James Watt: steam engine

The Insatiable Machine

by Trevor Jackson  · 15 Mar 2026  · 270pp  · 104,133 words

all over the world, in Europe and in India. The British case was special because of coal, and the wave of inventions in coal, iron, steam engines, and metallurgy that went in parallel with the inventions in the cotton sector. Prior to industrialization, all economic activity on earth depended on a flow

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was widely produced and copied and improved upon, and it was made out of metal, so eventually it was able to be run by furious steam engines instead of falling water. Like the water frame, it was a huge machine, so it was something installed in factories owned by capitalists, not by

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Newcomen patented an engine that burned coal in order to produce steam, and used the steam vacuum to run a piston, thereby making the first steam engine. But it was incredibly inefficient, needing something like 45 pounds of coal to produce one horsepower, so it made sense to use it only right

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meant more coal for industrial processes. Cheaper, stronger iron was used in more things, like construction and machinery. The next big breakthrough came with James Watt’s steam engine. Watt had worked at the University of Glasgow making and repairing scientific instruments, and eventually formed a partnership with Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton. Boulton provided

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the money and business know-how, and Watt the technology, and they got a patent on their steam engine in 1775. The machine needed the new, stronger iron from the blast furnaces, and the cheap coal, and the precedent of the Newcomen engine. The

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, well, 1 horsepower of energy. A water mill delivered 3 to 5 horsepower per hour, though with unpredictable variability due to climatic conditions. A single steam engine in the late 19th century could deliver 8,000 to 12,000 horsepower.38 Modern economic growth has meant a continual increase in energy consumption

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obsolete, but rather created for them a wide range of new employment. The number of horses employed in short-distance hauling vastly increased, even as steam engines were used for long-distance transport in the form of railroads and steamships. Cities relied on horses for deliveries, but also to power mass transit

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surprising: New technologies tend not to replace older ones but rather to reconfigure how they are used, or to use them with greater intensity.111 Steam engines did not replace horses; they actually increased their economic importance. Coal did not mean the end of deforestation but rather its intensification. The labor that

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was mostly not scientifically explored until the latter half of the 19th century, partly because Isaac Newton disliked the word “energy,” so the inventors of steam engines and fossil-fuel use were not thinking about the economic system as an energy system.112 As with energy, so too with the environment. The

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the transformation cannot be overstated. By the 1830s, a single spinning mill could run 50,000 spindles powered by a central drive shaft with a steam engine and, in a 12-hour shift, could spin enough thread to circumnavigate the globe twice.115 From 1780 to 1830, the production cost of a

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sold to British imperialists, who used it to build an empire in Africa. Continued industrial improvement made steam shipping continually cheaper and more reliable. Better steam engines meant ships could travel farther on the same amount of coal; the spread of telegraph cables after the 1850s meant they could make decisions based

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to understanding precise timetables to the creation of standardized time zones in 1883, provoked by the need to coordinate rail traffic.23 The first commercial steam-engine railroads were constructed in the mid-1820s: the Stockton & Darlington in England, which mainly carried coal, and the Baltimore & Ohio in the United States in

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It

by Arthur Herman  · 27 Nov 2001  · 510pp  · 163,449 words

” William Wallace and Robert the Bruce; the Arbroath Declaration and Mary Queen of Scots; Robert Burns and Bonnie Prince Charlie. They point out how James Watt invented the steam engine, John Boyd Dunlop the bicycle tire, and Alexander Fleming penicillin. Yet no one else seems to pay much attention. Scots often complain that Scotland

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polite, humane, enlightened culture. This intermingling of the practical and the intellectual was in fact a keynote of the Glasgow Enlightenment. It explains why engineer James Watt, who helped build Scotland’s first dry dock at Port Glasgow in 1762, was just as highly regarded by university professors such as Adam Smith

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to get things done. Older attitudes, including a deep-rooted Calvinism, were stronger there, but thanks to its commercial success, it was also more freewheeling. James Watt, engineer and self-taught philosopher, was a natural in Glasgow. He would have seemed a fish out of water in Edinburgh. Edinburgh was more artistic

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to gratify our needs. Eventually, Smith states, the division of labor produces people who do nothing but think about improvements: engineers such as his friends James Watt and Alexander Wilson, scientists such as Joseph Black, and those “whose trade it is not to do anything, but to observe everything”—philosophers, teachers, and

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nation’s memory, and help to nourish its posterity. CHAPTER TWELVE Practical Matters: Scots in Science and Industry Don’t think, try. —John Hunter I James Watt was instrument maker for the University of Glasgow when someone told him about a strange machine created by a Derbyshire man named Thomas Newcomen: a

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the cylinder. . . . I had not walked farther than the golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.” Contrary to myth, James Watt did not invent the steam engine. Two Englishmen, Newcomen and Thomas Savery, did that. What Watt did was typically Scottish: he perfected something created by someone else, and gave

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it a higher and wider application than its original inventor had imagined. Watt applied to the steam engine the idea of separate condensation, which allowed it to generate a constant motion, which, in 1781, Watt turned into a rotary motion. He had created

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and liberty. But just as in these other cases, the version of technology we live with most closely resembles the one that Scots such as James Watt organized and perfected. It rests on certain basic principles that the Scottish Enlightenment enshrined: common sense, experience as our best source of knowledge, and arriving

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, like the ceaselessly moving pistons of Watt’s steam engine. To the Scots, they were the key to modern life, just as they are for us. A rapid succession of Scottish inventors, engineers, doctors, and scientists proved their point to the rest of the world. James Watt, for example, grew up in Greenock, with

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, the question of what happens to the heat after objects are heated and cooled, or what he called “latent heat.” Watt’s work on the steam engine led him to conduct a series of experiments on precisely this problem. Those experiments demonstrated that heat was not a substance but a property of

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matter, just as his description of the principles of the steam engine laid the foundation of modern mechanical engineering. The issue for Watt, though, was always not just how a thing worked, but what to do with

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English ironmaster Matthew Boulton of Birmingham. Their partnership, formed in 1775, gave them a complete monopoly over steam engine construction for the next quarter-century. Together they transformed Britain’s economic life. They turned the steam engine from primarily a water pump into a way to supply power for every conceivable industry, from John

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greater and larger quantities than ever before. At almost the same moment as Watt and Boulton were setting up their factory and producing their first steam engine, Adam Smith was writing that the division of labor was the key to creating wealth. Watt’s invention revealed that the future of the division

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-on diagnosis, and thinking of objects such as the human body as a system—not so different from the practical approach of engineers such as James Watt. In fact, science and medicine were probably more closely linked in Scotland than any other European country. Together with mathematics, they formed the triangular base

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simply moving the enormous quantities of earth the construction of each lock required. He designed a huge dredging machine, powered by one of Watt’s steam engines, that could bring up eight hundred tons of mud a day. His friend and fellow poet Robert Southey saw it in operation when he came

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society, and now industrial society. The next logical step was to improve the means of transport on those thoroughfares, with the help of Watt’s steam engine. Strangely, Watt himself was reluctant to do this. He seems to have believed the tremendous power generated by his invention would make any ship or

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religious dissent and austere poverty, but high levels of literacy and a tendency to turn out ambitious, self-made men. George fell in love with steam engines while working as a teenager in the West Moor Mines. Stephenson took up a Cornishman’s invention, a locomotive engine powered by steam, and used

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to wait for another century, and another form of power—gasoline rather than steam.30 III There was one other unforeseen consequence of Watt’s steam engine, which many contemporaries missed, but which a perceptive German observer named Karl Marx did not. Steam power allowed a factory or mill owner to build

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emerging scientific industrial culture his fellow Scots had done so much to create. He wrote an admiring biography of Thomas Telford; his great heroes were James Watt and James Nasmyth, inventor of the industrial steam hammer. He was also a doctor, trained at Edinburgh medical school. In Smiles, in fact, all the

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the South Pacific and remote corners of Latin America. Nor should one forget the more than a half-million Scots who, like Henry Brougham and James Watt and Thomas Telford, packed their bags and headed for new horizons and new careers in London or Birmingham or Liverpool. The great Scottish diaspora followed

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1790s the incipient American industrial base came to rely on Scottish engineers, mechanics, and workers to set up its cotton mills, maintain and repair its steam-engine pumps, and operate its power looms. A textile worker from Paisley quickly discovered that he or she could work the same hours in a factory

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hardworking Scots, not as gold prospectors. Peter opened a steamship line carrying prospectors and other immigrants between San Francisco and Sacramento. He built the first steam engine for a U.S. Navy vessel on the West Coast, and the first steam locomotive in California. James and Michael became partners in the Union

