This is the Caledonian canal. And it is the most beautiful canal in Britain. It was built for ships of 400 tons, designed to transform the Highlands economy. It employed hundreds of men for years and makes the English canals with their narrow boats seem half-hearted. But it was never successful. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e9: Highland Flop
At full capacity the engines of the Kew Bridge Station were capable of pumping thirty million gallons ... a day ... It’s a cathedral to steam. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e10: Power Crazy
Steam-engines: the horse’s nemesis. They’d existed for decades before anyone tried to put them to work on the farm. Most farming jobs required them to be taken out into the fields. These were the earliest agricultural steam-engines: portable engines. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s2e1: Bread and Beer
Steamrollers were the first self-propelled self-steered steam-engines. ibid.
Soon entrepreneurs started building factories to house the stocking frames ... These frame-knitter workshops with their high long windows to let in light were all built together around 1820. Mark Williams: More Industrial Revelations s2e2: What to Wear? Discovery 2005
The knitters took their employers to court with little effect. So, under the mythical leadership of one General Lud, well-organised gangs of knitters smashed the frames of any employers who broke the law. ibid.
A sewing machine did away with ten tailors. ibid.
This is a replica of Murdoch’s model. A top-secret design for a vehicle that could pull carriages along the road ... Murdoch continued developing his model vehicle throughout the 1780s ... He was fascinated by high-pressure steam. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s2e3: Gas on Wheels
This time extracting gas from coal ... He soon became so successful that he lit his own house. The first house lit by gas in the world. And Murdoch’s employers soon turned gas-light into big business. From 1805 mills and factories were to work shifts around the clock using their own gas generating plants. It wasn’t long before everyone wanted the new light. ibid.
One of the most extraordinary pieces of machinery in the entire industrial age in my opinion – this is a Scrubber. The idea in our computer-dominated nano-technology world that the way to remove ammonia from gas is to scrub it with brushes underwater seems fantastic. But that’s what the machine does: gas is bubbled through water and scrubbed by slowly revolving brushes, and this is how town gas was cleaned throughout the whole of its life as a fuel supply. ibid.
200 years later Murdoch’s coal gas was readily available. It could be fed into an engine and ignited again and again and again. ibid.
Fifty years after William Murdoch first dreamed of steam on the roads another visionary, Walter Hancock, made it happen. ibid.
It was the clarity and precision of these beautifully carved letters that inspired Baskerville to change printing ... Baskerville set about designing new fonts based on stone-carving, and some of them are still in use today. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s2e4: Print & Paper
This work is close and detailed. Accuracy is paramount. Printers were called the aristocrats of labour. They were all highly literate. And served a long apprenticeship. And they were also correspondingly very well paid. ibid.
How to serve beer more quickly ... Bramah set himself the task of coming up with a solution to serve beer through a pipe to the bar: a beer engine ... The Bramah Press. Patented in 1795 it’s the same principle as the two syringes. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s2e5: Under Pressure
But Armstrong was going to use hydraulic power for something butcher than kitchen gadgets. Something that would give the ship-building industry quite a boost. And make him even more money. ibid.
The accumulator provides power at the turn of a valve. There’s no reason why it couldn’t provide power for lots of machinery. In fact, if you had a big enough accumulator and long enough pipes, you could provide power for a whole town or a city. And that’s what this company did – the London Hydraulic Power Company. ibid.
Cheap mass-produced bricks were used in their millions for workers’ houses in Stockport. And for roofs they could now get the best material available – slate from Wales. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s2e6: Building a Revolution
Michael Faraday, the father of electricity ... He conducted most of his experiments into magnetism and electricity here at the Royal Institution. And his practical demonstrations to a distinguished audience of fellow scientists and enthusiastic VIPs were the talk of the town. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s2e7: Bright Sparks
Armstrong, the Geordie genius, had with a combination of his power station and Swan’s lights pioneered the domestic use of electricity. ibid.
Another revolutionary discovery – the electric motor. Yet another breakthrough for the father of electricity. ibid.
This is mining country: tin and copper are found in this area, and have been worked here for over four thousand years. The Cornish coast is full of holes, hacked out of the granite by miners desperate to find metal ore. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s2e8: Heavy Metal
By the 1860s there were 340 mines across Cornwall; 50,000 people were working above and below the surface. ibid.
