned by glasgow corporation and they used it for delivering treated sewage out into the sea in the summer months they tell me it doubles up as a passenger boat so as well as sailing out to sea with the treated sewage it had a load of passengers on as well it must have been a bit whipping anyway it survived here now and it's here in southampton and they do cruises it's one of the few seen sailing around the salon today so i'm going for another look at the engines and what it's all about inside hello john how are you doing man i'm afraid i see you thank you come and have a look at our room right she was built as a coal-fired ship but she was converted in the shipyard before she left certainly he's never had any cold shovel damn what pressure did they roll runs at 180 psi yeah lots of pressure in it mind you for compounding three times you need to start off with a big high pressure we do yeah how often do you have to sweep the tubes oh we got steam supplier yeah which we would yeah the weight heads right now yeah successfully well we see we've got the advantage the ship can go sort of out of sight of the plan yeah anyway well no we're trying to the engine room okay look at the triple expansion engines all right we could perhaps explain what uh what the trip engine is the steam from the water comes into the high pressure cylinder first off and the exhaust from that then goes into a medium pressure cylinder and the exhaust from that then goes into the low pressure cylinder and the exhaust for that then goes into a condenser where it is condensed and it goes into the feed tank and then it's pumped back in the board again they've got to preserve as much of the clean water as they can the thing is everything on a ship like this is run on steam including the steering the steering gear has got a two-cylinder reciprocating steam engine this alters the rudder angle through a rack and pinion arrangement working on the rudder quadrant rudder movements are transmitted from the ship's wheel on the bridge by hydraulic pumps which form part of the wheel assembly right oh it's nice yeah all these lovely brass electric switches you could have there on your sideboard how does it work this like i know it's the steering gear it's a hydraulic system yeah the wheel connects to a gear wheel inside here which pushes two rams up and down so as one round goes up the other one goes down and you displace fluid along the pipeline yeah yeah yeah it's even there's an even a checky well notice when you move wheel the pressure look at that 200 psi already just stopped yeah that's good down in it there it is and now it's time to get the engines turning so we can put to sea shield all is fully operational and they do more than 20 cruises every year around the waters of the solar back at home i've got an interesting old book i can use to explain how these triple expansion engines work beyond this lovely engraving of a triple expansion engine where you can most more or less self-explanatory the steam comes in at the eye pressure cylinder end and it pushes the piston up and down after the valves let it in you know sort of thing and then it's exhausted into a receiver where it hangs about a bit until the valve on the intermediate cylinder opens and then it's left through into the intermediate cylinder and it does its work there and then it's exhausted again into another expansion chamber were waiting its turn to enter the the low pressure cylinder and then finally into down here that big square trunking into the condenser what in actual fact is happening is you're using every ounce of the power of the steam it's actually used three times you know in like a single cylinder mammoth type thing it's just used once and it goes up the chimney as you might say but here they get i mean at sea they've got to get every bit of economic economy that they can and of course they they made quadruple expansion engines and all sorts of different variations with three cylinders one on top of each other but in a ball there's no room for that so you've got to go along although the really big ships have all gone you can still see what the huge triple expansion engines that powered them were like because they weren't just used in ships this is the branch pumping station near wolverhampton which has been restored by an old friend of mine when craig expansion engines in here are the sort of size that the ones on the titanic would have been anyway come up here and have a you want to go look there yeah this is um this is where it all happens it's almost like a ship isn't it yeah yeah well then basically it's the same engines that we're in the titanic yeah beautiful yeah crossing the north atlantic yeah when we first first opened that regular the very first time and it moved and turned over a lovely feeling you wonder what they're all for really but they're all doing something yeah the world's got to keep advancing on it but in lots of ways not for the veteran or the instead of sitting in the bloody office with a mouse and one of them len's a real good steam man and he's known this engine and been involved with it for nearly 60 years but this isn't always got here parked outside he's got this lovely steam clean there's not many of these around and there was no way i was going to leave without having to go on it we've got three speeds okay no it's incredible yeah come on little toot yep these crayons were built to all big industrial lancashire boilers and breadth of the country from the motorway the boilers would weigh up to 40 or 50 tons and it would take a week to get from wolverhampton to birkenhead with such a huge load