Chapter 30: The Locomotive

**Dave Broker** (0:06)
By 1822, the merchants of Northern England had had enough. The port of Liverpool was handling a gigantic share of global trade, thanks to the nearby city of Manchester. Ever since strong steam power had popped onto the scene a few decades earlier, Manchester had started producing massive quantities of finished textile goods more efficiently than ever. The region's canal system, once a modern and speedy means of moving said goods to the port, was now overwhelmed and unable to keep pace. And so, some of the region's merchants teamed up for a feasibility study to see whether it would be practical to build a railway between the two cities.
By this point, railways had existed for well over a century. As you may remember from Chapter 6, mine operators in the 1700s realized that laying down tracks would allow their horses to more easily pull coal and minerals out of the collieries down to the shipping outposts. Originally, these rails were made of wood, but in the 1760s, the descendants of iron master Abraham Darby in Colbrookdale had started making rails of iron, which proved more durable. By the turn of the 19th century, there were approximately 1,500 of these short rail lines, totaling about 200 miles across Great Britain. Then, in 1801, Parliament passed an act to establish a long-distance railway between several small towns south of London. Even though the freight vehicles on its line were pulled by horses, this Surrey Iron Railway proved considerably better than the roads of the age and could even rival the speed of canals. Plus, it was a lot less expensive to build than a canal.
Among the investors in the Surrey Iron Railway was a lawyer and mine prospector named William James. Born in 1771 in the village of Henley and Arden, Warwickshire, William James was among the most important and most overlooked visionaries of his day. Just like his father had, James received a good education and set up a law practice in town. He specialized in land property law and counted some members of the landed gentry among his clients, in particular helping enclose their lands and set up coal mines on their properties. By 1812, he was successful enough that he also owned six mines in the Midlands in his own right. As a land agent and as a mine owner, James was keenly aware of the benefits of railways. And as he traveled the country, he imagined railways going up everywhere. And he began to tell others about this vision, even drawing up plans for the routes they might take.
So it was James who was hired to survey the lands between Liverpool and Manchester in 1822 to study the feasibility of a railway between them and suggest a route. James and a team of men would cross fields and streams with a series of chains 22 yards long to track the distances. Also with them was a new, strange-looking instrument with a viewfinder on top of a tripod. This device was expensive and closely guarded by a big muscular workman, in case one of the landowners, whose lands they were crossing, decided to send men out with muskets to confront the trespassers.
To James, this was all a risk worth taking. He could remake the map of Britain, increase productivity, and put an end to the canal era. Because as James knew full well by this point, the railways no longer depended on horses. Over the previous 20 years now, several inventors had built machines capable of rolling along railway tracks, powered with the same strong steam that created that boom in Manchester. Now it was time to put such a locomotive to use on the railway. And not even James could have conceived just how much change it was going to bring.
Thank This is The Industrial Revolutions. Chapter 30 The Locomotive.
The story of the locomotive begins, of course, with the steam engine. James Watt had started building steam engines primarily to drain mines. Matthew Bolton had pushed him to adopt them for rotary motions used in mills. But it was their employee at the Bolton and Watt Company, William Murdoch, who tried to modify the technology for uses in transportation. Murdoch had a tendency to get under Watt's skin, and Watt generally considered these uses of his steam engine to be a distraction. So when Murdoch designed and built a working model of a steam-powered carriage, Watt dismissed it. Watt's biggest problem with the Murdoch steam car was that it required a strong steam engine, and Watt was fundamentally opposed to strong steam.
As you may remember from chapter seven, strong steam describes the power of steam engines in which the steam pressure inside is at least 30 psi. To get that kind of pressure, the engine's boiler needs to be inside its cylinder, creating enough power to move a piston up and down without needing the vacuum created by Watt's special cooling condenser. Part of Watt's opposition to strong steam was no doubt ego. He had made modern steam engines possible with that condenser. And if it was irrelevant, then perhaps he felt his life's work would be irrelevant. But also, Watt knew that strong steam could be dangerous. If not operated properly, a high pressure steam engine could easily explode and kill people.