BBC - History -      British History in depth: Victorian Technology
Print this page
A powerful trading nation
During the reign of Queen Victoria Britain emerged as the most powerful trading nation in the world, provoking a social and economic revolution whose effects are still being felt today. Since the latter part of the eighteenth century the process of industrialisation had built a firm foundation for nineteenth century growth and expansion. At the heart of this was the successful development and application of steam technology. Before 1800 brilliant engineers and entrepreneurs such as James Watt and Matthew Boulton had made steam power a practical reality that had radically improved Britain's core industries, namely the mining of coal, minerals and other raw materials and the production of iron, textiles and manufactured goods. With its advanced industrial technologies Britain was able to attack a huge and rapidly expanding international market.
Between 1809 and 1839 exports grew from £25.4 to £76 million. Ten years later the figure was £124.5 million, with the major export markets being Europe, India and Asia and, increasingly, the United States. At the start of Queen Victoria's reign, Britain's standing as a global industrial and trading power was already unrivalled. The complex structures of international trade developed by the Victorians and the maintenance of the process of wealth generation derived from them were dependent upon efficient means of communication. In many ways, the Victorians owe their unique place in history to their imaginative and successful exploitation of three new communication technologies, the steamship, the railway and the electric telegraph.
During the reign of Queen Victoria Britain emerged as the most powerful trading nation in the world...
The steamship has a long, pre-Victorian ancestry, dating back at least to 1783 when the Marquis de Jouffray d'Abbans steamed his little boat, the Pyroscaphe, across the Seine. The first steam-assisted crossing of the Atlantic took place in 1819 when the Savannah sailed from Georgia to Liverpool in 633 hours. By 1833 the Atlantic crossing had been reduced to 22 days and steam ships had begun to operate on the major Imperial and trade routes to India, South Africa and Australia. The 1830s were also marked by the founding of three major shipping lines, the British and American Steam Navigation Company, the Great Western Steamship Company and the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company. The first two concentrated their efforts on the Atlantic and their rivalry launched the period of frenetic competition on that route that was to continue throughout the Victorian period and well into the twentieth century.
In April 1838 the Great Western sailed from Bristol to New York in 14 days and 12 hours, establishing the modern steamship era and the famous Blue Riband contest for the fastest transatlantic passage by passenger ships. Competition was intensified by the setting up by Samuel Cunard of a new shipping line. In July 1840 his first ship, the Britannia, crossed the Atlantic in 11 days and 4 hours. By 1901 the German liner the Deutschland could cross the Atlantic in under 5 days.
Top
Great pioneers
Isambard Kingdom Brunel     © The designer of the Great Western was the brilliant young engineer of the Great Western Railway, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who had persuaded his directors that a transatlantic shipping line was the natural way to expand the services offered by their railway. Brunel's response to the challenge posed by his rivals was to design a bigger and better ship. In July 1839, the keel was laid in Bristol for a new 3270 ton iron super ship. Designed for speed and comfort, this was to be the most revolutionary steamship of the early Victorian period. Equipped with cabins and state rooms for 360 passengers and the largest and most lavish dining room afloat, and the first large ship to be screw-driven, the Great Britain set the standard for large liners for many decades to come. By 1853 the Great Britain, refitted to accommodate up to 630 passengers, was operating an efficient London to Australia service and continued to do so for nearly twenty years.
The success of the Great Britain encouraged Brunel and his backers to create one more ship. In 1854 work started at Millwallon the Thames in east London on the building of the Great Eastern. Designed to carry 4000 passengers and enough coal to sail to Australia without refuelling en route, the ship was 693 feet long, 120 feet wide and weighed over 18,900 tons. Nothing on this scale had ever been considered before, and when she was finally broken up in 1888, the Great Eastern was still the largest ship in the world. The records of scale set by the Great Eastern were only finally broken by the super liners of the Edwardian era, the Lusitania of 1907, the Titanic of 1912 and the Imperator of 1913. On the Great Eastern's maiden voyage in June 1860 the ship carried only 38 paying passengers.
