Victorian Engineering Research Articles

Anthropocene Speculations: Steam Technology in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)

ABSTRACT This article reads Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” of 1798 as a visionary speculation on the ground-breaking technologies of its time—the steam engine and early experiments with steamboats. Within the larger framework of a history of the Anthropocene and drawing, more specifically, on science studies, current eco-Marxist perspectives and earlier (new) historicist research, I show how the poem blends two distinct epistemic frameworks and temporalities that have been neglected in critical discussions. On the one hand, Coleridge’s text resonates with the earlier mechanical philosophy and imagery from Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684/90) which expounds a natural history featuring engines; on the other hand, it negotiates contemporary experiments with steam transport and James Watt’s patented improvement of the steam engine, in particular. Intimating an acceleration of (natural) history through human technology, the poem, I argue, displays a powerful and highly ambivalent sense of that acceleration’s social, colonial, and ecological entanglements. By way of conclusion, the article considers the afterlife of the “Rime” in Coleridge’s letters, and in Victorian engineering discourse; I showcase the poem as a spectacular and self-reflexive example of early speculative (or science) fiction.

Lord Armstrong and the lakes of Cragside, Northumberland

William Armstrong is recognised as one of the great Victorian hydraulic engineers. He owned the world's first house to be lit by hydroelectricity at his estate at Cragside in Northumberland. He had five reservoirs constructed on the main estate and another on a nearby farm for a mixture of amenity, power and fire-fighting purposes. All but one are now owned and maintained by the National Trust. In the twentieth century two of the dams suffered breach failure and a third was severely damaged during floods. This paper provides a brief history of the lakes and also describes the breach and near-breach events.

Connaught Tunnel, UK: condition and repairs

The aims of this paper are to record how the Connaught Tunnel was surveyed, assessed and repaired by Crossrail for use for the new Elizabeth line in London, UK. The challenges and changes involved with implementing the repairs required to bring an example of Victorian engineering back into use again were based on Network Rail guidance and other current practice. The repairs will reduce future maintenance requirements, which will benefit railway operations in the future. Groundwater leakage remains within the tunnel as the cost of rectifying the leaks, if successful, would have been prohibitive. Prior to the Crossrail Act of 2008, consideration was given to the whole-life costing of reusing the tunnel as opposed to boring new tunnels, and the cost of new tunnels was considered to be higher than the costs of repairs, maintenance and ongoing drainage requirements to reuse the existing tunnel.

Advancing tunnelling: the Victorian engineering management legacy

Victorians are often held up as giants in civil engineering, able to build, span and tunnel in ways that had never been seen before, and still provide much of contemporary infrastructure. Their legacy can be easily seen in the railway networks of Great Britain, which demanded some of the most difficult and challenging civil engineering ever seen. As a consequence of such endeavours, the Victorian times also saw the emergence of the ‘celebrity’ engineers, stellar figures who first experienced the shift away from technical and site-based practices and moved instead towards the management and leadership of construction works, a professional legacy that arguably remains today. Such figures also served to anonymise further the construction workers or navvies, who were already working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions on projects where the loss of life was felt to be inevitable. Unpacking Victorian railway tunnelling operations not only duly acknowledges the spectacular feats of engineering that society inherited from them but also reveals how their legacy has contributed to the ways in which tunnelling operations are mobilised today. It is argued that such contributions should be recognised and consciously rebalanced if the next steps are to be taken to improve tunnelling operations within the profession of civil engineering today.

James Henry Greathead and the London Underground

This article investigates the origins and early history of the device known as the ‘Greathead Shield’, an important innovation in Victorian engineering crucial to constructing the London Underground. The aim is to explore the basis on which, many years later, a South African engineer, James Henry Greathead, was accorded prominent public acknowledgment, in the form of a statue, for ‘inventing’ the Shield. From a cultural studies perspective, how is the meaning of ‘invention’ to be understood, given that several other brilliant engineers were involved? The question is adjudicated using the notion of cultural ‘extelligence’, seen in relation to several contemporary and historical accounts, including Greathead’s own record of his achievements in the proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers and presented in The City and South London Railway (1896), edited by James Forrest. The paper was first delivered at the conference on ‘Novelty and Innovation in the Nineteenth Century’ held at the North-West University in May 2016.

Review: Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain: Myth and Modernity, Excess and Enchantment, by Paul Dobraszczyk

