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The coming of
Steam
The harnessing of steam is one of
clock time and sun
time the railways
Before the coming of steam, ordinary folk like you and me would probably
have been tied to a life of backbreaking toil on the land, because that’s how
some 95% of us earned our bread.
I have to admit to an element of bias here, because my ancestors were
among the pioneers.
But to me the harnessing of steam was one of the Great Inventions of
Mankind, up there with writing and the wheel.
Before the coming of steam, everything had to be done by muscle
power. We tend to forget this when we
read Jane Austen and other pre-steam authors.
Their heroes and heroines were taken from the moneyed elite. And maybe their lives didn’t change very much
when steam came.
But most people’s lives were transformed. The Industrial revolution had already started
when steam hit it (more) but the
transport revolution hadn’t. (Canal
aficionados will be after my blood for leaving out their favourite transport
system. But I did admit to being
biased.)
Very soon after steam hit transport, it hit the farms too. Along came huge traction engines, powering
giant threshing machines, or hauling 10 furrow ploughs across the fields on
cables. And within a few years the
proportion of people working on the land was down to (I think) less than
10%. There were casualties to be sure. But prices tumbled and most people saw huge
benefits.
Clock time and Sun time
Before the coming of the railways, every village kept its own time. When the Sun was out, the church clock was 
adjusted from a
sundial. These were often mounted on the
south-facing side of the church tower. This
one adorns the church at Market Harborough in Leicestershire. A wall-mounted sundial looks quite different
from the normal sundial that we are used to, but the principle is exactly 
the same. The gnomon (pointer) still points to the Pole
Star, but it points backwards through the fabric of the building.
Time ‘of the clock’ was regarded as inferior to true Sun time – and for
good reason. If you look up ‘The
Equation of Time’ on the Internet, you will find that ‘clock’ time and ‘Sun’
time can differ by up to ¼ hour at certain times of the year. It has to do with the vagaries of the Earth’s
orbit. This is why, in our northern
climes, the mid-winter mornings carry on getting darker for several weeks after
the evenings have begun to lighten. You
hadn’t noticed this? It’s true. And it happens because ‘clock’ time is
averaged out over the year. If you reset
your clock regularly from a sundial then this wouldn’t happen.
Of course the railways couldn’t be doing with all these different
times. Over the 1840s they gradually
adopted Railway Time (Greenwich Time) for all their services throughout the
country. Clocks were extremely accurate
by then, as this picture of the 1837 master clock from Euston Station in
Unfortunately most of
The railways
Before the coming of steam, travel was slow, expensive and
dangerous. This picture comes from the
Northern Echo 
Railway Centenary
Supplement, and it shows “a heavily laden stage wagon plodding slowly along
under eight horse power”. Leisure travel was the exclusive privilege of the
rich:
John Gilpin’s
spouse said to her dear –
Though wedded we have been
These twice ten tedious years,
yet we
No holiday have seen.
William Cowper (1731-1800)
Gilpin was real, and a wealthy man. Yet Mrs. Gilpin’s
idea of a 20th anniversary ‘holiday’ was a day out, by chaise and
pair, to a famous local eating house! (I
can recommend the tale of “John Gilpin”. It’s on the
Internet. His adventures, trying to follow his family to the pub on horseback,
are amazing.)
However then came the world’s first successful steam ‘demonstrator’, the
Stockton and Darlington Railway. And 
within a very few
years, the railway companies were taking us ordinary folk to the seaside in
trainloads – for very little money. And
we ordinary folk had the leisure to go.
The next few pictures come from the Stockton &
Darlington website. The first
depicts the ceremonial opening of the Railway in 1825, and shows some of the 38
wagons being hauled by George Stephenson’s ‘Locomotion’. The wagons at the front weren’t meant to 
have people
in. They were already filled with coal
and flour. A coach, called ‘Experiment’,
was provided for passengers. It was
thought that only rich people would want to travel on the Railway. How wrong can you be? The second picture shows a modern replica of
the locomotive.
Here is an unashamedly Pease-centred account of how it all happened.
Edward Pease was a Quaker businessman, born in 
North-East of
The Quakers thought big. And they
had a special pact with God that allowed them to make as much money as they
liked, as long as it was a by-product of doing good. All this slow and painful travelling gave
Pease plenty of time to ponder the thought that “there’s got to be a better way
than this”.
So by 1817, at around 50, Pease had retired from the woollen business to
concentrated on putting the ideas he had had into practice.
