NEWCOMEN, THOMAS

(b. Dartmouth, England; christened 24 February 1663; d. London, England, 5 August 1729), steam technology.

Newcomen is renowned as the inventor of the steam engine. He was descended from an aristocratic family that had lost its property during the reign of Henry VIII. His grandfather and father were merchants and nonconformists, and Newcomen followed them in both respects. During the 1680’s he became an ironmonger in partnership with John Calley, an artisan and fellow Baptist who later collaborated with him on the development of the steam engine. Newcomen became a leader of the local Baptists and often preached to their congregations. His formal education appears to have been rudimentary, and he published nothing. Few details are known of his personal life or of the circumstances that surrounded his invention.

Newcomen’s first successful engine, which was erected in the Midlands in 1712, was the reward of years of trials and tinkering. The increasingly troublesome problem of removing water from mines had already provided the stimulus for attempts by Newcomen and others to design an improved machine to serve either as a pump or as an engine to drive a pump. In 1698 Thomas Savery (also of Devon) invented a steam pump which he protected with a broad patent that covered all “vessells or engines for raiseing water or occasioning motion to any sort of millworks by the impellent force of fire.” Because of the scope of Savery’s patent, Newcomen was later prevented from patenting his own engine and was required to build his engines under license from Savery, although his work was entirely independent of Savery’s and his engine was totally different from Savery’s pump.

Newcomen’s engine was an ingenious combination of familiar elements: piston and cylinder, pumps, levers, valves, and the process of producing low pressure by the condensation of steam in a vessel. The key invention, which was the injection of cold water directly into the cylinder, was hit upon accidentally in the course of experiments that used cold water jackets to produce condensation. Later James Watt significantly increased the efficiency of the engine through his invention of the separate condenser (1765), which avoided the necessity of alternately heating and cooling the cylinder. Nevertheless, unmodified Newcomen engines continued to be used long after Watt’s improvement, but because of their low efficiency, they were confined largely to collieries, where coal was cheap.

At the end of the eighteenth century John Robison propagated the belief that Neweomen’s achievement somehow depended upon the application of scientific principles gained through an alleged correspondence between Newcomen and Robert Hooke. (Robison advanced a similar claim for the derivation of Watt’s separate condenser from Joseph Black’s theory of latent heat.) Robison’s allegation has been discredited; the records reveal no contact whatever between Newcomen and his contemporaries in science. His invention was the product of a familiarity with technical operations and needs in the mining industry, a close knowledge of contemporary craftsmanship, repeated trials and improvements, and a stroke of luck.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For a full biography, see L. T. C. Rolt, Thomas Newcomen: The Prehistory of the Steam Engine (London, 1963); this work modifies some of the views presented in H. W. Dickinson, A Short of the Steam Engine (London, 1938, 1963), ch. 3. An important contemporary account of Newcomenr’s work, which os based qpparently on firstand knowledge, is Mårten Triewald, Beskrifning om eld-och luftmachin vid Dannemora grufavor (Stockholm, 1734), trans. as A Short Description of the Fire-and-Air-Machine at the Dannemora Mines, and publishhed by the Newcomen Society as Mårten Triewald’ Short Description of the Atmospheric Engine, Extra Publication no. 1 (London, 1928). On the question of the influence of science on Newcomen’s work, see Rhys Jenkins, “The Heat Engine Idea in the Seventeenth Century,” in Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 17 (1936–1937), 1–11.

Harold Dorn