Is there evidence that Savery interacted with the Royal Society before he invented his engine? Would make the argument even stronger that the scientific understanding was a necessary condition for a practical steam engine.
A most lucid, fair-minded and sympathetic comparison of the the steam apparatuses of Ayanz and Savery (my pedantic mind refuses to call either an 'engine' due to to the lack of moving parts)! Your explanation confirmed my suspicions elegantly (that Ayanz used steam only to push water whereas Savery used it both to push and suck). Thank you for writing this! :)
Thank you. On "engine", I must one day look into where that more constrained definition came from. In the seventeenth century the word was applied all sorts of tools, and especially to hydraulic machines (e.g. pumps for putting out fires). Those who called themselves engineers tended to be fountain specialists!
You have a point! The engineering definition of the word is to this date very forgiving: a device that converts any form of energy into mechanical energy.
I'd be happy to march along with it, but being a Pedantus Pedantasaurus, I have a problem with it akin to Diogenes' quibble with Plato's definition of humans as 'featherless bipeds': if I fashion a comely stick out of an ungainly tangle of branches and use said stick to lop fruit off a tree, is the stick an engine? By the original sense of 'ingenious device; contrivance', I suppose it would be, and I'd be an engineer!
Not that I know of - I've never seen it referenced, and the earliest mentions of it that I've seen come from the 20thC, presumably because the manuscripts were studied.
I agree. I've never heard it before, and things being the way they were between England and Spain, I doubt it was publicized. No, I believe the initiation of the Industrial Revolution was purely a British thing.
Is there evidence that Savery interacted with the Royal Society before he invented his engine? Would make the argument even stronger that the scientific understanding was a necessary condition for a practical steam engine.
A most lucid, fair-minded and sympathetic comparison of the the steam apparatuses of Ayanz and Savery (my pedantic mind refuses to call either an 'engine' due to to the lack of moving parts)! Your explanation confirmed my suspicions elegantly (that Ayanz used steam only to push water whereas Savery used it both to push and suck). Thank you for writing this! :)
Thank you. On "engine", I must one day look into where that more constrained definition came from. In the seventeenth century the word was applied all sorts of tools, and especially to hydraulic machines (e.g. pumps for putting out fires). Those who called themselves engineers tended to be fountain specialists!
You have a point! The engineering definition of the word is to this date very forgiving: a device that converts any form of energy into mechanical energy.
I'd be happy to march along with it, but being a Pedantus Pedantasaurus, I have a problem with it akin to Diogenes' quibble with Plato's definition of humans as 'featherless bipeds': if I fashion a comely stick out of an ungainly tangle of branches and use said stick to lop fruit off a tree, is the stick an engine? By the original sense of 'ingenious device; contrivance', I suppose it would be, and I'd be an engineer!
Wasn't it from military engineers making (and mantaining) war engines, or were they named like that only later ?
Yeah, it's there in parallel. Inginers, as they'd often spell it in English, were often those responsible for siege weaponry and fortifications.
Was Beaumont's work known to the English of the 16th and 17th centuries?
Not that I know of - I've never seen it referenced, and the earliest mentions of it that I've seen come from the 20thC, presumably because the manuscripts were studied.
I agree. I've never heard it before, and things being the way they were between England and Spain, I doubt it was publicized. No, I believe the initiation of the Industrial Revolution was purely a British thing.