Stephenson's Rocket and the Rainhill Trials

In 1829, the directors of the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway faced a critical choice. Should they use stationary steam engines to pull trains along with cables, or risk using mobile locomotives? To settle the debate, they announced a public competition with a £500 prize. The challenge was to build an engine that could haul three times its own weight at a steady 10 miles per hour and, crucially, 'consume its own smoke' to avoid polluting the countryside. Some engineers still doubted that locomotives could be made reliable enough. The winner was Rocket, a small engine built by Robert Stephenson's company, whose boiler and draught design became the pattern for the steam locomotives that followed. This is the story of what Rocket was, how it worked, and why it won.