it's a very versatile engine crane and a big traction engine all rolled into one so when they've got a boiler to deliver to the docks or the shipyards the crane will be used back at the works to lift it onto the trailer [Music] once you are loaded up the traction engine will take over and tow the trailer from the works to the docks and once it got there the claim will be used to unload it i really enjoyed that but getting back to the water the canals were still very important even though railway mania had gripped the country by the middle of the 19th century the canal network were still thriving for the transportation of goods and steam power came to the canals this is the steam none of all the presidents it's 70 foot long and it's always riveted wrought iron with an elm bottom and it was powered by a compound steam engine the problem with the steam driven canal bolt is the fact that the machinery took up too much room like you could get 25 tons on a normal horse-drawn canal boat but one didn't buy steam you lost about 12 tons of valuable cargo space it had one good thing about it though it could pull two fully loaded canal boats called butters behind it because it went along so i suppose in some ways you know it would have a bit of an improvement on the noise the boiler is caught fired and is fed with filtered canal water by a steam pump the original engine has been replaced and the power now comes from a simple twin cylinder engine that came originally from a thames launch [Music] on the canals the steam engine was put to a variety of other uses especially for pumping this is the crofton pumping station on the kennett and haven canal near marlborough in wiltshire the canal which connects london to bristol at this point is much higher than any natural source of water and of course every time a boat comes to cross over the summit uh the water's going to be pumped up out of the river by the beam engines to enable the locks to work properly the beam engines were installed at crofton to make sure that the locks always had a supply of water the locks are actually 14 feet wide and 75 feet long and contain 70 000 gallons every time a canal boat comes along 70 000 gallons of water has got to be pumped out of the river at the other side of the canal the building that houses the engines is over a total of three floors and this is the top floor where of course the great beams are and the pivoted on on the beam wall which of course is the main wall of the engine house it goes across from one side to the other and straight down into the foundations and of course it's very strong because it's gonna support all the pull and thrust of the engine it's actually got two working engines in here one of them is an 1812 bolton watt which is the oldest working beam engine in the world still in its original building and still doing its original job on the middle floor like you get some idea of the feeling of power it's got an eight foot stroke and 42 inch diameter cylinder or pistons and of course here you get a good view of the the central wall which supports all the beams which in in turn support the great cast iron beam itself because the the actual engine house is really part of the engine this is the ground floor where the engines control from and at this end is the actual pumping engine also on this floor as well as the controls is the boiler room which contains two lancashire boilers that run on 20 pounds per square inch doesn't seem a lot that does it for moving all this massive iron but the secret is the actual vacuum and atmospheric pressure by the end of the 19th century the steam engine was being put to a wide range of uses and when engineers were faced with a problem of how to construct a bridge over the river thames that will allow big ocean-going vessels to continue to come up river into the pool of london it was steam power that came to their air because the idea they came up with was a bridge that was based on the basquial principle of a lifting central section and it was two huge steam pumping engines that provided the power to lift the bridge this is one of a pair of compound steam engines that actually works two water pumps that pump up the weights in the accumulator to actually make generate the energy to to what the hydraulic engines that that make the bridge lift up these two large green iron tanks contain approximately 100 tons of iron blocks and the steam engine works the water pumps that actually pump a column of water up underneath the hundred tonne of iron and when this valve here is opened like i'm going to do now the wall over tom's comes down on the piston compressing the water and enabling the hydraulic engine to move and what the quadrant that raises up the bridge muscule is actually french for seesaw and this is the base of one of the piers that the bascules swing down into in spite of the complexity of the system they only took about a minute to raise to their maximum 86 degrees this is the actual valve that controls the pressure from the hydraulic engines and of course i've just shut it and downs come in the bridge today the vascules are still operated by hydraulic power but now they are driven by oil and electricity rather than steam and back in the 1890s when tower bridge was first ordered a revolutionary new steam engine was set to make a dramatic first appearance that's an event designed to gain the maximum publicity for it in 1897 in celebration of our diamond jubilee queen victoria had the wall british fleet lined up with spitzed i think there were five lines six miles long of british battleships and cruisers witnessed by the crowned