FUN OF THE FAIR
From the 1870s until after the First World War, fairgrounds were enlivened by the smell of coal smoke, the blare of organs and the sheer exhilaration of steam-powered rides on scenic railways, gondolas, dragons and gallopers.

Many rides had centre engines with chimneys projecting from the big-top awnings. Others were powered electrically by showman’s engines with dynamos and extended chimneys to keep smoke off the customers and the varnished paintwork of the rides.

John Evan’s live-rail dragon scenic was typically elaborate. It used two engines, one to drive the cars (each weighing two tons and carrying 12 people), the other to power the organ, the lights and the centrifugal pump that kept water flowing down the steps of a painted waterfall decorated with real ferns.

JAMES WATT AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
The name of the Scots engineer James Watt was and still is to many people virtually synonymous with the steam engine, and the mistaken belief that he invented the steam engine long enjoyed popular currency. Watt’s reputation rose so high among the Victorians that when the Lord Provost of Glasgow, Sir James Bell, wrote a history of his great city in 1896, he found it a matter of pride to begin with the achievement of Watt.

‘According to tradition,’ Bell’s first paragraph starts, ‘it was while taking his accustomed walk on Glasgow Green on a pleasant evening in the spring of 1975 that the idea of the separate condenser to the steam engine flashed across the mind of James Watt. Every circumstance connected with that conception was momentous and memorable. No innovation, in any time or country, was fraught with such far-reaching and revolutionary consequences in the economic and social relations of the human race.’

The separate condenser to which Bell referred was the biggest single improvement ever made to the steam engine. By condensing the steam in a separate chamber rather than in the cylinder itself, Watt was able to create a far more efficient steam engine than Newcomen’s. To exploit his invention commercially, he joined the leading Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton in 1774, forming one of the most celebrated partnerships in world economic history.