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Iron Foundry, and while James retired, rich and satisfied, Michael opened another major foundry in Davenport, Iowa, with a sideline in steam engines and agricultural machinery. Meanwhile, Scottish engineer Andrew Hallidie designed and built San Francisco’s cable car network in 1873, a symbol of the city to

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optimism and intellectual energy, as well as a belief in education as the foundation of democracy. In 1848 new power looms driven by Watt’s steam engine were replacing the old hand looms, so the Carnegie family left for America. Andrew was twelve when they settled in the former Fort Pitt at

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items such as cooking utensils and sewing machines. The British had dominated the steel industry for more than a century, thanks in large part to James Watt’s steam engine and J. B. Neilson’s blast furnace. Now an English scientist named Henry Bessemer had developed a new way of forging steel directly out

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head. Before Carnegie, business had to wait for technological advances by scientists such as Charles Macintosh (the inventor of vulcanized rubber) and engineers such as James Watt to create new products or increase production. Now the demands of production themselves would force technological change. The manager, not the engineer or the foreman

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where certain quotations and facts came from, and what books are particularly useful for the discriminating reader. I have relied on two sturdy classics on James Watt: John Lord’s Capital and Steam Power, first published in 1923 and reprinted in a second edition in 1965, and Thomas Marshall’s 1925 biography

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets

by Andy Kessler  · 13 Jun 2005  · 218pp  · 63,471 words

materials for the boilers were a bit shoddy, and most experiments ended with boiler explosions, a nasty occupational hazard. Most of what I learned about steam engines was from reading Robert Thurston’s book titled “A History of the Growth of the SteamEngine” which he published in 1878, but still remains an

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Back in 1665 Edward Somerset, the second Marquis of Worcester (but he tried harder) was perhaps the first to not only think and sketch a steam engine, but also build one that actually worked. He created steam in a boiler, and had it fill a vessel half filled with water. He then

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the road from where Savery hailed, in Dartmouth, a blacksmith and ironworker by the name of Thomas Newcomen thought he could come up with a steam engine for the nearby mines. It appears he had seen the Savery engine, and must have either seen or heard about Papin’s design. What Newcomen

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combine the best of both, the Savery surface condensation vessel design with the Huygens/Papin cylinder and piston design to create, in 1705, an “Atmospheric Steam Engine”. A boiler would feed steam into a cylinder, until the piston reached the top. Then a valve was turned to cool the outside of the

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1708, the two men struck a deal to co-own the patent. In this way, Savery managed to cut himself in on the lucrative steam engine market even though his own design never really worked. The combination worked wonders. A two-foot diameter piston operated at six to ten strokes a

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He stumbled on the solution while watching a funky new steam engine pumping out his own flooded coalmines. This almost 3.0 steam engine would have a profound influence on industry, but that wasn’t so obvious at first. *** It was, of course, James Watt’s steam engine, but it still wasn’t all that good. Back in

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1763, James Watt was employed at Glasgow University, with the task of

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fixing a Newcomen steam engine. Fifty years after Newcomen’s invention, five horsepower was still not very efficient

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him fresh money to improve his design. In exchange, Roebuck received two thirds of any patent. In 1769, Watt was granted a patent for his steam engine design by Parliament, which had taken over this duty from the King. Of course, Parliament was run by property owners who, not surprisingly, were all

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the venture capitalist of his time. 24 HOW WE GOT HERE Boulton was buddies with Ben Franklin and the two often corresponded about steam and steam engines, even about one of their own. Franklin was probably trying to find a new market for his potbelly stove! In 1768 meanwhile, Watt stopped

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agreed to buy out Roebucks’ two-thirds interest in the patent, but more importantly, to fund Watt’s continued research to improve his external condenser steam engine work and make it work. The plan was to move Watt down to Birmingham, because that is where the demand was, but Watt had some

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member Joseph Banks was president of the Royal Society and had great connections. The bill passed and Boulton and Watt had the patent on Atmospheric Steam Engines (with cool condensers) until 1800, even though it still didn’t work that well. *** The Brits were at war on and off with the

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source of power, water wheels were slow and horses expensive to feed. Wilkinson needed piping hot coals to smelt his iron. He had seen James Watt’s steam engine pumping water out of coalmines, and thought he could use it to run his bellows rather than horses. So Wilkinson went through the hassle of

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Sometimes it’s that simple, and easy to miss. Being a reasonable businessman, he told Boulton and Watt that he could improve their crappy little steam engine by a factor of five, in exchange for the exclusive rights to supply precision cylinders to B&W. Deal. *** Here is the part of the

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What they were missing was a successful business model. It was Matthew Boulton who came up with one. Boulton and Watt didn’t actually sell steam engines since no one could afford one. Most of the early customers were Cornish mines. Beyond a few Parliament-sponsored joint-stock companies, the stock market

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punch. At the end of the night, the mine companies were drained of cash and the miners drained of brain cells. So instead of selling steam engines, Boulton just traveled around to mines (and later mills and factories) and simply asked the miners how many horses they owned. Boulton and Watt would

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then install a steam engine, and charge one third of the annual cost of each horse it replaced, over the life of the patent, that is until 1800. Back

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struck 240 blows per minute. Bet you couldn’t build one of those in your basement today. Also that year, Watt developed the double acting steam engine, which alternately fed steam into each end of the cylinder, kind of a 28 HOW WE GOT HERE push me pull you contraption. But

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pig iron from 12 hours to 45 minutes. It wasn’t until John Wilkinson’s combining of the Darby coke smelting process, the Boulton & Watt steam engine, his own precision cylinders, and the Cort forging process, that we got industrial strength iron, and lots of it. Boulton and Watt brought down the

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years. They had to prove themselves first. *** Did we get anything we need for the computer business? Lots, but most of it came indirectly. That steam engine would be indispensable for generating electricity, but not for a few more decades. Money, and keeping track of money, would become much more important as

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tighten the weft, and move the sword towards the other end of the warp to send the shuttle through the new shed. Got it? Makes steam engines sound simple. 30 HOW WE GOT HERE But looms are actually very simple but extremely labor intensive. A weaver must pay careful attention. In 1733

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no man or mule or horse or even running water could keep up with the power needed to run one of these things. Boulton & Watt steam engines to the rescue. The Spinning Mule was a breakout device. It was just what the textile business needed: cheap, smooth material. And of course,

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or fixed broken thread. He tried to use a waterwheel to operate the weaving mill, but quickly contacted Boulton and Watt and hooked up a steam engine. An experienced hand weaver could, according to Richard Guest’s, Compendious History of the Cotton Manufacture 1823, produce “two pieces of nine-eighths shirting

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able to win any suits. Meanwhile, Whitney built bigger and bigger cotton gins. Waterpower replaced the hand crank or horse. America didn’t have any steam engines, and it would be a while until that mode of industrialization took hold. But it did have the ability to turn out more cotton. In

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the time was to solve differential equations. Astronomers who studied the skies needed differential equations to predict orbits. The invention of the steam engine would have gone a lot faster if James Watt had been able to solve differentials in Isaac Newton’s law of cooling. Newton stated that if an object, hot or

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1822, a flamboyant professor in England, Charles Babbage announced that he would build a Difference Engine. The size of a house, it would need a steam engine to operate but it would solve differential equations. Great idea, poor execution. A few small-scale models were demonstrated, but the engine was ahead of

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Crompton Spinning Mule. This guy should get as much 42 HOW WE GOT HERE credit as James Watt. The Mule could only operate under power. Horses wouldn’t do, a water wheel might work, but a steam engine was exactly what was needed to give the mule enough power to stretch and wind, and

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materials up and down American rivers to get to ports to load onto British ships. *** John Fitch was the first to hook up a crude steam engine to paddle wheels. In 1787, he steamed a ship from Philadelphia to Burlington, New Jersey. Sure, this was only 20 miles, but it beat

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for this 44 HOW WE GOT HERE steamboat in 1791, one of the first the new United States granted. But like Watt’s original steam engine in 1770, Fitch’s cylinder and pistons leaked badly, and Fitch didn’t have John Wilkinson to come along with his cannon barrel-boring tool

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3 horsepower engine, had economic problems, as he couldn’t run cargo or passengers cheap enough and soon failed. Back in England, James Watt wasn’t resting on his laurels. His steam engine patent was to expire in 1800, so he kept inventing. As I noted, in 1782, he invented the double acting, non

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River, knowing full well it would be purchased by the U.S. It’s nice to have connections. *** James Watt, meanwhile, was still haunted by the bad rap that the early high-pressure steam engines got when their boilers exploded, and he refused to use high-pressure steam. But others eventually would. High-pressure

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The most important was George Stephenson. In 1803, he was working in a mining pit, and was put in charge of repairing an old Newcomen steam engine, still in use, probably because the mine was too poor to upgrade. There is something oddly magical about these Newcomen engines – as bad as they

