Matthew Murray

• 1. Introduction

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  Matthew Murray was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1765, and he left school at fourteen with no particular distinction to his name. He spent his early years as an apprentice to a blacksmith or whitesmith, learning to work metal by hand. Yet by the time he died in 1826, he had designed the world's first commercially successful steam locomotive, built engines that would run for more than a century, and supplied technology that crossed the Atlantic and helped power the Mississippi paddle steamers.

  What drove a journeyman mechanic from the flax mills of Darlington to the forefront of the Industrial Revolution? How did he outperform the most powerful engineering firm in Britain, Boulton and Watt, even as they tried to spy on him, bribe his workers, and block the expansion of his factory? And what became of the machines he left behind?

• 2. Flax, Patents, and Leeds

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  In 1785, Murray concluded his apprenticeship and married Mary Thompson of Whickham, County Durham. The following year he moved to Stockton and took work at the flax mill of John Kendrew in Darlington, a place where the mechanical spinning of flax had already been invented.

  In 1789 trade dried up in the Darlington mills, so Murray moved his family to Leeds to work for John Marshall, who was building a reputation as one of the more ambitious flax manufacturers of the era. Marshall had rented a small mill at Adel, partly for production and partly to develop a pre-existing flax-spinning machine. The two men worked through a period of trial and error, trying to solve the problem of breakages in the flax twine during spinning. Their improvements were enough to justify a new mill at Holbeck, which Marshall began constructing in 1791, with Murray overseeing the installation.

  Murray had not simply implemented someone else's ideas. He had designed new flax-spinning machines of his own, which he patented in 1790. Three years later he took out a second patent, covering instruments and machines for spinning fibrous materials. That patent introduced a technique called wet spinning, which transformed how flax was processed and helped establish the British linen trade on what the source describes as a solid foundation.

  By this point Murray was effectively the chief engineer at Marshall's operation. The move to Leeds had turned a modest apprentice into a man with patents to his name and an employer increasingly dependent on his judgment.

• 3. Round Foundry and Rivals

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  In 1795 Murray went into partnership with David Wood and set up a factory at Mill Green, Holbeck. Two years later the firm moved to larger premises at Water Lane, bringing in two new partners: James Fenton, who had previously worked with Marshall, and William Lister, a millwright from Bramley. The firm took the name Fenton, Murray and Wood. Murray handled technical innovation and order-getting; Wood ran the day-to-day works; Fenton kept the accounts.

  As the firm's reputation for precision grew, a larger assembly shop became necessary. Murray designed it himself: a massive three-storeyed circular building that became known as the Round Foundry, powered by a centrally mounted steam engine that drove all the machines inside. Murray also built a house for himself adjoining the works. Because each room was heated by steam pipes, locals took to calling it Steam Hall.

  The quality that made Fenton, Murray and Wood successful also attracted unwanted attention from Boulton and Watt, the dominant engineering firm of the period. Boulton and Watt sent employees William Murdoch and Abraham Storey on what was presented as a courtesy visit, but was in fact a reconnaissance mission. Murray, by his own account rather foolishly, showed them everything. On returning home, Murdoch and Storey reported that Murray's casting and forging work were markedly superior to their own. Boulton and Watt then tried to obtain information through an employee of Murray's firm via bribery. When that failed, James Watt junior purchased land adjacent to the workshop in an attempt to block the firm's expansion.

  Boulton and Watt also challenged two of Murray's patents in court and had both overturned. Murray's patents of 1801 and 1802 were invalidated because he had grouped too many improvements together in each filing. Under the rules of the time, a single infringement within a bundled patent voided the entire document. Despite these legal defeats, Fenton, Murray and Wood continued to draw orders away from their larger rival.

• 4. Engineering the Steam Engine

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  Murray approached steam engine design with a specific goal: he wanted engines that were simpler, lighter, and more compact than what existed, and that could be assembled on site with pre-determined accuracy. Many engines of the period suffered from faulty assembly that required significant remedial work.

  One obstacle was a patent held by James Pickard, which covered the crank and flywheel method of converting linear motion to circular motion. Murray worked around it by introducing a Tusi couple hypocycloidal straight line mechanism. This used a large fixed ring with internal teeth, inside which a smaller gear wheel with half the outer one's diameter would roll, driven by the engine's piston rod. As the piston rod moved back and forth, the gear wheel converted that linear motion into circular motion, with its bearing attached to a crank on the flywheel shaft. The result was an engine more compact and lightweight than its contemporaries. Murray abandoned the mechanism as soon as Pickard's patent expired.

