Bronze Age Gold from Wales

Single cylinder steam beam engine from Cardiff Waterworks Co. Single plate, cast-iron beam, Watt-type governor. First used for pumping water into Penhill Reservoir, Llandaff, and later moved to Llanishen Reservoir, where it was used until 1921.

1 cylinder : 20" diameter stroke : 3' 6" output : 20 hp efficiency : 10% flywheel : 12' diameter, operating at 30 rpm.

Sir Cyril Fox, Director NMW - "It is a first class example of its type. One of its most interesting features and certainly the most attractive is that the central column is pure Doric of the 5th century BC in design. The engine thus illustrates the neo-Greek phase of the classical tradition in architecture, and therefore, the humanism which informed the engineering profession in the first half of the 19th century. In other words, it demonstrates in its own field that relationship between art and applied science which produced in the mid-nineteenth century some of the noblest engineering works in the world."

In the first half of the 19th century Cardiff’s water supply was drawn largely from the River Taf. It was heavily polluted and people frequently suffered diseases and illnesses through drinking its water. In a particularly severe outbreak of cholera in 1850 one in every fifty of the population died. In order to provide a pure water supply, the Cardiff Water Works Committee had a new pumping station built to pump water from Ely Wells, in the west of the city, to Penhill Reservoir in Llandaf.

This engine, designed by James Simpson and built in Hayle, Cornwall in 1851, is one of two that were installed in the pumping house. The engine was later moved to Llanishen Reservoir where it worked intermittently until 1921. In 1932 the Water Works Committee decided that it should be preserved in a specially-built engine house for public display, but it was never opened to the public. It remained at Llanishen for almost half a century, and its existence was known to only a handful of people. It was dismantled in 1974 and re-erected in the Welsh Industrial & Maritime Museum.

Few beam engines such as this one were installed in Wales for pumping domestic water supplies because most of the water flowed under gravity from reservoirs high in the hills.

Source: Welsh Industrial & Maritime Museum Guidebook, 1984