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times, the railroads got built, and people and goods were shuffled about. The Industrial Revolution hit its stride. *** Around the same time, these high-pressure steam engines were strong enough and reliable enough for ocean going vessels. Even then, paddle wheels powered the first ocean going steamships. In 1819, the Robert Fulton

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he began to dream about a steam only trip across the Atlantic. There was only one problem, how to carry enough coal to keep the steam engine cranking for that long trip. A self-proclaimed “expert” on the subject, Reverend Dionysius Lardner, proclaimed in 1837 that the longest theoretical distance a

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Archimedes of Syracuse (Greece, not New York) had invented the screw pump to raise water for irrigation back in 220 or so B.C. The steam engine would directly drive a shaft to which a propeller was attached. The screw propeller was more efficient than a paddle wheel, because the moving water

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the 19th Century, steam power had increased by a factor of 1000, on a warship to protect trade routes, trade enabled by those very same steam engines. *** I think the lesson here is not any specific piece part for computing, but instead the parallels of the industrial revolution and the digital revolution

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the ability to constantly lower the price of goods and services, drove the industrial era. So too, the parallels of the microprocessor and networking with steam engines and transportation. They go hand in hand. 56 HOW WE GOT HERE What else? Well, these are 100-year cycles. And it’s really

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Between 1797 and 1821, during the Restriction, England’s economy took off, partially because it was wartime, but also because the industrial age had begun. Steam engines ran mills. The triangle trade ran circles around everyone else in the world. Affordable English goods were in high demand as substitutes for home spun

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out, he lost his funding and the ABC gathered dust. *** Here is where the story gets interesting and starts to resemble the birth of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution. The United States Army and Navy each had a problem. There was a war on, and they were painstakingly assembling artillery

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England needed cannons to put down the insurgency of colonists in America in 1774, cannon-maker John Wilkinson perfected these same coke ovens by adapting James Watt’s steam engine to run his bellows. The need for cannons helped spark the Industrial Revolution, and 175 years later, wars were STILL being fought over coke

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university and industrial company in England. Each built its own version. The British had a lead in computers, much as they had a lead in steam engines. Over time, all the parts needed for the Colossus class computers would be made in England and other parts of the sprawling Empire. Sir William

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115 What? Destroyed? This turned out to be a costly mistake. Because of Turing, they had a shot at repeating the steam engine story. These computers were no different than steam engines, they added value to raw materials, in this case knowledge instead of iron or cotton. But some paranoid bureaucrat cost Britain its

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design and manufacture. Von Neumann’s work had established a computing architecture. But the next move, like all the improvements Watt made to his original steam engine, was to get the hot, power-hungry vacuum tubes out of the loop and make computers commercially viable. And slow relays or a wave sloshing

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If you made it cheaper by half, they would not only come, they would use three times as many. Just like comfortable cloth off a steam engine run Spinning Mule and Power Loom. The transistor I described Hoerni and Noyce making was a bipolar junction transistor. It was a great device for

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you are off and running, producing code to save the aluminum and chemical industry from extinction. The biggest problem facing any new business, be it steam engines or static memory, iron foundries or semiconductor fabs, is finding capital to fund the business. Banks won’t lend money to businesses they don’t

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business? Forget it. Come back when the profits roll in. *** Back in 1769, Matthew Boulton was attracted to James Watt and his steam engine and provided him with risk capital because he understood early how the steam engine could change the manufacturing business. In exchange, he got two-thirds of the business, which reaped him 25

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adjusted for time and risk and competition. Boulton could have cashed out in year three, and many others could have owned his piece of the steam engine franchise. In fact, Watt could have cut out Boulton altogether, and just sold a piece of his business to the stock market, and used that

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computer revolution. He also proved that vacuums exist and that pressure could be measured with a tube of inverted mercury – two phenomena that James Watt needed to get his steam engine working. But Pascal’s rapidly firing mathematical mind would go to other, more near-term pursuits. He was a vicious gambler. He had

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Of course, its timing was spot on, as it now had a big enough home to handle the expansion of trade brought on by the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution. And thus began the modern insurance industry. But to me, something is terribly wrong with the whole business structure. You would

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Line Pioneers, Berkeley Sylla, Richard, 1998, The First Great IPO, Financial History Magazine Issue, 64 Thurston, Robert, 1878, A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine Weightman, Gavin, 2003, Signor Marconi’s Magic Box – The Most Remarkable Invention of the 19th Century and the Amateur Inventor Whose Genius Sparked a Revolution

The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes  · 15 Jan 2008  · 778pp  · 227,196 words

Beddoes, a one-time lecturer from Oxford, who had frequently applied to the Royal Society for subsidy. Despite recommendations from the Duchess of Devonshire and James Watt of the Lunar Society, Banks reluctantly turned down these requests, partly on the grounds that these experiments involved human patients breathing various kinds of gas

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new lodger came to stay with Grace Davy, arranged through the ever-solicitous Tonkin. Gregory Watt was the prodigal son of the great Scottish engineer James Watt. At twenty-five he was the youngest member of the Lunar Society, brilliantly clever but physically frail-probably consumptive-and emotionally unstable.25 He had

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or less ill, and in need of gas treatment. But he needed initial capital: he asked Giddy for a gift of £350, got financing from James Watt, applied publicly to Joseph Banks at the Royal Society, and privately to the Duchess of Devonshire. Knowing perhaps that the duchess was not averse to

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whole series of other papers on gases, electricity, heat and-most intriguingly-the universal energy transmitted by starlight. Beddoes read these eagerly, and, encouraged by James Watt, invited Davy-not yet twenty-to join the Institute as an assistant. It is significant that Davy (and his mentor Tonkin) clearly saw this as

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to his Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle, and sent him to visit the Institute’s most influential supporters: the powerful Wedgwood family at Cote House, and James Watt and the Lunar Society in Birmingham. Davy made an excellent impression on everyone he met, and his circle of acquaintances rapidly expanded. Initially Davy boarded

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the new empirical chemistry of Priestley and Lavoisier to test, and if necessary challenge, the Brunonian system of medicine by controlled experiment. He wrote to James Watt, an outstanding engineer, for designs of gasinhaling equipment, including a silken face-mask with a wooden mouthpiece. The masks and gas bags were based on

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Genius’, ‘Saint Michael’s Mount’ and ‘The Tempest’. It was in this same month that Davy first used a portable gas chamber especially designed by James Watt. This device allowed a much longer total exposure to nitrous oxide, and also psychologically isolated the subject from his laboratory surroundings. It was a narrow

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in Researches. For Thomas Beddoes this was a crushing disappointment, particularly as it was exactly what Joseph Banks had always predicted. Banks had written to James Watt: ‘in the case of Dr Beddoes’s project-I do not fully understand it, &…I do not expect any beneficial consequences will be derived from

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‘Inventor of the Capillary Tube Lamp’.100 George Stephenson (1781-1848) was a gifted, self-educated engineer, and later the designer of the early railway steam engine, the famous ‘Stephenson Rocket’ which brought him international fame. He was an inventor of genius, an honest man and no fraud. He was to be

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Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament were illuminated with the new gaslights, ‘most Brilliant’, Banks noted approvingly.8 There were paddle ships powered by steam engines, which could ply the Thames against the tide, and make all-weather crossings to France. These began to appear in Turner’s pictures, and even

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the turnpike road, A thing to counterbalance human woes: For ever since immortal man hath glow’d With all kinds of mechanics, and full soon Steam-engines will conduct him to the moon. Most remarkable of all, in the next stanza Byron light-heartedly connected the discovery and daring of contemporary science

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the first electrical generators, by producing an ‘alternating’ electrical current. This would lead to electrical dynamos that would ultimately revolutionise industry as much as James Watt’s steam engine. His experiment with magnetic coils and a galvanometer (which was made to move without physical contact), carried out at the Institution’s laboratory on 29

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laws of reflection, and indeed their undulatory theories are perfectly similar.’58 This allows her to discuss the action of sunshine, rain, frost, steam, clouds, steam engines, musical instruments and even ‘squeezing water out of a sponge’ in the same chapter, headed simply ‘Heat’.59 Newton remains the presiding genius of the

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at Birmingham, which met each month on the night of the full moon (in theory so they could walk home safely). A close friend of James Watt and Matthew Boulton, he described much. of the new science of the day in his long and remarkable poem The Botanic Garden (1791). Its extensive

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Shelley, and covered the basics of Romantic science including astronomy, chemistry, electricity, geology and meteorology. JAMES WATT, 1736-1819. Engineer and member of the Lunar Society. In partnership with Matthew Boulton he developed new forms of steam engine, for use in mines and textile manufacture. The international unit of electricity, the watt (a measure

