Glad to hear it! I agree that it ought to be an inspiring message, and I very much think it's still the case today. I'm amazed at just how many innovations we see every year are quite obvious in retrospect, and were low-hanging fruit. I should really start putting together a proper list of them.
Oct 16, 2022·edited Oct 16, 2022Liked by Anton Howes
Fantastic essay! Forgive me for forgetting, but I recall you mentioning you were working on a book, is it about the development of the steam engine and other industrial revolution era devices?
Also have to tip my hat at your archive spelunking. Both nauseating and inspiring how much you dig.
Haha! I must admit I can become quite obsessive when I sense there's something to be found.
There is indeed a book in the works, which will be on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution in general, focusing on explaining the acceleration of innovation. I will very likely integrate some of this work on the steam engine into it.
I think that you are missing a part of this, specifically metallurgy.
Remember, the west only had melted crucible steel, which means a homogeneous steel, from about 1740, and you need this to have good piston rings to seal cylinders.
You cannot have viable high pressure steam engines without working piston rings.
That might apply to Watt's and later engines, but it doesn't tell us anything about the conditions for Savery's or Newcomen's - Savery's being the real focus of this series.
Basically he argues it happened at the time and place, that it did, because Britain had a combination of super contingent economic conditions in the 19th century, a big weaving industry and a practical use for steam engines in coal mining.
Otherwise he seems to imply it could have happened anywhere with those conditions, and didn't depend on any special inventiveness.
Thanks! I've been sent this ACOUP piece a few times since it came out, but must confess that despite usually liking it, I found this piece very disappointing.
It's entirely conjectural, for example, that Kay's shuttle had the effect of raising incentives for mechanising cotton spinning - it's actually an idea from the 1830s that has somehow stuck despite all evidence to the contrary, especially in how it affected cotton, which was a much more variegated market that it appears at first glance. And it was strange for Brett to write that it was wool from Scotland and Wales that was being processed in the Low Countries - it was actually English wool that had the international reputation from the Middle Ages right through to the 17thC as the premium product!
On the role of coal in incentivising steam engines too, I think Brett has been far too quick to adopt a very basic, popular narrative, without interrogating it at all. He does, to be fair, often point out that he will sometimes only summarise an academic consensus, but with the IR it's very easy to fall into a trap by taking certain very plausible-seeming narratives too much on trust - something I've also occasionally found to my own embarrassment. (Then there's details he's missed like the aeolipile being nothing to do with atmospheric pressure, as you may have noticed from Part I of my steam engine series, but these are not widely appreciated already, so I can see how given he hasn't looked into steam engines in any detail he may have missed this.)
In general though, I would not have placed any of the same emphases that he did - perhaps the opposite. One thing I never tire of saying is that the IR was about so so so much more than just cotton, iron, steam and coal - it involved an acceleration of innovation right across the board. So for Brett to say that "Fundamentally this is a story about coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy" to me just seems flat-out wrong, and is not really the academic consensus either. It is certainly a position that is held by some eminent economic historians - so it's not entirely misplaced for him to highlight it as a position - but it's a highly contested point, especially by some of the big names in the field, which he seems to have missed entirely.
Overall, on plausibility, I tend to downrate such geographical explanations. I haven't seen much evidence to support them that does not immediately fall down upon closer examination of the details. Certainly not at all on weaving - I don't think Brett really gives a satisfactory reason for Britain's weirdness here at all - nor for the more famous case of steam engines and coal mines. Although it's certainly true that the Newcomen engines only proved to be cost-effective at coal mines, it was not at all true of Savery engines (which were also quite widespread and used throughout Europe until the 19thC), and the very first Newcomen prototypes were seemingly intended for copper and tin mines, with the very first almost certainly fuelled by peat - so it was only *after* their invention that their geographical limitations became clear. This is the pattern that I tend to see whenever I look into the detail, though I am always interested in potential counterexamples that may still hold.
I hope I've not been unfair to ACOUP here. I usually like the blog. But I found the inattention to detail in the piece quite frustrating, especially in light of Brett's usual excellence in this regard, and in light of how popular the piece has been. I can only chalk it up to him not being familiar with the literature on the Industrial Revolution, which is perhaps to be expected, as it's not his usual wheelhouse and and that literature is absolutely gigantic because of how much is contested. I'm sure I've made very similar mistakes when venturing a little beyond my specialties.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I don't think that's unfair to ACOUP, it's similar to my impression, but much better informed.
