Ken Warby was born in 1939 — not on October 8; he’s not appearing here because of his birthday. It’s because Warby’s boyhood hero was Donald Campbell. To Donald Campbell, the most important thing was speed records — he set speed records (eight of them) for top speeds in cars and boats. He was following in his fathers’…well, tire tracks? Malcolm Campbell had set the same records in the 1920s and 30s. Ken Warby wanted to do the same thing.
By the time Warby was an adult, the speed records on both land and water had been set dauntingly high; hundreds of miles per hour. They were all, by then, set by what were basically wingless airplanes. To build a speed record vehicle, the first thing you needed was a jet engine from something like a fighter plane.
By the time Warby was in his early 30s, he had a good job selling Makita power tools in Sydney, Australia. He’d never grown out of his hero worship of Donald Campbell, though and he saved his money and bought a military surplus jet engine at an auction. It was a Westinghouse J34 — it was over 20 years old and broken, but Warby carted it home, set it up in his back yard, and started to work.
Warby was well supplied with power tools thanks to his job, but if what you’re trying to fix is a turbojet engine with thousands of pounds of thrust — and you’re imagining yourself driving a vehicle powered by that engine — it’s also good to know what you’re doing. Warby didn’t — but he did know two aircraft mechanics from the nearby Royal Australian Air Force Base. He convinced them to help, and they worked on the engine while he started building a boat to put it in. The whole operation was still in his back yard.
Warby didn’t know much more about boatbuilding than he did about jet engines, but his collection of Makita power tools worked quite well as he set about building a 3-point hydroplane out of plywood. At the time it was just a hobby, really. He didn’t have any sponsors or outside funding, and didn’t even have a workshop. When it rained, they just covered the engine and the boat with tarps.
Warby’s helpers got the engine working — it would be really interesting to know how they managed to test the thing in a back yard — and the hobby project was finally finished in 1977. He took his boat to the lake formed behind Blowering Dam in the mountains south of Sydney and on October 8, actually managed to set the world speed record in the thing. He went over 300mph.
Warby’s boat was actually pretty similar to Donald Campbell’s boat “Bluebird” (all of the Campbell family speed record vehicles were called “Bluebird”). Campbell, though, had been killed in his boat in 1967 while trying to set the record. Warby not only survived, but his 1977 record still stands 43 years later.
There must be something about people who want to set world speed records. Malcolm Campbell did it in a boat called Bluebird, and his son Donald carried on, also in a boat called Bluebird. Ken Warby set the record in a boat called Spirit of Australia, and his son Dave is trying to do the same thing in a boat called Spirit of Australia II. His next attempt — on the same lake where his father set the record — is scheduled a little more than 4 weeks from today.
Setting outright speed records has now become so specialized and esoteric that the car or boat you use is useless for anything else, except maybe as the place you attach sponsor stickers. But on October 8, 1829 there was a competition — the “Rainhill Trials” — to see which among five different but everyday steam locomotives would be the fastest (and most reliable) choice for the brand-new Liverpool and Manchester Railroad in England, which was nearly ready to open.
There were five engines entered in the competition, which was held on a 1-mile length of track. The original idea was that the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad would have two stationary steam engines — one at each end of the track — and the trains would be pulled by cables. It was the railroad’s chief engineer, George Stephenson, who thought locomotives would be a better idea, even though at the time they were so new each one had to be built from scratch. Stephenson organized the competition and established the rules. Each locomotive would make ten back-and-forth trips on the mile-long track, and would have to average at least ten miles per hour.
The 10mph stipulation was a bit of a stretch. There was only one operating steam locomotive in the world at the time, on the Stockton and Darlington Railway, and it could only manage 8mph.
Oddly enough, the rules didn’t actually say the locomotive had to be powered by steam engine. One of the five entrants was “Cycloped,” built by Thomas Brandreth. It was powered by a horse walking on a sort of treadmill. Brandreth was apparently serious about this. He was one of the directors of the Liverpool and Manchester line, after all, and a “horse powered locomotive” — as opposed to just a horse pulling a carriage, which would seem much simpler and more obvious — had been tried before. But Cycloped was sunk by the 10mph rule; that’s a lot to expect of a horse on a treadmill, no matter how many carrots you offer.
The convention of the time seems to have been that when you managed to build a locomotive, regardless of what powered it, you’d give it a name. The other four entries were called “Novelty,” “Perseverence,” “Sans Pareil,” (this one still exists; it’s in a museum), and “Rocket.”
Novelty was the fastest of the bunch, but it was built with so many “novel” innovations that it broke and couldn’t be repaired in time to finish the competition. Perseverence persevered, but was too slow at 8 mph. Sans Pareil did pretty well for a while, but then had to withdraw when one of its cylinders cracked. That left Rocket, which won with an average speed of a blistering 14mph. It was, I’m sure, just a coincidence that the Rocket was designed by George Stephenson, who wrote the rules, and built by his brother Robert’s company. The railroad bought the Rocket and used it for the next 20 years.
Record-setting conveyances like the Rocket and the Spirit of Australia tend to be preserved in museums, under the possibly-questionable assumption that people like to look at these things even if they’re not moving at all. But the also-rans? Well, just as an example, the Cycloped was put out to pasture ages ago.
