50 Fun Facts About Steam Engine

Which unit of power did James Watt popularise in the 1780s to show buyers what his steam engines could do?

Horsepower let a buyer compare an engine with the animals it would replace. Watt measured a brewery horse at work and fixed one unit at 33,000 foot-pounds per minute.

Which streamlined British locomotive set the world speed record for steam traction, 126 mph, on a July day in 1938?

Mallard got its name because its designer, Nigel Gresley, bred wild birds. The record run was officially a brake test, and no steam locomotive has gone faster since.

Which locomotive won the Rainhill Trials of 1829 to work the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway?

Rocket was the only entrant to complete the trials. On the railway's opening day a year later it struck and killed William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool.

Which American engineer ran the first commercially successful steamboat up the Hudson River to Albany in 1807?

Robert Fulton had already built a working submarine, Nautilus, for Napoleon's France. His steamboat covered the 150 nautical miles to Albany in 32 hours.

Which household object stars in the probably mythical story of how young James Watt discovered the power of steam?

A boiling kettle lifting its own lid is the legend, and it holds a grain of truth: Watt's diaries show he used a kettle as a small boiler in his steam experiments.

Which American author trained as a Mississippi steamboat pilot and took a riverboat depth call as his pen name?

Mark Twain was the leadsman's cry for two fathoms, about 12 feet, which meant safe water for a steamboat. He later wrote that a pilot's prestige beat the captain's.

What colour of flag did Britain's Locomotives Act of 1865 make a man carry on foot ahead of road steam engines?

Red flags came with speed limits of 2 mph in towns and 4 mph in the country. The walker, in practice usually a boy, had to stay 60 yards in front.

Which computing pioneer proposed a cowcatcher for steam locomotives in 1830 while advising a British railway?

Charles Babbage sketched the idea while working for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. It was never built, and later makers may have reinvented it without knowing of his.

Which kind of power station, like a coal-fired one, makes electricity by turning water into steam for its generators?

Nuclear plants are steam plants at heart. The reactor is only a heat source, and the steam it raises does the same job as the steam in a coal station.

Which film series cast the preserved steam locomotive Olton Hall, repainted crimson, to pull its school train?

Harry Potter needed a scarlet Hogwarts Express, so the engine lost the green its old owner, the Great Western Railway, had always used. Its nameplates were swapped for Hogwarts Castle.

What is the name of the separate wagon coupled behind a steam locomotive to carry its fuel and water?

Tender is the word, and an engine without one is a tank locomotive, which carries its coal and water on its own frame and is shorter as a result.

Which steam locomotive crew member shovels the coal and keeps the boiler supplied with water?

Fireman is the railway title. On steamships the same job belongs to a stoker, a word navies kept for engine-room ratings long after the last coal-burning warship had gone.

What do steam locomotives drop on wet or slippery rails in front of the driving wheels to improve grip?

Sand only runs freely when it is bone dry, so British engine sheds kept special drying stoves and refilled every locomotive's boxes each morning.

Which American musical instrument plays tunes on a row of steam whistles and was a favourite of riverboats and circuses?

Calliope music can carry for miles. Its inventor patented it in 1855 as a signalling device for railways and steamboats, and showmen found the better use.

Which American railroad engineer became a folk legend after dying in a 1900 collision with a stalled freight train?

Casey Jones stayed at his post to brake and sound a warning. Legend says his hands still gripped the whistle cord when he was pulled from the wreck.

Which steel-driving man of American legend raced a steam-powered rock drill, won, and died with a hammer in his hand?

John Henry may have been a real convict labourer. One historian who traced him argues the man died of silicosis, a lung disease caused by tunnel dust, not of exhaustion.

Which canal, opened to shipping in 1914, relied on a fleet of more than a hundred steam shovels to dig its bed?

Panama Canal crews ran 102 of the machines through a decade of digging, 77 of them built by Bucyrus. The steam shovel itself had been patented by William Otis back in 1839.

