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The Quest for Speed
By Peter Gosling Bravo Ltd
Copyright © 2010 Bravo Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85733-643-6
CHAPTER 1
Speed Over Land
On Foot or by Wheel
The discovery of the wheel was Man's first technological breakthrough. If we look at all the different methods that save us having to walk everywhere – the machines that power them and the machines that themselves make the machines – they all need wheels. The oldest known wheel was found in Mesopotamia, in modern Iraq, and is believed to be over five and a half thousand years old.
In the beginning someone must have realised that a heavy object could be moved more easily if a fallen log, for example, was placed under it and rolled along. Doubtless someone else then had the bright idea of moving heavy objects on a sledge, with a series of rollers underneath, that were expelled at the rear as the sledge moved along. The expelled rollers could then be reinserted at the front of the moving object, and so on. The next improvement would have been the creation of axles, when it was discovered that, as the sledge moved over the rollers, it wore a groove along the inside length of each roller, leaving a 'wheel' standing proud at each end. Someone must have realised that if he could fix an axle beneath the sledge, with a wheel mounted at each end and rotating about it, he had a cart. After that, the next problem that needed to be solved was how to make the cart turn corners.
Early roads
Early men travelled along well-trodden tracks that were used to move sheep and cattle from place to place. As time went on these tracks became easier to navigate, as stones were cleared and trees cut down to make way for travellers. Such paths have been found in all parts of the world – in Europe, Asia and the United States. As wheeled transport of a primitive kind appeared, there came a need for better roads. Five thousand years ago a few simple brick paved roads appeared. Then, some two and a half thousand years ago, as the Romans conquered new territories, they needed to move their armies quickly across occupied lands. Their roads had to be capable of carrying chariots and carts, as well as their foot soldiers. The resulting roads were great feats of engineering, some of which are still visible today in Europe and Asia Minor.
Intended as highways, Roman roads were raised up on a cambered bank of material dug from roadside ditches. In general there were three layers: a layer of large stones, covered by a second layer of smaller stones, with a top layer of gravel or small stones. Each layer was between two and twelve inches deep.
The modern roads we enjoy today are there largely thanks to John McAdam, the inventor of a road construction method that was not only cheap, but also very effective, by providing a surface that made travelling more comfortable. The road construction allowed water to drain off by raising it above the surrounding area with layers of stones and side ditches. The layers could then be compacted by a heavy roller. The technique proved to be so effective that it was copied all over the world.
John Loudon McAdam (1756–1836), Scottish engineer and road-builder, pioneered the process known as 'macadamising', for building roads with a smooth, hard surface that was more durable and less muddy than soil-based tracks.
Stagecoaches
For thousands of years, if a man needed to travel, he would have to walk. Or, if he had enough money, he would ride his horse. If he was really wealthy, he could travel in a coach pulled by horses. This meant that the majority of people lived in small communities and seldom strayed far from them. However, by the late seventeenth century carriages that had previously been conveyances solely for the rich became more readily available as 'public coaches', for hire. In England, these travelled between London and cities such as Oxford on a daily service; journeys to York, Chester and Exeter would take up to four or five days. Each coach could carry up to six people, and travel was priced at a few pence per mile. Coaches travelling up the Great North Road (now known as the A1), between London and York, would stop to change horses at the George Hotel in Stamford, in Lincolnshire. This famous hotel still exists, and possesses rooms called 'The York' and 'The London', where passengers would rest according to the direction of their travel. Travellers from London to Edinburgh would also have stopped here on the ten-day trip to Scotland.
Improvements in the quality of roads – that made coach travel faster, cheaper and probably less uncomfortable – can be demonstrated by comparing a journey of one hundred miles down the Great North Road, to London, over a century. In 1685 it took two days and cost twenty shillings but, one hundred years later, the same journey took only one day and cost sixteen shillings.
As the quality of the roads improved, thanks to the work of McAdam and others, the journey time of the London mail coach to Holyhead (the Welsh port for crossings to Ireland) was cut, in the 1820s, from 45 hours to just 27 hours, with mail coach speeds rising from an average of 5–6 mph, to 9–10 mph. And, by 1843, the London to Exeter mail coach could complete the 170 miles in 17 hours.
In America, a sophisticated network of stagecoach routes was created in eastern and southern states, but it was in the west that stagecoaches, beloved of cowboy films, were a necessity. The distances that they had to travel were huge and the landscape rugged and dangerous. In 1858, John Butterfield began an overland stage line connecting St. Louis, Missouri, with San Francisco, California, by way of El Paso, Texas. The service ran via Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles, California, in those days small and isolated townships. Butterfield's company had won a contract worth $600,000 a year to deliver mail from St. Louis to San Francisco. Within a year it was also providing suitable stops to feed and rest travellers over the 2,795-mile length of the overland mail service. The whole journey took three weeks, weather and Native Americans permitting.
Stagecoach services in America also continued for much longer than in Europe. Even though railways were introduced into the country as early as the 1830s, mail coaches continued to be used for many more years, even into the 1920s, servicing small and isolated communities.
