Today, steam comes to America. 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.
Eighteenth-century scholars
talked about technology in a way that 20th-century
scholars do not. Technology was part of the natural
philosophy curriculum in any good university.
American intellectuals had a strong interest in the
technological revolution sweeping England by the
mid-1700s. In 1760 young John Adams wrote in his
diary that he was struggling to understand the
English "fire engines." That's what steam engines
were called back before Watt. Jefferson studied
them at William and Mary.
Still, historian Carroll Pursell points out that
our interest in steam engines had to be largely
academic. The real thing simply didn't exist in the
Colonies.
The first Newcomen engines were huge brutes -- two
stories high. They delivered around ten horsepower.
Their first use was keeping water out of British
coal and metal mines.
Here in America, we used up surface deposits of
coal and iron before we began digging deep mines.
At first we had no need for pumping engines. But
surface deposits ran out. And scarcer metals, like
copper, couldn't be found on the surface.
In 1748 John Schuyler's copper mine near Passaic,
New Jersey, was shut down by flooding. So Schuyler
paid the English engine-maker Jonathan Hornblower
1000 pounds to ship him a "fire engine" and a crew
of mechanics to set it up. The engine arrived five
years later, in 1753, along with Hornblower's son,
Josiah, and his crew.
When Josiah got the machine up and running two
years after that, Schuyler hired him to run the
engine and the mine as well. The engine did well
enough for five years. Then it was badly damaged in
a fire. Josiah got it running again, but only 'til
another fire ruined it in 1768. This time it stayed
ruined through the American Revolution. An aging
Josiah Hornblower made another repair in 1793, and
this time the old engine kept pumping well into the
19th century.
Still, America couldn't be built with off-the-shelf
English technology. We were starting to build our
own engines even before the Revolutionary War.
Before Hornblower repaired Schuyler's engine the
second time, it'd been surpassed, not only by
better English engines, but by early American
designs as well. By 1793 it was already something
of an antiquarian tourist attraction.
The real value of Schuyler's tenacity was that it
pointed the way to others. Colonial intellectuals,
like Ben Franklin, went to see it. Steam power had
been a school exercise for Jefferson and Adams. It
took Schuyler's checkered business venture to turn
that dinosaur of an engine into a glimpse of --
America's future.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
