So wrote Michael Reynolds in his book Stationary Engine Driving in 1880, yet, just over 100 years later in 1982, the last remaining rotative steam engine in the Lancashire cotton industry ceased driving the looms in Queen Street Mill at Harle Skye near Burnley. It was the end of the era of direct steam power in industry for, by that time, almost all the thousands of reciprocating steam engines that had powered the machines that made England the first industrial nation had been scrapped as obsolete and uneconomic. Yet, 100 years before Reynolds was writing, the rotative steam engine did not exist because it had not been developed out of the earlier forms of pumping engines.

I was fortunate when I went to Manchester in 1965 to study the history of technology and to establish an industrial museum for the city which had been the centre of the Industrial Revolution for I saw a variety of industries still powered by steam. For each, the basic steam engine had been adapted in the way most appropriate for the task it had to do.