I did think the "industrialisation was just waiting for the right economic conditions" theory might be a good fit with these pre-industrial steam engines being used to power fountains etc., that you've discovered.
If someone really dug into the medieval Chinese sources, is there a chance they'd find steam engines from the 1400s, or whenever, that had been lost to history because they never found an economic niche to make them important?
The fountains point is an interesting one. De Caus was certainly interested in industrial applications - he describes a wood-boring machine just a few pages later - but he doesn't seem to have conceived of how the cooling/condensing principle might be applied to something more than fountains. Or he did think of them and was just more focused on trying to get hired as a fountain engineer, which seems to have been his main source of income over his career. If there is a wider economic reason for a shift, I'd put it down to substantial pools of capital over the course of 1550-1650 becoming more dispersed in Britain, beyond just the monarchs.
Good idea. I must look into the Needham volumes at some stage, to see if there's anything already known on applying cooling/condensation the same way - beyond the obvious applications known on both sides of Eurasia like medical cupping. After all, a lot of what I've found here has really been "hidden in plain sight".
If he was actively looking for industrial applications, but didn't find any, that lends credence to the "steam engines were only worthwhile in rare economic niches, at least initially" theory, to my mind.
I'm struggling to think of a use for a wood-boring machine that could justify the capital cost of making a steam engine, and the continuous cost of coal, for example.
My understanding is: since wood is bulky and transports costs were high, wood was usually consumed close to where the trees were harvested. There wouldn't be a large enough market anywhere to support a centralised wood-processing-facility, that would have the throughput, and could afford, to invest the capital to have lots of mechanisation. Maybe the lack of division of labour meant wood only ever need to be bored locally, in small batches, so it it made sense to just do it by hand.
So there couldn't be a 17th century IKEA, I think. Which is why I guess factories mainly made small portable things, like the famous pin factory.
Isn't this theory at odds with your thesis though? Since it implies 17th-19th century Britain might not have had exceptionally high inventiveness, only the conditions to apply the inventiveness in way that had a lasting legacy.
Possibly. But then De Caus also hints very strongly in his preface that he has thought of more applications for cooling, but that he hasn't yet published them. So it's hard to say either way really, from so little. It's entirely possible he thought it was too valuable to share for free, rather than the other way around.
I mention the wood-boring machine just to show a general awareness of economic applications really, rather than for the use of cooling in particular - it just happened to be a hand-turned machine mentioned a few pages over. (On the point of wood-processing machinery in general, it could often be quite centralised. For example, England apparently exported quite a bit of wood to the Netherlands to be processed by its saw mills, in order to then be re-imported back to England as planks. I seem to recall that Gdansk/Danzig, at the mouth of the Vistula, also had a sawmill in the seventeenth century that was built with Dutch capital.)
Yes, the economic theory could be a little at odds with my general thesis. I meant it purely as a conditional: *if* there is a wider economic reason. That said, my general thesis is still very much compatible with, and actually requires, explanations for why the number of inventors increased in England. I suspect that some kind of economic story may be useful there, though working primarily through the channel of increasing the number of inventors (with, no doubt, some secondary effects too).
I, however, disagree on the causes for the long wait and argue that the primary reason why steam or atmospheric engines weren't adopted earlier was NOT the scarcity of inventors but the lack of an economic rationale for such an engine. To that end, I'd like to point out a remarkable study on the topic by John P. Murphy (2012).
His crucial observation, in my opinion, is that only practically free fuel at coal mine heads and the specific use case of pumping water from deep mineshafts made the Newcomen engine profitable. The first engines were set up at a copper mine near coal mines, but transporting the fuel was too expensive even at this location. Another data point: a Newcomen engine was purchased by a Swedish Dannemora iron mine in 1728, a little more than a decade after it had been successfully introduced in West Midlands. The engine was set up and tested but never used again. Murphy notes that the reason was that even in forest-covered Sweden, feeding the engine was just too expensive.
My conclusion from the above, and from what I know about the history of technology and the prevalence of simultaneous innovation, is that the geographical and historical accidents combined in England in a rare way that made early, very inefficient "steam" (or more properly atmospheric) engines profitable to build and operate in commercial use, not just as novelties. The main reasons IMO were
1. there was a great demand for coal
2. English coal seams, however, were largely below the water table, causing a need for solutions to pump water from the coal mines even at depths that were difficult to reach with e.g. horse-powered pumps.