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Niger, 1890 Charles Waterton, Wanderings in South America, 1825 William Wordsworth, rejected passage on Mungo Park, from The Prelude, 1805 Humphry Davy Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Considerations on the Medical Use of Factitious Airs, J. Johnson, 1794, British Library catalogue B. Tracts. 489 Henry Brougham, ‘Sir Humphry Davy’, in The Lives

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, May 2006. See also John Allen, ‘The Early History of Varfell’, in Ludgvan, Ludgvan Horticultural Society, no date 45 Golinski, pp157-83 46 Reply from James Watt, Birmingham, 13 November 1799, in JD Fragments, pp24-6 47 HD Works 3, pp278-9 48 HD Works 3, pp278-80; on Davy’s impetuosity

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Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Picador, 2001 49 Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences, vol 1, 1847, p264 50 HD Works 3, pp246-7; James Watt, Birmingham, 13 November 1799, in JD Fragments, pp24-6; equipment partly illustrated in Fullmer, p216 51 Treneer, p72 52 Fullmer, p213 53 Ibid., p214 54

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Fragments, p150 126 Coleridge to Southey, 1803; see Treneer, p114 127 Treneer, p78 128 JB Correspondence 4, letters 1290-6, cover an exchange between Banks, James Watt and the Duchess of Devonshire about the viability of Dr Beddoes’s scheme in December 1794 129 HD Works 3, p276 130 F.F. Cartwright

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Robert J. Gordon  · 12 Jan 2016  · 1,104pp  · 302,176 words

the days of ancient Rome, the First Industrial Revolution had begun to spread its bounty in many directions before 1870, particularly in the form of steam engines, cotton gins, railroads, steamships, telegraphic communications, and rudimentary agricultural machinery that greatly eased the burden of human labor on the farm. If the beginning of

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to come in 1870. In that year, light was obtained from candles, whale oil, and town gas, and most motive power in manufacturing came from steam engines, water wheels, and horses. An ever-expanding network of passenger and freight railroads provided intercity transportation, but train speeds were barely one-third those achieved

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accorded the railroads by commentators in the late nineteenth century, and for all the enormous progress that they enabled, the transportation revolution enabled by the steam engine was incomplete. Steam railroads did cross the country by 1870, but this did not help the urban worker in the daily task of transportation from

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, brickyards, and factories, and city governments curtailed fire protection and garbage collection.53 A full century after James Watt’s steam engine, why were cities so dependent on horses rather than steam-powered devices? Disadvantages of steam engines within the narrow confines of cities included the ever-present danger of fires started by sparks, their acrid

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, and the elimination of smoke and cinders. The diesel engine produced four times as much work out of a pound of fuel as did the steam engine.38 Whether in primitive conditions in the 1870s, the more comfortable Pullman cars introduced in the late nineteenth century, or the sleek streamliners of the

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, its points representing the new suburbs established along the rail lines extending out from the city.40 Because the early commuter railroads were propelled by steam engines, they shared the discomfort of smoke and cinders, hazards that could be alleviated only by closing all the windows and suffocating on hot summer days

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transit within the city in the late nineteenth century, where until 1890 the horse was the dominant prime mover of intracity passenger and freight transportation. Steam engines could not be used on city streets because of fear of fires started by sparks, deafening noise, thick smoke, and heavy weight that shook foundations

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a horse-drawn streetcar.58 At its peak, the Chicago system extended over eighty-six miles of cable tracks and was powered by thirteen large steam engines; it played a major role in extending the residential reach of the city. It was estimated at the time to have “removed from a street

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networks.”65 The solution to congestion in densely packed U.S. cities emerged from London, where the Metropolitan Railway underground line opened its service with steam engine propulsion in 1863. By definition, an underground or overhead “elevated” service could bypass all traffic congestion on the surface. New York’s elevated trains predated

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northern tip of Manhattan.66 Chicago’s elevated trains followed sixteen years later when elevated tracks opened for service in 1892, intended to allow small steam engines to bring visitors to the 1893 Columbian Exposition. For the 1893 fair itself, a three-mile elevated loop circled the fairgrounds, the first to be

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, as shown in chapter 5. Mechanization of agriculture lagged behind that of manufacturing, in part because steam engines were too expensive and bulky to be purchased by individual farmers. Thus the horse became dominant over the steam engine in farming and intra-urban transportation for the same reasons—its bulkiness and expense (additional factors

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until the arrival of the internal combustion engine was the problem of devising a self-propelled steam engine that could operate “on soft, uneven ground without sinking in or tipping over. In other words, a self-propelled steam engine had to be like a horse.”32 Though drought, heat, and insects were particular problems

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the period of rapid growth. This interpretation can be related to the sequence of industrial revolutions. The first industrial revolution (IR #1), based on the steam engine and its offshoots—particularly the railroad, steamships, and the shift from wood to iron and steel—resulted from inventions in the period 1770 to 1820

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line to automobile manufacture, dating from December 1, 1913.41 Developed from the ideas of many predecessors, dating back to Richard Garrett’s 1853 English steam engine factory, the assembly line revolutionized manufacturing and deserves equal credit with electric motors for achieving the acceleration of TFP growth which began in the 1920s

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assembly line, together with electric-powered tools, utterly transformed manufacturing. Before 1913, goods were manufactured by craftsmen at individual stations that depended for power on steam engines and leather or rubber belts. The entire product would be crafted by one or two employees. Compare that with a decade later, when each worker

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and Cyrus McCormick for his 1834 invention of the reaper. They were preceded by many British inventors going back to Thomas Newcomen and James Watt (the inventors of the steam engine) and George Stephenson (who shares in the invention of the railroad). Most studies of long-term economic growth attempt to subdivide the sources

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). 41. The required qualification is that the Chicago stockyards adopted assembly-line methods in the 1890s or even before, and Richard Garrett and Sons built steam engines on the assembly-line principle in England as early as 1843. 42. Abramowitz and David (2000, p. 48). 43. Weintraub (1939, p. 26). 44. Ristuccia

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, 477, 482 Star Wars (films), 420 State Farm (firm), 309 state governments: automobiles regulated by, 314; regulation of businesses by, 313, 629 steam boilers, 126 steam engines, 48–49; cable cars powered by, 146; commuter railroads powered by, 143; railroads powered by, 132–42, 168 Steckel, Richard, 83, 84 steel industry, 267

Energy: A Human History

by Richard Rhodes  · 28 May 2018  · 653pp  · 155,847 words

arena. A Frenchman, Denis Papin, concerned with feeding the poor, whose invention of the pressure cooker prepared the way for the steam engine. James Watt, of course, the Scotsman who gave us the steam engine itself, but also Thomas Newcomen before him, whose great galumphing atmospheric steam machine preceded Watt’s elegant elaboration. I visited a

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making room for natural gas, nuclear power, and renewables. Prime movers (systems that convert energy to motion) transitioned from animal and water power to the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the generator, and the electric motor. We learned from such challenges, mastered their transitions, capitalized on their opportunities. The current debate

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pay him for any experimental demonstrations he gave, provided that he submitted his ideas in advance for approval. In 1708 the society leadership referred his steam engine plans to Savery, his primary competitor, for assessment. Unsurprisingly, Savery disparaged Papin’s design. If Papin had dismissed Savery’s grossly inefficient use of unshielded

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. When new technologies falter, reverting to earlier, more dependable systems can sometimes ease the transition, combining the old with the new. The earlier, commercially successful steam engine for mine drainage succeeded by retreating from such ambitious designs as those of Papin and Savery. If the craft skills of the day were inadequate

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of wheel carriages.”18 The demands of his business forced him to set aside this early effort of invention, but by 1763, James Watt had learned enough about existing steam engines to understand something of how they worked.19 That winter, Anderson asked Watt to repair the model Newcomen engine that the university had

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repeatedly pumped most of the air out of a large tank. He had no doubt then “that Mr. Watt had really made a perfect steam engine.”37 Watt’s steam engine was far from perfect. The first engines he built, though much less wasteful of coal than the Newcomen engines that preceded them, were

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industrialist Matthew Boulton. Where Watt was querulous, Boulton was bold; he famously told Watt, who had initially proposed selling Boulton the exclusive right to produce steam engines only for the counties of Warwickshire, Staffordshire, and Derbyshire, “It would not be worth my while to make for three Countys only, but I find

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. Boulton & Watt engines followed that harnessed steam directly, mounted automatic throttles, produced rotary motion, measured output and more. From only pumping mine water, the new steam engines came to blow smelting furnaces, turn cotton mills, grind grain, strike medals and coins, and free factories of the energetic and geographic constraints of animal