Scale and technical virtuosity were not enough and the smaller, simpler and faster ships of Samuel Cunard captured the traffic.
This became a pattern and the ship never sailed with all berths filled. Scale and technical virtuosity were not enough and the smaller, simpler and faster ships of Samuel Cunard captured the traffic. Increasingly a white elephant, the Great Eastern came out of passenger service in 1863 and was chartered by the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company to lay telegraph cables across the Atlantic and from India to Aden, a task for which her huge size and powerful engines made her eminently suitable.
From an early date the British government realised that the successful operation and maintenance of an expanding trade empire depended upon fast, regular and reliable steamship services, supported by coaling and supply stations scattered all over the world. The primary function of the Royal Navy in Victorian Britain was the protection of these trade routes and their supply bases. As a result, the government sponsored the development and maintenance of the routes and, increasingly, the cost of building the ships. In 1840 the Peninsular Company became the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, with government contracts to operate services to Egypt, South Africa, India, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. In the process, as the Cunard name was becoming synonymous with the Atlantic so P&O developed its long term association with routes east of Suez.
Top
Booming railways
Representation of the Rocket which heralded the dawn of the railway age.     © Equally important were the links established between shipping lines and ship yards. During the Victorian period British shipyards on the Clyde, the Tyne, the Mersey, the Thames, at Barrow and Belfast came to dominate the world, having pioneered the use of iron and steel in ship-building, and developed marine technology to a high level. In 1900, for example, 739,000 tons of shipping was built and registered in Britain. British yards built ships for owners all over the world and were still in a dominant position at the end of the century, despite increasing competition offered by ship builders in Germany. Cunard had close links with the Glasgow yard of Robert Napier, while the Belfast firm of Harland & Wolff backed a new Atlantic challenger, the White Star Line, launched in 1871 and went on to have interests in other shipping companies, including the Union Castle Line.
Like the steamship, the railway predates the Victorian era. The start of the modern railway age is usually marked by the opening in 1825 of the Stockton & Darlington line. Other, mostly local, lines followed, the most important of which was the Liverpool and Manchester of 1830, famous for Robert Stephenson's Rocket locomotive. With its multitube boiler, blast pipe exhaust, pistons connected directly to the driving wheels and its ability to haul its train at over 30 miles per hour, this machine set the standard for locomotive design. The first long distance lines were opened in the first years of Queen Victoria's reign, the London and Birmingham in 1838, part of Brunel's London to Bristol route the same year and the London and Southampton in 1840. A railway boom and mania followed during the 1840s, with promoters and speculators planning lines all over Britain.
Like the steamship, the railway predates the Victorian era.
By 1845 2441 miles of railway were open and 30 million passengers were being carried. The railways, offering as they did new opportunities for travel and commerce, and breaking down social barriers in the process, were immediately popular, a popularity encouraged by acts of parliament that ensured that trains conformed to standards of speed and comfort and offered rates that were affordable by all. The spread of the railways also brought about, through time-tabling, a regularisation of time throughout Britain. Excursions and day trips, particularly to the seaside, became a familiar part of British social life. In 1851 many of the six million visitors to the Great Exhibition travelled by train to London in organised excursions. Queen Victoria made her first train journey on 13 June 1842 and then became a regular user of the rail network, for speed and convenience and because it gave her ample opportunity to show herself and her family to her subjects.
Expansion of the rail network was rapid and continuous. Between 1861 and 1888 the mileage grew by 81 percent and the traffic carried by 180 percent. By 1900, 18,680 miles were in use and over 1100 million passengers were being carried, along with huge quantities of freight. From 1852 the carriage of freight provided the railway companies with the bulk of their income. Safety standards, at first almost non-existent, gradually improved with advances in signalling and vehicle technology. By the end of the century trains ran regularly, and with complete safety, at speeds in excess of 70 miles per hour. Comfort also improved. The first lavatories appeared in family saloons in the 1860s, the first proper sleeping cars were introduced in 1873 and dining cars came into use from 1879.
