Steam and Steel

Steam and steel were the game changers

Steam made its first serious appearance in the coal mines. As I told in chapter 3, the depth to which mines were being sunk uncovered, in addition to rich seams of coal, both dangers and difficulties for the miners. One significant difficulty was that mines filled with water from the surrounding rock formations, and this needed to be pumped away continuously for coal to be extracted. Galloway describes a whole host of different mechanical methods employed until the use of the steam engine became a reality in the first decade of the eighteenth century. There has been a number of attempts before, not least by Savery, but it was the ‘atmospheric engine’ invented by Newcomen that brought about a revolutionary change. His engine was described as ‘a machine capable of draining with ease the deepest mines; applicable anywhere; requiring little or no attention; so docile that its movements might be governed by the strength of a child; so powerful that it could put forth the strength of hundreds of horses; so safe that, to quote the words of a contemporary writer, “the utmost damage that can come to it, is it standing still for want of fire.”’ The Newcomen engine did not rotate in the way we think of steam engines on railways for example; it was static and relied on the production of a vacuum, under a piston sliding in the cylinder, to raise the water using atmospheric pressure. These engines were soon employed in many mines which previously had been drained by mechanical means using the power of horses or running water. Osborne asks us to pause at this point and to marvel at Newcomen’s technical achievement, and he writes, ‘Newcomen had got his engine moving a sixteen inch diameter piston through a stoke of eight feet once every four and a half seconds.’

The engine was further developed, often, by those engineers building and installing them. William Brown, working as a colliery viewer near Newcastle, turned his skills to the building of Newcomen engines, but also and importantly casting the cylinders in iron, rather than copper. Brown was also casting, in iron, the pipes feeding the steam engine. Newcomen came from Devon, and was clearly aware of the mining challenges faced in the Cornish tin mines. It was through a Cornish connection that the first Newcomen engine came to be installed in the United States. It was often said that anywhere in the world where there was mining, the Cornish accent may be heard. In the mid nineteenth century Cornwall was the largest producer in the world of tin and copper, as is evidenced today by the many disused mine chimneys along the Cornish coastline as well as inland. The ability to pump water out of mines had made mining under the sea possible. It was said that in stormy weather the miners would hear the rumble of rocks moving on the sea bed above.

These are extracts from my book. The chapter goes on to explore the development of steel.

John Brown was known at the Father of the South Yorkshire Iron Trade. He had been born in Sheffield in 1816 and in 1844, following an apprenticeship in the emerging steel industry, founded his own company John Brown and Co, manufacturing steel from a small foundry in Sheffield.  Four years later, he had developed a conical spring buffer for railway carriages. In 1856, he moved all his operations onto the Atlas Works in Brightside and, three years later, was producing steel rail using the Bessemer process. Possibly one of his most important discoveries was that of rolled armour plate. Previous ships had been clad with cast iron plates, Brown found that, by rolling steel, far more effective armour could be produced. By 1867, three-quarters of Royal Navy Ships had Brown’s armour plating on them. He was knighted in 1867. 

Vickers was one of the first Sheffield firms to introduce the Siemens method of steel production. It is perhaps no coincidence that, in her biography of William Armstrong, Henrietta Heald notes the development of open hearth steel production by William Siemens and Pierre Emile Martin and the huge impact that had on the manufacture of guns by such as Armstrong and, of course, the Arsenal at Woolwich. A major ‘civilian’ company to adopt the Martin-Siemens steel was Dorman Long, which had begun life in 1876 at the West Marsh Ironworks in Middlesbrough. In the 1880s it adopted the new steel making technologies at both West Marsh and the recently acquired Britannia Works.  Steel for railway rails transformed railway economics for the previously used wrought iron had needed replacement every six months. Steel rails could last more than a decade.

I then explore the use of both steam and steel on railways and ships.