What actually makes the rhythmic chuffing sound that a steam locomotive gives off as it pulls away?

Exhaust blasting up the chimney does a second job: each puff drags air through the fire, so the harder a locomotive works, the hotter its fire burns.

Which Victorian engineer designed the Great Western, a wooden paddle steamer built to cross the Atlantic from Bristol?

Isambard Brunel saw that a bigger hull needs proportionally less coal. His ship reached New York in 1838 just behind the little Sirius, which had been given a four-day head start.

Which British express locomotive was the first to be officially authenticated at 100 mph, on a test run in 1934?

Flying Scotsman kept collecting records in retirement. On a tour of Australia in the 1980s it made the longest non-stop run by a steam locomotive, 422 miles.

Which ancient Greek engineer described the aeolipile, a hollow ball spun by jets of steam, in the first century?

Hero of Alexandria probably meant the spinning ball as a temple wonder. Nobody knows of any practical work it ever did.

Which Devon ironmonger and Baptist preacher built the 1712 engine that pumped floodwater out of English mines?

Thomas Newcomen sold tools to miners, so he knew their flooding problem at first hand. His church contacts are thought to have helped spread the engine from one mining district to the next.

Which engineer, illiterate until the age of 18, drove Locomotion at the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway?

George Stephenson, the Victorians' Father of Railways, also devised a miners' lamp that burned safely in gas. Parliament later ruled his claim to it equal to Humphry Davy's.

Which engineer's locomotive won an ironmaster a 500-guinea bet by hauling ten tons of iron in Wales in 1804?

Richard Trevithick later ran a locomotive called Catch Me Who Can round a circular track in London as a show. For all his firsts, he died penniless.

Which English inventor patented a steam-powered pump in 1698 and promoted it in a book called The Miner's Friend?

Thomas Savery won a patent so broad that it covered every pump raising water by fire. Parliament then stretched its life by a further 21 years.

Which Birmingham manufacturer became James Watt's business partner and later struck coins with steam-driven presses?

Matthew Boulton first wanted an engine because his own millstream ran low every summer. His mint went on to strike Britain's big copper cartwheel pennies of 1797.

Which French physicist invented the steam digester, the forerunner of the pressure cooker, in the 1670s?

Denis Papin went on to build a model piston engine worked by steam in 1690, the first of its kind, after seeing what trapped steam did inside his cooker.

Which French inventor built a three-wheeled steam wagon around 1770 to haul cannons for the army of Louis XV?

Nicolas Cugnot's machine is often called the first automobile. A later report says it knocked down a wall in 1771, which would make that the first car crash too.

Which nickname, chalked on one engine by a factory worker, stuck to Union Pacific's giant 4-8-8-4 steam locomotives?

Big Boy beat the name rumour had picked for the class, Wasatch, after a mountain range on the route. One of the giants, No. 4014, was rebuilt to running order by 2019.

Which small American locomotive, built by Peter Cooper, lost a famous race to a horse-drawn railcar?

Tom Thumb had boiler tubes made from rifle barrels and was well ahead until a belt slipped off its blower. The Baltimore and Ohio gave up horses the following year anyway.

Which Mississippi steamboat exploded in April 1865 in the deadliest maritime disaster in United States history?

Sultana was built for 376 passengers but carried over 2,000, mostly freed Union prisoners, when three of her boilers burst. The death of Lincoln's assassin a day earlier crowded the story out of the papers.

Which American steam car maker, founded by twin brothers, set a land speed record of 127 mph in 1906?

Stanley money came from photography: the twins had sold their dry-plate business to Eastman Kodak. Their run stood as the official steam car record until 2009.

Which experimental vessel gatecrashed Queen Victoria's 1897 fleet review, outrunning the navy boat sent to catch it?

Turbinia was Charles Parsons's advertisement for his new steam turbine, and the stunt worked. By 1905 the Admiralty had decided that every future warship would have turbines.

Which American engineer's 45-foot steam engine drove nearly every exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition?

