IEEC3.1 11 Early Engines of Whitehaven Revisited - A Partial Reassessment

Early Engines of Whitehaven Revisited

A Partial Reassessment

David Hardwick

An off-print from

Transactions of the 3rd International Early Engines Conference - Volume 1 pp209-242

Summary

This paper was not originally intended to be presented at the third International Early Engines Conference (IEEC3) but was added at short notice when one of the booked speakers was unavailable. It consists of material which the author had previously started to collate regarding the Whitehaven area in line with his research into the nature of early engine house construction. This was following a visit to survey the surviving structure at Saltom and comparison of that with existing interpretations.

It is focused on the collieries at Whitehaven in the 18th century and reconsiders the existing published information regarding the early engines erected there. This is supplemented with additional research into the locations and cylinder sizes of the Newcomen type atmospheric engines and what the buildings they were housed in looked like. Whilst it does not seek to provide a significant amount of additional information to the existing published material, it does identify several previous misconceptions and errors which have been published in various sources.

This is currently an incomplete piece of research due in part to the reordering of the Lowther papers since the articles by Allen and Beckett were published in the Transactions of the Newcomen Society (TNS). Despite the assistance of the extremely helpful staff at the Carlisle Archive Centre there has been some difficulty in locating the original sources they cited. There is, however, sufficient evidence from the documents located so far, both in terms of those found (and reconsidered here) that were previously cited from and from additional material now available, to question some of the conclusions made previously.

This paper, therefore, identifies the need for further research which the Author hopes to continue when time and the ability to access the original sources, now mostly held in Carlisle, permits.