2a. For instance, Chinese coal seams were apparently mostly above the water table, and gas explosions were a much greater problem than flooding - which would've probably advocated against the use of "fire engines"
2b. In some other locations, geography may have favored other solutions to the drainage problem. For a very long time, the preferred method for mine drainage was to drive an "adit" to a nearby valley, whose floor was below the mine bottom, and let gravity do the job. Obviously, this was feasible only in mountainous locales.
3. At coal mines, fuel was practically free, and the humongously inefficient early engines could still be more profitable than existing solutions, namely horse-powered pumps.
Without the confluence of these factors, I doubt that atmospheric engines of any design would've been adopted until perhaps much later. And this would've set back the cumulation of the necessary experience and user base needed for further and well-known improvements in efficiency, which finally made steam engines valuable in locations where fuel wasn't practically free.
I did my Ph.D. thesis on the development and adoption of one radical innovation in the mining industry between 1900 and 1950. It was remarkable to me how often and how early breakthroughs were anticipated but not taken into use because there was no pressing economic rationale for that.
Murphy, J. P. (2012). Energy, mining, and the commercial success of the Newcomen “steam” engine [PhD thesis, Northeastern University]. https://doi.org/10.17760/d20002721
Thanks for reading. I'm going to continue our discussion from twitter here.
1) Demand for coal and for new drainage techniques in mines in England long pre-dated the appearance of either Savery's or Newcomen's engines. They even pre-dated the attempts of Kalthoff and Petty. I also suspect it'd be very easy to find cases where the same cost/benefit conditions for mining would have obtained elsewhere in the world and in earlier periods. I'm highly, highly sceptical of the claim that Chinese coal mines were all fundamentally different - I have not looked into this in detail yet, but it sounds a lot like the typical "just-so" stories that plague the history of technology. Even if it were the case, I'd be very surprised if English mines were different to literally everywhen and everywhere else in the world where coal was used.
2) As I briefly mentioned, very significant sums were already being spent on English drainage solutions - this is not just for mines, but for all cases of raising water, such as for city water supplies and for draining marshland.
3) I totally agree that *after* the 1710s, when Newcomen realises that his turf-powered prototypes at a Cornish copper mine isn't going to be profitable - that is, long after he had already invented and begun development on his engine - that the best place to implement Newcomen engines was at coal mines. It's a common story, and long pre-dates Murphy btw. As discussed over twitter, it is absolutely the case that the costs and benefits of particular machines starts to become the binding constraint on where and when they are adopted. *But* my contention that this is only a meaningful way to think about this only when the machines are already invented (though granted, some of their subsequent improvement will most likely be arrived at through inventors observing the machinery in action thanks to continued use).
4) I think there is far too much focus on the Newcomen engine, and if my series does anything at all I hope that it redirects attention back to the Savery engines. Savery engines were absolutely *not* a technological dead-end, as I point out in Part I. They continued to be developed even into the 19thC, and were widely adopted throughout Europe - they were significantly smaller and cheaper to install than the massive Newcomen engines, and were used for all sorts of other uses (that is, *not* at coal mines). Arguably, by using high-pressure steam, they were actually a much more obvious ancestor to the high-pressure engines of Trevithick, etc. than the Newcomen purely atmospheric and then low-pressure-augmented Watt engines. It is certainly asserted by a lot of people that Savery engines were a dead-end, but I think it's just one of those things people repeat from others without actually bothering to look at the evidence.
This is a very important point for a variety of reasons, not least because the adoption of Savery engines did not follow the coal-mine-specific adoption pattern of the Newcomen engines, and thus pose a problem for the usual narratives of what factors were important for the invention of the steam engine.
Great series! One question that I had throughout, is why did a high-pressure steam engine did not emerge before an atmospheric one? On the face of it, it seems easier. A high-pressure engine does not require the assumption of vacuum or the weight of the atmosphere. The pushing power of steam must have been noticed many times casually when a sealed vessel was heated while the sucking power of the inverted flask is trickier to notice and reproduce (as you mention in one of the anecdotes).
One explanation I've heard is that lacking metallurgy (as a different comment mentioned), but that seems insufficient. After all Europe had cannons for a long time which require withstanding much higher pressures (and higher spikes of pressure). The pressure difference could also be made similar to a Newcomen engine or the Savery engine. After all, 1 atm below atmospheric pressure is about the same stresses as 1 atm above (and the Newcomen engine likely achieved only negative 0.5-0.75 atm inside the piston).
