Good Friday Blast: How a Boiler Repair Shattered a Steamship and Ten Lives

Good Friday Blast: How a Boiler Repair Shattered a Steamship and Ten Lives

Fear of sudden, mechanical catastrophe: a makeshift boiler repair turned a 55-foot passenger steamship into shrapnel and killed ten people on a clear Good Friday morning. The PS Telegraph was described as "literally blown to atoms," and a two-year-old's body was recovered only after the death toll had been announced - so how did a patchwork fix become a public crisis that reached Parliament?

In this episode, we tell the sequence of decisions, the technical mismatch and the human stories aboard the PS Telegraph, and we ask the question that echoed through coroners' courts and engineering chambers: who is responsible when a machine kills?

Person: John Wright; Richard Wright; Esther Walton; Mary Stephen; William Nickerson; Digeens; James Cammel Date: April 4, 1817 Location: Foundry Bridge, Norwich; River Wensum Event: Boiler explosion aboard PS Telegraph Ship dimensions: 55 feet 5 inches length; 11 feet 3 inches beam; 6 feet depth; 20 tons; 3 horsepower

- The vessel had 22 people aboard, including men, women and three small children. - The PS Telegraph measured 55 feet 5 inches in length and weighed 20 tons. - The boiler repair joined a wrought iron boiler to a cast iron end-plate, creating incompatible materials. - The boiler failed less than ten minutes after departing Foundry Bridge on April 4, 1817. - A two-year-old child's body was pulled from the River Wensum after the initial death count had been announced.

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