Newsletters and virtual meetings are no substitute for real meetings, workshops, tours and picnics. In the meantime, thank you for the excellent feedback on Richard Williams’ talk, broadcast online to those of you who missed his earlier real talk in London in January. Also, a special thank you to all those who forwarded the first two e-newsletters. As a result, each issue of the newsletter reached another 500 people. Thanks to those who re-tweeted us on social media: it was highly appropriate that George Tetin’s 50 canaries were trending on twitter! Please continue to spread the word . . .

A Health Warning: Phillip Ingram’s Saltscape is seriously time consuming and will make you prone to wanderlust! But not as time consuming as all those websites, so please keep sending your suggestions in.

Jonathan Aylen: President

A website which cherishes the history of Associated Octel’s Amlwch chemical plant on Anglesey, which shut in 2004. It used sulphuric acid (once a by-product of local copper refining) and seawater to make bromine products – notably anti-knock agents for petrol.

Andrew Cunningham writes “the story covers a wide range of subjects such as internal combustion engine knock, the chemical processes involved in producing antiknock, their contribution in WW2, the road/rail transport flows to support the processes and the impact of the Britannia Bridge Fire. It’s obviously a labour of love by an ex-manager and he seems to have nailed it very well”.

The large number of online hits on our gas catastrophe stories shows you like a disaster. The Newcomen Society is planning a post-lockdown workshop on lessons from engineering failure. Here is a trailer for the workshop – an expensive failure of a crane hook on the vessel Orion.

The Friends of the Stockton and Darlington Railway have gone all-out to maintain public interest in the line during lockdown. They have produced two introductory films on the railway. Beautifully illustrated and very well narrated. Their website has no links to these films, so go straight to the YouTube sites (via the title link above).

Following on from their introductory film The Railway That Got The World On Track!, the Friends of the Stockton and Darlington Railway have also produced a 2nd film What Survives?

The Women’s Engineering Society is a charity and network of women engineers and technologists, now a hundred years old.

In addition to the Women’s Engineering Society, this website celebrates the long history of women engineers with a set of blogs and activity packs. Read a blog by Emily Rees on the Victorian marine engineer Henrietta Vansittart who held US and UK patents on propeller design.

But, for readability it would be hard to beat Deborah Jaffé and Stephen Van Dulken’s blog on Ingenious Women. It includes such gems as a male inventor called Mildred, a long deceased female inventor who managed to set up a Facebook page from beyond the grave, and a spiritualist inventor in San Francisco. Deborah Jaffé is Editor of Newcomen Links and Stephen Van Dulken is a patent expert who worked at the British Library. But, your President must declare an interest: Stephen Van Dulken has advised me in the past on hot water bottle manufacturers.

Much more than steam, a valuable resource for anyone interested in some of the less well -known engineers connected with the railway story. Includes those who played a key role in rail development, but have no biographer yet. Navigate with the search function or the links. (The only shortcoming – the site is unaware that all the Newcomen Society Transactions (The Journal) are readily available on line to members!)

A big thank you to Andrew Cunningham, Professor David Eaton, Deborah Jaffé , Jonathan Aylen and Bob Gwynne for the above sites, and especially Phillip Ingram for earlier contributions.

WE NEED YOUR STORIES AND WEB FAVOURITES!

We’re looking for material for future newsletters during the lockdown. Do you have any interesting stories or some great websites that you’d like to show other members? Please send to editor.links@newcomen.com