heads of europe and the world into the middle of it all an only invited guest game speeding through the fastest thing anybody had ever seen on water it was the little 44 ton experimental steam turbine vessel that had been built by charles parsons here it is the world's first steam turbine ridden ship the turbinia and it's got pride of place in the center of newcastle's discovery museum when it were actually in use the wrecking flames used to come out of the funnel and of course charles parsons himself for being here in this control room shouting instructions down to the lads in the engine room and i mean the thing did an unbelievable 34 knots i think which is nearly 40 miles an hour and nobody had ever seen anything go so fast on the on the water before the success of the turbine here really stemmed from two innovations number one the steam turbine and number two the slenderness of the all mr parsons did a bit of ruin you see so he made it right for roinborn on the river cam in cambridge with these sort of speeds the steam turbine could no longer be ignored the admiralty immediately took up a system of building destroyers with steam turbines inside them the steam turbine is like a series of windmills inside a case or the wind can't extend escape you know sort of the the instead of it being wind of course it's steam and it's impinges onto all the the blades of the windmill and they're all attached to the same shaft and of course it it makes it go faster i've got a wonderful book here that describes i mean when you look at a steam turbine it you don't look much at all it's shrouded in cheap tin that covers up the great casing that contains all the works when we've taken off the lagging you've got to lift up the next bit revealing the the main spindle and that's the what that holds it all together or it all spins around on and then at the left hand end here is the main steam valve or the main delivery of the steam coming in to feed the turbine there's the main steam pipe most of it's lagging to stop condensation then we'll we'll sort of take the inside of the outer case in a way uh which reveals the the actual blades or the the windmill part of it inside there's like a a slight taper in in these veins and the reason for that is that the narrow end the eye pressure comes in and as its energy is expanded it it sort of you know it has less power it it the veins are a bit bigger you see and that's the way that you know it utilizes all the full power of the steam when you see one in reality it looks ever so fragile you know and you think you're going around with a bit of muck guaranteed smash it to pieces and these are the actual turbines in turbinia there's actually three turbines in here like a bigger in the middle and two smaller ones on the on the outsides each of which has a prop shaft that sticks out at the back end with three propellers on each prop shaft that's some power you know when you think about it sticking out the the stern end of the ship it's crammed a lot of machinery in an old woods yeah ugly eight feet wide it's bad enough really with the with the ship stationary but what it must have been like doing 40 miles an hour must have been incredibly hot by the 1920s turbine driven liners have taken over the world shipping routes the steam turbine virtually replaced the older reciprocating steam engine on major vessels on the seas the turbine driven liner represented the high point of overseas passenger trouble turbines meant that ships were not only bigger than they'd ever been before but were also faster the white star and the french line among others were competing to make the biggest and best liners but the cunard line was the leader [Music] alas you can't see many of them know but there's still a very special one that you can look around this ship is the world's most famous turbine powered ship the royal yacht britannia was built by john brown at clyde bank i must say they had a wonderful job of the old when you look at it outside it's perfectly smooth and the reason for this is they're actually butt jointed the plates of the all and of course they're held in position by my straps on the inside with a double raw rivets which is a wonderful way to build the board and much cheaper whereas lapa warbler and you could see big rows of rivets and a lap joint but with this method you'd all see anything it's like as though it were made of plastic my name is ship britannia the royal yacht was launched in 1953 and commissioned in 1954 and between then in 1997 it furried the queen and the royal family around the world almost a thousand times here i am in the in the art of the ship the engine room and of course these are the turbines the steam comes from the boiler house along this big fat pipe here into the high pressure cylinder which is the the smaller of the two black things when the steam had done its work in the turbines and it turned the spindles around into the gear boxes which are these two big white bits with lots of lubrication pipes on and all of that it then in turn turned the two prop shafts to the stern end of the boat where it turned around the propellers in a way we went it actually took britannia more than a million miles from the world with these two engines without a real major refit this is one of the two great gearboxes that transmit the power from the turbines to the prop shafts the prop shafts are 30 meters long and about 12 inches diameter and turned the propellers at the other end of the stern end of the ship which are 10 foot diameter and it developed 12 000 horsepower and of course propelled the ship at 21 knots this area here were