A lecture from the North of England Institute for Mining and Mechanical Engineers. In-person at Neville Hall and streamed online.

The North Seaton Viaduct reaches its centenary in 2027. Built across the River Wansbeck, it carried coal from the Ashington Coal Company to Blyth, where it began its onward journey by ship to London and beyond. To many people it is simply the Black Bridge: a familiar landmark, a striking piece of steelwork, and part of the local landscape. But the bridge is more than an isolated structure. It is remaining evidence of the energy system that powered industrial Britain.

That system depended on steam. Without steam, Britain’s industrial age as we know it could not have happened. Steam power drove pumps, winding engines, locomotives, ships, mills and factories. It allowed mines to go deeper, machinery to work harder, materials to move further, and production to expand beyond the limits of human, animal, wind and water power.

Yet steam was itself dependent on coal. Cheap, available coal made steam power practical, while steam made it possible to extract, move and use more coal. This created a reinforcing cycle: coal fed steam, steam expanded industry, and industry demanded more coal. Later, steam also became the means of converting coal into electricity, carrying the energy of the coalfield into homes, factories, streets and transport systems far beyond the mine.

The Black Bridge is therefore more than a local landmark. It is a monument to the system that released the energy stored in coal and carried it into the wider world. We now create power in different ways, but the modern world was first awakened by coal: brought from the darkness by miners, transformed by steam into motion, and carried into industry, transport and everyday life through the systems created and built by engineers.

Chris Smith is a respected engineering innovator with a distinguished career spanning robotics, automation, software design, academia and industrial leadership. A former Mechanical Engineering graduate of Newcastle Polytechnic, he is Chief Executive of The Automation Group of companies, where his knowledge, expertise and enthusiasm have driven the development of advanced products and processes used internationally in manufacturing and logistics.

He is the inventor of the iCart AGV and continues to lead its development, including the latest iCart MOCO: an automated guided vehicle designed to carry mobile cobots, developed in collaboration with Kassow Robots. Earlier in his career, he worked at International Research and Development Ltd as Principal Software Designer for a multi-microprocessor CNC machine tool controller, contributing to high-speed interpolation, floating-point mathematics, tool compensation and operating system design. He then spent 16 years in academia, gaining rare insight into the barriers between research and industrial application. He is currently a Visiting Professor and Chair of the Engineering Industrial Advisory Board at the University of Northumbria.

His design philosophy is captured in the phrase: “Engineering is an art constrained by the laws of physics.”

17:30-18:00 - Tea and Coffee

18:00-18:50 - In person talk and live stream starts

18:50 to 19:00 - Q & A

Welcome to our NEIMME Lecture. NEIMME is the Royal Chartered membership organisation for Engineering, Science and Technology in the North.

For more information about our events and the benefits of NEIMME membership see: https://mininginstitute.org.uk/membership/

For information on IOM3 membership see: https://www.iom3.org/

Description supplied by the event organiser.