Braithwaite & Ericsson

Braithwaite and Ericsson was a short-lived London engineering partnership between John Braithwaite and the Swedish-American mechanical engineer John Ericsson, operating from Braithwaite's family workshop near St Pancras in north London from around 1828. The firm built marine engines and general steam engineering equipment, but earned its place in railway history through a single extraordinary achievement: the design and construction of Novelty for the 1829 Rainhill Trials, in just six weeks before the competition.

Novelty was the most dramatically different of the Rainhill contestants — lighter and more elegantly proportioned than either Rocket or Sans Pareil, with a vertical boiler and a design philosophy quite unlike Stephenson's approach. On the opening day of the trials it reached an estimated 28 mph and became the crowd favourite, its speed and lightness astonishing spectators who had expected heavy, slow machines. The locomotive's weakness was its construction: built in six weeks, it had insufficient development for sustained operation, and repeated boiler and pipe failures prevented it completing the course. Had Braithwaite and Ericsson had another six months, the outcome of Rainhill and potentially the subsequent direction of locomotive engineering might have been quite different.

The partnership dissolved around 1834. John Ericsson moved to the United States in 1839, where he invented the screw propeller — transforming maritime propulsion — and designed the USS Monitor ironclad warship that fought the CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads in 1862, becoming one of the most celebrated engineers of the nineteenth century. Braithwaite continued in civil engineering, surveying the route of the Eastern Counties Railway. The firm's brief existence illustrates how close the early locomotive competition was — and how different history might have looked had Novelty's engineering matched its ambition.