Fy hoff grair: Cadi Iolen
24 May 2020
,Our curator Cadi Iolen is responsible for the care and conservation of thousands of objects. Here she tells us more about her favourite object in the collection, the 1861 Tanygrisiau house.
Our curator Cadi Iolen is responsible for the care and conservation of thousands of objects. Here she tells us more about her favourite object in the collection, the 1861 Tanygrisiau house.
Bury a time capsule – for children of all ages from very young up to 100+
A great way to leave something for future people to find is to make a time capsule. Fill it with everyday items from ‘now’ and bury it in your garden or you could put it in the corner of the attic where no-one goes!
After the ‘lockdown’ you could always make a time capsule with your classmates in school and bury it on the school grounds.
I’ve made quite a few time capsules over the years. I used to make them with my son when he was growing up and we buried them all over the place! We hoped that they would last a hundred years or more so that somebody would find them and see our things.
I have made two capsules with schools in Swansea too. One we buried at Waun Wen School, and one we buried in the grounds of Penlan Community Centre. Chris Coleman, who was the Wales football manager at the time came to help Waun Wen School bury their time capsule in the school garden. He grew up in Waun Wen.
Penlan children buried their capsule in the Community Centre garden.
We used big plastic boxes for the capsule because there were a lot of children who wanted to add something.
What you’ll need
When you make your capsule you can use any empty container that you might have in the house. I like to use empty coffee jars or any jar that has a screw lid (I tend to raid our re-cycling box).
I couldn’t find an empty coffee jar this time but luckily we had an empty marmalade jar.
Remember, the container you use will be very interesting to future people too!
What goes into your Time Capsule
I searched around my house for things to put in.
The items should not be expensive, just little things you don’t mind burying. I chose:
Write a little note to go in the jar. It can say things about you like your name and age and todays date. Also write a little explanation of why you are burying the capsule. If you can add a picture of you then good, but you can always draw a picture of yourself too.
You could write your thoughts of the Covid 19 lockdown, what you miss the most or who you miss most.
You could write a letter to your future self and dig the capsule up yourself in twenty year’s time!
Make sure your container is clean and dry before putting your things in. Screw the lid on tight.
Then if you have some tape (doesn’t matter if you don’t) put an extra seal around the lid to keep any water out.
Send us pictures of your time capsule!
We would love to see what you put in your time capsule
Share your pictures with us via the Amgueddfa Cymru Twitter account!
You are now ready to bury the capsule. Remember to make a ‘treasure’ map of where you buried it.
This is in case you want to do more than one and you’ll have a way of knowing where they all are.
Before the invention of the railway locomotive, the speed and pulling power of horses represented the maximum that land transport could achieve. Steam-hauled railways introduced entirely new concepts of speed; vastly more goods and people could be transported further, faster and more cheaply.
Steam-hauled railways revolutionised many aspects of peoples’ lives. Within less than a single lifetime, steam-hauled railways went from remarkable novelties to being mainstays of everyday life.
The railway revolution began in Merthyr Tydfil on 21 February 1804 with the first recorded steam-hauled journey on rails. The key personalities were the talented Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick and Samuel Homfray, owner of the Penydarren Iron Works.
Trevithick had developed a compact high pressure stationary steam engine that could be built more cheaply and produce more power that pre-existing designs of similar size. Homfray formed a partnership with Trevithick to manufacture the stationary engines. In 1801 and in 1803 Trevithick had built and demonstrated experimental steam-powered road vehicles but had failed to arouse public enthusiasm. In south Wales he encountered a dense network of tramroads serving the ironworks, quarries and mines – all horse drawn and all built with iron rails. He hoped there might be an additional market for his high pressure steam engines if he could demonstrate their usefulness on railways. Homfray, seeking to widen demand for the engines he was beginning to build and market, agreed to fund the construction of a railway locomotive.
The pioneering locomotive was designed and built at Penydarren Iron Works over the winter of 1803-04.
The locomotive successfully pulled five wagons loaded with ten tons of iron and 70 men who had hitched a ride on the wagons for the 9¾ mile journey. Over the following weeks the locomotive made a number of further journeys the length of the tramroad.
The locomotive was widely reported at home and abroad.
Frequent breakages of the brittle cast iron track by the unsprung locomotive resulted in it being converted into a stationary engine within a few months. Two further Trevithick-designed locomotives were built in England in 1805 and 1808 but he found no commercial backers.
Despite Trevithick’s failure to commercially develop his locomotives, a seed had been planted. Engineers in the North East of England, notably Timothy Hackworth and George Stephenson, built a succession of viable locomotives in the 1810s that reliably hauled coal wagons from collieries to shipping places. These developments enabled the Stockton & Darlington Railway to use steam locomotives from its opening in 1825, and lead to the first long distance steam-hauled railway opening between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830.