The invention of crude wooden rail-ways, plate-ways, or wagon-ways are
lost in the mists of time. But by the
late 1700s, reasonably good ones were being used in mines, both underground and
around the pithead. And Pease knew that
a horse could draw 10 tons along a level rail-way, whereas on an ordinary road
it could draw “scarce a ton”. He also
knew that mine owners were beginning to build private railways to carry coal
from their mines to nearby large towns.
So he developed the concept of the railway as the new King’s Highway.
That is to say, a public rail road on which
hauliers would pay to transport their
wagons. It didn’t work out quite like
that, but the principle was sound.
There had long been a plan to build a colliery railway from the
“… if the railway be
established, and succeeds, as it is to
convey not only goods but passengers (my italics), we shall have the whole
of
So, unlike all previous railways, the Stockton and Darlington was to be
a Public railway, open to both freight and passengers on payment of a fee.
As soon as word got round that Pease was serious, George Stephenson
walked into his life. The well-educated 
Quaker businessman,
and the self-taught engine-wright from the coalfields,
hit it off at once. And the two remained
friends for the rest of their lives.
Stephenson was given the job of surveying the line. He introduced Pease to his latest colliery
steam-engine, Blutcher – worth, as he put it, 50
horses. Pease was converted, and his
railway became at least partly a steam railway.
One of the plans had been to dig a canal for the level parts of the
route, and resort to a railway for the hillier parts. But Pease was having no transhipments en
route. On another occasion, Stephenson
pointed out that the direct line to the coalfields didn’t go near Darlington. He was put straight very firmly. “George, thou must think of Darlington : thou must remember it was Darlington sent for
thee.”
George Stephenson did not invent the steam locomotive. The first serious (stationary) steam engine
was built by one Thomas Newcomen nearly a hundred
years before (around 1710 during Queen Anne’s time). It was huge, very inefficient and was used
for pumping out tin mines in Cornwall.
Early steam engines worked by vacuum.
We won’t go into it, it’s on the Internet. But the main points are that it didn’t matter
too much how big they were, or how inefficient – and there was no need for a
dangerous pressurised boiler.
But a locomotive had to be small, light, powerful and economical – and
reliable too. Again others had shown
the way, but none of their efforts came to much. Stephenson’s great achievement was to make it
all happen.
For a locomotive, you have no choice but to resort to high pressure
steam, and find a way of making it safe.
You also need a small but very powerful furnace. The ‘steam draught’ was invented, I think by
Stephenson. It’s what makes steam
engines chuff, and it makes the fire burn with terrible ferocity.
Meanwhile, the businessmen of Liverpool and Manchester were being held
to ransom by their local canal company.
They saw what was in progress across the Pennines, and they wanted one
too. But they had far more money to
invest, and they wanted a railway bigger, better, faster and more
reliable. Stephenson was hired and,
with all this money and the experience of the S&D, he gave them all
three. With his new locomotives,
including his famous ‘Rocket’, he was able to make the Liverpool and Manchester
another great step up. But it was still
the S&D that showed the way.
The railways were a major part of the Industrial revolution, and it’s
difficult sometimes to separate out the benefits that these two massive
developments brought to mankind. But
cutting transport costs was of itself a huge advance.
Within a very few years railways were criss-crossing the country, just
as Edward Pease had predicted.
Stephenson’s son Robert was a major driving force. British contractors were criss-crossing much
of northern Europe with railways too.
The French railways run on the left to this day (if you’ve travelled on Eurostar, you will of course have spotted this as soon as
you emerged in France). If my memory
serves, the Portuguese and Italian railways also run on the left.
These days, large
power stations are the only economic application for steam. But you can still experience steam-driven
fairground rides. And you can watch
steam traction engines drive traditional farm machinery. I’ve not heard tell of the huge ploughing
engines being demonstrated. Maybe the
risk of cable breakage is considered too high for these safety-conscious times.
In many places round the world you can ride behind a steam engine on a
‘heritage’ railway.
This picture of ‘Bittern’ was taken by Dave Warwick. Bittern is an identical twin of the world
steam speed record holder ‘Mallard’. She
has been lovingly restored from the ground up by the Watercress Line. I played a small part in the restoration,
which is why I’m devoting space to it.
The Watercress Line is based at New Alresford
(‘new’ because it’s only about 800 years old).
I’m told that Bittern has been restored to a much higher standard than
Mallard herself. So she should be able
to go quite a bit faster if the opportunity arose. But, as the picture shows, she has been
restored to be used; not to be incarcerated in a museum like poor Mallard.
Cars and lorries took transport up to the next level, and the aeroplane
took it to the next level still. But to
my mind, neither revolutionised ordinary people’s lives the way steam and the
railways did.
© C B Pease, April 08