Sublime

The stationary steam engine constructed by the English inventor Thomas Newcomen in 1712, building on the work of previous experimenters, was used to pump water out of flooded coal mines. Early steam engines were large (Newcomen engines were typically housed in buildings three stories tall) and inefficient, but this did not matter much because they

Only after Watt’s

Kelvin, despite his brilliance, mistook the value of the battery he made, and which brought him fame, for the value of having the ability to make a battery out of scrap. It was the latter that needed to be nurtured. It was the ability to make that was truly valuable. Kelvin’s batteries were cool, but Kelvin was cooler. After all, batteries are comm

According to a second, more widely held view, the switchover only really started in the late-eighteenth century, after the Scottish engineer James Watt designed a new kind of steam engine. Watt’s engine, it’s often said, anachronistically, “kick-started” the Industrial Revolution. As water power gave way to steam power, CO2 emissions began to rise,

on February 21, 1804, in the presence of Homfray, Crawshay, and a government engineer who had come to observe. Trevithick wrote to a friend the next day, “We carried ten tons of iron in five wagons, and seventy men riding on them the whole of the journey … The gentleman that bet 500 guineas against it rode the whole of the journey with us, and is s

First, the steam turbine, the most important continuously working high-load prime mover of the modern world, was invented by Charles Parsons 120 years ago, and it remains fundamentally unchanged; gradual advances in metallurgy simply made it larger and more efficient. These large (up to 1.5 GW) machines nowgenerate more than 70% of our electricity

Newcomen’s steam engine from a machine of limited usefulness and very low efficiency to a much more practical device capable of about 20 kW that began revolutionizing many tasks in coal mining, metallurgy, and manufacturing