Beale notes for booklet

In 1786 a John Beale patented an 'umbrella with joints, flat springs, and tops, worm  springs and bolts, slip bolts, screws, slip rivets, cross stop and square slips'.  I do not know who John Beale was but perhaps he was a forerunner of two later Beales - Joshua Taylor and his son John. With an impressive record of inventions Joshua had moved to Greenwich from the east end of London in the 1830s and opened one the earliest engineering firms on Greenwich Marsh.

 

WAPPING AND WHITECHAPEL

 

In Wapping Joshua Taylor Beale was described as a cabinet maker and he took out a patent for 'improvements' to the design of a rotary steam engine - he was to take out several more over the next few years. 

 

 Soon he had moved to a bigger works in Chapel Lane, Whitechapel with a new partner, George Porter.  The next patent was for a means of heating inflammable liquids without any risk of them catching fire. This was a very important process for manufacturers who wanted to work with coal tar - heating over an open flame is a very dangerous thing to do. In the east end of London there were also many sugar refiners and there was a great need for ways to boil sugar safely - this process would be  very useful to them too.

 

Beale was already buying waste tar from the local gas works in partnership with a local tobacco merchant, Mr.Beningfield. He began to make special oil lamps which used 'substances not usually burnt in such vessels'. He described this substance as -mineral naphtha' - oil derived from coal tar. He also devised new lamps which could burn ‘the commonest hydrocarbon obtained from coal tar’ and they became very successful.   He patented this lamp in 1834 and it was said that this followed ‘twenty years in experiments’. Another patent of 1837 ‘has no resemblance to the former one’. In this lamp the fluid was to form into a vapour ‘in a sort of retort and to mix that vapour with oxygen from the atmosphere'. This was the Air and Vapour light.

 

 

AT GREENWICH

 

In the early 1830s Beale moved to Greenwich where he rented a riverside site from the Enderby Brothers. This is shown on maps as 'Beale's Foundry' – today very roughly, it would represent the western end of the Alcatel Factory site, and include the area of their boiler house and chimney

 

In Greenwich Beale lived in Conduit House on Trafalgar Road at the bottom of Vanburgh Hill – the site of the old Granada Cinema, now flats.  He may have been in the area for some time previous to this because of a report that in 1816 a 'Mr. Bell' used coal tar for his garden paths in Blackheath. This comment comes from Francis Maceroni (more of him later) who was a friend of Beale and both of them had an interest in coal tar – and the printer may easily have confused 'Bell' for 'Beale'. Perhaps, somewhere in a Blackheath garden, are the remains of the first tarred footpaths ever laid! However he continued to give his address as 11 Church Lane, Whitechapel while saying his works was in East Greenwich

 

ROTARY ENGINE

 

In 1823, again in partnership with Mr.Beningfield had patented a ‘rotative engine’ and there was another patented in 1835 and he said it was used in a steam vessel.  This was mentioned by no less than George Stephenson who described a trial of the engine at Yarmouth in a steam boat. The engine could not be made to work and although the boat got out to sea it could not get back and the party had to pay £40 to have her returned.  In 1837 he claimed in Mechanics Magazine to have sold ‘a considerable number’ of engines. It is said that he named them the ‘anti John Scott Russell Steam Engine’

 

 

STEAM CARS

 

Beale continued with his work on steam engines in Greenwich and in the 1840s began to use them in road vehicles. In this venture he was joined by another Mr. Beningfield, - John, who was the 'steward of the Rams gate steamer'. In the early 1840s at least two cars were made at Beale's Greenwich works and they were the not the only experimental road transport which trundled round the roads of North Kent in the nineteenth century.  From the 1820s onwards some Kentish roads were - well, almost - buzzing with newly invented vehicles.   Most of them were steam powered and were developed as the same time as railway locomotives but they were lighter and smaller and, perhaps, more sophisticated.