The best I could come up with is the problem of controlling the pressure. With an atmospheric engine, you cannot exceed 1atm negative pressure, while the pressure in a high-pressure engine is unbounded. While machining and machinery design were likely advanced enough to make the basic engine, control mechanism such as the centrifugal governor only preceded the Newcomen and Savery engines by about 50 years (according to Wiki). Still, feels a bit weak. There was quite advanced clockwork by the 1500s (not to mention the advanced clockwork in the ancient world and the east).
Is there something else about high pressure engines that makes them that much harder to invent the atmospheric engines?
It's a great question, and one where I'm not wholly sure on the answer. There are a few early expansive-only entries, not least that by de Ayanz c.1600.
I'm not convinced by the metallurgy answer either. The expansive phase of Savery engines seems to have been handled just fine by brass vessels and pipework made of wood (elm specifically, if I'm not misremembering).
As for regulation, I noted in Part II that Drebbel had already invented a thermostatic control as early as the 1620s, which was certainly well-known by the 1660s (when there are tons of descriptions of similar). One case I must investigate a little more is Denis Papin, who seems to have focused on expansive force at about the same time as Savery had revealed his engine. The limitations of his device may provide some of the clues!
Very interesting. It does seem like the 1600s were somehow "when the clock starts ticking" for steam engines. Perhaps it is a tide of history, the culmination of many small advances that enables a steam engine of some type to be primed for invention, and the fact we ended up with the atmospheric engines first is more due to random chance, and less because of any physical or mechanical reason.
So what was the difference with the Roman Empire? I think, printed books was the main factor. I.e. much more people were acquainted with the ancient idea of the suction effect of the vacuum created by cooling. Another factor could be the patent system: many of those people were incentivized to invent the pumping machine.
Certainly NOT too long a post at all. Very engaging!
Thank you John!
Truly a great write up, Anton. It reveals the great depth of research and reasoning you've applied to this fascinating field.
Cheers Joe!
That's a very inspiring note to end on. I wonder what other inventions are out there, just waiting for someone to actually build them?
Glad to hear it! I agree that it ought to be an inspiring message, and I very much think it's still the case today. I'm amazed at just how many innovations we see every year are quite obvious in retrospect, and were low-hanging fruit. I should really start putting together a proper list of them.
Fantastic essay! Forgive me for forgetting, but I recall you mentioning you were working on a book, is it about the development of the steam engine and other industrial revolution era devices?
Also have to tip my hat at your archive spelunking. Both nauseating and inspiring how much you dig.
Haha! I must admit I can become quite obsessive when I sense there's something to be found.
There is indeed a book in the works, which will be on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution in general, focusing on explaining the acceleration of innovation. I will very likely integrate some of this work on the steam engine into it.
I think that you are missing a part of this, specifically metallurgy.
Remember, the west only had melted crucible steel, which means a homogeneous steel, from about 1740, and you need this to have good piston rings to seal cylinders.
You cannot have viable high pressure steam engines without working piston rings.
That might apply to Watt's and later engines, but it doesn't tell us anything about the conditions for Savery's or Newcomen's - Savery's being the real focus of this series.
This was really fascinating.
I usually like his stuff, but Bret Deveroux (ACOUP) wrote a piece on the causes of the industrial revolution, that I wasn't sure what to think of:
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
Basically he argues it happened at the time and place, that it did, because Britain had a combination of super contingent economic conditions in the 19th century, a big weaving industry and a practical use for steam engines in coal mining.
Otherwise he seems to imply it could have happened anywhere with those conditions, and didn't depend on any special inventiveness.
I'd be interested if you find that plausible.
Thanks! I've been sent this ACOUP piece a few times since it came out, but must confess that despite usually liking it, I found this piece very disappointing.
It's entirely conjectural, for example, that Kay's shuttle had the effect of raising incentives for mechanising cotton spinning - it's actually an idea from the 1830s that has somehow stuck despite all evidence to the contrary, especially in how it affected cotton, which was a much more variegated market that it appears at first glance. And it was strange for Brett to write that it was wool from Scotland and Wales that was being processed in the Low Countries - it was actually English wool that had the international reputation from the Middle Ages right through to the 17thC as the premium product!
