Beam engine, Verdant Works

Image: © Chris Allen Taken: 21 Oct 2016

Dundee's jute museum is housed in Verdant works and in 2015 a new gallery was opened that contains this magnificent Boulton & Watt beam engine that incorporates the separate condenser, parallel motion, sun and planet gear and centrifugal governor (Watt merely borrowed the governor from mill wrighting circles where it was used in corn mills for adjusting the gap between the stones). The engine was installed at William Sandeman's Douglasfield Bleachworks in Dundee, It was ordered in 1801 and installed in 1802 at a cost of £517. The engine is believed to have worked for most of the century and was purchased and gifted to Dundee's Free Library Committee in 1898. It was displayed in a new museum at Dudhope Barracks from 1900 to 1939 when WWII intervened. The museum never reopened and the engine was dismantled in 1960s for display in Edinburgh but this too never happened and the engine returned to Dundee in 1975 and remained in store until 2012 when work started on a plan to conserve and display it at Verdant Works. This is a very late example of the type as at about the same time all iron engines with conventional cranks were starting to be built. This is the only surviving Boulton & Watt engine to have worked in Scotland and to be displayed close to where it originally worked.

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0