PREVIEW: Epochs #242 | The History of Steam Power with Alex Masters: Part III
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
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4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 2025
⏱️ 21 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | What you get then, which is 1829, |
| 0:16.3 | What you get then, which is 1829, is the famous Rain Hill Trials. |
| 0:27.8 | And this is George again wants to run this railway entirely with steam engines. |
| 0:35.1 | So Stockton Darlington, Public Railway, some people use steam engines, some people use horses, |
| 0:41.7 | it's all a bit of a mess. |
| 0:43.4 | He wants this to be absolutely 100% steam train hauled or locomotive hauled. |
| 0:50.1 | So they set up a competition on a completed piece of the track at Rain Hill |
| 0:58.4 | and set up a bunch of conditions. |
| 1:02.2 | It's got a whole five times its own weight and got to go faster than 10 miles an hour |
| 1:06.5 | and all the rest of it for a 500 pound prize, |
| 1:09.0 | which is not an inconsiderable amount of money. |
| 1:13.3 | Five people... the rest of it for a 500 pound prize which is not an inconsiderable amount of money um five people get there i think they have quite a lot of interest um but only five actually turn up |
| 1:22.1 | one of them is called cycloped which is actually a treadmill with a horse on it which immediately gets |
| 1:32.6 | disqualified because it's not steam engine one of them is called perseverance and is built by a |
| 1:38.8 | chap from edinburgh uh it never works he spends the entire weekend in the workshops trying to get it to go and it just doesn't. |
| 1:47.2 | One of them is called Saint-Pouret and is built by Timothy Hackworth, the chief mechanical engineer of the Stockton, Darlington. |
| 1:57.5 | One of them is called novelty and is built by a Swede called John Erickson, |
| 2:04.0 | who is currently down in London building fire engines. |
| 2:09.4 | Is that the Erickson? |
| 2:10.7 | The John Erickson. |
| 2:11.8 | Right, okay. |
| 2:12.4 | Yeah, the guy who goes on to invent screw propeller and build the USS Monitor for the US Navy in World War in the Civil War. He did loads of stuff. Loads of stuff. Loads of stuff. Very famous man. Yeah. Really fascinating chap. I think he dabbles with submarines at one point as well. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So, yeah, I believe so. This is 1829, so he's quite young and fresh-faced. I was going to say, you must have been young then. It's just a nipper. I think he was in, yeah, it must have been in his mid-20s. That's interesting. And then there is from Robert Stevenson, the Rocket, which is the famous yellow one. George's son? George's son. Strange still? No, they've got a professional working relationship now. |
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