BackTrack
Rocket is one of the most famous and recognisable railway locomotives; its victory at Rainhill in October 1829 is seemingly well-known, so too its part in mortally injuring William Huskisson MP on the opening day of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. Its history outside these two epoch-making events is, however, less well known. This article will explore something of its design and history; Part Two will discuss its sisters.
’Rocket’ men
The design of Rocket is popularly ascribed to George Stephenson alone, but the idea to build an entry for the Rainhill Trials of October 1829 came not from George or Robert Stephenson but rather from Henry Booth, the Secretary, Treasurer and later General Manager of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. Having made the suggestion to George, Stephenson senior “took a day or two to look in to the merits of the plan I proposed and then told me it would do, and join me in the venture”.1
Booth (1789-1869) was the scion of a wealthy and influential family of Liverpool Corn Merchants. The Booths, like many of the ‘great and good’ of Liverpool in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, was a Unitarian and it was for Renshaw Street Unitarian Chapel that Booth’s first essay in boiler design appeared, for the chapel’s central heating system. Of an inventive turn of mind, he had taken out his first patent in 1819 for a steamboat with a form of hydraulic transmission.2
Booth was a member of the circle of radicals which grew around William Roscoe, the Abolitionist Unitarian who would be Member of Parliament for Liverpool in 1806. Booth, like Roscoe, was an Abolitionist which must have put him somewhat at odds with the slave-owning Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. He had been a member of the Liverpool Jacobin Club and had been opposed to war with Republican France. Later a member of the Liverpool Concentric Society, he was a supporter of free trade, the abolition of the Corn Laws and religious emancipation: Unitarianism had been illegal in England until 1813. Booth was active in local and regional politics, championing the Reformed Parliament of 1832 and movements for liberty as far afield as France, Spain and South America.3 Always technical-minded, Booth would take a hand in designing the coke-burning boilers for Lancashire Witch (1828), the first locomotive designed to burn coke, the vertical boiler Twin Sisters (1829) and famously Rocket.
Booth’s boilers
The boiler of was a form of double-return flue, a type of boiler used by Trevithick on his London Steam Carriage and for his pioneering locomotive at Penydarren.4 This was a central main flue running through the boiler barrel, which in returning bifurcated into two smaller diameter flues which both terminated in their own chimneys. Within the main flue were two water tubes to further increase the heating surface. This boiler design may not have been successful as it was modified with twin parallel boiler flues each with its own firebox, the first tentative step toward the multi-tubular boiler. By using coke to prevent smoke, Booth and the Stephensons had mitigated one ‘nuisance’ of the steam locomotive. The second nuisance was that of noise. Thus, in order to keep noise to a minimum, instead of using a strong blast characteristic in the chimney, a pair of bellows, driven by eccentrics under the tender, was used. They provided a continuous stream of air via a nozzle or tuyère under the fire. George remarked in a letter to Timothy Hackworth that the bellows worked perfectly and “there was [author’s emphasis]’ about in operation, justifying the decision to use bellows to mitigate the noise problem. Furthermore, the use of bellows on a coke fire was application of existing technology - that of the smithing hearth - in order to get a coke fire to burn as hot as possible so as to prevent smoke.5 The reported:
