Railways, bridges, ships, the lot: Isambard Kingdom Brunel. ibid.
Armstrong never had any formal training in engineering … The greatest armament supplier of the time. ibid.
Britain is full of magnificent examples of architectural and engineering genius. And it stands testimony to the men who actually constructed it all and of course the architects and engineers who designed it. ibid.
Ha ha. I’ve been up a few chimneys in me time, you know, but I’ve never been up one with as nice surroundings as this one. Fred Dibnah’s Building of Britain e4: Scottish Style
Robert Adam’s style was so distinctive they named it after him. ibid.
This is Glamis Castle – the childhood home of the Queen Mother ... One of the best examples of the Scottish Baronial style in existence. It’s a style that was developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. ibid.
By the eighteenth century the leading Scottish architect William Adam began to design country houses that broke away radically from the Baronial style. ibid.
It was William’s more famous son Robert who took some elements of this and added a lot of ideas of his own to create a style of architecture that is named after him. Robert Adam had spent three years travelling around Europe drawing and studying the great buildings of the past. He was particularly impressed by the remains of the ancient Roman buildings he saw, and it was this that influenced the Adam style more than anything else. ibid.
The eighteenth century saw the building of the first canals and with it the birth of civil engineering. Fred Dibnah’s Building of Britain e5: Building the Canals
The canals were like the arteries of the industrial revolution. ibid.
[James] Brindley was actually a mining engineer ... Work on the Bridgewater Canal started in 1759 ... It was opened in 1765. It was an immediate success ... A major engineering achievement. ibid.
His Barton aqueduct which carried boats forty feet above the river was so amazing in its time it was considered one of the wonders of the world. There’s not much of it left now. ibid.
A canal across the Pennines from Leeds to Liverpool ... A hundred and twenty seven miles and climbed over the Pennine chain – the backbone of England. ibid.
The whole enterprise was incredibly expensive. ibid.
There’s more to lock gates than meets the eye. ibid.
Elm is a beautiful timber for chucking in water and lasting for ever. ibid.
It took six years to build this tunnel under atrocious conditions ... Cut and cover – where they dig a great tunnel through the hillside and then put in the centring ... Lay the masonry which had all been cut to shape ... Cover the whole lot up ... Withdraw the wedges from underneath the centring ... And keep advancing like that ... A beautiful stone arch tunnel. ibid.
Those early civil engineers who built the Leeds and Liverpool Canal helped to revolutionise transport in Britain. They made cheap travel across the Pennines possible, and laid the foundations for the Industrial Age. They helped turn Britain into the Workshop of the World in the Victorian Age. ibid.
The magnificent town hall like this one here at Bolton is a grand example of Victorian civic pride. The success and prosperity that the industrial revolution brought to towns like this left us with some magnificent buildings. The Victorians loved to have everything ornate ... The great age of Victorian splendour. Fred Dibnah’s Building of Britain: Victorian Splendour s1e6
Pugin had a great passion for Gothic architecture of the medieval cathedrals ... He really believed in it with his heart and soul. ibid.
The Houses of Parliament: this was the job that made Pugin’s name. He got it as a result of the old Palace of Westminster burning down in 1834 ... Pugin wanted to build something that would match Westminster Abbey next door. ibid.
Building began in 1837 and the Barry-Pugin partnership was right for the job. Pugin looked after the detail of the design. ibid.
First of all there was water and wind, the earliest forms of power to drive machinery. Then came steam, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Britain led the world in harnessing the power of coal, water and steam to drive the engines that revolutionised transport and made mass production possible. The steam engine really is a fascinating thing. Fred Dibnah’s Age of Steam e1: The Early Pioneers, BBC 2003
The steam-engine really 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 crank shaft or a connecting rod. And the second principle of course is the condensation of steam which creates a vacuum in the cylinder. ibid.
The steam turbine isn’t only used for generating electricity. It serves dozens of purposes in the world of industry. ibid.
Thomas Newcomen 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 at Staffordshire at a colliery, and it proved to be the world’s most successful steam-engine. ibid.
What was needed was a more efficient engine. And this is where James Watt came on to the scene ... In 1769 James Watt came up with the answer: he put together all the existing technology that were known about the steam engine at the time and came up with the revolutionary design that of course earned him the name the Father of the Steam-Engine. ibid.
It was a Cornishman called Richard Trevithick who made some of the greatest advances in the 1790s and the early 1800s. ibid.
Mining was still a difficult and dangerous business. Sometimes it was the steam-engine itself that made it dangerous. ibid.
In 1803 Richard Trevithick builds a second road carriage which he drove around the streets of London. ibid.
So Trevithick turned his attention to developing a steam locomotive that would run on rails. ibid.
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. Fred Dibnah’s Age of Steam e2: The Transport Revolution
By this time the first steam powered locos designed to run on metal tracks appeared on the scene. And the pioneer as with so many things associated with steam was the great Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick. ibid.
Stephenson wasn’t the inventor of the locomotive, but he played a leading part in turning it into a practical means of hauling coal and transporting passengers over long distances. It was the beginning of the railways as we know them. ibid.
Originally there were nine of these winding-engine houses, and this is the only one left. And it actually still works. ibid.
As the railway network spread across the country it was the locomotive that won the day. ibid.
The development of the railways wasn’t straightforward, especially when the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was involved. While Britain’s network had developed with a four-foot-eight-and-a half-inch gauge, Brunel’s Great Western Railway was built with a completely different seven-foot-and-a-quarter-inch gauge ... They did away with Mr Brunel’s extra line on the outside. A shame really. ibid.
In spite of losing the battle of the gauges, Great Western Railway went from strength to strength. And in 1902 they appointed George Jackson Churchward as their locative superintendent, and he produced a range of designs that were far ahead of their time and very successful. ibid.
Between 1804 and 1971 Britain built an incredible one hundred and ten thousand steam locomotives. ibid.
For nearly two hundred years steam drove the wheels of industry and made Britain into the greatest industrial nation in the world. Fred Dibnah’s Age of Steam e3: Driving the Wheels of Industry
These things are called looms for spinning cloth with. The noise levels are terrific. Can you imagine what it must have been like in a room with fifteen hundred of these things all going at the same time for sixteen hours a day? ibid.
A Boulton & Watt beam-engine – all of twenty horse-power. ibid.
By the middle of the nineteenth century a steam-engine had been harnessed to every industry that was around ... And it had a massive effect on the lives of working people. ibid.
This is what’s known as a Cornish boiler – reputedly invented by Richard Trevithick in Cornwall. ibid.
People don’t realise really the power of steam ... It’s like a potential bomb in a way. ibid.
By the middle of the nineteenth century Boulton & Watt’s rotating beam-engine began to give way to this thing – the horizontal steam-engine. ibid.
It was a very efficient way of driving machinery. ibid.