The Newcomen atmospheric engine

Assembled from 21 blocks · 1 evidence · 29 related

1. Story
2. The first steam engine to work reliably as a commercial machine, erected in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen, an ironmonger of Dartmouth, to pump water out of a coal working in the West Midlands. It is not a steam-pressure engine at all: steam fills the cylinder at little above atmospheric pressure, cold water sprayed inside condenses it, and the vacuum lets the weight of the atmosphere drive the piston down. Because the cylinder is heated and chilled on every stroke it wastes almost all the heat put into it, and its thermal efficiency is under one per cent. That did not matter, and understanding why is the point of the machine: it was installed at pitheads, where fuel was the waste product lying on the ground, so an engine that ate coal to raise water that let miners cut more coal was profitable at any efficiency. Several hundred were at work in Britain before Watt's improvements, and the design continued to be built long after, because where coal was free the more economical engine was not worth its higher first cost.
3. Knowledge
4. Coal
5. The Newcomen atmospheric engine
6. Connections
7. Coal
8. The steam engine
9. The first commercially successful steam engine begins pumping
10. The organic economy and its ceiling
11. The Newcomen atmospheric engine
12. Coke smelting of iron
13. The British canal network
14. Industrial child labour
15. The first commercially successful steam engine begins pumping
16. The Bridgewater Canal opens from Worsley into Manchester
17. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens
18. Women and young boys are barred from working underground
19. The main-line steam locomotive
20. Evidence
21. Supports the high-wage-economy explanation of why mechanisation was profitable in Britain first, the sequence of textile bottlenecks, and the dating and interpretation of the Engels pause. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — outbound HTTP to research domains is blocked by the environment's egress proxy and the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted before this pack began. The book is a real and widely held title, but nothing attributed to it here was read from it.