Paul Dobraszczyk Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain: Myth and Modernity, Excess and Enchantment Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2014, 310 pp., 16 color and 153 b/w illus. $124.95, ISBN 9781472418982 Until recently critical discussions of architectural ornament were generally to be found in writings about nineteenth-century and/or Islamic architecture. Still riding the contemporary wave of interest in ornament and its relationship to architectural form, Paul Dobraszczyk's Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain offers the reader new perspectives on a historical moment of the nineteenth century that is curiously apposite to architects and theorists today.1 One aspect of the resurgence of this interest is carefully detailed and chronicled in Dobraszczyk's comprehensive study of Victorian Britain's experience with iron as the first truly modern building material. Dobraszczyk articulates a technological experience for Victorian architects that is analogous to the one that Antoine Picon and others have theorized regarding the reappearance of ornament in contemporary architectural culture, which they see as strongly influenced by the new wide-ranging opportunities made possible by advances in digital culture. In similar fashion, advances in iron production methods and technologies in the second half of the nineteenth century led to revolutionary ways of understanding and producing architecture. Through an exploration of various “ironworlds” in Victorian Britain, Dobraszczyk claims to seek out how a “fusion of iron and ornament” sought to reconcile art and technology by creating “a new, modern architectural language that drew on both history and modernity” (3). Striving also to challenge assumptions about the “perceived ideological split between Victorian architecture and engineering” (5) as well as more enduring and complex relationships, such as perceptions of architectural form and material as they relate to history, Dobraszczyk concerns himself in detail with what he refers to as iron's “unboundedness” (9). This “unboundedness” of iron, according to Dobraszczyk, has a number of implications, but the perception of iron as unbounded can be attributed to two main factors. The first was the large amount of the material that …

A Century of Cleansing Winchester

The provision of mains sewerage and the centralised collection of refuse are two of the most long-lasting infrastructure projects brought in by Victorian engineers. The Sanitary Act of 1866 required local Councils to supply ‘a sufficient sewerage system and a supply of wholesome water’, triggering a large number of schemes throughout the country. The City of Winchester is taken as an example of a city slow to implement the Act. When mains drainage came to the city, it was allied to a refuse destructor to supply energy to the pumping plant. Over a century of increasing population requiring sewerage and refuse services over an increasing area, the subsequent history of the plant provides an insight into the development of such services in a typical, medium-sized British town.

Forth Bridge: the restoration challenge

The Forth Bridge is a symbol of engineering excellence and remains an icon for both railway and civil engineers throughout the world. Following in the footsteps of designers Sir Benjamin Baker and Sir John Fowler and contractor Sir William Arrol, this first full restoration project since its opening in 1899 proved to be a significant challenge. In undertaking this unique restoration project, Network Rail and Balfour Beatty were required to understand the dynamics and engineering principles of the bridge. The original design was not conceived with a complex maintenance regime in mind and certainly not the scale and complexity of scaffold access systems. It was a principal concern that the existing structure was never put out of balance by the average of 4000 t of scaffolding, encapsulation, materials and equipment required. The restoration works to the world's first cantilever and Britain's first all-steel bridge were complex and were carried out with its protected status as a grade A listed Victorian engineering icon in mind.

Editor's Letter

Are you a digital native or an analogue native? Here's one way to find out: do the facial hair portraits below remind you of a) Victorian engineers or b) your friends?

Socio-technological disasters and engineering expertise in Victorian Britain: the Holmfirth and Sheffield floods of 1852 and 1864

Urban and environmental historians are becoming increasingly interested in the social construction of expertise in the management and control of natural resources. Experts are often depicted as disinterested, neutral and objective professionals, sufficiently qualified to gauge an independent perspective on a given problem. Yet what happens when an expert's judgment is called into question by other professional experts? The micro-analysis of socio-technological disasters offers one way to interrogate the construction and challenge of professional expertise at both the empirical and conceptual levels. Taking a comparative approach towards the study of two major reservoir failures involving considerable death and destruction in the United Kingdom – Holmfirth in 1852 and Sheffield in 1864 – this paper draws on the under-utilised research of the sociologist Barry Turner and others on the social aetiology of disasters as a route into revealing and accounting for the contested nature of expertise within the Victorian engineering professions. It is based on extensive archival research, including the written records of local and central government, private waterworks' proprietors, the printed press and the records of public inquiry. The cases reveal remarkable continuities in administrative and professional knowledge regarding the explanation of socio-technological disasters, as well as the widespread use of outside experts to interrogate the supposed failings of interested parties.

Breaking bad: the material smashing machine

A threatened museum in London preserves a unique piece of Victorian engineering heritage, says Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Colonel Crompton – Victorian engineering pioneer

Col. R E B Crompton was not only one of the pioneers of the GB electrical power/distribution industry who founded the innovative company bearing his name but also a distinguished mechanical engineer with a particular influence on heavy road vehicles and the development of tanks in the First World War. A prolific patentee, he had an outstanding record of technical achievement over a wide range of fields.

