Steam Engines :: essays research papers

The Steam EngineThe steam clean railway locomotive provided a street corner in the industrial development of Europe. The first modern steam engine was built by an engineer, Thomas Newcomen, in 1705 to improve the tendernessing equipment used to close out seepage in tin and copper mines. Newcomens idea was to put 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 drive the piston down. In 1763 James watt, an instrument-maker for Glasgow University, began to make improvements on Newcomens engine. He make 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 firm produced nearly five hundred engines before Watts clear expired in 1800. Water power continued in use , provided the factory was now liberated from the streamside. A Watt engine brood Robert Fultons experimental steam vessel Clermont up the Hudson in 1807.RailroadsThe coming of the forces greatly facilitated the industrialization of Europe. At mid.eighteenth century the plate or rail treat had been in common use for moving coal from the pithead to the colliery or furnace. After 1800 flat tracks were in use outside London, Sheffield, and Munich. With the expansion of commerce, facilities for the presence of goods from the factory to the ports or cities came into pressing demand. In 1801 Richard Trevithick had an engine pulling trucks rough the mine where he worked in Cornwall. By 1830 a railway was unresolved from Liverpool to Manchester and on this line George Stephensons Rocket pulled a train of cars at fourteen miles an hour. The capacious railway boom in Britain came in the years 1844 to 1847. The railway builders had to fight vested interests-for example, canal stockhold ers, turnpike trusts, and horse breeders-but by 1850, aided by gaudy 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 despatch steadily became more important than passengers. After 1850 in England the state had to deputise 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 miserable from overcapitalization, rising costs, and state regulation.