Top
Communication revolution
The building of the railway network was the major achievement of the Victorian period, changing for ever both social patterns and the landscape of Britain. The great engineers, Stephenson, Brunel, Locke, Vignoles and many others built their lines across hills and valleys, across mountains and marshland and over great rivers with determination and style, and often regardless of cost. Their legacy are the great embankments, viaducts, tunnels and bridges that cover the face of Britain, in many cases still visible long after the trains they served have disappeared. Their stations, wondrous constructions in iron and glass and great cathedrals to modernity, brought a new building type into British culture.
As the railway was, in essence, a British creation, it was readily exported to many parts of the world, as a concept, and in component form. British engineers, British construction teams and British capital built railways throughout the Empire, in the Americas and in many parts of Europe. The famous railway contractor Thomas Brassey built railways in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Russia, India, Argentina and Australia. Imperial railway building projects were often inspired by strategic as well as industrial and commercial motives, but such projects, notably in India and Africa, opened up huge and long lasting markets to British manufacturers.British-made locomotives, rolling stock and railway equipment were exported around the world throughout the Victorian period.
The building of the railway network was the major achievement of the Victorian period, changing for ever both social patterns and the landscape of Britain.
The spread of the railway in Victorian Britain was closely linked to the development of the electric telegraph. The idea of communicating via electricity dates back to the eighteenth century but it was the understanding of electromagnetism from the 1820s that gave the idea a practical reality. In 1837 Cooke and Wheatstone developed the electric telegraph which used an electric current to move magnetic needles and thus transmit messages in code. The first operational telegraph system linked Euston station and Camden town, and from there it spread all over the railway network, used both to carry messages and to control signalling. The technology of the telegraph rapidly expanded, making possible mass communication on both national and global scales. With instruments in every post office, the telegraph, and its visible offspring, the telegram, personal communication on a scale hitherto inconceivable became commonplace. A telegraph cable was laid across the Channel in 1851, followed by others across the Irish and North Seas.
In 1866 Brunel's huge ship, the Great Eastern, laid a durable telegraph cable across the Atlantic. The global network spread rapidly, with many countries establishing their own systems. Colonial, military and commercial implications were quickly appreciated. By 1878 Britain had constructed two overland and one maritime telegraph links to India, part of a network that by the end of the century had reached almost every corner of the world. Related to the telegraph, but far more practical on a personal level, was the telephone, developed by the Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. By 1887 there were 26,000 telephones in use in Britain (and 150,000 in the United States) and multiple switchboards had been installed in most major towns and cities.
With the development by Marconi of practical radio transmissions at the very end of the nineteenth century, the foundations for the global communications systems of the twenty first century were in place in Victorian Britain.
In Britain, the attitudes and achievements of the Victorians are still part of many aspects of modern life today. These legacies are probably most tangible in the fields of communication. The Victorians not only built a British railway network which was more than twice as large as today's network but often operated with greater effiency. Urban transport systems such as buses and underground railways were also created by the Victorians. With those systems came the habit of commuting, one of the most durable and least appealing of nineteenth century legacies. The post service, the electric telegraph which was the forerunner of today's internet and the phone paved the way for the making of a world which relies heavily on complex structures of domestic and worldwide communications.
Victorian Things by Asa Briggs (London, 1988)
Companion to Britain in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914 by Chris Cook (Longman, 1999)
Brunel: The Great Engineer by Tim Bryan (Ian Allan, 2000)
The Railways of Britain by O S Nock (London, 1947)
The Railway Heritage of Britain by Gordon Biddle & O S Nock (Studio Editions 1990)
The Oxford Companion to British Railway History by Jack Simmons & Gordon Biddle (Oxford, 1997)
The Railway Empire by Anthony Burton (Murray, 1994)
Top
About the author
Since 1981, Paul Atterbury has been a freelance writer, lecturer, broadcaster and exhibition curator. He has written or edited over thirty books, mostly on ceramics, antiques and the decorative arts as well as travel. For the last eleven years Paul has been a member of the Antiques Roadshow team of experts. He was the curator of a major exhibition about the Victorians at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.