Our Technical Editor, Derek Rayner, investigates some early steam rollers from the mid-19th century.


Taken from The Illustrated London News of 12 October 1867; this engraving is entitled ‘Steam-roller for the streets of Liverpool’ and shows one of the first illustrations of a Batho-type roller. This one weighed 30 tons. D RAYNER COLLECTION

A history of the Kent firm of Aveling & Porter was published by Aveling-Barford in 1965. This is often known as the ‘orange book’ because of the colour of its cover and also to distinguish it from Bob Whitehead’s contemporary book A Century of Steam-Rolling. The Aveling-Barford book was entitled A Hundred Years of Road Rollers and was to commemorate the centenary of the first Aveling roller - in 1865. The first thing it tells us, however, is that Thomas Aveling didn’t invent the road roller and neither did he build the world’s first steam roller, for such a machine was in use earlier than that in France. Further, it is recorded that Messrs Clark and Batho sent a steam roller to India in 1863 which had been built in Birmingham by Worsdell and Evans, a firm of railway wagon makers and general machinery merchants. William Clark was the chief engineer to the municipality of Calcutta and William Batho designed the roller for him. A Century of Steam-Rolling reveals that the first patent for steam rolling was taken out in 1859 by Mr Louis Lemoine of Bordeaux, France. The machine concerned had a centre-driven wheel and other smaller carrying wheels - back and front - by which it could be steered. It was used experimentally in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, in August 1860. Also in that same year, M Ballaison from Mesrue, near Paris, produced a steam roller of the tandem type which also saw use in the Bois de Boulogne a year later. It is not known at this distance whether these two rollers were designed and constructed independently of each other or as a result of some collaboration between the two people involved.

An Aveling & Porter roller to the Batho design pictured in the yard of RL Knight at Sittingbourne, Kent, sometime around the end of the 20th century and not far from the works where it was built. The firm ceased business after a famous boiler explosion - following which an auction was held in July 1906. Knight’s are recorded as having four rollers of this type - Nos 523 plus 525 of 1870 and Nos 812 plus 857 of 1872 - although which of these is depicted here is not known. RRA COLLECTION

Developments continued in France and a Paris company, Gellerat et Cie, took the Ballaison roller design forward; the machine produced as a result of this development being hired from 1865 onwards to the local authority in Paris. Rather surprisingly, the British railway locomotive building firm - Manning Wardle of Hunslet, Leeds - built a 15-ton steam roller in 1865 to the Ballaison-Gellerat design and it’s believed that this also went for use in France.
The first roller associated with Aveling was one of his 12hp traction engines and was pictured in the 1965 Aveling-Barford book hauling a huge roller behind it in the style of a trailer and was said to have been the idea of the contracting firm Easton, Amos & Anderson. This firm had contracts for road rolling and the outfit was put to work by them on the Belvedere Estate near Erith in Kent in the autumn of 1866.
This combination was later tried in London’s Hyde Park but was not wholly successful since the traction engine's wheels left ruts in the rolled surface and so Thomas Aveling’s first steam roller was a conversion, for he used a 12hp traction engine to which he fitted smooth wheels. This new style of roller was recorded at work for the First Commissioner of Her Majesty’s Works in Hyde Park, London, on 1 December 1866 and a rear view of the machine was famously pictured in the supplement to the Illustrated London News of 15 December 1866. At this stage, it was recorded that the rollers were 3ft broad and 7ft in diameter, having a weight of three tons on each square foot of road. The weight of the whole engine was more than 20 tons. The publication went on to say that the Parish Vestry of Islington had the acquisition of such a machine under consideration. The roller was still at work in Hyde Park during March the following year. A front view of this awesome monster was seen in The Illustrated Times of 16 November 1867.

A side elevation of one of the Batho designs of steam rollers - taken from the joint paper by Batho and Aveling to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in Birmingham in 1870. COURTESY INSTITUTION OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS

No technical details exist in Aveling's records of the first three steam rollers produced since the appropriate books have not survived. It is therefore left to the Despatch Books to tell us that No 1 roller was ‘forwarded’ to Liverpool on 23 September 1867 whereas No 2 roller went to French agent A Huet on 5 August 1867 - an interesting juxtaposition of dates!

End of the On-line article.
Subscribe here | Buy a single issue at the cover price (P&P included) | Backissues here