The Pump That Emptied the Mines: Newcomen's Engine at Dudley
Coming to Wonder Inventions on 28 November 2026.
Staffordshire, 1712. Beneath the ruined keep of Dudley Castle, the Earl's Conygree coalworks is drowning: the Thick Coal seam lies under fifty yards of black water and the horse-gins that lift it are killing horses faster than they can be bought. Thomas Newcomen, a Devon ironmonger, and his partner John Calley come north with a mad proposal — a house of brick and oak in which steam will be condensed to let the whole weight of the sky push a piston down. Dragged through fords, quarries and oak woods by a grudging steward, a one-eyed blacksmith and a fourteen-year-old pit-bank girl, the engine is forged, hauled, raised and burst, and only after a midnight disaster drops the pump rods to the bottom of the shaft does the great beam finally nod and the water begin to pour out across Tipton Green.
About this story
- Length
- 10 illustrated pages
Who appears
- Thomas Newcomen — Dartmouth ironmonger, builder of the atmospheric engine
- John Calley — Plumber and glazier, Newcomen's partner and solderer
- Ambrose Pell — The Earl's colliery steward, sceptical paymaster (leaves after page 8)
- Sary Hodgetts — Pit-bank girl and bailer, becomes the engine's first attendant
- Gideon Round — Dudley blacksmith who forges and raises the engine's ironwork
What happens on 28 November 2026
This story is finished and scheduled. On 28 November 2026 it opens here in full — every page illustrated, with narration you can listen to — as part of Wonder Inventions. Nothing on this page is a placeholder: the story exists, it has been reviewed, and this is its address.
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