On the role of coal in incentivising steam engines too, I think Brett has been far too quick to adopt a very basic, popular narrative, without interrogating it at all. He does, to be fair, often point out that he will sometimes only summarise an academic consensus, but with the IR it's very easy to fall into a trap by taking certain very plausible-seeming narratives too much on trust - something I've also occasionally found to my own embarrassment. (Then there's details he's missed like the aeolipile being nothing to do with atmospheric pressure, as you may have noticed from Part I of my steam engine series, but these are not widely appreciated already, so I can see how given he hasn't looked into steam engines in any detail he may have missed this.)
In general though, I would not have placed any of the same emphases that he did - perhaps the opposite. One thing I never tire of saying is that the IR was about so so so much more than just cotton, iron, steam and coal - it involved an acceleration of innovation right across the board. So for Brett to say that "Fundamentally this is a story about coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy" to me just seems flat-out wrong, and is not really the academic consensus either. It is certainly a position that is held by some eminent economic historians - so it's not entirely misplaced for him to highlight it as a position - but it's a highly contested point, especially by some of the big names in the field, which he seems to have missed entirely.
Overall, on plausibility, I tend to downrate such geographical explanations. I haven't seen much evidence to support them that does not immediately fall down upon closer examination of the details. Certainly not at all on weaving - I don't think Brett really gives a satisfactory reason for Britain's weirdness here at all - nor for the more famous case of steam engines and coal mines. Although it's certainly true that the Newcomen engines only proved to be cost-effective at coal mines, it was not at all true of Savery engines (which were also quite widespread and used throughout Europe until the 19thC), and the very first Newcomen prototypes were seemingly intended for copper and tin mines, with the very first almost certainly fuelled by peat - so it was only *after* their invention that their geographical limitations became clear. This is the pattern that I tend to see whenever I look into the detail, though I am always interested in potential counterexamples that may still hold.
I hope I've not been unfair to ACOUP here. I usually like the blog. But I found the inattention to detail in the piece quite frustrating, especially in light of Brett's usual excellence in this regard, and in light of how popular the piece has been. I can only chalk it up to him not being familiar with the literature on the Industrial Revolution, which is perhaps to be expected, as it's not his usual wheelhouse and and that literature is absolutely gigantic because of how much is contested. I'm sure I've made very similar mistakes when venturing a little beyond my specialties.
Speaking of peat and this time period...
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/09/peat-and-coal-fossil-fuels-in-pre-industrial-times.html#more
Cheers - a great source of references. Writing about Dutch peat is on my to-do list. Possibly for later this month or next.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I don't think that's unfair to ACOUP, it's similar to my impression, but much better informed.
I did think the "industrialisation was just waiting for the right economic conditions" theory might be a good fit with these pre-industrial steam engines being used to power fountains etc., that you've discovered.
If someone really dug into the medieval Chinese sources, is there a chance they'd find steam engines from the 1400s, or whenever, that had been lost to history because they never found an economic niche to make them important?
The fountains point is an interesting one. De Caus was certainly interested in industrial applications - he describes a wood-boring machine just a few pages later - but he doesn't seem to have conceived of how the cooling/condensing principle might be applied to something more than fountains. Or he did think of them and was just more focused on trying to get hired as a fountain engineer, which seems to have been his main source of income over his career. If there is a wider economic reason for a shift, I'd put it down to substantial pools of capital over the course of 1550-1650 becoming more dispersed in Britain, beyond just the monarchs.
Good idea. I must look into the Needham volumes at some stage, to see if there's anything already known on applying cooling/condensation the same way - beyond the obvious applications known on both sides of Eurasia like medical cupping. After all, a lot of what I've found here has really been "hidden in plain sight".
If he was actively looking for industrial applications, but didn't find any, that lends credence to the "steam engines were only worthwhile in rare economic niches, at least initially" theory, to my mind.
I'm struggling to think of a use for a wood-boring machine that could justify the capital cost of making a steam engine, and the continuous cost of coal, for example.
My understanding is: since wood is bulky and transports costs were high, wood was usually consumed close to where the trees were harvested. There wouldn't be a large enough market anywhere to support a centralised wood-processing-facility, that would have the throughput, and could afford, to invest the capital to have lots of mechanisation. Maybe the lack of division of labour meant wood only ever need to be bored locally, in small batches, so it it made sense to just do it by hand.
So there couldn't be a 17th century IKEA, I think. Which is why I guess factories mainly made small portable things, like the famous pin factory.
Isn't this theory at odds with your thesis though? Since it implies 17th-19th century Britain might not have had exceptionally high inventiveness, only the conditions to apply the inventiveness in way that had a lasting legacy.
