This event is both an in-person and on-line event. No need to register – just come along or click this zoom link to join on-line.

The ‘tramp’ ship was created and constructed as a distinct type of merchant vessel in the 1870s and 1880s by shipbuilders and shipowners operating predominantly out of ports and rivers in the North East of England.

To explain the construction of tramp shipping in this period, this lecture explores the key technology that really made ‘tramping’ across the oceans a viable, economical and profitable venture.

Dr Oliver Carpenter‘s argument is that the adoption and use of the marine compound engine by shipowners created the ‘tramp’ class of merchant steam ships for the first time in a new and rapidly-growing sector in British shipping.

About the Speaker

Dr Oliver Carpenter is Curator of Infrastructure & Built Environment at the Science Museum in London. He is responsible for the national collections of Building Construction; Civil Engineering; Docks & Diving; Electricity Supply; Firefighting; Gas Industry; Heating, Cooling & Ventilation; Lighting; Locks & Fastenings; Nuclear Energy and Sewerage & Sanitation.

Oliver was Lead Curator of Energy Revolution at The Adani Green Energy Gallery – a major new permanent gallery about the low-carbon energy transition, which opened at the Science Museum in 2024. Before joining the Science Museum in 2015, he was a Collections Research Volunteer at Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust and Associate Lecturer in History of Science, Technology and Medicine at University of Kent.

Oliver has a PhD in History of Technology and has published on the history of the British merchant shipping industry in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. He is a member of the Newcomen Society Council.