Today we visit the first American steam engine. 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.
The intelligentsia of
18th-century America were quite interested in the
technological revolution that was then sweeping
England. In 1760 the young John Adams wrote in his
diary that he was struggling to understand the
English "fire engines," as steam engines were then
called. But the historian Carroll Pursell points
out that our interest in steam engines was largely
academic, because the real thing simply wasn't to
be found in the colonies.
The early 18th-century use of steam engines in
England was pretty well limited to keeping water
out of the relatively deep British coal and metal
mines. On this side of the Atlantic we made do for
some time with surface deposits of coal and iron,
so there was no great need for pumping engines. But
a problem arose when we went after copper and other
scarcer metals, because they lay deeper in the
earth.
In particular, Colonel John Schuyler's copper mine
near Passaic, New Jersey, was closed down by
flooding in 1748. So Schuyler sent the English
engine-maker Jonathan Hornblower 1000 pounds to
ship him a "fire engine" accompanied by workmen to
help set it up. The engine arrived five years
later, in 1753, along with Hornblower's son,
Josiah, and several mechanics.
When Josiah got the machine into operation almost
two years later, Schuyler hired him to run the
engine and the mine as well. It ran well enough for
five years until it was badly damaged in a fire.
Josiah got it back into operation again, but only
until another fire ruined it in 1768. This time it
stayed ruined until after the Revolutionary War.
Josiah Hornblower made another repair in 1793, and
this time the old relic kept pumping well into the
19th century.
But America wasn't built on off-the-shelf English
engines. We were starting to build our own engines
by time of the Revolutionary War. Before Hornblower
repaired Schuyler's engine the second time, it had
been surpassed not only by better English engines
but by early American designs as well. It was, by
then, something of an antiquarian tourist
attraction.
The real value of Schuyler's tenacity was that it
pointed the way to others. Colonial intellectuals
and writers visited the mine -- Ben Franklin
stopped by to see. What was an intellectual
exercise for John Adams was made real for us by
Schuyler.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
