Engineering and History of Rocket: A survey report, The

Journal of Transport History, The, Mar 2001 by Jarvis, Adrian

M. R. Bailey and J. P. Glithero, The Engineering and History of Rocket: a survey report, Science Museum, London, and National Railway Museum, York (2000), 186 pp., L29.95.

This book is a detailed record of the dismantling (and reassembly!) of probably the most famous machine in the world, Robert Stephenson's Rocket, winner of the 1829 Rainhill trials, prototype for the initial locomotive stock of the world's first main-line railway. The aims of this dismantling included discovering more about how the locomotive was made in the first place, how it had been altered in service, how it had been repaired after a number of accidents and what changes had been made since it entered the Patent Office Museum in 1862 - where early curators seem to have added or discarded bits as they fancied, leaving only patchy records of what they had done.

Alongside the practical work of dismantling, measuring, drawing and photographing components which had not seen daylight for a very long time indeed, a thorough historical survey was also carried out which brought together all the available evidence gathered in past initiatives involving the locomotive, including retrospective drawings made before it entered the museum and the work which went into 'designing' the numerous replicas which have been built over the years. The authors identify nine, which probably makes it the most replicated machine in history.

The first two chapters relate to Rocket's place in locomotive history and the history of the locomotive itself. To this reviewer it is compelling stuff, though the interpretation of the relative contributions of George and Robert Stephenson seems slightly fudged. On the evidence provided, the authors appear to support the new orthodoxy that Robert did the work while George found the money and marketed the product (nothing wrong with that - it worked well enough for Boulton and Watt, or Rolls and Royce) but they never quite say so. The unworthy thought occurs that the Science Museum has exhibited something of a penchant for marketing `George Stephenson's Rocket' and that the authors may have felt constrained.

In some ways the real breakthrough which Rocket represented was the realisation that track strength limitations made it necessary to think in terms of power rather than drawbar pull - a smaller, lighter locomotive and train travelling at higher speed than a lumbering brute moving at horse speed with a huge load. But was it only a question of moving the maximum number of ton/ miles? The Liverpool & Manchester Railway had been promoted as a freight-- carrying venture but, once built, made its money carrying businessmen. There are grounds for conjecture that some time around 1828 George realised that passengers were the real market and fell into line with Robert's `light weight, high speed' philosophy, with which he had previously disagreed. He was never one to miss the main chance. The book concerns itself almost entirely with how it was that Rocket turned out as it did, rather at the expense of why.

To some academic historians `rivet counter' is a term of vilification rivalled only by 'anorak'. For them, the book ought to carry a health warning: it gives the sizes of the rivets as well. But the kind of historian who mistakes a micrometer for a rather nicely made G clamp is beyond redemption and will learn nothing from this book. Those who approach it with an open mind, even if with only limited engineering knowledge, will learn much. How comfortable it used to be when we could just reel off the dates of key innovations, each one a step on Samuel Smiles's great ladder of technological progress. This book gets us down to the reality of machines and their design: what worked and what didn't; how design ideas were developed and modified.

Everyone who has been involved in restoring or replicating some long motionless piece of machinery has performed some, perhaps many, of the processes reported in this book. But, so far as this reviewer knows, its closest published competitor in Britain is the one which he himself produced in 1980 - a booklet of twenty-eight pages. Not exactly a close-run thing. There were times when he wondered exactly who the authors were addressing, but nonetheless this must be accepted as a piece of ground-breaking research which reflects great credit both on them and on those who commissioned the project. There is a dimension of transport history which involves getting soot under the fingernails (or, in these conservationally correct days, on one's surgeons' gloves) while grubbing out small but meaningful detail that others have missed.

Adrian Jarvis, Centre for Port and Maritime History, Liverpool