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face of these bounties, their unintended consequence, was increasing air pollution: the pollution of domestic and industrial coal smoke and pollution from the processes the steam engine drove. Already in Ireland as early as 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote in the Dublin Weekly Journal, “The physicians in Dublin make it their constant practice

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Matthew Boulton, who showed them through the Boulton & Watt factory at Soho. They dined there that afternoon. After dinner, Boulton reviewed the history of the steam engine, and they examined an early-model engine improved with a new Wilkinson cylinder. “Then an astonishing thing happened,” writes Wilkinson’s biographer. “The four men

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that beginning, the British network of feeder railways grew with the canal network. Three other developments, two of them fortuitous, then stimulated innovative change. James Watt’s steam engine patent expired in June 1800. Its patent protection had discouraged other inventors from exploring improvements. Now, as both Watt and Boulton retired, the field of

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his boot prints onto the ceiling. Such exploits earned him the nickname “the Cornish Giant.” Besides an imposing physical presence, Trevithick was gifted at building steam engines, usually introducing innovations that increased their efficiency. In 1795, when Boulton & Watt enjoined an atmospheric engine Trevithick built at Ding Dong mine in Cornwall for

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their patent attorney, recommended that they have a steam carriage built and exhibit it in London. The patent, for “Methods for improving the construction of Steam engines and the application thereof for driving Carriages and for other purposes,” was granted on 24 March 1802.27 At Coalbrookdale that summer, Trevithick designed and

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Trevithick’s common road steam locomotive turned up no investors interested in supporting its further development. The Cornish Giant concluded that the future of the steam engine wasn’t transporting people but working machinery and hauling coal. He set his engines to work boring brass cannon, pumping water, and blowing furnaces. Along

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deepened to expose new veins of coal or iron ore; expensive horses were less than adequate at lifting water or minerals from deeper levels. Trevithick steam engines—smaller, more efficient, and less expensive than the big atmospheric engines of Boulton & Watt—filled a need. “Whim engines,” they were called: whim a contraction

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there would first drive steamboats. Britain, in contrast, eruptive with steam and braided with canals, looked beyond wagon and water carriage to the railway. “The steam engine meant that coal could be exploited to supply mechanical energy as readily as heat energy,” writes the economic historian E. A. Wrigley, “thus overcoming the

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September 1825. The prospectus for the Liverpool & Manchester line claimed that it would deliver goods much faster than shipment by canal. The unreliability of early steam engines justified questioning that claim, but travel we would not consider rapid today also seemed impossible in a world where no one traveled faster than a

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for the present, until the question respecting the steam engine had been decided, and until we had an opportunity of considering the subject more maturely. Murdoch acquiesced, and nothing was done until 1801.”32 Which was not quite true. In 1794, independent of Murdoch, James Watt Sr. began work under painful circumstances on a

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electricity until late in the nineteenth century. Both were feeble, limited, and expensive compared with the products of the development of steam, the broad-shouldered steam engines that powered factories, raised water, propelled ships, and hauled trainloads of passengers and freight. On a smaller but complementary scale, horses moved goods and passengers

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of electromagnetism. That research paralleled the development of the electric generator and its reverse, the electric motor. Spin the device with mechanical power from a steam engine or a waterwheel, and it output electric current. Input electric current into the device, and it output mechanical power, turning machines such as looms or

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. As do all innovators of new technologies, he faced the larger problem of developing and deploying the infrastructure required to support his inventions. Behind the steam engine, a network of mines and distribution systems supplied coal for its operation. Local generating plants and networks of underground pipes sustained gas lighting. When Edison

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. Motors large and small, all the way down to motors for individual sewing machines, began replacing the shafts and belts that transferred power inefficiently from steam engines. Country people still read and cooked with kerosene, but electric lights went on in the cities of the world. * * * I. One hundred-fifty candlepower is

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generated electricity in downtown Detroit. From farm experience, and from an apprenticeship with a company that built steamships for the Great Lakes trade, he knew steam engines. By 1893, Edison Illuminating had promoted him to chief engineer. Ford began building his first automobile after he moved to Detroit, in a workshop he

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displaced the superannuated horse, and consider whether such a system has general utility or adaptability!”12 Pedro Salom had considered the question. He thought not. Steam engines and electric motors could be run up smoothly from idle to full power without gearing. But to operate without stalling, internal combustion engines had to

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of Mines Synthetic Liquid Fuels Program, 1944–55. Report of Investigations 5506. Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, 1959. Burn, Robert Scott. The Steam-Engine, Its History and Mechanism, Being Descriptions and Illustrations of the Stationary, Locomotive, and Marine Engines. London: H. Ingram, 1854. Burnett, D. Graham. Trying Leviathan: The

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, Brock. “Sierra Club Involvement in Nuclear Power: An Evolution of Awareness.” Oregon Law Review 54 (1975): 607–21. Evans, Oliver. The Abortion of the Young Steam Engineer’s Guide. Philadelphia: printed for the author by Fry and Kammerer, 1805. Evelyn, John. A Character of England. London: Joseph Crooke, 1659. Early English Books

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Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions. London: Robert Scott et al., 1664. Eyles, Joan M. “William Smith, Richard Trevithick, and Samuel Homfray: Their Correspondence on Steam Engines, 1804–1806.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 43, no. 1 (1970): 137–61. Fanning, Leonard M. The Rise of American Oil. New York: Harper & Brothers

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, 1948. Farey, John. A Treatise on the Steam Engine, Historical, Practical, and Descriptive. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827. Fenger, Jes, O. Hertel, and F. Palmgren, eds. Urban Air Pollution—European Aspects

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Projections.” Renewable Energy for Development 10, no. 3 (1997) (online). Galloway, Robert L. Annals of Coal Mining and the Coal Trade: The Invention of the Steam Engine and the Origin of the Railway. London: Colliery Guardian, 1898. ———. A History of Coal Mining in Great Britain. London: Macmillan, 1882. Galvani, Luigi. Commentary on

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Perfect Engine.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 68 (1997): 85–107. ———. Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. James Watt: Volume 1: His Time in Scotland, 1736–1774. London: Landmark. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age. New York: Vintage,

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Together. Surbiton, UK: Medina, 2013. Jungk, Robert. The New Tyranny: How Nuclear Power Enslaves Us. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1979. Kanefsky, John, and John Robey. “Steam Engines in 18th-Century Britain: A Quantitative Assessment.” Technology and Culture 21, no. 2 (1980): 161–86. Kasun, Jacqueline. The War Against Population: The Economics and

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, CT: Yale University Press, 1974. Kemble, Frances Ann. Record of a Girlhood. Vol. 2. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1878. Kerker, Milton. “Science and the Steam Engine.” Technology and Culture 2, no. 4 (Autumn 1961): 381–90. Kerridge, Eric. “The Coal Industry in Tudor and Stuart England: A Comment.” Economic History Review

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20 (1941): 17–28. Lord, Eleanor Louisa. Industrial Experiments in the British Colonies of North America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1898. Loree, L. F. “The First Steam Engine of America.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 10 (1931): 15–27. ———. “The Four Locomotives Imported into America in 1829 by the Delaware & Hudson Company.” Transactions

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. 2 (1977): 157–74. Rolt, L. T. C. George and Robert Stephenson: The Railway Revolution. Stroud, UK: Amberley, 2016. ———. Thomas Newcomen: The Prehistory of the Steam Engine. Dawlish, UK: David and Charles, 1963. Rose, Mark H. “Urban Environments and Technological Innovation: Energy Choices in Denver and Kansas City, 1900–1940.” Technology and

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the author, 1878. Strohl, Dan. “Ford, Edison and the Cheap EV That Almost Was.” Wired 6 (2010) (online). Stuart, Robert. Historical and Descriptive Anecdotes of Steam-Engines, and of Their Inventors and Improvers. 2 vols. London: Wightman and Cramp, 1829. Sturtevant, A. H. “Social Implications of the Genetics of Man.” Science 120

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R. “Energy, K-Waves, Lead Economies, and Their Interpretation/Implications.” Social Studies Almanacs online, 2012. Thurston, Robert H. A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine. 2nd rev. ed. New York: D. Appleton, 1884. Tierie, Gerrit. “Cornelis Drebbel (1572–1633).” PhD diss., Leiden University online, 1982. Titley, Arthur. “Richard Trevithick and

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1906. Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1910. Uppenborn, Friedrich. History of the Transformer. London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1889. Valenti, Phillip. “Leibniz, Papin and the Steam Engine: A Case Study of British Sabotage of Science.” American Almanac online, 1996. Varadi, Peter E. “Terrestrial Photovoltaic Industry—The Beginning.” In Power for the World

