Trevithick's Stationary Engine

Captured with extreme precision, this engine’s complex array of intersecting tubes and valves is crisply legible. Or at least, it would appear so to a trained engineer. Comprehension was paramount to Francis William Webb, who made these photographs after rescuing the engine from a scrap heap in South Wales about 80 years after its assembly. The long-lost machine—a pioneering design powered by high-pressure steam—was built by Richard Trevithick shortly after the inventor devised England’s first steam locomotive. Webb was uniquely equipped to document the engine. He had studied with Trevithick in the 1850s at the Crewe Works railway facility, before becoming the site’s draftsman, and eventually, its chief mechanical engineer. When he discovered his mentor’s lost machine in the 1880s, he took it back to Crewe to be studied and restored.


Webb documents the machine as an archaeologist might an ancient fossil, describing its forms for posterity. A skilled technician with an illustrator’s eye, he circumnavigated his subject, photographing it from multiple perspectives. Isolated in a void of white, it appears as a perfect specimen. This effect seems to have been painstakingly achieved by masking the negatives, to remove distracting details from the background of the scene. Unencumbered by context, these views of the engine rigorously record its labyrinthine forms. They were published as engravings in an 1885 issue of the Scientific American Supplement, which hailed the engine as “a relic of the very highest interest.” Then prized for preserving technologies past, the works appear today as portents of photography’s future. In the next century, photographers like Bernd and Hilla Becher would reprise the same objective approach to depict industrial structures of their own time.