What did I discover that so shocked me? When researching my last post on the inventors surrounding Prince Henry in the 1610s, and because I’ve been looking into the history of energy at the urging of Apoorv Sinha and others at Carbon Upcycling, I had a read through the published work of one of the inventors, Salomon de Caus.ĭe Caus often features in histories of the steam engine, as someone who in 1615 wrote about and depicted the expansive force of steam - heat up water in a copper vessel with a narrow tube coming out the top, and see how water or steam can be made to rise! He was even briefly known as the “true”, French inventor of the steam engine, because of a nineteenth-century hoax. (For paying subscribers there’s also a special treat at the end - the official reboot of the Invention Quiz - as a reward for your patience.) But I hope this post will be worth the extra wait. And so I had to delve ever deeper to get to the truth, and to reformulate what I knew. Things I thought I knew, and on which I agreed with a lot of other historians, turned out to be ever more questionable. But then, the more I delved into the topic, the more I had to delay writing it up. I had to translate a lot of primary sources from sixteenth-century French, Italian, Dutch, German, and even Latin, so that was already going to cause a delay. Although I haven’t been posting, however, I have been hard at work researching. Though Watt was not actually the inventor of the steam engine, his contribution to it’s development was significant and it is recognised that the electrical unit the ‘Watt’ is named as a mark of respect for this great inventor and pioneer of the industrial age who died in 1819 leaving a legacy of innovation that had changed the course of history.As regular readers might have noticed, it’s been a long time since my last newsletter - far, far longer than usual. Not surprisingly Watt became very well off as a result.
Mine owners who used his machine were required to pay him one third of the money they were saving by using his engine.
Watt compared the output to the engine to the pulling power of horses formerly used in the mines giving rise to the ‘horsepower’ ratings still used in engines today. His patent prevented any rival manufacture and the development of any further improvements to the Newcomen engine he had based his invention on so that the ‘Boulton & Watt’ company he had formed with his backer had a monopoly on production. Watt’s genius with invention was matched by his business acumen and entrepreneurial skills. This made Watt’s engine 4 times more powerful than earlier designs. Watt realised that he could improve the engine’s efficiency by the use of a separate condenser. His interest really took off in 1763 when he was given a Newcomen steam engine to repair. He worked as a mathematical-instrument maker as a teenager and soon became interested in steam engines, which were used at the time to pump water from mines. James Watt, the son of a merchant, was born on January 19, 1736, in Greenock.
0 kommentar(er)
