William Church

There is a coloured print of 1833 that shows a wonder of the age. A tall, gilded carriage, decorated with lions, rolls along a country road with no horses in front. Passengers in top hats and bonnets crowd its roof. Underneath is the caption: “Dr. Church’s London & Birmingham Steam Coach, built at Birmingham, 1833.”

It is a picture of a journey that never happened. The coach never ran a service to London. Its inventor, William Church, was one of the most prolific minds in nineteenth-century Birmingham, and one of the least rewarded.

A doctor from America

Church was American. His Birmingham obituary says he was born in Vermont; the printing historians Legros and Grant, writing in 1916, called him a native of Boston. He was born in about 1778 and, his obituary says, educated for a medical career. That is why Birmingham always called him “Dr Church”, and in 1835 a directory listed him under both physicians and engineers.

He was in England by 1818, when he patented machinery for making nails, spikes, wire and screws, giving his address as Turner Street, off the Commercial Road in London. In 1821 and 1822 he patented printing apparatus from addresses in the City and in Nelson Square, south of the Thames.

The machine that set type

To see why the 1822 patent mattered, picture a printing office. A compositor stood at a case of type and picked out every letter, space and comma by hand, one at a time, building lines in a composing stick. When the job was printed, every piece had to be put back in its compartment. It had worked like this since Gutenberg.

Church’s patent, number 4664, granted on 21 March 1822, attacked the whole process. It described three machines: a type-caster, a composing machine and a press. In the composing machine the letters were stored in channels in a tall, sloping frame; pressing a key released a piece of type, which dropped into line. The type-caster was meant to cast a whole fount at a time. Legros and Grant reported that it was said to produce 75,000 pieces of type an hour.

The boldest idea was what happened next. Church did not plan to sort used type back into cases at all. He would melt it down and cast fresh type for the next job. Legros and Grant, looking back from 1916, saw that this “distribution through the melting-pot” was exactly how the great composing machines of their own day, the Monotype and Linotype, worked. “The earliest and simplest form of composing machine, so far as the authors are aware,” they wrote, “was that of Church.”

What nobody has shown is that Church’s system went into regular commercial use. Hand composition remained normal for decades. The idea was ahead of the machinery to make it pay.

Birmingham

By May 1824 Church described himself as “of Birmingham, esquire”, and he stayed for nearly forty years. The town had what an inventor needed: skilled metalworkers, foundries, engine builders and men with money to risk. The patents poured out. Woodcroft’s index lists him for casting iron and casting tubes and cylinders (1824–25), augers and boring bits (1824), more printing improvements (1826), spinning (1827), buttons (1829), knife sharpeners (1829), and nail-making machinery (1831 and 1832). His obituary says he built machines for spikes, nails, button shanks and hooks and eyes, the small staples of Birmingham’s trade.

From 1829 he lived at Haywood House, Bordesley Green, then still on the edge of the countryside east of the town.

Steam on the road

In 1829 Church patented improvements in steam propulsion for boats, and from 1832 he turned to steam carriages for the road. His patent of 9 February 1832 was the first of three. His coach had an iron frame, a boiler made of upright tubes, and wheels with springy rims meant to soften the jolts of a rough road.

Backers in Birmingham formed the London and Birmingham Steam Carriage Company, which, according to the engineer-historian William Fletcher, raised “a large capital” and advanced Church large sums. Trials began on the roads in November 1834. In 1835 the coach set out from the works with forty passengers aboard, but turning a corner its rear struck the footpath, damaging part of the boiler, and it had to be hauled back. A few days later the Birmingham Gazette reported it running six miles out along the Coventry Road and six miles back, three of them at 15 miles an hour.

That was as good as it got. “The carriages were constantly brought out,” Fletcher wrote in 1891, “and as constantly failed.” The company advertised that all difficulties were overcome, but no coach ever ran a regular service to London. In April 1835 a fiat in bankruptcy was issued against Church. Three years later the London and Birmingham Railway opened, and it was the railway, not the steam coach, that carried Birmingham’s passengers to London.

A railway engine, and a disaster

Church turned to rails. In 1838 an engine of his design was at work as a ballast engine on the new London and Birmingham Railway. Then came tragedy. On 10 November 1840, at Bromsgrove station, the boiler of a locomotive called Surprise, on trial for the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway’s steep Lickey Incline, exploded. The driver, Thomas Scaife, and Joseph Rutherford were killed. The Birmingham Gazette reported that the engine had been designed by Dr Church and built three years earlier by Joshua Horton of Brierley Hill. The two men’s gravestones still stand in the churchyard of St John the Baptist, Bromsgrove.

Still inventing

Church kept going. In the 1840s he patented ways of making metal tubes with Jonathan Harlow (1841), machinery for stamping candlestick parts (1846), and machines for cutting and printing playing cards (1848, with the woollen draper Thomas Lewis, and 1850). In 1850 a Birmingham paper reported he was perfecting a machine for dating railway tickets, to stop fraud. In the 1850s, with the merchant and gun manufacturer Samuel Aspinwall Goddard, he worked on heavy guns, and in 1860 a gun built on a principle “varying between that of Sir William Armstrong and Dr. Church” was tested at Woolwich.

His Birmingham obituary put its finger on the problem: “As soon as the mechanical difficulty was solved he tended to lose interest in a project.” Twice married, he outlived his second wife by twelve years. He was about eighty when his son-in-law invited him home to Vermont, and Birmingham friends helped to pay for the journey. He died there on 7 October 1863, aged 85. The death notice called him “for more than forty years a resident of Birmingham, and one of the first mechanical geniuses of the age”. The obituary added: “The Doctor never accumulated any money.”