 

Colonel Francis Maceroni had had considerable experience with steam road vehicles since the late 1820s when he had been working with Goldsworthy Gurney. Later, as a partner of a Mr. Squire, he had manufactured steam road vehicles in a small works in Paddington but – as ever short of money – had sold them to a Mr. Asda who took them and demonstrated them in European capitals.

 

 In 1841 Colonel Francis Maceroni set up the ‘Common Road Steam Conveyance Company'...  This body aimed to commission a steam vehicle to Maceroni's patents.  They asked Joshua Beale to build the vehicle which he did with the help of his brother, Benjamin, who undertook the drawings. 

 

At about same time as Maceroni commissioned this carriage from Beale another, Greenwich while Deptford based, entrepreneur, Frank Hills, seems to have been doing much the same.

 It is far from clear if Beale was working for Hills as well as Maceroni.  A correspondent to Mechanics Magazine described a factory where two ‘handsome and powerful’ carriages were being built.  These were vehicles to take a number of passengers – one for 15 and one for 20 – and these seem to describe the larger vehicles commissioned by Maceroni. One of Hills vehicles was of this size, but the other considerably smaller.  It may be that Beale was not the only steam carriage builder in Greenwich at this time or it may be may be that Beale manufactured only one or both of the two vehicles which Hills commissioned. Hills, Beale and Maceroni began to undertake demonstration trips around the Kentish countryside.

 

On a Wednesday in July 1840 a party of seventeen went in Maceroni's carriage from East Greenwich through Lewisham to Bromley... Coming back to Greenwich they turned off onto the Dover Road and  went up Blackheath Hill - at 12 miles per hour  ''in gallant style' with 17 passengers.  They continued across Blackheath and up Shooters Hill and as they needed water they stopped at The Bull.  Inevitably, water was not all they took on there - the report says 'the men were regaled and eulogised the scientific engineer'. Frank Hills' carriage went rather further - Windsor, Brighton, Hastings - although there was a need to stop every eight miles to take on water. 

 

This activity on Kentish roads had stopped by the end of 1841.  Maceroni told the 'Common Road Steam Conveyance Company' that he would charge £800 each for the carriages made by Beale – but because of the changes  necessary to the design  he charged  Maceroni an extra £300 per vehicle.  The money was not paid and Beale impounded the carriages. No more was heard of any of them and the eventual fate of these vehicles is not known.

 

 

GAS AND THE EXHAUSTER

As time went by Beale became more and more involved in making equipment for the early gas industry. He tried to make gas cookers - at a time when such things were quite unheard of.   In the 1830s another gas equipment manufacturer, Thomas Barlow, had set up an all-gas house in Colebrooke Row, Islington. Beale clearly took a great deal of interest in this and Barlow accused him of sending spies to look round the kitchen door to examine these cookers and see what was going on.  Beale also patented a propeller for boats and a means of preventing 'encrusting' in boilers by the addition of human urine and soda.

 

Most importantly Beale patented the principle of a piece of equipment called an 'exhauster' and the idea was later improved by his son John. Exhausters could be used in the gas works to draw the gas through the pipes like a pump. Although the principle had been first described in Tudor times it was Joshua Beale who turned it into a working reality.  In a paper to the Society of Engineers in 1864, Mr. A. M. Wilson remarked that 'Beale's exhauster was brought out originally as a rotary steam engine, although in this capacity it has never been, very extensively employed’.   It is clear though that his rotary engines were used to drive many exhausters at the very large number of gas works which used them.

 

One local customer was the South Metropolitan Gas Company based in the Old Kent Road who bought an exhauster from Beale in 1854.  This was designed to ‘pass 40,000 cubic feet (of gas) per hour’ and included ‘an 8 h.-p. engine, and a boiler ….. if a second-hand engine cannot be obtained to answer the same  purpose’.

 

JOHN BEALE

John Beale redesigned the system and patented it in the 1860s - by which time he had taken over the business from his father. He was determined to make it successful. It has been said that when a fire at the Greenwich works destroyed much of the factory he had a marquee erected on the marshes so that he could continue to demonstrate his exhausters to better advantage.  John also patented a reworking of the rotary steam engine in 1857.