Possibly. But then De Caus also hints very strongly in his preface that he has thought of more applications for cooling, but that he hasn't yet published them. So it's hard to say either way really, from so little. It's entirely possible he thought it was too valuable to share for free, rather than the other way around.
I mention the wood-boring machine just to show a general awareness of economic applications really, rather than for the use of cooling in particular - it just happened to be a hand-turned machine mentioned a few pages over. (On the point of wood-processing machinery in general, it could often be quite centralised. For example, England apparently exported quite a bit of wood to the Netherlands to be processed by its saw mills, in order to then be re-imported back to England as planks. I seem to recall that Gdansk/Danzig, at the mouth of the Vistula, also had a sawmill in the seventeenth century that was built with Dutch capital.)
Yes, the economic theory could be a little at odds with my general thesis. I meant it purely as a conditional: *if* there is a wider economic reason. That said, my general thesis is still very much compatible with, and actually requires, explanations for why the number of inventors increased in England. I suspect that some kind of economic story may be useful there, though working primarily through the channel of increasing the number of inventors (with, no doubt, some secondary effects too).
Wonderful essay!
Thank you!
This is really very interesting, thank you!
I, however, disagree on the causes for the long wait and argue that the primary reason why steam or atmospheric engines weren't adopted earlier was NOT the scarcity of inventors but the lack of an economic rationale for such an engine. To that end, I'd like to point out a remarkable study on the topic by John P. Murphy (2012).
His crucial observation, in my opinion, is that only practically free fuel at coal mine heads and the specific use case of pumping water from deep mineshafts made the Newcomen engine profitable. The first engines were set up at a copper mine near coal mines, but transporting the fuel was too expensive even at this location. Another data point: a Newcomen engine was purchased by a Swedish Dannemora iron mine in 1728, a little more than a decade after it had been successfully introduced in West Midlands. The engine was set up and tested but never used again. Murphy notes that the reason was that even in forest-covered Sweden, feeding the engine was just too expensive.
My conclusion from the above, and from what I know about the history of technology and the prevalence of simultaneous innovation, is that the geographical and historical accidents combined in England in a rare way that made early, very inefficient "steam" (or more properly atmospheric) engines profitable to build and operate in commercial use, not just as novelties. The main reasons IMO were
1. there was a great demand for coal
2. English coal seams, however, were largely below the water table, causing a need for solutions to pump water from the coal mines even at depths that were difficult to reach with e.g. horse-powered pumps.
2a. For instance, Chinese coal seams were apparently mostly above the water table, and gas explosions were a much greater problem than flooding - which would've probably advocated against the use of "fire engines"
2b. In some other locations, geography may have favored other solutions to the drainage problem. For a very long time, the preferred method for mine drainage was to drive an "adit" to a nearby valley, whose floor was below the mine bottom, and let gravity do the job. Obviously, this was feasible only in mountainous locales.
3. At coal mines, fuel was practically free, and the humongously inefficient early engines could still be more profitable than existing solutions, namely horse-powered pumps.
Without the confluence of these factors, I doubt that atmospheric engines of any design would've been adopted until perhaps much later. And this would've set back the cumulation of the necessary experience and user base needed for further and well-known improvements in efficiency, which finally made steam engines valuable in locations where fuel wasn't practically free.
I did my Ph.D. thesis on the development and adoption of one radical innovation in the mining industry between 1900 and 1950. It was remarkable to me how often and how early breakthroughs were anticipated but not taken into use because there was no pressing economic rationale for that.
Murphy, J. P. (2012). Energy, mining, and the commercial success of the Newcomen “steam” engine [PhD thesis, Northeastern University]. https://doi.org/10.17760/d20002721
Hi Janne,
Thanks for reading. I'm going to continue our discussion from twitter here.
1) Demand for coal and for new drainage techniques in mines in England long pre-dated the appearance of either Savery's or Newcomen's engines. They even pre-dated the attempts of Kalthoff and Petty. I also suspect it'd be very easy to find cases where the same cost/benefit conditions for mining would have obtained elsewhere in the world and in earlier periods. I'm highly, highly sceptical of the claim that Chinese coal mines were all fundamentally different - I have not looked into this in detail yet, but it sounds a lot like the typical "just-so" stories that plague the history of technology. Even if it were the case, I'd be very surprised if English mines were different to literally everywhen and everywhere else in the world where coal was used.