In 25 years steam-haulage had progressed from experimental to reliable. Within a few decades more, railways employing steam locomotives were in use on every continent.
A conjectural reconstruction of Richard Trevithick’s pioneering Penydarren locomotive is displayed in the National Waterfront Museum at Swansea, where it is periodically demonstrated in-steam.
You may also be interested in this short film about Richard Trevithicks Steam Locomotive:
https://museum.wales/articles/2008-12-15/Richard-Trevithicks-steam-locomotive
While Wales is working hard to drive forward a positive climate agenda, with a target of 100% renewable electricity by 2035, our industrial past casts a long environmental shadow. Here Jennifer Protheroe-Jones, Principal Curator – Industry looks at our industrial history and its impact.
Wales was an early and unwitting contributor to climate change.
The 1851 Census showed that Wales was the first nation to have more people employed in industry than in agriculture, the important switch having probably occurred in the mid to late 1840s.
Wales was a notable international centre of industry in the mid 19th century, being one of the most important iron producing nations, and the centre of both the world copper and tinplate industries. Plentiful easily worked coal underpinned all these industries – to fuel furnaces, to power steam engines that drove machinery and locomotives that hauled raw materials and finished products.
Welsh steam coal is ideally suited to steam-raising. It burns with relatively little smoke, produces limited amounts of ash and produces a great deal of heat. As it burns, steam coal fissures but does not crack into small pieces. The fissures allow the coal to burn from the inside as well as from the outside, considerably increasing the heat output and so increasing the steam-raising properties of the fuel. Because steam coal does not break into small pieces as it burns, it sits on top of the fire bars and burns, rather than trickling through the bars as small fragments of unburnt coal which would go to waste amongst the ash. This property of not breaking into small pieces is specially relevant to fuel used in locomotives, because the vibration of the locomotive as it moves along the track tends to make poorer quality fuels break into small pieces which are wasted when they trickle through the fire bars into the ash pit. These properties made Welsh steam coal a premium fuel in wide demand.
A few decades later, exports of Welsh coal would outstrip the large amounts being used by industries within Wales. By the start of the twentieth century, south Wales was the most important coal exporting coalfield in the world, supplying diverse countries with steam coal. In energy terms, the Bristol Channel was at this time the equivalent of the Persian Gulf a hundred years later. If high quality fuel capable of powering the widest range of machinery was required, then the coal-exporting ports of south Wales were key places to obtain it.
In the 19th century the sight of smoke from works’ chimney stacks was regarded as a sign of prosperity. By the early 20th century smoke from burning coal was increasingly recognised as a nuisance but regarded as unavoidable. It was not until after the second world war that serious efforts began to be made to reduce the volumes of smoke from industries and from coal fires in houses – and by this time oil was globally becoming a more important energy source than coal.
The burning of coal, oil and natural gas releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that cause climate change. Internationally, today the largest uses of coal are in electricity generation, cement manufacture and in steel making. Coal ceased to be used to generate electricity in Wales in March 2020; coal continues to be used in the steel and cement industries.
The Welsh coalfields were intensively mined in the 19th century and output peaked in 1913, declining thereafter due to exhaustion of accessible reserves of coal. Output in 1913 was 60 million tons, half of which was exported; in 2018 output was down to 1.1 million tons. Welsh coal output was in steep decline by the time climate change was widely recognised as a major global issue. Each year the world now produces over a hundred times as much coal as Wales did in 1913, when the Welsh coal industry was at its peak. Even back in 1913, Wales was only producing around 5% of world coal output – its importance at the time was that half of it was exported and that it was regarded as the premium fuel of its time.
The complex web of communications that enabled Welsh coal to be traded internationally is explained in the Coal gallery at the National Waterfront Museum at Swansea.
The National Waterfront Museum will be fifteen years old this autumn, so recently staff have been looking through our archive of the opening ceremony on 17th October 2005.
That day was a great moment of celebration, as the museum had taken around five years to plan, build and fill with fascinating displays on the story of Welsh industrialisation over the past four centuries. Also, because interactive displays were then still a very new thing for museums there was considerable public interest in what was soon to be described as Wales' first digital museum.
Over 200 invited guests attended the opening ceremony that was conducted by the (then) First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, and rugby legend Sir Gareth Edwards. The first National Poet of Wales, Gwyneth Lewis, composed a bilingual poem in honour of the museum and this was read at the opening ceremony by the National Museum's Keeper of Industry, Dr David Jenkins, and myself.
It was certainly a day to remember!
Spring Bulbs for Schools Investigation - Resources for Schools
A Conversation with Theatr na n'Óg
Volunteering: Get Involved with cataloguing & cleaning collections at the National Slate Museum
Reclaiming Narratives Through Creative Interventions at St Fagans National History Museum