Thomas Newcomen, a Dartmouth iron monger (hardware salesman) and a sometimes lay-preacher, had passed from the scene before the full eruption of the Industrial Revolution. However, Newcomen’s contribution cannot be overemphasized, because his atmospheric steam engine became the prototype device that with later modifications powered rapid industrial growth initially in England and then later throughout the Western world.
Newcomen’s engine was arguably the most important development in a long line of devices designed to overcome the problem of water seepage into coal, tin, and copper mines. As miners dug deeper to reap greater profits, the mines quickly filled with water. Indeed, Newcomen was not the first person to dabble with steam power to expel water from mines. In fact, one of his contemporaries, Thomas Savery (1650-1715), had obtained a patent in 1698 for his so-called ‘‘fire engine,’’ a device to extract water from mines by using the heat force generated by fire. In truth, Savery’s machine was not an engine at all, as it contained no moving parts and merely applied high-pressured steam directly on the water it sought to raise. Because Newcomen feared a patent dispute, he became Savery’s partner, despite the fact that his invention was far superior to the fire engine of his colleague. The real significance of the Newcomen engine is that it first brought together the essential hardware—cylinder, piston, and a separate boiler—and processes to tap the potential of steam power, the key elements that would be utilized by the improved steam engines for the next century.
He commenced his experiments with the same device—a cylinder and piston—that the ancient Romans had employed to bring water from the mines. However, he soon decided to add a brewer’s copper kettle to house water and a furnace to heat the water. He then installed a water jet inside the piston cylinder to condense steam. When the water boiled and the steam condensed it, the piston was forced to move within the cylinder creating a vacuum. The weight of the atmosphere above forced the piston down, this motion creating the real power stroke of the engine. Thus, his device actually is often more correctly described as an atmospheric engine. The up-and-down movement was harnessed to a ‘‘walking beam’’—a huge horizontal beam of wood that balanced like a seesaw and was connected at one end to the piston of a pump. The Romans had used endless shifts of sweating men and panting horses to work such a pump. Newcomen’s result was dramatic—an engine that produced in just two days what fifty men and twenty horses previously could replicate only by working twenty-four hours a day for a week.
Despite its improvements on earlier devices, Newcomen’s engine had several key drawbacks. The most significant one was its crude inefficiency, especially when compared to the later 18th century modifications and improvements. Furthermore, the constant heating and cooling required the boiler to obtain more fuel, a problem somewhat masked initially because the device was primarily used in coalmines where there was a ready source of fuel. This insatiable demand for coal, however, became a nagging problem at other mines and led his successors to seek more efficient solutions.
The first Newcomen engine operated at a coalmine at Dudley Castle in Straffordshire in 1712. It was an instant success, raising 120 gallons of water 153 feet in one minute. Soon a number of flooded mines reopened and miners once again found employment. By 1769 at least 120 English coal mines sported Newcomen engines. A French observer once marveled at the Newcomen engine and compared its operation to that of the human body: heat spawned all the engine’s motions; the circulation that took place in the engine’s tubes was like blood in a person’s veins; valves opened and closed at the proper moments like in the human heart; the machine fed itself; the engine rejected what it used regularly; and it drew from its own work everything required for support.
There can be little doubt that Thomas Newcomen is a pivotal figure in the Industrial Revolution. His crowning achievement is that he Constructed the initial efficient steam-powered device, a prototype steam engine. This important initial link soon led James Watt and others to thrust Great Britain and other countries headlong into the Age of Steam and the industrial era.
World History