quite important it's where the wall ship will control from of course all orders from upstairs on the bridge and the captain but all these beautiful chrome and plated wheels represented full forward gear and full backward gear and all the pressure gauges and vacuum gauges were all important on you know getting it all running in the right direction i mean there's lots of wonderful bits about it that wouldn't normally be on a on an oily ship i mean steam valves have a notorious habit of dripping and and of course they've got beautiful chromium plated drip trays with little drains underneath so no doubt it was some guy's job every every morning to come around with the draining cannon and drain them all off when you're done with the main steam turbines that propel the ship you've still not done with steam around here there's another three steam generating sets you know i'm stood here in sort of a miniature power station with three steam turbines that generates all the electricity for the ship charles parsons has revolutionized marine propulsion with his invention of the steam turbine but the turbine wants to have an even greater impact on the provision of power for the 20th century and beyond [Music] alan titchmarsh explores a time when industry physically changed our landscape next on bbc2 british isles a natural history [Music] throughout the 19th century the steam engine was used for everything from driving machinery and mills and factories to propellant ships across the oceans and from lifting coal from the depths of the earth to powering great locomotives but one man was to change all that with the invention of a completely new type of steam engine that was to revolutionize the supply of power the steam turbine was invented by charles parsons and it was to have a massive impact on the home on transport and on the workplace in the 1880s when parsons was at university the industrial revolution was in full floor mainly powered by great reciprocating steam engines in one form or another a lot of them driven by bevel cog wheels and shafting and of course the noise were terrific fingers i had a friend once who god bless him as deceased now and he he was the chief mechanical engineer for a textile firm up here called um van toner and he and i used tell me tales about when when he had to go around reporting steam engines and of course you've got to put yourself in the picture it's the middle of the night and it's like no three o'clock in the morning and they think they've ironed out the problem with this steam engine which had a great deal of bevel gearing in its transmission to different parts of the works and they decided to give it a run you know and they started it up for the noise the next thing outside the middle gates there's about 20 people who'd been walking up by the noise of the gearing and thought it was like seven o'clock time to go you know sort of thing incredible and of course this of course led to uh the quest to find something that didn't make as much noise and the answer to that was electricity which changed the wall where the machinery like this was driven up to this time belts pulleys and gears were the only way to take the energy from the point of generation and deliver it to a machine that was some distance away the coming of electricity meant that the energy could be delivered directly and silently to a mortar on the machine but electricity didn't make steam redundant the thing that made possible the mass supply of electricity steam and nearly all the electricity generated in great britain comes from power stations like this behind me and of course the steam turbine in 1888 charles parsons installed his first ever steam turbine in fourth frank's power station in newcastle on time and that was the forerunner of many many more and we still use the steam turbine today this is egg butter power station in east yorkshire and it's fired on pulverized coal that means crushed up coal and it does five percent of great britain's demand for electricity you know anything just one power station that's a lot of electric five percent for all of great britain these cooling towers are 380 feet high and approximately 200 feet across the base and have you ever wondered why they need to be so large there is a very good reason for it and i think what we'll do we'll have a loop what it's like inside the sole purpose of it is the cooling water from the from the turbines enters in a series of pipes a few feet below where we are here with the warm water going down it creates slight warmth inside this great chamber and then through that big gap bottom the colder rushes in and of course cools off the water and then it's sent back to the uh condensers in the power station you know the heat of these great cooling towers and of course the steam issuing from the top can be seen 10 and 15 miles away the stuff that comes out the top of here is quite harmless it just turns into jew and floats away you know i don't do any harm to anybody the call arrives by train and there's a thousand tons on every train mode when it arrives it's turned into where these conveyor belts are over the back and of course pulverized into a very fine powder coal dust is highly inflammable as soon as it goes into the boiler it explodes with an unbelievable ferocity and generates a hell of a lot of heat peak periods when everybody's turning on the microwaves and the cookers and lightened electric fires it burns 800 tons an hour here i am in one of the great boilers incredible thing almost like a cathedral down in the bottom there's a great boiler full of water which is connected to another great drum