Episode Details

A steam locomotive is being built. Someone appears determined to sabotage it. But Sherlock Holmes begins to suspect the opposite: what if the saboteur is actually trying to prevent a disaster?

In this Chesterton Radio deep dive, Adrian and Clara Markham explore The Adventure of the Unfinished Engine and the surprisingly modern questions beneath the mystery: engineering responsibility, boiler safety, professional ethics, and the danger of trusting an authority nobody has actually verified.

From the hard lessons that created modern boiler codes to the organizational failures examined after Challenger, the story turns on one very Holmesian question:

How do you know?

Because sometimes the most dangerous words aren’t “Nobody checked.”

They’re “I thought somebody else did.”