![]() But two things were happening: Steam power picked up those specialized tasks that were absolutely essential for the industrial revolution - like pumping water out of mines so we could have the coal and metals we needed. Steam-engine factories never did produce more than a few hundred total horsepower per year. Most of the power still came from waterwheels and windmills. By the end of the century, over 2000 steam engines had been built in England, and fewer than 500 of them were Watt engines.Īctually, steam engines never did become the major power source during the eighteenth century. Historians Kanefsky and Robey tell us that, as good as they were, Watt's engines didn't dominate production. Watt's engines were more compact, but their cylinders were still between one-and-a-half and five feet in diameter. A Newcomen engine was a two-story structure. The cylinders of the old Newcomen engines were from two to ten feet in diameter. In those days 190 horsepower would by no means fit under the hood of a car. And in less than 20 years he'd increased the output to as much as 190 horsepower. His first engines put out only about six horsepower - not much more than the first Newcomen engines - but they were smaller and they ate far less coal. What Watt did was to make improvements that left steam engines four times more efficient. When James Watt sold his first engine in 1769, steam engines had been around for seventy years. He was followed by Thomas Newcomen's first real steam engine in 1711. Thomas Savery began it all with his steam pump in 1698. Steam engines were England's gift to the world in the eighteenth century. 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. Today, let's look at steam engines in eighteenth-century England.
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