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University Press, 2007. Volti, Rudi. “A Century of Automobility.” Technology and Culture 37, no. 4 (1996): 663–85. Waerland, Are. “Marten Triewald and the First Steam Engine in Sweden.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 7, no. 1 (1926): 24–41. Walker, J. Samuel. Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective

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. Andriesse, Huygens: The Man Behind the Principle, trans. Sally Miedema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 229. 20. Quoted in Phillip Valenti, “Leibniz, Papin, and the Steam Engine: A Case Study of British Sabotage of Science,” American Almanac online, 1996, n.p. 21. Leibniz report on Von Guericke: Antognazza (2009), 141. 22. Quoted

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in Andriesse, Huygens: Man Behind the Principle, 278. 23. Quoted in Valenti, “Leibniz, Papin, and the Steam Engine,” 3. 24. Quoted and illustrated in ibid., 6. 25. Demonstrators not accorded standing: see Steven Shapin, “The Invisible Technician,” American Scientist 77, no. 6 (1989

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of James Watt, with Selections from His Correspondence (New York: D. Appleton, 1859), 136–42, q.v. (1690), 105–6. 27. Ibid., 108–9 (tran. ed.). 28. Landgrave fountain project: Sigvard Strandh, A History of the Machine (New York: A&W, 1979), 115. 29. Quoted in Valenti, “Leibniz, Papin, and the Steam Engine,” 10

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. 30. Ibid. 31. Papin, “A New Method of Obtaining,” in Muirhead, The Life of James Watt, 106. 32. Quoted in Valenti, “Leibniz, Papin, and the Steam Engine,” 10. 33. Papin’s book: Recueil de diverses Pieces touchant quelques nouvelles Machines

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1729. Reprinted in The Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Walter Scott. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, vol. VII, p. 217. 42. John Farey, A Treatise on the Steam Engine, Historical, Practical, and Descriptive (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827), 444n. 43. Galloway, Annals of Coal Mining, 301. 44. Frank Dawson, John Wilkinson

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of the Ironmasters, ed. David Lake (Stroud, UK: History Press, 2012), 67. 45. Quoted in Smiles, Industrial Biography, 128. 46. First US steam engine, 1755: L. F. Loree, “The First Steam Engine of America.” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 10 (1931): 21; John Fitch: Shagena, Jack L. Who Really Invented the Steamboat? Fulton’s

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson  · 20 Mar 2012  · 547pp  · 172,226 words

Revolution started in England. Its first success was to revolutionize the production of cotton cloth using new machines powered by water wheels and later by steam engines. Mechanization of cotton production massively increased the productivity of workers in, first, textiles and, subsequently, other industries. The engine of technological breakthroughs throughout the economy

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. It is not a coincidence that the Industrial Revolution started in England a few decades following the Glorious Revolution. The great inventors such as James Watt (perfecter of the steam engine), Richard Trevithick (the builder of the first steam locomotive), Richard Arkwright (the inventor of the spinning frame), and Isambard Kingdom Brunel (the creator

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to markets where their innovations could be profitably sold and used. In 1775, just after he had the patent renewed on his steam engine, which he called his “Fire engine,” James Watt wrote to his father: Dear Father, After a series of various and violent Oppositions I have at last got an Act of

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on many fronts, reflecting the improved institutional environment. One crucial area was power, most famously the transformations in the use of the steam engine that were a result of James Watt’s ideas in the 1760s. Watt’s initial breakthrough was to introduce a separate condensing chamber for the steam so that the cylinder

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having to be warmed up and cooled down. He subsequently developed many other ideas, including much more efficient methods of converting the motion of the steam engine into useful power, notably his “sun and planets” gear system. In all these areas technological innovations built on earlier work by others. In the context

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of the steam engine, this included early work by English inventor Thomas Newcomen and also by Dionysius Papin, a French physicist and inventor. The story of Papin’s invention

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to get a local judge to impound the ship, but was unsuccessful. The boatmen then set upon Papin’s boat and smashed it and the steam engine to pieces. Papin died a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave. In Tudor or Stuart England, Papin might have received similar hostile treatment

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around the bulky new finished industrial goods, such as cotton textiles, and the inputs that went into them, particularly raw cotton and coal for the steam engines. Early innovators in building canals were men such as James Brindley, who was employed by the Duke of Bridgewater to build the Bridgewater Canal, which

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Trevithick in 1804. Trevithick’s father was involved in mining in Cornwall, and Richard entered the same business at an early age, becoming fascinated by steam engines used for pumping out the mines. More significant were the innovations of George Stephenson, the son of illiterate parents and the inventor of the famous

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political system open and responsive to the economic needs and aspirations of society. These inclusive economic institutions gave men of talent and vision such as James Watt the opportunity and incentive to develop their skills and ideas and influence the system in ways that benefited them and the nation. Naturally these men

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Bohemian city of Budweis, on the Moldau River, was built with gradients and corners, which meant that it was impossible subsequently to convert it to steam engines. So it continued with horse power until the 1860s. The economic potential for railway development in the empire had been sensed early by the banker

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falls far behind: the ruins of the Roman empire at Vindolanda Courtesy of the Vindolanda Trust and Adam Stanford Innovation, essence of inclusive economic growth: James Watt’s steam engine The Granger Collection, NY Organizational change, a consequence of inclusive institutions: the factory of Richard Arkwright at Cromford The Granger Collection, NY Fruits of

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DuPlessis (1997) on the Second Serfdom in Eastern Europe. Conning (2010) and Acemoglu and Wolitzky (2011) develop formalizations of Brenner’s thesis. The quote from James Watt is reproduced from Robinson (1964), pp. 223–24. In Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2005a) we first presented the argument that it was the interaction between

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein  · 15 Sep 2014  · 829pp  · 229,566 words

had signed onto the demand to cut foreign aid in favor of local disaster relief. Of course Britain—the nation that invented the coal-fired steam engine—has been emitting industrial levels of carbon for longer than any nation on earth and therefore bears a particularly great responsibility to increase, as opposed

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replacement workers in rural areas was difficult. Beginning in 1776, a Scottish engineer named James Watt perfected and manufactured a power source that offered solutions to all these vulnerabilities. Lawyer and historian Barbara Freese describes Watt’s steam engine as “perhaps the most important invention in the creation of the modern world”—and with

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.25 By adding a separate condenser, air pump, and later a rotary mechanism to an older model, Watt was able to make the coal-fired steam engine vastly more powerful and adaptable than its predecessors. In contrast, the new machines could power a broad range of industrial operations, including, eventually, boats. For

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compared with coal. For one thing, it was free, while coal needed to be continually re-purchased. And contrary to the widespread belief that the steam engine provided more energy than water wheels, the two were actually comparable, with the larger wheels packing several times more horsepower than their coal-powered rivals

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decidedly cheaper.”26 As Britain’s urban population ballooned, two factors tipped the balance in favor of the steam engine. The first was the new machine’s insulation from nature’s fluctuations: unlike water wheels, steam engines worked at the same rate all the time, so long as there was coal to feed them

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and the machinery wasn’t broken. The flow rates of rivers were of no concern. Steam engines also worked anywhere, regardless of the geography, which meant that factory owners could shift production from more remote areas to cities like London, Manchester, and

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, making it far easier to fire troublemakers and put down strikes. As an 1832 article written by a British economist explained, “The invention of the steam-engine has relieved us from the necessity of building factories in inconvenient situations merely for the sake of a waterfall.” Or as one of Watt’s

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annex countries in distant lands. As the Earl of Liverpool put it in a public meeting to memorialize James Watt in 1824, “Be the winds friendly or be they contrary, the power of the Steam Engine overcomes all difficulties. . . . Let the wind blow from whatever quarter it may, let the destination of our force

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be to whatever part of the world it may, you have the power and the means, by the Steam Engine, of applying that force at the proper time and in the proper manner.”28 Not until the advent of electronic trading would commerce feel itself

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the 1800s could now go wherever labor was cheapest and most exploitable, and wherever resources were most plentiful and valuable. As the author of a steam engine manual wrote in the mid-1830s, “Its mighty services are always at our command, whether in winter or in summer, by day or by night

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. “Nature can be conquered,” Watt reportedly said, “if we can but find her weak side.”30 Little wonder then that the introduction of Watt’s steam engine coincided with explosive levels of growth in British manufacturing, such that in the eighty years between 1760 and 1840, the country went from importing 2

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Daly and Joshua Farley point out that Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776—the same year that Watt produced his first commercial steam engine. “It is no coincidence,” they write, “that the market economy and fossil fuel economy emerged at essentially the exact same time. . . . New technologies and vast

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earth is the reverse of the one we have assumed for three centuries.”35 For one of those centuries, a huge white marble statue of James Watt dominated St. Paul’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, commemorating a man who “enlarged the resources of his Country” and “increased the power of Man.” And