Briefing: Impacts of Victorian engineering on a modern flood risk study

A strategic flood risk management (SFRM) study was undertaken for the heavily urbanised reaches of the River Medlock through Manchester, UK. Many of the buildings and structures on this reach date back to the Victorian era and the industrial revolution, when rapid growth of cities often focused on areas around sources of water for industrial and transportation needs. Key structures on the modelled reach include the Medlock Cloughs, a group of structures designed by Victorian engineers to actively manage water levels in the Bridgewater Canal and the Medlock. Further downstream at Potato Wharf, Giants Basin allows overflow from the canal to spill back into the river. A one-dimensional hydrodynamic model to represent the study reaches was built. Hydraulic modelling of the Medlock Cloughs and Giants Basin proved challenging for several reasons. It was not possible to verify existing survey data or to obtain new survey data because of health and safety issues. The study team was also unable to establish maintenance procedures on the structures or determine whether they now operate as intended by the Victorian engineers who built them. These obstacles were overcome by using old survey drawings, historic data and photographs in modelling the structure. The Medlock Cloughs component of the model proved crucial to obtaining accurate level and flow results for the modelled reaches, as the split in flows between the canal and river controlled the water levels upstream. The lessons learnt from this study may have application in assessing flood risk in other similar situations, and included the requirement for credible, accurate data for structures, and the importance of accurately representing, in a computational model, old structures that are no longer operating as intended.

The art of John Martin's London sewerage system

The development of London's drainage system is a testament to Victorian ingenuity and engineering skill, and Sir Joseph Bazalgette is rightly credited with overseeing and ensuring its successful implementation. However, the roots of the system were established in the 1830s when an artist of the Romantic Movement blurred the boundaries of art, architecture and engineering and developed the basis of a system that still contributes to the health of London today. In today's world, where disciplines increasingly seek to find a common vocabulary and collaborate more effectively, it is perhaps timely to remember that history can provide some truly visionary precedents.

Engineered exploitation of microbial potential

Engineered exploitation of microbial potential

Last of the giants

The paper looks at the life and times of the Cornish beam engine a magnificent example of Victorian engineering that helped transform 19th century Cornwall into the mining capital of the world. Viewed on a grey winter's day, the red brick and granite buildings of the East Pool Mine in Cornwall have the melancholy charm befitting an industrial leviathan, incongruously beached alongside a supermarket car park. Cornish beam engines came in a number of standard sizes, and the engine at Taylor's Shaft at East Pool was a top-of-the-range model with a 90in diameter cylinder.

The Hunterian Redisplayed

The redisplay of the Hunterian Museum, although not yet fully complete, allows an opportunity to take stock anew of this magnificent and varied collection. Assuredly the grandest and most diverse to be housed in one location within the Scottish university system, this has rightly now received the official imprimatur of a 'collection of national significance' within Scotland. Of the three principal exhibition spaces, two are devoted to the collection of William Hunter, anatomist, doctor and obstetrician, and-as importantly collector extraordinaire. The third (including its balcony) comprises an eclectic, but not haphazard, juxtaposition of material, which, to this reviewer, successfully marries-for the most part-a diverse range of aspects of the University of Glasgow's collections. This is, architecturally, the most impressive gallery in the museum, and a pleasing blend of Gothic revival and Victorian engineering. At the time of writing, only the Scottish Roman sculpture (itself acquired since the 18th century) awaits redisplay, as an important component of the wider, World-Heritage-List-inspired, reconsideration of the Antonine Wall and the material culture associated with it. It meantime sits in

Explaining tunnel construction by joint mapping

Modern-day railway tunnels are a superb legacy from a bygone age, built by eminent Victorian tunnel engineers. The great skills and abilities of these engineers and their workmen, even in very poor working conditions and with very limited technology, have resulted in these tunnels being in constant use up to the present time and beyond. But how were they built to last so long? No plans or as-built drawings survive, and only very limited written accounts of their construction are available. Attempts at looking deeper through the linings with ground-probing radar and electrical resistance techniques have failed to reveal any of the secrets. Destructive testing such as coring has been used, but the overall picture is still missing. The only remaining signs of the construction works are the open shafts and the joints. The shafts indicate where some of the access and construction points were situated along the tunnel, and the joints mark the lengths of excavation used in building the tunnel. The joint lengths can be long in good ground, or shorter in poor ground; they can be shorter across an infilled or hidden shaft, or in a ‘break-up’ length, but longer in a ‘junction’ length. The length between joints can therefore reveal much about the conditions under which tunnelling took place, and can also point to the location of other working shafts that have been backfilled and hidden. The author believes that there is much to learn about tunnel construction from a careful study or ‘mapping’ of the joint lengths, particularly when now used in conjunction with a non-destructive testing technique such as ground-probing radar.

Sir Douglas Strutt Galton (1822–1899) and the Administration of Victorian Engineering

(2007). Sir Douglas Strutt Galton (1822–1899) and the Administration of Victorian Engineering. Transactions of the Newcomen Society: Vol. 77, No. 1, pp. 51-67.

Brunel's coastal railway

In 2006 the engineering profession (and many others) celebrated the 200th anniversary of the birth of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The list of Brunel's engineering successes is extensive, including the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, and the Thames Tunnel, and his influence is felt world‐wide. Although not usually quoted as one of his iconic masterpieces, Brunel's stretch of coastal railway from Dawlish Warren to Teignmouth in southern England (South Devon) is an early Victorian engineering triumph that has a close connection with geology. Although having many initial technical problems, subsequent breaches and continual need for maintenance, it still stands today as a monument to Brunel's genius. It has, however, influenced coastal processes, and has yet to face the predicted global warming sea level rises.