Who invented railway engine?

Answer 1

who invent railway's engine

Answer 2

George Stephenson - inventor of the first steam locomotive engine for railroads.

This is altogether too facile, and not borne out by historical research. The railway engine is a complicated beast, and different people invented different parts of it at different times. From this point of view, the railway engine could be said not to have been invented at all: it grew from a number of experiments, not the work of one man but a combination of the ideas of many. Stephenson was by no means the earliest in the queue.

James Watt took out a patent in 1784 for the propulsion of a wheeled carriage by his steam engine, and suggested the idea of a multitubular boiler; but he never followed it up, perhaps because he dreaded the idea of high-pressure steam. Joseph Cugnot built and demonstrated the first practicable steam carriage, which used two vertical single-acting cylinders and drove the single front wheel through a gear train. Valve events were controlled by a four-way union, which had been invented by the Frenchman Papin in 1685, and used by Leupold in a stationary high-pressure engine in 1720. The whole thing fully laden weighed about 12 tons, and could reach 3 mph on the public road. Unfortunately there was no means of replenishing the water in the boiler and the contraption's range was less than a mile. (See Proc Inst Mech Eng, 26 Jan 1853.)

Also in 1784, William Murdoch built a model steam road carriage which used a single double-acting cylinder and high-pressure steam. He was warned off by James Watt and turned his attention elsewhere. The American Nathan Read made a model steam carriage in 1790, said to have been the first application of a multi-tubular boiler.

Richard Trevithick of Cornwall built a road-going steam carriage in 1801, Watt's patent having expired, leaving Trevithick to follow his own inclinations freely. In 1802 he patented the engine part of his carriage. It had a circular boiler with a single cylinder let into it horizontally. The end of the piston rod drove a large flywheel, which kept the motion going at the end of the stroke, and on the flywheel shaft was fixed the first of a train of gears which could be used to drive road wheels. Leupold's four-way union was used to control admission and exhaust of steam.

The roads in Cornwall were pretty dreadful, and Trevithick decided to try the carriage out on a plateway at Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales. It was built at the Pen-y-Darren Ironworks in 1803 and was first run in 1804. It had an 8-in cylinder with a stroke of 4 ft 6in, and hauled a load of ten tons a distance of nine miles at 5mph, on a single filling of water in the boiler. (Francis Trevithick, Life of Richard Trevithick, 1872.)

This could quite certainly be said to be the first working railway engine. George Stephenson at the time was 23 years old and had not yet entered the field.

Trevithick's loco was too heavy for the lightweight plateway and was very soon relegated to the status of a stationary engine. Nevertheless, Trevithick's contributions to the basic design of the steam railway locomotive were fundamental. He had applied high-pressure steam; he had placed an engine on rails for the first time; he had essentially coupled the driving wheels, admittedly through gears rather than by a coupling rod, so as to use all the weight for adhesion; he had thrown the exhaust steam into the chimney and thus, perhaps wihout realising it, had demonstrated the feedback effect by which the rate of steaming is controlled by the work being done.

The next locomotive engine was built in Gateshead in 1804, by John Steel, who had assisted Trevithick at Pen-y-Darren. Steel was engineer at an iron foundry owned by John Whinfield, and was killed in a boiler explosion in France in 1815. The engine was built for Christopher Blackett, the proprietor of the Wylam Colliery, and was demonstrated at the foundry where it was built, but at five tons in weight was clearly too heavy for the wooden wagon ways in use there, and was not accepted. It was of very similar design to the Pen-y-Darren loco, but had flanged wheels for running on rails rather than the earlier engine's flangeless wheels for running on a plateway. (Gateshead Observer, 1858.) A set of drawings was sent to Trevithick's son Francis, who published them as his father's own design in his book of 1872.

Blackett determined to improve his wagon ways before trying again, and had his whole line from pit to river relaid as a plateway in 1808. A local mechanic, Thomas Waters, agreed in 1811 to build a suitable locomotive engine, and stipulated that he should be assisted by Timothy Hackworth, the foreman blacksmith at the colliery. Hackworth's first concern was to build a man-powered locomotive, which could carry varying numbers of lead weights to control the adhesive weight, and with this device he established the complete suitability of the pure-adhesion locomotive for any contemporary haulage requirement.

Waters and Hackworth then built the first Wylam engine, like all previous efforts with a single cylinder and a flywheel. This was an unsatisfactory device; after much alteration and improvement it was able to haul four or five wagons the length of the line, but it was hardly reliable and it was set up as a stationary engine in 1812.

Hackworth and Hedley, the colliery viewer, built the second Wylam engine in 1812, with many deviations from earlier practice. For the first time a wrought-iron boiler was used, 10 feet long and 4 feet diameter, and two vertical cylinders of 9-inch diameter each worked a longitudinal lever to which was attached a connecting rod working down to a crank each end of the main shaft. The drive from this shaft was taken to the axles of the carrying wheels by the usual gear train. There was of course no need for a flywheel. The exhaust was taken into the chimney, and boiler water was continually replenished by a mechanical feed pump worked from one of the levers. It is not clear who thought of this idea, but evidently the replacement of the horizontal cylinder by vertical ones made possible the attachment of a second vehicle carrying an external water supply.