at the top by thousands and thousands of yards of tubing which contains an unbelievable pressure when it's going of 2 500 pounds per square inch and when the coal dust is blasting through these nozzles here these are the burners you know blown in which in the middle here is just a great unbelievable fireball impinging on all these pipes each of which is full of water until it gets higher up where it turns to steam at that great pressure here we are in the great turbine oil where there are full of separate steam turbines and generators what naturally happens steam enters the turbine by a series of nozzles around the perimeter of the blades inside the casing of course when it comes out it expands and and turns the rotors we use every available ounce of pressure that is in it really it hasn't changed very much since 1884 when mr parsons first designed it it actually revolves at 3 000 revolutions a minute and of course turns the shaft that works the generator next door which is really a big electrical magnet that generates the electricity even in a modern nuclear power station like this one at their shim in lancashire steam is still at the art of the process the main difference between a coal fired and a nuclear power station is the fuel instead of using coal the nuclear power station uses uranium contained in metal fuel rods to eat the water which makes the steam to turn the turbine but although nearly all of industry is powered by electricity today there are still a few businesses around that do things the traditional way like this little brewery tucked away in rural oxfordshire here at utm brewery steam is arriving well they use a combination of original steam power and years of expertise in the brewing trade to produce their prize within earls and stout they are still broodier using the traditional methods in this beautiful building that was erected in 1899 this is it the main power plant the steam engine that were made 104 years ago by buxton and thornley at burton on trent especially for the brewing business it works all the plant by a system of line shafting and bevel gears and corn clutches to every floor in the place and over here this is mr james clark whose family have ruled this brewery for five generations and he's going to explain a bit about it and our idea being a prairie we always have a sort of abundance of steam around we've got two uh modern oil fired boilers so we're really just using some of the steam that's there anyway so these ideas of combined heat and power plants for climate change level yeah not particularly new now i first i'd far rather see equipment like this working yeah than just there for show and that's what this does it's there to work it's all nice yeah all right what exactly is going on in here man well in here we've got uh today's brew now just come at the end of its boiling process energy being supplied by the steam that run the engine it's the basis of beer but it's not being fermented yet um we've added the hops you can probably smell that in the environment and shortly afterwards this will be run out into another vessel called the hotback where we'll remove the solid hot material uh ready for its cooling process i had an uncle once we made hot bitters and i think he went to a brewery bobby spent ops you know all right yeah right good stuff it weren't alcoholic though you it was just like drinking beer but you didn't get drunk yeah i'm not sure about that i never did the gristmill is yet another example of the original machinery is still on day-to-day use in the brewing process here and it's still drinking my steam the mill breaks open the malt grains so the flavor comes out in the blue at the end of the process the engine pumps the brew all the way up to the top floor for cooling this is our work pump again driven by the steam engine yes the main crank at the top it's actually a bank of three pumps yeah the work that we saw boiling in the copper earlier has been running to the hotbacks behind us here uh the hops are being strained out yeah and the work's now being pumped nearly to the top of the brewery again yeah when you're going to pogba where there's not many people seen under the counter but the tackle runner is very similar in it but when you see a pint please and then that's just the same design that's a positive displacement pump which is uh very gentle on the liquid it's moving thank you well here we are drinking a sample of the end product brewed by steam power hmm very nice though but there are not many steam engines still earning the living like the one at hoot norton hundreds and hundreds of them have been scrapped but some have been saved and have now become museum exhibits this is the national railway museum in new york where they have some of the most famous locomotives in railway history the air force pacifics were built by sir nigel gresley and when they first appeared in the mid-1930s the revolutionary design caused a sensation mallard was one of the many a4 class steam locomotives built by grassley for the london and northeastern railway and of course with all its wonderful streamlining it went very fast from up the east coast from london to edinburgh non-stop the first of nigel griswold's a4 pacific's left doncaster works in 1935 and it wasn't long before a major problem manifested itself the things went that fast the current breaking system of the period were no good and they had to get the westinghouse break and signal company to redesign all the braking system gresley decided that it would be a good opportunity to push the locomotive to its limit and maybe capture back the speed record of