The Steam Engine

Matthew Boulton and James Watt’s Steam Engine: Why the Industrial Revolution started only in Britain

Steam Engine History

A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. Since the late 1700s steam engines have become a major source of mechanical power. The first applications were removing water from mines. In 1781 James Watt patented a steam engine that produced continuous rotative motion. The engines could be sited anywhere that water and coal or wood fuel could be obtained. By 1883, engines that could provide 10,000 hp had become feasible. Steam engines could also be applied to vehicles such as traction engines and the railway locomotives which are commonly just called steam engines outside America. The stationary steam engine was a key component of the Industrial Revolution, allowing factories to locate where water power was unavailable.

Today steam turbines generate about 90% of the electric power in the United States using a variety of heat sources. Steam engines are external combustion engines, where the working fluid is separate from the combustion products. Non-combustion heat sources such as solar power, nuclear power or geothermal energy may be used. The ideal thermodynamic cycle used to analyze this process is called the Rankine cycle. In the cycle, water is heated into steam in a boiler until it reaches a high pressure. When expanded through pistons or turbines, mechanical work is done. The reduced-pressure steam is then condensed and pumped back into the boiler.

In general usage, the term steam engine can refer to either the integrated steam plants (including boilers etc.) such as railway steam locomotives and portable engines, or may refer to the piston or turbine machinery alone, as in the beam engine and stationary steam engine. Specialized devices such as steam hammers and steam pile drivers are dependent on steam supplied from a separate boiler.

 

 Using boiling water to produce mechanical motion goes back over 2000 years, but early devices were not practical. The Spanish inventor Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont patented in 1606 the first steam engine. In 1698 Thomas Savery patented a steam pump that used steam in direct contact with the water being pumped. Savery’s steam pump used condensing steam to create a vacuum and draw water into a chamber, and then applied pressurized steam to further pump the water. Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine was the first commercial true steam engine using a piston, and was used in 1712 for pumping in a mine.

James Watt,(30 January 1736 (19 January 1736 OS) – 25 August 1819) was a Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer whose improvements to the Newcomen steam engine were fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world.

Newcomen Watt Steam Engines

Animated – A brief look at the Newcomen and the Boulton & Watt steam engines of the 18th & 19th century.

 

 

United Learning Website – Excellent 19 minute video on Industrial Revolution. Click Here to watch on YouTube.