  In 1799 William Murdoch, working for Boulton and Watt, invented the D slide valve, which admitted steam alternately to each end of a cylinder. Murray improved the valve's operation by driving it with an eccentric gear attached to the engine's rotating shaft. He also patented an automatic damper that regulated furnace draft according to boiler pressure, and designed a mechanical hopper that fed fuel to the firebox automatically. He was the first engineer to place the piston in a horizontal position within a steam engine.

  Murray expected very high standards of workmanship from every employee. He designed a special planing machine for surfacing slide valve faces and kept it in a locked room, accessible only to certain workers. The Murray Hypocycloidal Engine, now preserved at the Thinktank museum in Birmingham, is identified as the third-oldest working engine in the world and the oldest surviving working engine with a hypocycloidal straight line mechanism.

• 5. Salamanca and the Middleton Railway

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  In 1812 Fenton, Murray and Wood supplied John Blenkinsop, manager of Brandling's Middleton Colliery near Leeds, with a twin-cylinder steam locomotive named Salamanca. It was the first commercially successful steam locomotive ever built.

  Murray paid Richard Trevithick a royalty to use his patented high-pressure steam system but made a key departure from Trevithick's single-cylinder design: Salamanca used two cylinders, which produced a smoother drive. Because cast iron rails of the period could not bear heavy loads without breaking, the locomotive had to be kept lightweight. To solve the traction problem on a lightweight machine, John Blenkinsop had patented in 1811 a toothed wheel and rack rail system, with a toothed rail running along one side of the track at a gauge of 4 ft 1 1/2 ins. This was the first rack railway.

  The rack system allowed a small locomotive to haul loads totalling at least twenty times its own weight. Salamanca was so successful that Murray built three more models. One was named Lord Wellington. The other two are said to have been called Prince Regent and Marquis Wellington, though the source notes there is no known contemporary record of those names. The third locomotive intended for Middleton was diverted at Blenkinsop's request to the Kenton and Coxlodge Colliery waggonway near Newcastle, where it appears to have been called Willington. George Stephenson saw it there and modelled his own locomotive Blucher on it, though without the rack drive, making Blucher considerably less effective.

  Around 1819, once malleable iron rails became available, the rack and pinion system became unnecessary for flat-track railways. After two of the Middleton locomotives exploded and killed their drivers, and the remaining two grew unreliable following at least twenty years of hard service, the colliery returned to horse haulage in 1835.

• 6. Beyond Locomotives

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  In 1811, a year before Salamanca ran, the firm built a Trevithick-pattern high-pressure steam engine for John Wright, a Quaker of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. The engine was fitted to a paddle steamer called l'Actif, a captured privateer that Wright had purchased from the government. Renamed Experiment after paddle wheels and the new engine were fitted, it proved very successful and was eventually transferred to another vessel, The Courier.

  In 1816 Francis B. Ogden, the United States Consul in Liverpool, received two large twin-cylinder marine steam engines from Murray's firm. Ogden then patented the design in America as his own invention. The design was widely copied and used to power the Mississippi paddle steamers.

  Murray's gold medal from the Royal Society of Arts came in 1809, awarded for his heckling machine, which prepared flax for spinning by splitting and straightening its fibres. His improvements to heckling and spinning were credited with saving a trade that was, at the time, close to collapse: production costs fell, quality improved, and the manufacture of flax machinery at Leeds grew into an important export industry.

  In 1814 Murray patented a hydraulic press for baling cloth, one in which the upper and lower tables approached each other simultaneously. He improved upon the earlier hydraulic presses built by Joseph Bramah. In 1825, just before his death, he designed a press for the Navy Board intended to test chain cables. It was 34 ft long and capable of exerting a force of 1,000 tons.

• 7. Legacy and Last Years

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  Matthew Murray died on the 20th of February 1826, aged sixty, and was buried in St Matthew's Churchyard in Holbeck, Leeds. His tomb was topped by a cast iron obelisk made at the Round Foundry, the same building he had designed to house his expanding enterprise.

  The firm of Fenton, Murray and Wood survived him until 1843. Several engineers who trained there went on to significant careers, among them Benjamin Hick, Charles Todd, David Joy, and Richard Peacock. Murray's only son, also named Matthew, served his apprenticeship at the Round Foundry before travelling to Russia, where he founded an engineering business in Moscow. He died there at the age of forty-two.

  The engines Murray built outlasted him by a remarkable margin. Several of his large mill engines ran for more than eighty years. One, installed second-hand at the locomotive repair works at King's Cross, ran for over a century. The 34-ft Navy Board press that Murray designed to exert 1,000 tons of force was completed just before his death, meaning the largest machine he ever built was finished without him ever seeing it in operation.