Today, a look at steam engines in 18th-century
England. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Steam engines were England's
unique gift to the Industrial Revolution. Yet they
were a surprisingly minor presence during that
technological revolution. Thomas Savery built a
steam pump in 1698. A few years later, Thomas
Newcomen built a steam engine. When Watt and
Boulton began selling engines in 1776, steam had
been around for seventy years and almost Six
hundred engines had been built.
Watt's first engines delivered about six
horsepower, little more than early Newcomen engines
did. But Watt's engines were smaller and he'd soon
quadrupled energy efficiency. By 1800 some Watt
engines could deliver as much power as your
automobile engine.
But they would, by no means, have fit under the
hood of your car. Newcomen's engines stood two
stories high with cylinders as large as ten feet in
diameter. Watt's engines were more compact, but
still huge by our standards. And they hadn't begun
to dominate power production. By 1800, two thousand
steam engines were running in Great Britain. Fewer
than five hundred were Watt's.
In the greater scheme of things that was still
small potatoes. Throughout the 18th century most
power continued to come from waterwheels and
windmills. Engine makers never installed more than
a few hundred new horsepower each year. But the
engines they did make were picking up the
specialized jobs essential for the rest of the
Industrial Revolution - like pumping water out of
mines so we could have the coal and metals we
needed.
By 1800, the total capacity of every steam engine
ever built added up to the output of one of our big
stationary diesel engines. Steam didn't change the
English countryside overnight, but it was a
stalking horse of revolution. Steam engines were
agents of changes that far outreached anything
their makers had ever thought of.
So steam carved its place in the power-driven,
steel-shaped, 19th century. Take railways: The
English never had been great road builders. For
1500 years, they'd done little to surpass their
Roman road system. Then outlying tradesmen created
a great canal system to move their new manufactured
goods and they added horse-drawn rail links to
portage goods between canals. That idea came
out of the mines where tramways were used to move
coal and ore.
When Richard Trevethick built a steam locomotive in
1804, rail systems had been in place for decades
and a new generation of high-pressure lightweight
engines was poised to change our very conception of
motion. The story was similar for steam powered
boats.
So steam came in on little cat feet - nudging and
prodding during what Dickens rightly called an
epoch of belief and an epoch of incredulity. Steam
finally became the highly visible center of the
technologies that utterly changed our life on
planet Earth
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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