Steam Engines :: essays research papers

The Steam EngineThe steam engine provided a landmark in the industrial development of Europe. The first ripe steam engine was built by an engineer, Thomas Newcomen, in 1705 to improve the pumping equipment used to eliminate seepage in tin and copper mines. Newcomens idea was to pitch a vertical piston and cylinder at the end of a pump handle. He put steam in the cylinder and then condensed it with a spray of cold water the vacuum created allowed atmospheric pressure to push the piston down. In 1763 James watt, an instrument-maker for Glasgow University, began to make improvements on Newcomens engine. He made it a reciprocating engine, thus changing it from an atmospheric to a true "steam engine." He also added a crank and flywheel to provide rotary motion.In 1774 the industrialist Michael Boulton took Watt into partnership, and their impregnable produced nearly five hundred engines before Watts patent expired in 1800. Water power continued in use, but the factory was now liberate from the streamside. A Watt engine drove Robert Fultons experimental steam vessel Clermont up the Hudson in 1807.RailroadsThe coming of the railroads greatly facilitated the industrialization of Europe. At mid.eighteenth century the menage or rail track had been in common use for moving coal from the pithead to the colliery or furnace. After 1800 flat tracks were in use immaterial London, Sheffield, and Munich. With the expansion of commerce, facilities for the movement of goods from the factory to the ports or cities came into pressing demand. In 1801 Richard Trevithick had an engine pulling trucks around the mine where he worked in Cornwall. By 1830 a line was opened from Liverpool to Manchester and on this line George Stephensons Rocket pulled a train of cars at fourteen miles an hour. The big railway boom in Britain came in the years 1844 to 1847. The railway builders had to engagement vested interests-for example, canal stockholders, turnpike trusts, and horse bre eders-but by 1850, aided by cheap iron and better machine tools, a network of railways had been built. By midcentury railroad trains travelling at thirty to fifty miles an hour were not uncommon, and freight steadily became more important than passengers. After 1850 in England the state had to intervene to regulate what amounted to a monopoly of inland transport. But as time went on the British railways developed problems. The First World War (1914-1918) found them suffering from overcapitalization, rising costs, and state regulation.