By the 1860s the Cornish mining boom was over. ibid.
Silk production is a slow laborious process. It originated in China 4,000 years ago. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s2e9: Cutting It Fine
But the simple punch-card went on to revolutionise much more than weaving. ibid.
Machine tools are the unsung heroes of the industrial revolution. Without them the spectacular feats of nineteenth century engineering would not have been possible. Mark Williams, More Industrial Revelations s2e10: Machine Tools
Harnessing the wind had secured the lowlands. And wind was about to propel Holland’s trading ambitions. Both the British and the Dutch had made contact with the East Indies, and in 1602 the Dutch East Indies Company was formed to harvest the treasure of the world. Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations: The European Story s3e1: Reaping the Whirlwind, Discovery 2005
In seventeenth-century France they built one of the greatest engineering feats of its time: a massive canal across the country from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea. Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations: The European Story s3e2: The Canal King
By 1668 Riquet’s reservoir and mountain channel were well under construction. He had solved the problem of how to fill the canal with water. ibid.
This was no ordinary sized canal. Riquet’s ambitious plan was to build a canal with twice the volume of any built before, so that it would be deep enough to carry ocean-going boats. ibid.
Riquet employed 12,000 workers to carve out the canal ... They even received sick-pay. ibid.
No-one had ever built a tunnel for a canal before. It was nicknamed Le Mal-Pas (the bad step). ibid.
Britain built the first steam locomotive to deliver coal from its mines. They would have stayed purely as industrial machines if it hadn’t been for Robert Stephenson. Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations: The European Story s3e4: The Impossible Railway
This is the cutting made for Stephenson’s railway. At three and a half kilometres long and twelve metres deep it took forty barrel runs to take away the earth. At times 20,000 navvies were employed to build the line to Birmingham. ibid.
In the nineteenth century engineers struggled to keep up with the demand to build roads, railways and canals. There was only one alternative to a man with a pickaxe and that was to use explosives. Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations: The European Story s3e5: Big Bang
The Italian Chemist Ascanio Sobrero had created a monster. The problem with nitroglycerine is it’s very unstable, extremely dangerous. You can never tell when it’s going to go boom! Nitroglycerine was the most destructive explosive that had ever been found ... Alfred Nobel however was determined to tame it. ibid.
After several accidents the Californian government actually banned Nobel’s blasting oil because it was so unstable. Alfred Nobel wasn’t having the best of luck in Europe either. Despite all of his attempts to make things as safe as possible his Swedish factory blew up. His explosives empire was booming. He had built a German factory near Hamburg. Unfortunately, when this was also destroyed in a violent explosion he decided to continue his research out of harm’s way ... Would Nobel live long enough to succeed? ibid.
During the nineteenth century electricity went from being an obscure scientific curiosity to becoming the driving force of the modern world. Ironically, it was on the railways electricity found its first practical use. Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations s3e6: The European Story: Generation Electric
Siemens completed his Indo-European telegraph in 1870. ibid.
Two Englishmen, father and son, transformed the textile and iron industries of northern Europe. It’s a story of espionage and intrigue ... William Cockerill was born in 1759 ... One of the British machines Cockerill built was the Spinning Jenny. Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations: The European Story s3e7: Industrial Espionage
Perrier bought a water engine for the project, and when the Paris Water Works was completed it worked perfectly. Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations: The European Story s3e8: Steam on the Water
In 1775 Perrier launched the very first steam-powered boat on the River Seine in Paris. ibid.
Once paddle-steamers had proved to be a commercial success in the United States they quickly spread across Europe. ibid.
In 1829 John Ericsson built a steam locomotive called Novelty. ibid.
Ericsson had developed a shortened version of the Archimedes' Screw that would propel boats. ibid.
As well as being labour-intensive the major problem with steam engines was they made such inefficient use of coal ships which couldn’t carry enough for long journeys. ibid.
The United States showed great interest in Ericsson’s ship ... Jon Ericsson went on to make his fortune in the United States building revolutionary iron-clad warships, designing guns and advancing development of the steam-engine. ibid.