Engines were the beating heart of the Industrial Revolution, the main power sources that drove the looms of cotton mills, the railways, the machine tools of factories, and all manner of other machinery.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of engines were made in Manchester's factories. They ranged from enormous steam locomotives and mighty mill engines to electricity generators and little gas engines. Reopening in summer 2025, the Power Hall at the Science and Industry Museum will showcase the museum's amazing collection of historic engines with connections to the Manchester region.
In this story, you can find out more about the different engines in the Power Hall by exploring the interactive maps of where they were made and used. Most of our engines were built by communities of skilled workers in factories around Greater Manchester and the North West, people who lived and worked on streets that often are still familiar to us to today. Even if the factories themselves closed long ago, knowing where the engines came from gives them a sense of place for us.
The engines may have mostly been made around Manchester, but the stories of their working lives are global. From the cotton mills of Lancashire to the railways of South Africa, they helped to power the world, driving enormous changes in how people lived, worked and travelled. Fuelling these engines, with coal and other fossil fuels, was the key driver in human activity starting to change the Earth's climate. Each of the engines in the Power Hall has its own story to tell, but taken together they reveal the impact that the Manchester region's makers, innovators and engineers have had on the way people generate and use energy around the world.
Textile power
From the late 1700s, giant smoking chimneys began appearing across Lancashire as factory owners installed steam engines to power their textile mills. Coal fired steam engines offered more reliable power and a better choice of location than the water wheels that drove the first cotton mills and their use spread throughout the textile industry over the following decades.
Zooming in on these engines can reveal surprisingly local stories. The Durn Mill Engine and Firgrove Mill Engine, for example, were both used in cotton mills just a few miles away from the Rochdale iron foundries that built them, all conveniently linked by the Rochdale canal, which could also supply coal and raw cotton to feed the textiles machinery they powered.
Steam-powered factories could be built anywhere, unlike water-powered mills that needed to be built near rivers, often in rural places where it was hard to recruit weavers. By building steam-powered mills near towns, mill owners could exploit a plentiful pool of workers more willing to endure repetitive factory work for low wages.
These engines were big and had to be reliable, as whole mills were driven by just one engine linked to thousands of spindles or hundreds of looms, and a day without power could mean a day without workers being paid. The working lives of thousands of weavers were controlled by the steady beat of mill steam engines.
He must not take a moment's rest; the engine moves unceasingly; the wheels, the straps, the spindles hum and rattle in his ears without a pause, and if he tries to snatch one instant, there is the overlooker at his back with the book of fines.
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845)
Steam engines helped Manchester become the centre of Britain's cotton industry in the 19th century. There were over 100 cotton mills in the city by the 1850s, their chimneys belching out smoke across the skyline. Even more mills were built in nearby towns, and much of the housing built for the workers there still stands today in the distinctive red-brick terraced streets of Greater Manchester.
Manchester became the city at the heart of an interconnected industrial region, a supplier of machinery to textile industries near and far, a hub for the cotton trade, and for storing finished goods. In vast warehouses across the city, hydraulic presses squeezed cloth into compact bales for shipping. Yet inventors and entrepreneurs soon realised that engines could be used for making more than just textiles.
Making more
Following the cotton mills, other industries began using engines to drive machinery in the early 1800s. Steam powered machines for grinding, cutting, lifting, pumping and turning began a revolution in manufacturing, making it possible for people to make more than ever before.
The lathe on which these knobs are finished is now turned by a steam engine; so that the workman, relieved from that labour can now make them twenty times as fast as he did formerly.
Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1835)
Steam powered factories turned 19th century Manchester into an industrial powerhouse that made far more than cotton—processed food, books, chemicals, household items, machinery. At first, these factories were steam powered, using engines similar to our early Grasshopper engine; or the later Double Diagonal engine that once powered textile printing machines in Newton Heath.
Yet steam engines were not ideal for everyone. They were too big for many workplaces, slow to start, dirty, and needed a steady supply of coal and water. Over the 19th century, engineers devised new types of smaller engines driven by gas, oil or hot air. They were convenient, clean, powered up quickly, and compact enough to be used in all sorts of places where steam engines were impractical. This included our Crossley atmospheric gas engine, which once powered a bakery, or the little Robinson gas engine, which was the perfect size for powering a machine for chopping potatoes in a fish and chip shop.
At first these engines were made in workshops near the centre of Manchester, but as demand grew, vast new factories were built on the outskirts to mass produce them, like those of Crossley Brothers in Openshaw and The National Gas and Oil Engine Company in Tameside. By 1900, these companies had sold tens of thousands of small engines across the world.
Employing thousands of workers drawn from nearby streets, factories like these were more than just places of work; they were a centre of local communities. For example, the Crossley Brothers factory had its own chapel, financed a Lads' Club, and had cricket and football teams, which played against teams of workers from other factories. However, Crossley Brothers football team was sadly not as successful as the team of the nearby Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway works in Newton Heath, which eventually evolved into Manchester United.
Science Museum Group © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum
Railway engines
In 1830 a radically new type of engine arrived in Manchester, as steam powered railway locomotives began pulling trains on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. This was the world's first steam powered inter-urban passenger railway.