Working at a steam pressure of 50 psi, this engine hauled nine wagons at a speed of four or five miles an hour, and remained in service for many years. It offered the first regular and reliable haulage of traffic by a steam locomotive in the world. Nevertheless, it was still on the edge of the sustainable load that could be withstood by the plate rails, and in 1813 Hackworth brought the third Wylam engine into use. This was exactly similar to the second engine, but its weight was taken on eight wheels, arranged in sets of four under separate frames or bogies. One bogie was bolted to the main frame of the engine, and the other was attached by a centre pivot.

Hackworth thus becomes the inventor of the bogie, commonly considered to have been first used by the American John B Jervis in about 1828. It seems likely, however, that Jervis took the idea from personal examination of the third Wylam engine, which when he saw it had been working for more than a dozen years.

In 1815 Hackworth was fired from Wylam for declining to work on a Sunday, and after that time no improvements to the steam locomotive appeared from that source.

In the meantime, John Blenkinsop, not persuaded of the efficacy of simple adhesion, patented a rack locomotive for use at the Middleton Colliery in Leeds. Like the second Wylam engine, it had two vertical cylinders driving a pinion engaging with the rack through the medium of a gear train. The four carrying wheels were unpowered. (Patent No 3431, 10 April 1811.) A number of such engines were built by Matthew Murray, and worked between Middleton and Leeds from 1812 to about 1836.

Hackworth and Blenkinsop did not know of each others' work until 1813, and it is not now possible to determine which of them was first to use two cylinders. Credit for this important improvement must go to them equally.

In 1813 two of Blenkinsop's engines were sent to the Kenton colliery, close to Killingworth near Newcastle, but public opposition soon led to their withdrawal. In 1814, George Stephenson, the enginewright at Killingworth, who had been in the habit of spending his free time watching the experiments at Wylam, supervised the construction of a locomotive engine which was in many ways a compromise between the Wylam and the Middleton designs. The boiler and cylinders were similar to those of the Middleton engine; the connecting rods and gear train were a close copy of the Wylam. The wheels were roughened by protruberances to secure a hold on the track, ignoring the smooth wheels which had been used at Wylam ever since Hackworth's demonstrations of 1811.

After trials, the protruberances were removed and the exhaust steam was turned into the chimney instead of exhausting straight into the open air; with these modifications the engine was able to haul 30 tons at 3mph.

In 1815 Stephenson took out a patent in which the lower end of the connecting rods were attached to a pin on a spoke of the driving wheels, the gear train being dispensed with. To maintain the proper relationship of the cranks, the axles were conncted by an endless chain running over toothed wheels. Stephenson maintained this method of coupling the wheels until Hackworth invented outside coupling rods, on the Stockton and Darlington in 1825.

The Killingworth engines ran on edge rails, rather than the plate rails which were retained at Wylam, and worked until 1826. While Stephenson retained the Killingworth design of a single straight flue through the boiler, none of his engines could successfully compete with the horse. And in fact in 1824 Stephenson wrote that he could see no way in which his engines might be improved. This state of affairs persisted until Hackworth returned to the fray, as locomotive superintendent for the Stockton and Darlington in 1825.

Four of the first five locos on the S&D were all of Stephenson's design, the same essentially as the Killingworth engines but with Hackworth's coupling rods. They were all unreliable and unsuccessful, and the fifth loco, a four-cylinder affair built by Robert Wilson, was little use either. Things were so bad that other proposed local railways had no intention of using locomotives, and in 1827 the Committee of the S&D had all but determined to abandon steam in favour of horses, when Hackworth proposed to build a new locomotive that would do the job. This was the "Royal George," the first six-coupled engine in the world.

The Committee required Hackworth to use the boiler from Wilson's engine, and Hackworth enlarged it in both length and diameter, to 13 ft by 4 ft 4in. The single flue was taken out and replaced by a double one, and so the chimney was necessarily at the furnace end. The heating surface was thus greatly increased, being more than double the area allowed by Stephenson. Two cylinders of 11 x 20 in worked vertically down onto the rear coupled axle, which was unsprung. The other two axles were controlled by compensating beams. All the wheels had wrought iron tyres, their first use in a locomotive engine. The feed water was heated by the exhaust steam; bearings were self-lubricated; and the safety valve was spring-loaded. The boiler was lagged by wooden strips; and, most important of Hackworth's many improvements, the exhaust steam was introduced into the chimney through a coned blast pipe.

In 1829 Robert Stephenson, George's son, declared that this was the most powerful locomotive that had yet been made; but nevertheless the deputation sent by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway recommended the use on that line of stationary engines throughout. Stephenson turned to Hackworth for advice, and Hackworth set out the facts in a clear and unbiased way. The L&M Rly thereupon decided upon a comparative test of different locomotives, the famous Rainhill Trials.

As is well known, the winner was George Stephenson's "The Rocket," and it is on this engine that his fame mainly rests. What is less well known is that the sucess of "The Rocket" derived mainly from the use of a multi-tubular boiler with a separate firebox, at the suggestion of Henry Booth, Secretary of the L&M. Nevertheless, this style of construction has come to be called "the Stephenson boiler," and we are where we are and Stephenson's reputation is what it is. Zerah Colburn, in Locomotive Engineering (1871), wrote "There is no ground for asserting, as has been done, that George Stephenson was the inventor of any essential part of the Locomotive Engine…"

Answer 3

who invent railway's engine