Matthew Murray

Matthew Murray (1765–1826) was an English steam-engine pioneer and manufacturer who, with the colliery engineer John Blenkinsop, produced the world's first commercially successful steam locomotive — Salamanca, completed at the Round Foundry in Leeds in 1812 — and who was among the most inventive and technically capable engineering entrepreneurs of the early Industrial Revolution.

Born at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1765, Murray was apprenticed as a blacksmith and worked at John Marshall's flax mill at Adel before founding the engineering firm of Fenton, Murray and Wood at the Round Foundry in Holbeck, Leeds in 1795. The works rapidly became one of the most important centres of precision engineering in early nineteenth-century Britain, producing steam engines, machine tools, and textile machinery of consistently high quality.

The collaboration with John Blenkinsop produced four rack-and-pinion locomotives for the Middleton Colliery Railway in Leeds between 1812 and 1813: Salamanca, Prince Regent, Lord Wellington, and Marquis Wellington. These locomotives used Blenkinsop's patented toothed rack-rail to provide positive drive on the colliery gradient and Murray's two-cylinder engines arranged horizontally at the front of the boiler — a layout that anticipated the basic configuration of all subsequent steam locomotive development. The Middleton locomotives ran commercially from 1812, the first sustained use of steam locomotion for commercial freight haulage in history, and the system operated for nearly two decades.

Murray's inventions extended well beyond the locomotive: his patents covered improvements to flax-spinning machinery, a steam ploughing engine, and refinements to the steam engine itself. The Round Foundry was an important early machine-tool manufacturer, and Murray's workforce produced work of a precision unusual for its era. He died at Leeds on 20 February 1826 and is buried at St Matthew's Church, Holbeck.