William Brunton

William Brunton (1777-1851) was a Scottish mechanical engineer born at Lochwinnoch in Ayrshire, the son of a watch and clock maker. He trained in the fitting shops of the New Lanark Mills, joined Boulton and Watt in 1796, and by 1802 was superintendent of the Soho engine yard. In 1808 he became engineer of the Butterley Company in Derbyshire, where in 1813 he patented a steam locomotive that pushed itself along a railway with mechanical legs imitating those of a horse. Called the Mechanical Traveller, it ran at about two and a half miles an hour at Newbottle Colliery but never left the experimental stage and was abandoned after a boiler explosion that killed and injured bystanders. In 1814 he moved to the Eagle Foundry, where a grasshopper engine he built in 1815 worked until 1876, and he became a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1824.