2) As I briefly mentioned, very significant sums were already being spent on English drainage solutions - this is not just for mines, but for all cases of raising water, such as for city water supplies and for draining marshland.
3) I totally agree that *after* the 1710s, when Newcomen realises that his turf-powered prototypes at a Cornish copper mine isn't going to be profitable - that is, long after he had already invented and begun development on his engine - that the best place to implement Newcomen engines was at coal mines. It's a common story, and long pre-dates Murphy btw. As discussed over twitter, it is absolutely the case that the costs and benefits of particular machines starts to become the binding constraint on where and when they are adopted. *But* my contention that this is only a meaningful way to think about this only when the machines are already invented (though granted, some of their subsequent improvement will most likely be arrived at through inventors observing the machinery in action thanks to continued use).
4) I think there is far too much focus on the Newcomen engine, and if my series does anything at all I hope that it redirects attention back to the Savery engines. Savery engines were absolutely *not* a technological dead-end, as I point out in Part I. They continued to be developed even into the 19thC, and were widely adopted throughout Europe - they were significantly smaller and cheaper to install than the massive Newcomen engines, and were used for all sorts of other uses (that is, *not* at coal mines). Arguably, by using high-pressure steam, they were actually a much more obvious ancestor to the high-pressure engines of Trevithick, etc. than the Newcomen purely atmospheric and then low-pressure-augmented Watt engines. It is certainly asserted by a lot of people that Savery engines were a dead-end, but I think it's just one of those things people repeat from others without actually bothering to look at the evidence.
This is a very important point for a variety of reasons, not least because the adoption of Savery engines did not follow the coal-mine-specific adoption pattern of the Newcomen engines, and thus pose a problem for the usual narratives of what factors were important for the invention of the steam engine.
Great series! One question that I had throughout, is why did a high-pressure steam engine did not emerge before an atmospheric one? On the face of it, it seems easier. A high-pressure engine does not require the assumption of vacuum or the weight of the atmosphere. The pushing power of steam must have been noticed many times casually when a sealed vessel was heated while the sucking power of the inverted flask is trickier to notice and reproduce (as you mention in one of the anecdotes).
One explanation I've heard is that lacking metallurgy (as a different comment mentioned), but that seems insufficient. After all Europe had cannons for a long time which require withstanding much higher pressures (and higher spikes of pressure). The pressure difference could also be made similar to a Newcomen engine or the Savery engine. After all, 1 atm below atmospheric pressure is about the same stresses as 1 atm above (and the Newcomen engine likely achieved only negative 0.5-0.75 atm inside the piston).
The best I could come up with is the problem of controlling the pressure. With an atmospheric engine, you cannot exceed 1atm negative pressure, while the pressure in a high-pressure engine is unbounded. While machining and machinery design were likely advanced enough to make the basic engine, control mechanism such as the centrifugal governor only preceded the Newcomen and Savery engines by about 50 years (according to Wiki). Still, feels a bit weak. There was quite advanced clockwork by the 1500s (not to mention the advanced clockwork in the ancient world and the east).
Is there something else about high pressure engines that makes them that much harder to invent the atmospheric engines?
It's a great question, and one where I'm not wholly sure on the answer. There are a few early expansive-only entries, not least that by de Ayanz c.1600.
I'm not convinced by the metallurgy answer either. The expansive phase of Savery engines seems to have been handled just fine by brass vessels and pipework made of wood (elm specifically, if I'm not misremembering).
As for regulation, I noted in Part II that Drebbel had already invented a thermostatic control as early as the 1620s, which was certainly well-known by the 1660s (when there are tons of descriptions of similar). One case I must investigate a little more is Denis Papin, who seems to have focused on expansive force at about the same time as Savery had revealed his engine. The limitations of his device may provide some of the clues!
Very interesting. It does seem like the 1600s were somehow "when the clock starts ticking" for steam engines. Perhaps it is a tide of history, the culmination of many small advances that enables a steam engine of some type to be primed for invention, and the fact we ended up with the atmospheric engines first is more due to random chance, and less because of any physical or mechanical reason.
Papin had invented the weighted safety valve and used it in his pressure coocker
So what was the difference with the Roman Empire? I think, printed books was the main factor. I.e. much more people were acquainted with the ancient idea of the suction effect of the vacuum created by cooling. Another factor could be the patent system: many of those people were incentivized to invent the pumping machine.