The engines built to run on it, like Planet, showed the world how useful such machines could be for moving people and goods swiftly over long distances between towns.
The almost miraculous success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, where Locomotive power gives a celerity of every species of commercial intercourse unparalleled in the history of the world.
Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser (17 August 1832)
The success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway helped the city grow into a centre for railway equipment manufacturing. As the industry developed, huge new factories were built to manufacture locomotives, carriages and wagons in East Manchester, at Gorton Locomotive Works and Beyer, Peacock & Company's Gorton Foundry.
The number of engines made by these factories was enormous; Beyer, Peacock alone built almost 8,000 railway locomotives in over a century of production.
Manchester made locomotives of all shapes and sizes, ranging from tiny narrow gauge tank engines, like Pender, to the enormous Garratt articulated locomotives, like South African Railways' 2352. The city's role in locomotive building continued well beyond the steam age, with diesel and electric engines, like Ariadne, produced on the same sites that had once turned out Victorian steam engines.
These locomotives were widely exported. The stories of their working lives connect the workers of Manchester's industrial suburbs to train travellers around the world: holidaymakers on the Isle of Man, refugees fleeing the troubles of the Partition of India, Dutch commuters, and many others who made their journeys hauled by the railway engines that now rest in our museum.
Networks of power
Steam was not the only power source used to drive machines in industrial Manchester. Thousands of machines across the city were powered by high-pressure water, particularly warehouse hoists and hydraulic cotton-bale presses. Victorian Manchester was even described as the 'home of the hydraulic press,' because there were so many of them. Electricity also arrived in Manchester in the 19th century, with demonstrations of battery powered lights delighting onlookers, and the Salford-born scientist James Joule making important discoveries about this modern energy source. By the early 1900s, electric motors had started being used to drive machinery in Manchester factories.
The spinning and weaving mill of Measrs. Ashworth, Hadwen, and Company, at Fairfield, Droylsden, containing 83,000 spindles and looms, has been fitted with a thousand-horse power turbine generator and electric driving power… The advantages of the new method were steadiness of pull, faster speed, fewer breakages, and adaptability.
Cotton Factory Times (15 February 1907)
At first, both hydraulic power and electricity needed to be generated locally. Users needed to have their own small steam or gas engine to pressurise water or drive a dynamo, like the little Dugdill steam engine used to light a shop in 1890s Bolton. However, it is far more efficient to have one big central power station generating power for thousands of people connected to a network, than it is for thousands of people to have their own engine.
In the 1890s, Manchester started to build a city-wide hydraulic network, with three pumping stations powering the machinery of hundreds of customers. By 1910 there were 23 miles of hydraulic pipe network beneath the city, supplying over 2,000 hydraulic machines with power at the turn of a tap. The hydraulic network lasted until 1972, by which time it had been overtaken by electricity networks, an even more versatile source of power. Yet even today, old hydraulic cranes can still be seen around Manchester on the walls of old warehouses that have been redeveloped into apartments and offices.
Electric power stations to supply British towns and cities began being built in the late 1800s, using machines like our mighty Ferranti Steam Alternator, which once ran a South London power station. Manchester's first power station opened at Dickinson Street in 1893, and similar Ferranti machines were installed there when the station was expanded a few years later.
These early electricity generators were replaced by more efficient steam turbogenerators in the 20th century, many of them made by the Metropolitan Vickers factory at Trafford Park. At first, towns each had their own power station to generate electricity, but the development of the National Grid from the 1930s gradually connected the whole country to one immense energy network supplied by even bigger out-of-town power stations, which have now been joined by new sources of renewable energy.
The power of maps
Seeing the museum's engine collection through maps—visualising where the engines came from and where they went—opens up many perspectives on the stories these artefacts can tell.
Science Museum Group © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum
The technological story of engines is often deeply connected to their geography. The map markers for the mill engines, for example, hint at the patterns of early industrialisation in Lancashire, showing how mill owners turned to local foundries for new steam engines to drive their cotton mills, changing ways of working forever.
The cluster of engines made in and around Manchester shown on the maps reveals the city's insatiable demand for energy during the Industrial Revolution and its rise to prominence as a place for making engines for all purposes and all places. The distant map markers for Manchester-made railway engines around the world highlight historic patterns of machinery export to British colonial territories and the role these machines played in a complex and often exploitative imperial history.
Copyright of South African Railways
Alongside these technological and global narratives, the maps also reveal more local stories, as we zoom in on familiar streets around Greater Manchester and discover the history around us. They reveal, for instance, how much heavy industry was once located in what is now the centre of Manchester itself, how engines were once made in spaces now filled by today's pubs, offices and apartments. They also connect our collections to communities around Greater Manchester, helping us to tell the personal stories of the skilled people who made them in the sprawling factories of places like Gorton and Tameside.
Perhaps more than anything else, seeing our museum collection mapped out like this gives us a real sense of place. It connects the engines to specific locations, environments and communities and all the wider meanings a sense of place carries, reminding us that these are much-travelled objects with identities of their own and many stories to tell of the people who made and used them.
