Discovery

I wanted to break tradition and document my day. I can feel your raised eyebrows reverberating back into what is to you the past and to me the present. I will dispel such quizzical looks with some hairy liberations of my own, albeit proverbial ones.

A trifling fancy gripped me this morning. I have so much gotten bored of being housebound each day that earlier this week I wandered to Newcastle with no purpose but to kill time and left the Grainger Market that day with two packets of biscuits, then proceeded to have a walk along the promenade at Whitley Bay. It was peaceful, enjoyable somewhat, but not nearly as brilliant as today.

Today, I prised my little brother from the clutches of my PS3. We were bound for the Discovery Museum, and discover we did.

Where to start? Let's start at the very beginning: a very good place to start. The wondrous propellers shown above are the work of Charles Algernon Parsons of Ryton, which lies some 7 miles upstream of the Tyne Bridge. Parsons invented the steam turbine, and later developed turbine-driven ships, the first of which was the Turbinia, shown below as she currently sits in the Discovery Museum.

Turbinia, who was completed in 1894, demonstrated Parsons' ingenuity and was by far and away the fastest ship in the world at the time, both due to its knife-like bow and novel use of turbines. Setting a new standard for steamships, the Blue Riband prize for crossing the Atlantic quickly fell into ownership of ships using Parsons' technology. At around the same time, the International Mercantile Marine Co. was setting up a monopoly that was to cruise liners as NewsCorp is to media, which included the White Star Line, of which you will have no doubt heard. To claim a victory over this conglomerate, Cunard commissioned a new range of liners, larger and faster than ever before, using Parsons' brilliant engineering.

The Mauretania. Isn't she beautiful? Cunard needed the greatest shipyards in the world, and two of them at that. A merger between Tyneside shipyards Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson was necessary in order to construct a ship larger than the world had ever seen before. Mauretania held the Blue Riband between 1909 and 1929, though not without a well-documented, ill-fated attempt by White Star to beat Cunard by taking a shortcut with a slightly slower class of ships, their Olympic line. Just as Mauretania dwarfed its sister Lusitania and later comrade Aquitania, the Titanic has fame far beyond that of the Olympic and the Britannic. This would still be the case were she successful in her challenge. To return to a less tragic and commercially exploited topic, Newcastle innovated and implemented one of the greatest developments to fluvial transport to date.

What's this? A locomotive? In fact, it's Locomotion No 1. With this engine, George and Robert Stephenson sped up the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. The duo improved the existing railways for horse-drawn wagons for the heavier mechanical machines, first in the North East, then in Liverpool and Manchester — which opened the floodgates for passenger rail services — and then continuing to supervise the construction of railways all around the UK. The British Empire then carried these innovations across the world.

That's not even everything yet. Not nearly. Have you ever used a light bulb? Thomas Edison may well have displayed his version at the Chicago World Fair, but neither he nor Joseph Wilson Swan of Tyneside ever knew who achieved success first. As ingenious as the pair were, they merged their companies rather than compete or burn their fortune in court under the name EdiSwan. The photograph above shows a replica of Swan's 1878 bulb, with the nearest to perfect vacuum ever, a carbon filament and a rather lovely shape, as well as a reflection of the flash from my camera.

Speaking of cameras, this is an early home camera. It uses bromide paper: yet another brainchild of Joseph Swan. Though lenses were much altered across the years, and different methods for the development of photographs introduced, the majority of film never strayed far from the original bromide paper. Only the recent surge in digital photography has superseded cameras of a similar class to those that used Swan's paper.

Seriously, Newcastle. I am in awe.