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political practice to a symptom of “command and control environmentalism.” Using messaging that would have fit right in at a Heartland conference three decades later, James Watt, Reagan’s much despised interior secretary, accused greens of using environmental fears “as a tool to achieve a greater objective,” which he claimed was “centralized

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Joseph Banks, described by a British colonial official as “the staunchest imperialist of the day.”21 During his tenure, the society counted among its fellows James Watt, the steam engine pioneer, and his business partner, Matthew Boulton—the two men most responsible for launching the age of coal. As the questions hanging on the

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the swells as they come, but doing some pretty fancy tricks along the way. It was precisely this need to adapt ourselves to nature that James Watt’s steam engine purportedly liberated us from in the late 1770s, when it freed factory owners from having to find the best waterfalls, and ship captains from

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worrying about the prevailing winds. As Andreas Malm writes, the first commercial steam engine “was appreciated for having no ways or places of its own, no external laws, no residual existence outside that brought forth by its proprietors; it

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degree of responsibility to cut its emissions as, say, Britain, which has been accumulating wealth and emitting industrial levels of carbon dioxide ever since James Watt introduced his successful steam engine in 1776?35 Of course not. That is why 195 countries, including the United States, ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate

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21 (2013): 31. 27. J. R. McCulloch [unsigned], “Babbage on Machinery and Manufactures,” Edinburgh Review 56 (January 1833): 313–32; François Arago, Historical Eloge of James Watt, trans. James Patrick Muirhead (London: J. Murray, 1839), 150. 28. C. H. Turner, Proceedings of the Public Meeting Held at Freemasons’ Hall, on the 18th

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June, 1824, for Erecting a Monument to the Late James Watt (London: J. Murray, 1824), pp. 3–4, as cited in Andreas Malm, “Steam: Nineteenth-Century Mechanization and the Power of Capital,” in Ecology and Power

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. 29. M. A. Alderson, An Essay on the Nature and Application of Steam: With an Historical Notice of the Rise and Progressive Improvement of the Steam-Engine (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1834), 44. 30. Asa Briggs, The Power of Steam: An Illustrated History of the World’s Steam Age (Chicago: University

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–57, 462 industrialized nations, see developed world Industrial Revolution, 18, 25, 157, 175–76, 177, 409 colonialism and, 171, 175, 457 slavery and, 415–16 steam engine in, 171–73 infertility, in humans: environmental damage and, 424–25, 428–30 stress and, 437 infertility, in marine life: BP spill and, 431–33

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: extractive industry and, 83, 94, 295, 296, 332, 344–47 from fracking, 328–29, 332, 344, 346 water power, 16, 101, 215 of factories, 171 steam engine vs., 171–72 Waters, Donny, 431, 432 Watt, James, 171–75, 204, 266, 394, 410 Waxman-Markey, 227 wealth: concentration of, 154, 155 decentralization of

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World

by Deirdre N. McCloskey  · 15 Nov 2011  · 1,205pp  · 308,891 words

or Steve Jobs’s iPad. Why did Leonardo da Vinci in 1519 conceal many of his (not entirely original) engineering dreams in secret writing, whereas James Watt, of steam-engine fame (famous too for his fiercely defended anti-betterment patents), would in 1825, six years after his death, be honored with a planned statue

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rules of the game—rules designed, unsurprisingly, by the elite in favor of the old rich. The open economy created numerous nouveaux riches, such as James Watt and Robert Fulton. Both eventually failed to protect their monopolies. Fernand Braudel argued to the contrary that capitalism was inherently and permanently monopolistic. But les

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or proletarian, down to the present. Denis (or Dionysius) Papin (1647–ca. 1712) improved in 1688 on the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens’s notion of a steam engine—“The steam cylinders,” he pointed out, “could be used for a great variety of purposes”—and is supposed to have built in 1707, a century

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of hand knitting. (In the event perhaps the lack of a patent was for the better, compared, say, with Watt’s fierce monopoly on the steam engine a century and a half later, or Edison’s monopolizing three centuries on. Knitting by machine in fact spread in the guild-weak lands of

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police and soldiers, the nasty international corporation in the social imaginary of the left looks amateurish in its pursuit of more voluntary customers for its steam engines and steamboats, hamburgers and athletic shoes. Wise up, said Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Get prudent nationally to offset the private interests of a

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the African success of Botswana, in southern Africa, and 94 times richer than the African catastrophe of Zimbabwe next door. From the time of atmospheric steam engines to the present, England and Scotland together have been world centers for invention: modern steel, radar, penicillin, magnetic resonance imaging, float glass, and the World

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Despite Britain’s long relative “decline”—the word is a misapprehension based on biological metaphors and the happy fact that once-British inventions such as steam engines and bicycles and antibiotics have proven over the past two centuries rather easy to imitate—it remains even today, I say again, among the most

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them on Boston Common.) And in any case the autonomy of the Radical Reformation allowed for betterment. John Lienhard instances an early theorist of the steam engine, Denis Papin (1647–ca. 1712, cast out of France as a Huguenot), and the at-last-successful inventor of the engine, the Devonshire blacksmith Thomas

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eventually to political pamphlets, independent newspapers, Puritan courtesy books, epistolary novels, and guides to young men climbing the social ladder. The mere idea of a steam engine with separate condenser, if permitted and if accompanied by skilled machinists trained in making precision scientific instruments and the boring of cannon, and the expiration

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meters laid out in rule books in a most un-Romantic way. Even in Scotland the corporation of Glasgow, to avoid competition, denied a young James Watt license to set up a workshop—he was driven, happily, to apply to the university, and there invented the separate condenser.15 Without permission from

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Industrial Revolution, and especially of its astounding continuation into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The goldsmith John Tuite’s patent of 1742 modifying Newcomen’s steam engine was, according to Margaret Jacob, the first British patent to be granted that says boldly in the application that it will put people out of

…

to the Prince of Wales, Jean Desaguliers, of Huguenot origin, was the first person to emphasize in print, Jacob continues, the labor-saving character of steam engines.2 Mokyr concludes that “the British government was by and large unsupportive of reactionary forces that tried to slow down the Industrial Revolution.”3 It

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dear Count, you will admit that if the smoke gets in the eyes of the engineer, or if an idea of putting a high-pressure steam engine on rails inspires the provincial British artisans Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson, then ideas can matter mightily. One can make merry of an ideational history

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one of betterment free from monopolizing guilds or interfering autocrats. The new ideology made wholly honorable the fiddling by ordinary folk with air pumps and steam engines and looms and pottery. It pushed the French to recommend a British and an earlier Dutch respect for individual initiative, at least among a liberal

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. Interchangeable parts. Sewerage in cities. Iron hulls of ships. Assembly lines. Bituminous pavement. The classic case is the steam engine. Although the discovery of the atmosphere clearly played a role in the early steam engine, most of its betterments were matters of tinkering, and high and low skills of machine-making. Eastern science perhaps

…

and George Stephenson’s safety lamps in coal mining. Well after the theorizing of the steam engine by Carnot, as Lawrence Joseph Henderson put it in 1917, the science of thermodynamics owed more to the steam engine than the steam engine owed to science. Margaret Jacob argues plausibly for an ideal cause working earlier through a

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material one. The steam engine, itself a material consequence of seventeenth-century ideas about the “weight of air,” inspired new

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ideas in the 1740s about machinery generally. Yet it is doubtful that the inventor of the “atmospheric” steam engine, Newcomen, an artisan familiar with pumps, knew much about high science. Science didn’t make the modern world. Technology did, in the hands of newly

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Diversity: A Comparison of Mitochondrial, Autosomal, and Y-Chromosome Data.” American Journal of Human Genetics 66 (March): 979–988. Joy, Charles A. 1877. “Papin’s Steam Engine.” Scientific American 36. Judt, Tony. 2010. Ill Fares the Land. London: Penguin. Julien, François. 1996. A Treatise on Efficacy: Between Western and Chinese Thinking. Trans

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–243. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLeod, Christine. 1988. Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLeod, Christine. 1998. “James Watt: Heroic Invention and the Idea of the Industrial Revolution.” In Maxine Berg and Kristine Bruland, eds., Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives, pp. 96–115

Empire of Guns

by Priya Satia  · 10 Apr 2018  · 927pp  · 216,549 words

to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture—the commonly accepted story of the industrial revolution—is typically anchored in images of cotton factories and steam engines invented by unfettered geniuses. The British state has little to do in this version of the story. For more than two hundred years, that image

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1859, and saw the giants of the industrial revolution as exemplars of that ethos: he wrote the first biography of Matthew Boulton, of Boulton & Watt steam engine fame, shortly after, in 1865. The myth of self-help has remained at the heart of our understanding of the industrial revolution. To be sure