Tools of the trade
The great flowering of technical and economic developments that began in Britain in the late eighteenth century did not happen overnight, but occurred slowly over a number of years. The coming together of science and technology was the result of a long historical process, and the engineers and scientists who enabled the Industrial Revolution to take place needed particular tools to allow them to develop and test their ideas.
The early growth of technology had been hampered by the fact that the Roman numerical system had remained in use until about 900 CE, long after the fall of the Roman Empire. The Hindu–Arabic numeral system, based on ten digits, was first used in Europe around 1000 CE. This made it possible for arithmetic to be performed more easily than with Roman numerals — although financial operations continued to be carried out in the 'old' way until Tudor times.
Our modern decimal place value system was first used by mathematicians in India, probably by the sixth century CE, possibly even earlier, and their system was recognised by Arab and Persian mathematicians in Baghdad, particularly Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi, in the ninth century CE. He wrote two books on algebra and the Indian numbering system, and the numerals he used have come to be known as Arabic numerals.
Al-Khowarizmi also introduced a form of decimal point to distinguish between whole numbers and fractions, and the word algorithm is derived from his name. His algebraic treatise Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala gives us the word algebra, and is believed to be the first book to be written on the subject. The books were subsequently translated into Latin in the twelfth century by Adelard of Bath, enabling European scholars to learn from them.
The scientists of the Islamic world realised that, in order to understand how the world works, they needed to be able to measure the characteristics of everything. This required a means of expressing those characteristics, and a method for manipulating them meaningfully.
In England, these concepts were developed further by Isaac Newton (1643–1727), who formulated the mathematical tools used by engineers. Numbers could now be manipulated according to rules (algorithms), and the characteristics of everything that was measurable could be recorded and put to use. That ability, together with the practical information regarding, for example, the performance of steam under pressure, could be measured, examined and tested. Newton's life's work was concerned with mathematical physics, including defining: the laws of motion; the conservation of momentum; the properties of gases, liquids and solids; and the differential and integral calculus that kick-started the Industrial Revolution.
Steam Power – Britain and America on the Move
It was not the engineers of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century CE who first realised that steam could be a source of power. At some point between the first and the third centuries CE (the dates are disputed), the Greek scientist Hero of Alexandria found that, if steam were made to escape through the end of a small tube, the force of its expulsion resulted in a backward pressure on whatever the tube was fixed to. We now know that that is the principle by which a jet engine works – Hero was ahead of his time. He built a device called an aeolipile, which consisted of a metal sphere mounted on a pair of bearings about which it could rotate. The sphere could be partly filled with water, and on each side of the axis of rotation were two thin tubes. The water was heated by an external source and, when it boiled, the steam emerged from the tubes and the sphere started to spin round. History does not recount if the aeolipile was ever put to any use, but it worked – although the concept was not rediscovered until almost two thousand years later.
The dawn of a new age: the Industrial Revolution
By 1800 a new breed of workers was emerging, called 'engineers'. They built bridges, tunnels and railways. The age of steam had arrived.
In mining, the pumping of water out of mines had been a problem that had faced engineers for many years. The earliest uses of pumps using a cylinder and piston were in Greek and Roman times; they were also used in China in the eleventh century.
Tin mining had always been a major industry in Cornwall, but flooding limited the depth at which the mineral could be mined. However, in 1712, Thomas Newcomen perfected a practical steam engine, using a beam, for pumping water. It employed a cylinder containing a moveable piston, connected by a chain to one end of a rocking beam that worked a mechanical lift pump from its opposite end. The top of the power cylinder was open to the atmosphere; steam was introduced at the top stroke to the underside of the piston, and then water was sprayed in, condensing the steam and creating a vacuum. Atmospheric pressure, acting on the upper side of the piston, drove it down.
The system worked, despite being rather inefficient, until, in 1776, James Watt produced a better derivative of the Newcomen engine with a separate condenser. In order to reduce the losses in the working of the steam in the steam cylinder, it was necessary to keep the cylinder as hot as the steam that entered it. Watt separated the steam from the cylinder by injecting the cooling water spray into a second cylinder, the condenser, connected to the main one. When the piston had reached the top of the cylinder, a valve was closed, and a second valve, controlling the passage to the condenser, was opened. External atmospheric pressure would then push the piston towards the condenser. Thus the condenser could be kept cold and under less than atmospheric pressure, while the cylinder remained hot.
Railway travel in England
Using tracks to move wagons about began in earnest with the Wollaton Waggonway, Nottinghamshire, in 1603. The tracks were made of wood, with flanged wooden wheels running on an edge rail. In 1768 the first cast iron rails for railways were made in Coalbrookdale, Derbyshire, for use in coalmines. Then, in 1803, the Surrey Iron Railway opened as the first public railway in Britain. The wagons were pulled by horses and ran carrying a few passengers.