George Corliss gave his giant a flywheel 30 feet across, and it turned the Philadelphia fair's machines through more than a mile of shafting.

Which device with a pair of spinning metal balls did James Watt fit to his steam engines to steady their speed?

Centrifugal governor design was older than Watt: Christiaan Huygens invented it in the 1600s for windmills, and millers used it to set the gap between their millstones.

Which improvement, devised by James Watt in 1765, let a steam engine's cylinder stay hot and so slashed its coal bill?

Separate condenser engines burned about half the coal of the best older design. Watt said the idea struck him on a walk across a city park one day in May.

In the first piston engines of the early 1700s, what pushed the piston down after cold water collapsed the steam inside?

Atmospheric pressure did the real work. Steam only filled the cylinder so that it could be turned back to water, leaving a partial vacuum for the weight of the air to crush.

At which Scottish university was James Watt an instrument maker when a model engine set him thinking about steam?

Glasgow professors gave him a small workshop inside the university after he tended a set of astronomical instruments sent from Jamaica. The model he was asked to repair in 1763 did the rest.

Which French engineer's 1824 book on the motive power of fire, inspired by steam engines, founded thermodynamics?

Sadi Carnot paid for the 600 copies himself and died of cholera at 36 with the book almost unread. Kelvin and Clausius later built the second law on it.

Which American ship made the first Atlantic crossing by a steam-powered vessel in 1819, though mostly under sail?

Savannah baffled the ships it met. A British cutter chased it for hours off Ireland, sure that it was a sailing vessel on fire.

Which Birmingham dinner club of inventors counted James Watt, Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley among its regulars?

Lunar Society meetings fell on the Sunday nearest the full moon so that members could ride home by its light. They cheerfully called themselves lunaticks.

Which part did a crewman reportedly tie shut on the locomotive Best Friend of Charleston, blowing up its boiler in 1831?

The safety valve hissed as it worked, and the story goes that the man was tired of the noise. It was the first locomotive boiler explosion in the United States.

Which trackside invention of 1860 let British express locomotives refill their tanks at speed without stopping?

Water troughs lay between the rails, and a lowered scoop forced the water up into the tank by speed alone. Passengers in the front coach were warned to shut their windows against the spray.

Which country was still building heavy steam locomotives by the hundred each year well into the 1980s?

China's Datong factory alone turned out 250 to 300 a year and had built over 5,000 by the time it switched to diesels at the end of 1988.

Which mass-produced American freighter of World War II ran on an old-fashioned triple-expansion steam engine?

Liberty ship builders chose the obsolete design on purpose. It was cheaper, many more firms could make it, and the gear-cutting shops needed for modern machinery were busy with warships.

Which propulsion device proved itself when HMS Rattler towed the paddle steamer Alecto backwards at 2.8 knots?

Screw propeller power won the day, though the match was hardly even. With both ships at full steam, Rattler's engines were putting out more than twice the power of Alecto's.

Which country's crown granted Jerónimo de Ayanz a patent in 1606 for a steam-powered pump to drain flooded mines?

Spain had put Ayanz in charge of its 550 mines, and he nearly died in one, which set him to work on the pump. He also tested a diving suit before King Felipe III.

Which Confederate locomotive did Union raiders steal in Georgia in 1862, setting off the Great Locomotive Chase?

The General was hunted for 87 miles, partly by an engine running in reverse. Six of the raiders became the first soldiers to receive the Medal of Honor.

Which mechanism did James Watt patent in 1781 to turn a wheel without infringing a rival's patent on the crank?

Sun and planet gear was really the idea of an employee, William Murdoch. Once the rival patent had lapsed, the firm went back to the plain crank.

Which Scottish engineer showed off his steam hammer by cracking an egg in a wine glass without breaking the glass?

James Nasmyth followed the gentle tap with a full-force blow that shook the building. He first sketched the design in 1839 for a giant paddle shaft that, in the end, was never needed.