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’t demarcate modern and premodern industries. Particular processes rather than entire industries were transformed. Karl Marx knew that the machine came from the workshop; the steam engine was produced piecemeal in Soho and in John Wilkinson’s ironworks. The entanglement of large and small, old and new, is what makes short- or

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air, and in 1795 (the year of the scandal around him in the Quaker church) he was a trustee for James Watt for the Soho Foundry’s investments in the manufacture of steam engines. His father and siblings lent Boulton money on a mortgage on Boulton’s shares in the Birmingham Canal Navigation Company

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to create an assay office in town. Both invested in the Rose Copper Company, in Swansea, in 1802. Galton Jr. assisted Boulton and Watt in steam engine orders and other business matters. The wealth acquired from gunmaking had far-flung and important repercussions in the industrial and commercial economy. Farmer and Galton

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for guns was low, skilled smiths might be busily employed in making buttons, buckles, cutlery, spurs, candlesticks, whip handles, coffee pots, inkstands, bells, carriage fittings, steam engines, snuffboxes, lead pipes, jewelery, lamps, or kitchen tools. They were flexible; they had to be, and it was the nature of metalworking. Birmingham’s population

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Boulton not only took gunmakers’ help, he had a stake in their affairs. He leased land from his frequent colleague and Handsworth neighbor John Whateley. James Watt leased a forge and engine from the Whateleys. Boulton introduced Whateley to his business associate William Matthews to supply guns for a ship Matthews was

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near the scale of Birmingham. It was water powered, but the River Ravensbourne proved such an unreliable power source that it was replaced with a steam engine. Lathes, grinders, and other machinery were installed; cottages erected for workmen; and bonuses awarded for good work. A proofhouse was added, and the Tower workshops

…

. In 1811, the French traveler Louis Simond visited a Birmingham mill where three hundred men made ten thousand barrels a month with a 120-horsepower steam engine. Small workshops coexisted with and served the large-scale units, like Galton’s, Boulton’s, and the Ordnance Office’s, that emerged out of government

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1820. He was attacked for this, but his machines found less controversial use in producing the tubes used in gas and water pipes, bedsteads, and steam engines. Surplus government musket barrels were also repurposed as service conduits for gas lighting. Birmingham’s gunmakers were in some ways part of the backbone of

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also gave the British government a major role in the creation and employment of arguably the most iconic developments of the industrial revolution, including the steam engine, copper sheathing, and interchangeable-parts manufacturing. Early changes in iron production owed much to the state and to war demand. The first reverberatory furnace was

…

and perspective in drawing plans. In this way, the Ordnance Office and John Wilkinson came to play a central role in the history of the steam engine. In 1770, just before Townshend became master general, the office hired Jan Verbruggen, from The Hague, as master founder. Experienced in improving cannon boring technology

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engine at the Royal Brass Foundry to keep up with his furnace capacity. Thus did state establishments “unintentionally nourish” development of the steam engine. The precision Verbruggen introduced made the steam engine more viable. John Wilkinson improved on his machinery, patenting a cannon lathe in 1774. The Ordnance Board canceled the patent a year

…

lathe based on his cannon lathe, and it alone could accurately bore the cylinders for James Watt’s steam engines: its importance to Watt’s experiments “cannot be exaggerated.” Wilkinson was already the iron supplier for the Boulton & Watt steam engine enterprise. In typical Birmingham style, Boulton, another government contractor (on which more below), was applying

…

the lessons of button manufacture to steam engine manufacture. Wilkinson was also one of the earliest purchasers of Boulton & Watt engines, which he used to raise water from mine shafts. He was the

…

to purchase their blowing engine, to blow an iron furnace at his works in Broseley, buying four more in a year. He partnered in the steam engine business: he made the main engine parts—cylinder, condenser, and piston—at his ironworks, and Soho took on the more complicated parts. The alliance lasted

…

, Boulton and Watt struggled to get their cylinders made, finally setting up their own boring mill—the beginning of the Soho Foundry. Galton supported their steam engine venture at the turn of the century, too. In the 1780s and 1790s, Richmond expanded the Ordnance Office’s technological pursuits. He originated the Ordnance

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. In 1782, he went to see Boulton and Watt; they promised to mention his work to their partner John Wilkinson. They corresponded about using a steam engine in his experiments. Boulton and Watt also forwarded Cort’s description of his technique to Wilkinson. Cort demonstrated the technique before Midlands ironmasters. He had

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than being bound to forests or rivers. Coal-rich areas like Wales, the Midlands, and Scotland profited; new metal-using trades and iron founders thrived. Steam engines fueled the spread of the puddling furnace. They, too, multiplied as war put pressure on coal mining. In 1796, Boulton determined that little money was

…

usefull to the publick.” He advised his son “to confine his persuits to things usefull rather than ornamental.” The war and the expanding market for steam engines underwrote his embrace of utility. After the wars, the influential political economist Thomas Malthus claimed, “In carrying the late war, we were powerfully assisted by

…

our steam-engines.” In fact, war had assisted the spread of steam engines. These inventions—steam engines, lathes, the puddling process—facilitated the rise of large-scale industry. They were interdependent and mutually reinforcing, and the state

…

-century industry and innovation. In all this, too, the state supported industrial revolution—haltingly, ungraciously, and yet vitally. * * * — Major turning points of industrial revolution—the steam engine, puddling, copper sheathing—were triggered by war and produced by networks of contractor-industrialists. Causal relations between science and industry were not direct, unitary, or

…

James Keir arrived in the area around 1770, dreaming of amassing a fortune by experimenting with alkalis. As general manager at Soho, he collaborated with James Watt and other Lunar Society members. His chemical works made key ingredients for pottery, glass, and soap, but he also made metal alloys, specifically out of

…

interest in inventing a mode of coin manufacture that would reduce costs and deter counterfeiters. He would adapt the coining press to the rotative steam engine. Moreover, just then, steam engines had made it possible to mine enormous quantities of copper in Cornwall. (This, too, fueled the counterfeiting disease.) From 1785, Boulton owned his

…

was also entangled with guns: he turned to gunmakers for pivotal technical expertise and collaboration. He and Watt were already collaborating with Galton on the steam engine business, civic affairs, and the Lunar Society. Boulton was also in frequent touch with the Whateleys. They shared common interests and supported one another’s

…

oversaw the modernization and reequipment of the Royal Mint from 1807, a project completed in 1810, a few months after his death. He supplied the steam engine, the bulk of the machinery, and the skilled fitters to supervise it. The first coinage of this reformed Royal Mint was a load of copper

…

autobiography he published that year, acknowledging also the kindness of other “famous Birmingham names,” including Galton, Boulton, Priestley, and Garbett. A year later, Galton and James Watt corresponded with a Liverpool slave trader about supplying engines for Trinidad. Galton was not alone in searching for a way to simultaneously pursue the African

…

Enfield. They persuaded the master armorer at Harpers Ferry to take charge of Enfield. The factory made locks and bayonets; its waterwheels were replaced by steam engines. It went into full production mode in 1856 as the Royal Small Arms Factory (as Colt’s factory closed in failure). The sixty-odd parts

…

wrought iron to work into various goods. Over time, it was employed further back in the chain of production. a “plain Englishman”: Joseph Black to James Watt, 1784, quoted in Coleman and Macleod, “Attitudes to New Techniques,” 602–3. Wilkinson installed fourteen: Birch, The Economic History of the British Iron and Steel

…

manufacture of navy biscuits on a production-line basis. Maudslay’s factory at Lambeth set new standards of precision engineering using lathes but also made steam engines; he sold one to the Woolwich Arsenal in 1809. Boulton puzzled over: P. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment, 89. In 1775, the Society: Aris’s Birmingham Gazette

…

: Mathias, The Transformation of England, 65–66, 82–83. This community also: See, for instance, BCA: MS3782/12/27/102: SGII to Matthew Boulton (and James Watt), [1782]. “culture of apartness”: P. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment, 187–88. a range of devices: Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 1:43

…

into a national banker. Wallace, The Social Context of Innovation, 228–32. The Spooners evolved: The partners also leased land, a mill, and a steam engine on behalf of James Watt from the Whateleys. BCA: MS3602/295: Lease, December 21, 1817; MS3602/308: Lease, December 7, 1818. two Quaker banks: Price, “The Great Quaker

…

copper, 76, 168, 199, 202–3, 205–12 counterfeit, 202–3, 205, 206, 208, 210 meaning of “coin,” 201 silver, 210–11 standardization of, 210 steam engine and, 206, 207, 211 token, 126, 202, 206–8, 210, 211 Cold War, 12, 13, 256, 299, 374–77, 401, 410 Collins, William, 129–30

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