 

In the 1920s the South Metropolitan Gas Company’s house magazine ‘Co-partnership Journal’ reported on ‘an old resident of Greenwich, when asked about Mr. Beale's work, replied "Yes, I knew the man. He invented a machine for blowing people's gas meters round, and it proved to be such a fine thing that the gas companies have stuck to it ever since."

 

Beale's patents for the exhauster were taken over by Bryan Donkin and Company and became a major part of their output. In 1903 Donkin left London for Chesterfield where they continued to pioneer new developments in gas industry machinery.

 

BICYCLE

 

John Beale stayed in Greenwich and continued, like his father, to invent a very wide range of devices although it is unlikely that the factory at Enderby Wharf continued. . He became interested in bicycles. In 1878 he patented the 'facile' bicycle. Up until then the machines which are commonly known today as 'penny farthings' were called 'ordinaries'. There had been several attempts to make them safer and Beale's machine was one of these. It was called 'The Facile' and was advertised as 'suitable for young and athletic and the elderly' - but they could still tip you up so that you became 'a cropper'. In essence 'The Facile' had pedals pivoted onto the end of low-set levers rather than cranked pedals. It was manufactured and marketed by Ellis and Co. who was based in 47 Farringdon Road in the City of London. As part of the publicity drive they organised the South London Facile Club and in 1880 W. Snook won a 24-hour road race - going from Land's End to John o' Groats on a 42-inch front wheel.

 

The original Facile was manufactured at 32 Greenwich High Road by Beale and Straw. This is a small shop premises which could don’t have supported a major manufacturing concern and it was taken up in 1881 by Ellis & Co. in Fleet Street and later in Farringdon Road where it was apparently made.

 

MOVING PICTURES

 

There are a considerable number of works about the history of moving pictures and a large number of devices with obscure names which preceded the use of film.  Some of these ascribe an early device to John Beale ‘of Greenwich’ and others say that this is wrong and the true inventor of something called the chorutoscope was a Lionel Beale. There is a great deal of confusing and contradictory information given.

 

John Beale certainly invented ‘a magic lantern picture apparatus’ which was registered as a ‘useful design’ in April 1875. He gave his address as ‘Conduit House, East Greenwich’ so we can be sure this is the right man.   This device is described in some detail in several histories ‘a method whereby a face could be shown in motion by means of a series of sixteen pictures.  The pictures were on a revolving disc with a gearing which allowed them to be illuminated and to be shown in an alternative order.

 

An earlier device was the Choreutoscope said to have been demonstrated by Lionel Smith Beale in 1866 but not patented. This consists of showing images – dancing skeletons – drawn on a slide and cranked through the apparatus.   Lionel Smith Beale was a physician and professor at Kings College, London.

He corresponded with Darwin and wrote on evolution, he produced many important medic al works, among them a book on the use of the microscope in medicine. None of the writers seen on this subject give a source for information about this apparatus,  its demonstration or inventor.

 

An early ophthalmoscope is exhibited at the College of Optometrists and ascribed to a Lionel Beale, who may, or may not, be the same man

 

Some works on the subject describe the choreutoscope as having been invented by an ‘optician’ – various ‘Lionel Beale’ or ‘John Beale of Greenwich.  Clearly John Beale was an engineer not an optician, and there may well have been an, as yet undiscovered, Lionel Beale who was an optician.  It seems much more likely that the Choreutoscope would have originated from an optician rather than an elite professor of medicine with a vast background of published research.

 

John Beale’s more intricate device clearly joined the list of predecessors to motion pictures even if it has been frequently described as a different machine and ascribed to someone else.

 

 

John Beale died in 1899. Before his death he had built Heathview in Westcombe Park Road where it is said that you can still see in the flower beds the remains of the test track for his bicycles.