Energy | Stories from the stores

This post was written by Tara Knights, a work placement student with the Research & Public History department from Sussex University’s MA Art History and Museum Curating.

This is the third installment in a series of blog posts where we have been exploring the lives of our ancestors by looking at a collection of tool bags from the Science Museum’s collections. This time we will be looking at the mining industry. We might think we’re fairly familiar with the tools of the mining trade, with the Davy lamp and pickaxe especially being mining icons. But do you know what kind of instruments mining engineers would use?

Mineralogical test kit (Science Museum)

Mining engineers played (and still play) an important role in the consultation of almost every stage of a mining operation. They first analysed the potential of a mineral deposit, and then determined the profitability of a mine.

When the minerals had been successfully extracted, this mineralogical test kit was used to perform a mineralogical analysis in order to identify mineral species and understand their characteristics and properties. In order for a substance to be classified as a mineral it had to pass a series of tests, and this kit contains the tools needed for mineral testing, including a blowpipe, tweezers and chemicals.

The flame test indicated the identity of the substance being tested by the colour of the flame it produced. For example, a potassium compound burns with a lilac flame. Blowing through the blowpipe over a candle providing a heat source produced a tiny area of intense heat on a charcoal block, and created the right conditions for separating metals from their ores. After the process of mineralogical testing had taken place, this Tutton’s goniometer for cutting, grinding and polishing minerals may have been used. It was manufactured by Troughton and Simms, London c. 1894, and designed by Mr. A.E. Tutton.

Tutton’s goniometer (Science Museum)

This article was written by Ben Russell, Curator of Mechanical Engineering

1712 was a red letter year for humankind: for the first time, rather than just relying on wind, water, or muscles, a new energy source became available: the steam engine.

Thomas Newcomen of Dartmouth took the earlier, and rather ineffective, steam pump by Thomas Savery, christened by him the ‘Miner’s Friend’, and expanded it up into a truly practical industrial machine that harnessed the power of the atmosphere. The first of Newcomen’s engines was erected near Dudley Castle in the Midlands, in 1712. Here, then, was the beginning of our mineral energy-intensive age.

Thomas Barney’s 1719 engraving of the Newcomen engine erected near Dudley Castle ( Science Museum, London )

As the Science Museum expanded in the early twentieth century, the central role of steam meeting our energy needs placed the engine collection centre-stage: the first things visitors still see entering the museum are engines by James Watt, and other engineers.

The thing was, the museum long had a gap in its collections: there was no Newcomen-type engine to display. Curator HW Dickinson was asked to make good the deficiency. By the end of 1914, and mindful that agents for Henry Ford’s museum at Detroit were also snooping around, he had surveyed all the candidate engines.

The one chosen was that from Pentrich Colliery, Derbyshire. It was built by Francis Thompson in 1791, and used the original working cycle pioneered by Newcomen, although the engine was physically altered (and relocated) during its working life.

The Pentrich engine just before it was dismantled and shipped to the Science Museum ( Science Museum, London )

Dickinson oversaw the purchase, dismantling and re-erection of the 105 tons of iron, stone and timber comprising the engine and large portions of its engine house inside the Science Museum . It remains there today, symbolising the substitution of mineral for organic energy which Britain’s industrial revolution depended upon.

For an alternative view of the Newcomen engine why not check out the Science Museum’s Climate Changing Stories.

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