The Other Men Behind Those Inventions (12 August 1978)

One of the interest of growing old is not only how we live and learn, but also how we live and unlearn.  That thought struck me the other day when a talk touching on the subject of television was given by a man on the wireless – or on the radio, as it is now called.

For more than 50 years I had accepted without question that television had been “invented” by John Logie Baird.  I recalled how he had given his first sensational demonstration to the Royal Institution in 1926 and had transmitted images across the Atlantic in 1928.  I knew that the BBC had adopted his system only in part for its broadcasts and that eventually it had been superseded entirely by the Marconi-EMI system. But for me, as for most Britishers, Baird was still the great pioneer.

The man in the radio talk, however, pointed out that the Americans had the same opinion of one of their nationals, the Germans of one of theirs, and one other European nation (which, I did not catch) one of theirs.  What this meant – though he did not specifically say so – was that as far as three other nations were concerned Baird might just as well not have been born!

It reminded me of how the name of Dr. Rudolph Diesel, of Germany, had just about obliterated that of Herbert Akroyd Stuart, of Fenny Stratford, as the inventor of the first heavy oil engine.  I, for one, would never have heard of Stuart before coming to Bletchley but for the fact that he was a Yorkshireman, born at Halifax, and remained enough of one to will his remains to be brought back from Australia and buried in Halifax churchyard.

I see that encyclopaedias are now getting around to giving him his due, one of them stating: The principle was invented in England by Herbert Akroyd Stuart in 1890 and developed by Rudolph Diesel in Germany”.

Incidentally, the invention of the first successful heavier than air flying machine is now credited to a Yorkshire squire, Sir George Cayley.  It was a glider, of course.  But it was invented in 1809, and the famous Wright brothers were still flying gliders in 1902 – nearly 100 years later. It was not until December 1903, that they introduced a power unit and thus made the first successful aeroplane.  A Frenchman had introduced a power unit in 1890 but photographs seemed to show that at no time were all the wheels off the ground.

The question of who invented what is often a ticklish one.  When I was a boy I used to look at a picture of another boy who was watching the steam lifting the lid of his mother’s kettle.  His name was James Watt and I gained the impression that all steam engines had their beginnings in that simple, boyish curiosity.  It was an impression I held more or less right down to this year of 1978 before I really learnt otherwise.

Not that Watt was not a genius in his own right – he certainly was.  His inventions of the sliding valve and of speed governors alone would have assured him of a high place in engineering history.  But the engine which he patented in 1769 is very recognisable as a development of one built by the Englishman Thomas Newcomen 59 years earlier.  The boiler, piston cylinder, beam and connecting rods were all in Newcomen’s engine.

There is one country where the names of both men are held in great esteem (no pun intended) and that is Holland.  They have a saying over there that “God created the world, but the Dutch made Holland”.  An exaggeration, of course, but very descriptive of the battle for land reclamation which they have been waging ever since the year 500 AD.

All this was impressed upon me almost by accident on a day trip from Germany to Holland earlier this year.  I greatly admire Dutch painting and was hoping we would able to take in the Van Gogh Gallery at Amsterdam, but it was not to be. For it turned out a particularly busy day.  The annual flower festival was taking place and there were so many snarls of traffic in that area before we escaped that we thought Amsterdam would probably be as bad or even worse.  So we set off along the side of a canal towards the coast.  When it seemed we would not be able to go much further, we came upon a café.  And right beside the café was a large and strange-looking building called the Cruquius Expo, Cruquius being not a place but the name of a celebrated Dutch water engineer.

The building turned out to have been a pumping station from 1849 to 1933.  The original engines, built on the Boulton and Watt system by British engineers were still there and had worked over the whole 84 years.

Other than old steam engines, some of them Boulton and Watts, from other pumping stations were also on view.  There were also prints of a Newcomen mine-pumping engine of 1725 and a Newcomen engine working a pumping station at Rotterdam in 1774, together with various other prints and models illustrating the story of land reclamation in Holland from early times down to the present day.

What impressed me most was the strength and durability of the British products of those times and also the regard in which they were held by the Dutch.  After 300 years or more of windmills – some of them in series – as fitful sources of pumping power, the steam engines must have come to the Dutch like a gift from the gods.

One popular myth was exploded – the well known one about the little Dutch boy who saved his country from inundation by sticking his finger in a leaking dyke.  The Dutch have always laughed at this yarn from its very impossibility and no-one has been able to trace it further than to an American woman novelist last century.  But some canny Dutchmen decided to play along.  They pointed out a certain hole as the very one into which the boy has plugged his finger.

Now, they, or their descendants, wish they hadn’t because the crowds of tourists hold up the traffic, all firmly believing they are seeing the site of one of the great deeds of history!