the lms people also maybe get the world speed record back off the germans it must have been very exciting in 1938 when the driver and the fireman climbed on board mallard left grantham heading towards peterborough with six coaches and a dynamometer car to register the speed and the power and they reached the unbelievable speed of 126 miles an hour it must have been exciting up here going that fast believe me they were all shaking about everywhere you know i remember listening to the recording of the the money watcher we drove it after the event once over the top i gave my ladder head and she just jumped to it like a live thing after three miles the speed meter in my cab showed 107 miles an hour and before i knew it the needle was at 216 and we got the record go on all girl i thought we can do better than this so i nursed her and shot through a little bathroom at 123. only 124 125 126 miles per hour 126 that was the fastest speed of team locomotive had ever been him in the world mallard now as pride of place in the museum it's the biggest collection of railway locomotives in the land the biggest collection of steamrollers and traction engines that i know of is also in a museum at thirstford in norfolk and it's one i've known about for a long time when i was about 15 years old it came to my knowledge by people who travel a bit further than i'd ever traveled that deep hidden away in a place called firstford in norfolk there were a gentleman who'd got a feel for the steam engines incredible everybody said he went mad because he was buying them 40 odd years ago for like 25 boned each and that's about all they were worth you know and some of them got cut up for a lot less the man who actually collected all these his name was george cushing and he collected 45 i think of these engines i mean he's really got nearly one of every type of traction engine and portable engine that you could wish to have this one here which is uh i know for a fight one of mr cushing's favorite makes the evil england porter thomas airling did a great deal for the development of the traction engine after the eveling the next one on the list is is a burrell which of course just like airlings they were like country blacksmiths in thetford it makes you wonder how they could have constructed somewhat like this in a in a village in hidden away in norfolk that's amazing all of them each individual person who the beginnings of the firms were village blacksmith uh and then of course you know they've developed and developed into quite big engineering concerns that that made literally hundreds of these things right up till 1930s when the death knell were here you know it didn't they didn't really have a great long life you know not as long as the actual steam locomotive this is what's known as a savage center engine the engine were placed in the center of a great roundabout they built the roundabout roamed the thing and it's rather interesting because this is thought to be the second oldest one of its type in existence quite lots of nice embellishments on it and looks very pretty doesn't it mr cushing bought him not because he thought thousands of people had come and looked at him he bought him because he really loved him he realized what a shame it would be if they all got chopped up i did have the pleasure of meeting him i'm afraid to say he just passed on at the ripe old age nearly 99 he were only a week short or something like that but whatever he did he do it deserves a lot of recognition for serving all these magnificent pieces of machinery he never really saw the end of his dream because there's still another 30 outside that have not been done up yet but hopefully someday they will be nearly all labeling them portions you know that's one just like mine at all [Music] literally dozens of them in there everywhere incredible place to get all this while running the game would literally take thousands and thousands of manners fortunately there are plenty around that are still running kept alive by enthusiasts like this lot who gathered for a steam phone in gambon [Music] hello fred how are you here how's your tractor doing very well yeah this machine here is one of the oldest abe lincoln port attractors that that got converted to a steamroller didn't it that's right yeah and of course now i'm here to go and convert it back to a tractor somebody said the other diodel it'll look a lot nicer and wet you do redo the paperwork [Laughter] who gave me a passport to come here a long time they make quite a few this is the only mclaren clary engine this size left in the world today it's only through the dedication of enthusiasts like this the historic steam engines are kept alive and in steam there are more than 50 steam railways around the country all run by enthusiasts one that i found particularly interesting is the tanfield railway just outside newcastle one of the things that is interesting about it is that here you can see the wall history of the railways from the earliest doorstrong wagon ways right up to the modern little industrial locals like this one that was built by robert stephenson and company in the 1940s more than a hundred years after their built rockets oh thank you very much today the tamfield railway is run by a group of dedicated enthusiasts yes yes yes yeah we're here to uh get steve up well here at the marley hill engine chest they've built up a grand collection of industrial locomotives that have come from shotgun power stations and defunct goal mines [Music] how many uh welcome office have you got [Laughter] how many wagons would it pull this when it was performing proper you know