George Medhurst
Just to the right of the porch at Shoreham Church is a curious, elongated metal memorial, lying flat to the ground, recording the death of 17-year-old Ann Medhurst in 1820. She was the daughter of George and Ann Medhurst, and the unusual memorial seems like a typical product of George Medhurst’s restless mind: he was one of the 19th century’s more pioneering – and frustrated – inventors. |
In some ways, in the early 1800s, Medhurst was to science and technology what Samuel Palmer was to art – ahead of his time and never properly appreciated. Born in Shoreham in 1759, he first worked as a clockmaker in London and then created the “equal balance column scale” used in grocers’ shops for generations to come. He would take out patents for countless devices and techniques – to allow for a washing machine or an engine powered by gunpowder in a chamber (an early internal combustion engine).
His key focus was making things move with compressed air. As early as 1800 he patented an “aeolian engine” to power a wheeled vehicle, and 12 years later published a “Plan to convey Passengers upon an Iron Railway, through a tube of 30 feet in Area, by the power and Velocity of Air”. Later he reckoned the train could be taken out of the closed tube and propelled along in the open air if it were attached to a pneumatic tube in the ground – a so-called atmospheric railway. |
The ideas had gone nowhere by the time a disillusioned Medhurst died in 1827. But they were admired by the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and atmospheric railways were later built. Medhurst’s plan to use differential air pressure to speed cash and paperwork in tubes around buildings was to be taken up, and the Post Office installed an underground “pneumatic” line in London to deliver mail to a sorting office – having turned down Medhurst when he pitched the idea to them years before.
Read more in the Society’s publication “George Medhurst, Shoreham’s Inventor”