Like many of his contemporaries George Stephenson was a semi-literate self-made man. But that was no reflection on his engineering ability or his ambition. And his next project was huge – an intercity line – the first – between Liverpool and Manchester. ibid.
GWR – the Great Western Railway. It crossed over rivers, was blasted through hills, and hundreds died in its construction. And this gigantic wonderful radical piece of engineering was conceived and designed as a whole by one man – Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Mark Williams on the Rails s1e3: Brunel
The Clifton Suspension Bridge ... It was a mathematical masterpiece. ibid.
It took him nearly two years to complete his plans. ibid.
In the Railway Act he hadn’t mentioned what type of gauge he was going to use. He was ready to put forward his big idea ... Just because George Stephenson had started using a gauge of four-foot-eight-and-a half inches, it didn’t mean that all railways would have to be built to that dimension. So Brunel chose a broad gauge – seven feet from rail to rail. ibid.
Land was purchased at great expense from the Bishop of London at Paddington – the Terminus of the Great Western Railways. ibid.
His wide lines caused total devastation to the surrounding countryside. ibid.
Box Hill. Couldn’t go over it. Had to go through it ... He [Brunel] was going to drive two seven-foot broad-gauge lines through this hill. This is Box Tunnel – at nearly two miles long it was the greatest railway tunnel ever attempted, and an infamous piece of engineering if ever there was one. ibid.
Over a hundred men lost their lives, and many many more were seriously injured and maimed. ibid.
An engineering triumph: the Maidenhead Viaduct ... He flattened the arches. Brunel’s secret was in the maths. His pages of sketches are surrounded by detailed calculations. He had projected the force on every part of the bridge with great accuracy. Brunel had worked out how to design arches stronger and flatter than any ones built before. ibid.
He worked it all out by hand. ibid.
By 1892 the battle was lost – the standard gauge prevailed across the whole system. But just imagine what our railways would be like if Brunel had won! ibid.
In the early 1800s Britain was building its first steam-hauled railways. And it wasn’t long before people wanted to ride on the trains. Mark Williams on the Rails s1e5: Carriage Kings
By 1830 Britain had its first inter-city railway. Mark Williams on the Rails s1e6: Death on the Tracks
Boiler explosions were the biggest killers of drivers and firemen. ibid.
By the middle of the nineteenth century there was a railway building bonanza. ibid.
Safety signalling was starting to improve but for the new railway companies which were often cash strapped because of their huge initial investment safety wasn’t always their number one priority. ibid.
Coal: here at Worsley in the north-west commerce, necessity, raw materials and invention came together to kick-start the industrial revolution. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations: Boom Time s1e1, Discovery 2002
Demand for coal was heavily outstripping supply ... The solution to the problem was found in the last place you’d expect: down the mine itself ... Water. And you’ve got to get rid of it because it runs downhill ... And this is the engine that powers the pump. It’s a very special engine. ibid.
Why not use the water? Why not treat it as a resource? In the same way you treat the coal you’ve so heavily won underground. Why not use it to create a canal so that you can transport your coal to your points of sale? ibid.
They laid rails but they treated the route as if it was a canal. Long flat sections interspersed with short steep inclines sometimes up to one in seven. The new railway reinforced Cromford’s importance as an industrial centre. Cheap cotton could now be sent to the weaving mills of Lancashire. These original Cromford & High Peak Company rails are cast-iron and one point two metres in length. They are all straight. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e2: Pants for Everyone
Creamware: a very pleasant tea-drinking vessel. The man who first made this genteel crockery was a hero of the industrial revolution: engineer, scientist, marketing genius – Josiah Wedgwood turned cups and saucers into an international business empire. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e3: Clocking On
The Wedgwood factory near Stoke ... A production line: consistent quality on a massive scale. ibid.
This new product used powdered flint for colour and texture. And was made of white clay and stone from Cornwall and bore clay from Devon and Dorset. And Cream-ware was the speciality of Josiah Wedgwood. Master potter, inventor, and one of the great entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution. ibid.
You can’t put this lot straight into a kiln; you have to make a protective container known as a sagger. And this job is known as sagger-maker’s-bottom-knocking ... Leading to this – the Bottle Kiln. ibid.
In fifty years revolutionaries like Wedgwood transformed the trade of potter into an industry. Wedgwood’s manufactory innovations were so well executed and so durable that Cream, or rather Queen’s-ware, is still made today. ibid.
Steam power had finally arrived in the textile industry. And this is what the boilers are generating steam for: it’s a tandem – because there are two cylinders one in front of the other like a bike – compound – because the steam is used more than once – condensing – because downstairs is James Watt’s separate condenser – creating a partial vacuum in this the big cylinder – steam engine! It develops five hundred horsepower. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e4: Pennine Passage
Because this is what it's driving – three hundred power-looms. You can get an idea of how loud it is, but you can’t feel the concrete floor vibrating ... Now everything is powered by steam. ibid.
A beautiful piece of working iron: a standardised Telford gate design to be found all over his roads. Looks almost Art Deco. Except it’s 1820 not 1920. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e5: Working Iron
What fired Telford’s ambition to create this incredible structure? The answer lies in the specification for this wrought-iron suspension bridge. The iron is to be best quality Shropshire iron. The world’s first iron bridge had been constructed only forty-seven years before the Menai over the River Seven in Shropshire, the heart of the iron industry. ibid.
In 1709 Abraham Darby got a patent for a new method of casting pot-bellied cooking pots ... in sand. In 1709 he moved from Bristol to here. And also in 1709 he did an amazing thing: because he discovered a way of smelting iron with coke ... He truly was the Father of the Industrial Revolution. ibid.
And it was local [Birmingham] traders who took the initiative. In 1769 they commissioned James Brindley to build a canal connecting the local coal mines to the canal. The price of coal halved, cutting costs in the metal workshops. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e6: Coining It
Matthew Boulton, the great entrepreneur ... It was his collaboration with James Watt, the father of the steam engine, that really put Birmingham on the map ... In thirty years they dispatched over five hundred steam engines via the canal network to mines and factories all around Britain. ibid.
Boulton was always quick to spot an opportunity. In the 1790s rapid inflation created a national demand for coinage, so he set up another production line using steam power to revolutionise coin making – a trade still carried on in the city [Birmingham] today. ibid.
Why was Sheffield king of the steel and cutlery business? ... Location, location, location. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e7: Cutting Edge
In the seventeenth and eighteen centuries Sheffield had over a hundred and sixty mills. ibid.
After three or four hours the lid would have been opened and the puller-out would wrap his lower body in water-soaked cloth, a water-soaked leather apron, position himself over the furnace – not a pleasant job – then the crucible would have been pulled out. ibid.
Sheffield not only had supplies of iron, coal and water, it now also had the steel industry which was ideally placed to exploit the steam engine. ibid.
1856 when Henry Bessemer invented a process for producing mass-produced steel. ibid.
From the 1770s the steam-engine market was dominated by the partnership of Boulton & Watt. They had made some improvements in efficiency but their engines, using massive copper boilers like giant kettles, had serious limitations. To get more power they had to build bigger and bigger machines. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e8: The Iron Horse
Richard Trevithick, a mining engineer with a passion for steam, was dreaming of small powerful engines – powerful enough to do a range of jobs and small enough to move themselves around. High pressure locomotion. This was the way of the future. The technology of the steam railways. ibid.