In the early 1850s, the British created several military fortification bases in different parts of India, one of the earliest of which was at Roorkee, over 100 miles north-west of the country’s capital Delhi in the direction of the Sivalik Hills of the Himalayas. The town is now in the state of Uttarakhand. Another similar base was at Kamptee - then Kamthi - a suburb of Nagpur in the state of Maharashtra and over 500 miles north-east of Bombay.
From the road steam point of view, India was the first country in the world to use a steam roller for road making purposes in 1863. This machine was to the design of William Clark and William F Batho. Clark was the chief engineer of the Calcutta municipality and the roller had been built by Thomas Worsdell at his Berkeley Street Works in Birmingham. It had a vertically-mounted boiler and vertical single-cylinder engine. The roller inevitably worked in Calcutta.
It is, of course, generally accepted that the design by Thomas Aveling, in association with William Batho which resulted in Aveling’s 30-ton roller for
