Just before the Summer holiday break, I had the great fortune to run into retired curator Debbie Rudder. Debbie has written much about the Boulton and Watt, along with our Steam Collection and has always been a favourite of the volunteer walkthroughs. We had a lovely time catching up and I asked what she had been working on. Please read below for Debbie’s written response, which is a gem for all our Steam enthusiast volunteers:
Hello Cate,
You asked me if I’d written anything lately that might be of interest to Volunteers.
When I arrived home, I recalled the intriguing drawings directly behind the B&W engine (on the ground floor of the extended exhibition). I did spend a lot of time this year analysing them and related objects, which were originally thought to be architectural drawings, but which I realised are mostly engineering drawings. Sorting through them, identifying and understanding them was quite a big task.
I wrote about the main drawing on that wall, of the St Petersburg Mint equipment, some years ago.
The other drawing that I know is there is of a ‘vacuum trumpet’ for a British Mint coining press. You can read my analysis of the object on the MAAS website.
I found the related vacuum pump drawing (shown right) to be of particular interest, and hope I am right in stating that this was the first use of vacuum in an industrial process. Of course, Boulton & Watt’s engineers were very familiar with its use in steam engines, so it’s not surprising that they applied the concept to minting.
A nice rendered drawing of one of those presses (with boy feeding blanks into it) can be seen below and here.
I think there are one or two other drawings reproduced beside the vacuum trumpet. I wish I had thought to look today! If any Volunteers are interested in them, they could put the search term ‘british mint boulton’ into OPAC and look for them.
Regards,
Debbie