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1776: the engine starts

Related4Ways outWhy an ERP project takes ten years

A flooded mine gallery. Miners pass buckets from hand to hand.

1776. England's mines are drowning.
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Takeaways
  1. Watt's engine did nothing new: the same work with a quarter of the coal.
  2. Boulton and Watt sold savings, not engines: they took a third of the coal saved.
  3. Once steam turned a shaft, the factory left the river and set its own clock.

Boulton shows a small heap of coal beside a big one. Watt wipes his glasses.

Same work. A quarter of the coal.
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A mine owner signs a contract. Boulton holds the pen.

Pay us a third of what you save.
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A factory far from any river, a clock on its front, workers filing in.

The factory no longer needs the river. It has a clock.
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Related topic4Ways out→Why an ERP project takes ten yearsNext on this line1Momentum→Coal, rail and the timetableWhere you are1Momentum→Station 1 of 6

The story in words

In March 1776, at the Bloomfield colliery in the English Midlands, a steam engine started pumping water out of the galleries. Engines like it had worked in mines for sixty years. This one came from a new partnership between a Birmingham manufacturer, Matthew Boulton, and a Scottish instrument maker, James Watt, and it burned about a quarter of the coal.

The secret was a separate condenser. Older engines heated and cooled the same cylinder at every stroke; Watt condensed the steam elsewhere, so the coal went into work rather than into reheating metal. The idea dated from 1765. It took more than ten years, a wealthy partner and a patent extended by Parliament to turn it into an engine anyone could buy.

Boulton and Watt did not really sell engines. They sold savings: the customer paid a third of the coal saved, for the life of the patent, measured by a counter fitted to the engine. A subscription, indexed on performance, checked by an instrument.

Then, in the early 1780s, Watt made the engine turn a shaft. Mills, forges and breweries could now draw their power from coal instead of a waterfall, settle in town, and run to the clock all year round. Work stopped following the day, the season or the river. It followed the machine.

  1. Richard L. Hills, Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine, Cambridge University Press, 1989.
  2. Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

By The Signalman