The steam engine

Assembled from 30 blocks · 3 evidence · 29 related

1. Story
2. Treated here as one technology across its whole eighteenth-century development, because what mattered economically was a sequence of changes to a single machine rather than a single invention. Newcomen's atmospheric engine (1712) made mine drainage possible at any efficiency. James Watt's separate condenser, patented in 1769, kept the working cylinder permanently hot by condensing the steam in a separate vessel, and cut coal consumption per unit of work by something on the order of two-thirds to three-quarters — which mattered enormously away from the pithead, where coal had to be bought and carted. Rotative engines from the early 1780s, using the sun-and-planet gear, converted reciprocating motion into a turning shaft, and that is the change which let steam drive a mill rather than only a pump. The consequence that reorganised the map came last and is often stated backwards: steam did not make power cheaper than water — good water sites remained cheaper for decades — it made power PORTABLE. A watermill must be where the fall is; a steam mill can be wherever coal can be delivered, which meant a town, which meant labour, credit, finishing trades and a canal wharf in the same place.
3. Knowledge
4. The Newcomen atmospheric engine
5. The steam engine
6. James Watt
7. Cromford Mill
8. Connections
9. The Newcomen atmospheric engine
10. Cromford Mill
11. James Watt
12. Boulton and Watt
13. Manchester
14. Watt patents the separate condenser
15. The rotative engine turns a shaft
16. Coal
17. The steam engine
18. The first commercially successful steam engine begins pumping
19. The steam engine
20. Richard Arkwright
21. The water frame
22. Cromford Mill begins spinning
23. The steam engine
24. Boulton and Watt
25. Watt patents the separate condenser
26. Boulton and Watt form their partnership
27. Evidence
28. Supports the separate-condenser priority date, the extension of the monopoly to 1800, and the Boulton and Watt licensing model. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted — legislation.gov.uk is blocked from this session. The patent number and the regnal citation of the extending Act are deliberately omitted rather than reconstructed from memory.
29. 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.
30. Supports the organic-economy framing: that a photosynthesis-based economy faces a land-area ceiling on all energy and material uses simultaneously, and that coal is an escape from it because it draws on a stock rather than a flow. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session; the acreage-equivalent figures Wrigley gives are therefore deliberately not quoted anywhere in this pack.