well it would take nothing of 25 call hoppers drawing them in and out of their calories a few hundred something it runs very sweet doesn't it nice engine it's a nice engine yeah lunges this is the corset arch the oldest railway bridge surviving in the world they were built in 1725 to 26 by a group of core owners who call themselves the grand allies nobody really had built an arch that big in 1725 they used sort of roman technology and for a bit of a guide you know and it were years before anybody built another one as big as this one the thing is that the man who built it so mr wood had a sort of panic attack near the end and before the thing were completed it's reputed that he actually jumped off and never saw it finished you know feared the the wagons of coal going over it might have collapsed it and as many as 900 odd wagons a day went over this bridge for a call [Music] oh the water level all right bush can you throw it up the top of the gas yeah we need to watch it yeah before you go down the [Music] it's a time when stevenson were building lots and lots of local artists the tamfield railway were still running on wooden tracks and horse propelled it wasn't really till the 1840s that steam were introduced here and then it weren't locomotives it were three stationary winding engines and of course all that remains of one of them is this well the saddle in the ground here full of big lumps of stone once here there were an engine room with a winding engine and a great chimney and a reservoir for this boilers then finally in 1881 i think they finally got steam locomotive proper apparently they all were called up and down during the week of bricks and all sorts of other materials but on saturdays the passengers could have a ride on you know the pain public in the same wagons that they brought the call [Music] there were quite a few railways like this round here in the northeast including one from south shields that was known as the marsden rattler by the locals in a way steam has now become a bit of an holiday attraction something for a day out or if you come up here to scotland more like a week out if you take a cruise on this lovely little steamer the vic 32 [Music] [Applause] [Music] and they encourage you to have a go at everything so you might find yourself juggling call or helping to raise the anchor before you set sail to explore the locks and islands off the west coast of scotland were built in yorkshire in 1942 and it's like based on the clyde puffer the flight puffers had no condenser the exhaust steam went up the chimney and helped to draw the fire and it were really designed for inshore delivery boats and all around the shores of great britain delivering all sorts of stuff when we were out in the lock i talked to nick walker the owner of the balls and he told me that during the war it had been used to deliver ammunition it stands for victory in shore craft what did it do like after its stairs of uh you know carrying ammunition well she was laid up in recycled naval dockyard yeah and then uh sent to the scrap yard and in the keithing and keith we have keith tillenberg who used to own the island of egg to thank for rescuing it from the scrapyard my wife and i have spent the last 25 years restoring that and taking people on holiday it's quite a lot of people's dream to actually what to see on a steam driven ship absolutely well the whole thing's a dream come true no let's go down below and look at the engine this is the engine it's a compound which really means that it uses the stream twice and it's like typical of a ball to this sort of style and what really transpires is the steam first of all is used in the high pressure cylinder and then it's exhausted into an intermediate chamber and then it's exhausted into the low pressure cylinder so it equalizes the pressure on the torque on the crankshaft and then after that it's exhausted into the condenser which of course it's condensed back into the water again and used again over and over again is the difference being a seafaring machine i've noticed that the pressure's dropping a bit so i'd better put some more black gold on the fire and get the captain up top from with shouting down his pipe for more steam i'll get on with that i'd rather be on this than on one of them plastic things now i've got steve up he's going to let me have a go at the steering wheel right keeping close to this shoulder yeah yeah you're going to come you've got to come closer you're safer and there are rocks all out here yeah yeah if you just come to starboard a bit yeah yeah because we're clear of that that's right starboard yeah and if you see one i will look out for the other one because they always come in pairs we don't want the rope wrapped around our prop yeah then he put me to work on a bit of steeplejacking [Music] there's no better way to see this lovely scottish scenery than from the decks of a client puffer that's magic i wish i'd have lived in the days when you could travel like this all the time [Music] but steam is more than just enthusiasm or nostalgia steam power was developed here in britain and it's one of our unique contributions to history so it's a great credit to all the dedicated enthusiasts we've seen in this series but such an important part of our other change has been kept alive we're telling the whole story of our lovable bolton steeplejack from its beginnings next on bbc2 stand by for the fred dibnis story [Music] you

Channel: Rick Slobodian

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Id: cwdlgyoKQzU

Length: 173min 3sec (10383 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020