Another Cornishman, Richard Trevithick, designed and built a locomotive known as Puffing Devil and, on a February day in 1804, Trevithick's locomotive, with its single vertical cylinder, eight-foot flywheel and long piston-rod, managed to haul ten tons of iron, seventy passengers and five wagons from the ironworks at Penydarren in Wales to a local canal, for transportation to a factory. During the nine-mile journey the locomotive reached speeds of almost 5 mph (8 kmph).
The use of cast iron is one of the great steps forward in the Industrial Revolution. It was first used in China around 500 BCE and, by the fifth century CE, the Chinese were producing wrought iron and steel.
Numerous experiments were made at this time with varying designs of locomotives and, in particular, the suitability of the tracks they ran on. The problem was in the rails: in the early stages they were made of wood, and later of cast iron, that tended to break up as the weight of the locomotives increased. Trevithick, nevertheless, proved that smooth wheels on smooth track could provide sufficient grip to be practical. Only the quality of the iron used, however, stood in the way of a steam-powered railway becoming a commercial proposition. He was able to demonstrate his ideas to the public in 1808, when he built a circular track in London's Euston Square with one of his locomotives (called Catch-me-who-can) pulling passengers in a simple truck, for a fare of one shilling, but the public was not impressed.
Interest in railways then lapsed, although better and more reliable locomotives were being built. But in 1820 wrought iron, and later steel, became available for rails and interest revived, largely thanks to the work of Robert Stephenson and Company, 'Engine Builders and Mill Wrights'. In 1824 the company won an order for locomotives to be used on the first commercial railway line in England, running between Stockton and Darlington. The line opened in September 1825 and the Stephenson locomotive, named Locomotion No. 1, hauled thirty eight wagons and six hundred passengers along the twenty-one mile route. Most of the passengers were accommodated in open wagons but a lucky few rode inside the first ever passenger coach, called Experiment. The route was used primarily to transport coal, using a steam engine; passengers travelling on the line were horse-drawn. The distance between the rails was 4 ft 8.5 in (1.47 m), which has remained the standard in most parts of the world.
In 1830 the Liverpool to Manchester line was opened. It was preceded by the Rainhill Trials, which were advertised in the Liverpool Mercury in May 1829.
TO ENGINEERS AND IRON FOUNDERS
THE DIRECTORS of the LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER RAILWAY HEREBY OFFER A Premium of £500 over and above the cost price; for a LOCOMOTIVE ENGINE, which shall be a decided improvement on any hitherto constructed, subject to certain stipulations and conditions, a copy of which may be had at the Railway Office, or will be forwarded as may be directed on appellation of the same, if by letter, post paid.
Henry Booth, Treasurer
Railway Office, Liverpool, April 25, 1829
There were five entries to the trials and Stephenson, with his Rocket, was awarded the contract. The Liverpool to Manchester railway was opened with great ceremony on 15 September 1830. In Liverpool, eight trains lined up – one of which carried the Duke of Wellington, victor of the Battle of Waterloo – ready for a grand parade along the route. First class passengers were accommodated in carriages resembling traditional stagecoaches, while second class passengers sat in open trucks with wooden bench seats. The route was lined by cheering crowds, but the opening was unfortunately marred by an accident halfway along, when the MP for Liverpool, William Huskisson, was run over by Rocket, driven by George Stephenson, and died of his injuries – he has gone down in history as the first-ever railway casualty.
By 1840 a railway network was being created throughout the United Kingdom, and the Steam Age had begun. The following table illustrates the rapid increase in the size of the railway network.
Within a decade the railways had spread north as far as the Scottish border, south to Brighton, to Liverpool in the west, and to Hull in the north-east. By 1854 lines had spread further in all directions, covering most of the country except Wales and parts of Scotland. At last, ordinary people had something they had never had before – affordable mobility. The effect this had on lives everywhere was huge. Villages became towns, towns became cities, and workers could move to where they were needed.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
England's engineering genius, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–59), was responsible for the design and construction of the Great Western Railway line that joined London's Paddington Station to the city of Bristol, a distance of 118 miles. The line, commenced in 1838 and completed in 1841, was unique in being built with a broad gauge of 7 ft 01/4 in, as opposed to the more common 4 ft 81/2-in gauge. Brunel not only specified the route of the railway, he also designed the viaducts and tunnels along the way. He later extended the line from Bristol to Exeter, with the 194-mile (312 km) journey from London taking 41/2 hours, at an average speed of 43 mph (69 kmph).
An important consideration following the creation of the Great Western Railway was the realisation that clocks in London did not tell the same time as those in Bristol. Because Bristol was west of London, there was a difference of eleven minutes between the two places. This caused great problems in the creation of train timetables for journeys across long distances. To begin with, all the stations along the route had two clocks, one showing 'railway time' and the other 'local time'. However, in December 1852, Bristol accepted as standard the time as set by Greenwich Observatory, and this became the standard throughout the country.
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Excerpted from The Quest for Speed by Peter Gosling. Copyright © 2010 Bravo Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Bravo Ltd.
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