Steam Power

Steam Power. Thomas Newcomen constructed the first commercially useful steam engine in England around 1712 to pump water out of mines. During the 1720s, England exported a number of engines to continental Europe. American intellectuals such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson knew of such engines, but not until 1753 was the first Newcomen engine brought to America, to pump water from the copper mine of Col. John Schuyler, on New Jersey's Passaic River. It was accompanied by Joseph Hornblower, whose family had been installing Newcomen engines in Cornwall. Put into operation in 1755, Schuyler's steam engine burned in 1768 and remained out of commission until 1793. Between 1799 and 1801 the emigrant British engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe designed and erected two massive engines for the new Philadelphia waterworks, built at the Soho Works in New Jersey.

These early engines were all used to pump water, a task adapted to their relatively slow reciprocating motion and small horsepower. By the time Robert Fulton (1765–1815) successfully launched his celebrated Hudson River steamboat Clermont in 1807 (using an English engine purchased from Boulton and Watt), a dozen other American inventors had already experimented with steamboats. With the exception of John Fitch's boat, which he operated on the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Burlington, New Jersey, during the summer of 1790, none of these worked well and all (including Fitch's) had engines designed by the makers themselves. Fulton's success, coupled with the appearance of boats designed specifically for the western waters by Oliver Evans (1755–1819) and others, launched a steamboat era that greatly improved the nation's transportation on both coasts and in the Mississippi River watershed. Fulton's Pittsburgh‐built New Orleans, launched on the Mississippi in 1811, was only the first of a vast fleet that brought improved transportation and fostered industrialization throughout the interior.

Oliver Evans, whose high‐pressure engine dominated the western fleet, built his first engine in 1801. The Newcomen engine had worked at atmospheric pressure (about 16 pounds per square inch [psi) as had James Watt's improved design of 1763. In such engines, increased power could only be secured by increased size. Evans, a Delaware‐born inventor and manufacturer, built his new “Columbian” engine at his Mars Iron Works in Philadelphia to operate on pressures as high as 100 psi. Very powerful for their size, such engines quickly became standard on the western waters as well as in factories.

During the early nineteenth century steam engines gradually replaced water power as the favored source of power for manufacturing, and by 1899 steam engines were producing over eight million horsepower of energy for industrial uses. As coal slowly replaced wood for fuel, new engine designs used steam expansively in more than one cylinder or in the form of turbines. With improved boilers, some of the new engines by the end of the century used steam at 300 psi and produced thousands of horsepower. In this process, George H. Corliss of Providence and Charles T. Porter of Newark were particularly important innovators. Since steam engines were the first large machines made from iron, the spread of steam power stimulated the growth of the iron and machine trades. And by freeing manufacturers from reliance on water power, steam allowed factories to be built in cities, closer to transportation and a labor supply.

Steam was also applied to the operation of railroads. By the time Robert Stephenson's locomotive Rocket won the celebrated Rainhill trials in England in 1829, Americans were already investigating steam propulsion for land transport. In 1829–1830, Americans purchased the John Bull from Stephenson and The Stourbridge Lion from another English locomotive maker. The latter became the model for The Best Friend of Charleston, the first steam locomotive built in the United States for sale. In 1830, Peter Cooper's Tom Thumb raced a horsedrawn train on the new Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which opened its first line that year. Soon such large manufacturers as Philadelphians William Norris and Matthias Baldwin dominated the American locomotive trade and sold large numbers of engines abroad as well. Steam remained the unchallenged source of power for railroads until 1925, when the Central Railroad of New Jersey introduced the first diesel‐electric locomotive. In 1934 the Burlington line used diesel‐electric for its streamlined Zephyr passenger trains, and in 1941 the Santa Fe became the first railroad to use that power for freight service. As late as 1945 only 3,800 of 43,500 American locomotives were diesel, but by 1960, diesels accounted for 95 percent of the total.

The use of steam power in American agriculture began late, proceeded slowly, and never became as widespread as in other sectors of the economy. A federal census of engines in 1838 reported several hundred at work at specialized tasks on farms, especially in grinding sugarcane on Louisiana plantations. The lack of power for fieldwork hampered nineteenth‐century agriculture, although the replacement of oxen with horses improved the situation for most farmers. In 1849, however, portable steam engines that could be pulled by horses to a barn, woodlot, or wherever more power for belt work was needed became available. As the nation's wheat acreage doubled between 1866 and 1878, the demand for mechanically powered machines led to efforts to use these portable steam engines to power self‐propelled vehicles that could be steered. The first such traction engines were produced in 1882, and in 1910 the horsepower produced by steam used in agriculture peaked at 3.6 million. Some ten thousand traction engines were in use on farms in 1913, but already gasoline‐powered tractors were competing with them. By 1925 the manufacture of steam traction engines had largely been abandoned.

A few early automobiles were steam powered, including the Stanley Steamer, built in Massachusetts by the twin brothers Francis and Freelan Stanley from 1897 until 1918. But the gasoline‐powered internal combustion engine soon supplanted the steam engine in automotive technology.

Steam power remained of some economic importance as the twentieth century ended. Steam turbines, for example, were widely used to generate electricity. Its ubiquity and dominance as a power source for transportation, manufactures, and agriculture, however, was largely confined to the nineteenth century, after which internal combustion engines burning petroleum products eliminated steam engines from most sectors of the American economy.
See also Antebellum Era; Automotive Industry; Economic Development; Electricity and Electrification; Factory System; Gilded Age; Iron and Steel Industry; Maritime Transport; Motor Vehicles.

Bibliography

James Thomas Flexner , Steamboats Come True, 1944.
Louis C. Hunter , Steamboats on the Western Rivers, 1949.
Carroll W. Pursell Jr. , Early Stationary Steam Engines in America, 1969.
Louis C. Hunter , A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780–1930, Volume II, Steam Power, 1985.

Carroll Pursell