Page 76 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

Heaven & Earth / Industrial revolution

Local heroes: celebrating six innovators

Statues and celebrations were de rigueur in the hometowns of the great industrial trailblazers

James Watt Glasgow Matthew Boulton
By 1834, Glasgow boasted three statues Birmingham
of Watt, two the product of public Boulton was at least as prominent in life as
subscriptions, one the gift of James Watt Watt, yet has posthumously been overshad-
Junior to the university. Between 1864 owed. His entrepreneurial and inventive
and 1906, five more statues were talents (especially his coining machinery,
privately commissioned for the city’s supplied to numerous European mints)
buildings. Glasgow’s engineering would not be so well remembered today
societies hold an annual James Watt without Watt’s steam engines. However, in
Anniversary Dinner; Glasgow University 1956 Birmingham commissioned William
named its engineering laboratories after Bloye’s bronze Conversazione, in which the George Stephenson
him, and in 1919 marked the centenary life-size figures of Boulton, Watt and William Newcastle-upon-Tyne
of his death by establishing two James Murdoch discuss an engineering drawing.
Watt chairs of engineering, funded Boulton’s home, Soho House, was opened George and his son, Robert, were born
chiefly by Scottish engineers. in 1995 as a museum to him and the city also on Tyneside and lived most of their lives
there. The city’s chief monument to
marked the bicentenary of his death in 2009. George, erected in 1862, stands in Neville
Street, appropriately close to the railway
station. Some 70,000 people attended
the inauguration festivities. In 1881,
The statue of Boulton, Newcastle celebrated the centenary of
Watt and Murdoch in
Broad Street, Birmingham his birth even more grandly, with
exhibitions, lectures, fireworks, a public
breakfast to launch a ‘Stephenson
scholarship’ fund and a procession of
16 locomotives from the central station to
his birthplace at Wylam and back.
Stephenson’s birthplace (pictured above)
is now in the care of the National Trust.

Richard Trevithick
Camborne
Allegedly saved from a pauper’s funeral by
Abraham Darby parts were cast in the Darby foundry, which his fellow workers in Dartford (Kent) in ALAMY/DREAMSTIME/NATIONAL TRUST-GEOFFREY FROSHT/PHIL HOSKEN/BRIDGEMAN
by then had passed to his grandson, 1833, Trevithick was rediscovered when
Ironbridge Abraham Darby III (1750–89). Since 1967, the Institution of Civil Engineers launched
Born in Wren’s Nest (Worcestershire) in the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust has a subscription for a memorial window in
1678, Darby’s prime association is with preserved the remains of industry in the Westminster Abbey to mark the 50th
Coalbrookdale, where in 1709 he reput- gorge by establishing several highly anniversary of his death. That window
edly invented the smelting of iron with innovative museums. now features Cornish symbols and four
(coked) coal, and founded a major angels, each holding a drawing of a
iron-making dynasty. The greatest Samuel Crompton Trevithick invention, including ‘Railway
monument to his achievements is the Bolton locomotive, 1808’. On Christmas Eve
world’s first iron bridge (pictured below), The inventor of the (unpatented) spinning 1901, Camborne celebrated the centenary
which has spanned the Severn Gorge at mule, Crompton died poor and unre- of the steam road locomotive, the Puffing
Coalbrookdale since 1779. Its inter-locking Devil’s journey through
marked in 1827. Posthumously he rose to the town.
fame, thanks initially to Gilbert French, a A ‘Trevithick Day’
local antiquarian who, in 1859, published celebration still
his biography. French’s championing of takes place
Crompton inspired Bolton’s workers to annually. Since
fund the bronze statue by William Calder 1932, a statue of
Marshall, unveiled in the town in 1862. Trevithick has
Bolton’s centenary celebrations in 1927 stood in front of
included a children’s pageant, which the town hall.
culminated in a song, inviting “Ye Men of
Crompton’s Native Town… [to] Sound his
Fame Across the Earth”. Crompton’s An 1816 portrait of
childhood home, Hall i’ th’ Wood is now Cornish engineer
open to the public. Richard Trevithick

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