query: When was Watt's steam engine invented?

title: Watt steam engine

text: Watt steam engine The Watt steam engine, alternatively known as the Boulton and Watt steam engine, was the first practical steam engine and was one of the driving forces of the industrial revolution. James Watt developed the design sporadically from 1763 to 1775 with support from Matthew Boulton, Watt's design saved so much on fuel costs compared to earlier designs that they were licenced based on the amount of fuel they would save. Watt never ceased developing the steam engine, introducing double-acting designs (with two cylinders) and various systems for taking off rotary power. Watt's design became synonymous with steam

title: Watt steam engine

text: picture shows the model built and tested in 2016. Currently, a project to build and test a 2 kW engine is under preparation. An example of how it was built with its material. Watt steam engine The Watt steam engine, alternatively known as the Boulton and Watt steam engine, was the first practical steam engine and was one of the driving forces of the industrial revolution. James Watt developed the design sporadically from 1763 to 1775 with support from Matthew Boulton, Watt's design saved so much on fuel costs compared to earlier designs that they were licenced based on the

title: Watt steam engine

text: walls of the cylinder were alternately heated, then cooled with each stroke. Each charge of steam introduced would continue condensing until the cylinder approached working temperature once again. So at each stroke part of the potential of the steam was lost. In 1763, James Watt was working as instrument maker at the University of Glasgow when he was assigned the job of repairing a model Newcomen engine and noted how inefficient it was. In 1765, Watt conceived the idea of equipping the engine with a separate condensation chamber, which he called a "condenser". Because the condenser and the working cylinder

title: Watt steam engine

text: a similar Newcomen one. In 1775, Watt designed two large engines: one for the Bloomfield Colliery at Tipton, completed in March 1776, and one for John Wilkinson's ironworks at Willey, Shropshire, which was at work the following month. A third engine, at Stratford-le-Bow in east London, was also working that summer. Watt had tried unsuccessfully for several years to obtain an accurately bored cylinder for his steam engines, and was forced to use hammered iron, which was out of round and caused leakage past the piston. Joseph Wickham Roe stated in 1916: "When [John] Smeaton saw the first engine he

title: Watt steam engine

text: and the steam expanded against the vacuum on the other side. This increased the efficiency of the engine, but also created a variable torque on the shaft which was undesirable for many applications, in particular pumping. Watt therefore limited the expansion to a ratio of 1:2 (i.e. the steam supply was cut at half stroke). This increased the theoretical efficiency from 6.4% to 10.6%, with only a small variation in piston pressure. Watt did not use high pressure steam because of safety concerns. These improvements led to the fully developed version of 1776 that actually went into production. The separate

title: History of the steam engine

text: temperature was a jacket around the cylinder where steam was admitted. Watt produced a working model in 1765. Convinced that this was a great advance, Watt entered into partnerships to provide venture capital while he worked on the design. Not content with this single improvement, Watt worked tirelessly on a series of other improvements to practically every part of the engine. Watt further improved the system by adding a small vacuum pump to pull the steam out of the cylinder into the condenser, further improving cycle times. A more radical change from the Newcomen design was closing off the top

title: James Watt

text: Watt was the sole inventor listed on his six patents: James Watt James Watt (; 30 January 1736 – 25 August 1819) was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world. While working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt became interested in the technology of steam engines. He realised that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of

title: James Watt

text: James Watt James Watt (; 30 January 1736 – 25 August 1819) was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world. While working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt became interested in the technology of steam engines. He realised that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and reheating the cylinder. Watt introduced

title: Watt steam engine

text: the piston in the cylinder. All of these changes produced a more reliable design which used half as much coal to produce the same amount of power. The new design was introduced commercially in 1776, with the first example sold to the Carron Company ironworks. Watt continued working to improve the engine, and in 1781 introduced a system using a sun and planet gear to turn the linear motion of the engines into rotary motion. This made it useful not only in the original pumping role, but also as a direct replacement in roles where a water wheel would have

title: History of the steam engine

text: and the Boulton and Watt company was formed to license the design and help new manufacturers build the engines. The two would later open the Soho Foundry to produce engines of their own. In 1774 John Wilkinson invented a boring machine with the shaft holding the boring tool supported on both ends, extending through the cylinder, unlike the then used cantilevered borers. With this machine he was able to successfully bore the cylinder for Boulton and Watt's first commercial engine in 1776. Watt never ceased improving his designs. This further improved the operating cycle speed, introduced governors, automatic valves, double-acting

title: Watt steam engine

text: sources of power for British industry, thereby freeing it from geographical constraints and becoming one of the main drivers in the Industrial Revolution. Watt was also concerned with fundamental research on the functioning of the steam engine. His most notable measuring device, still in use today, is the Watt indicator incorporating a manometer to measure steam pressure within the cylinder according to the position of the piston, enabling a diagram to be produced representing the pressure of the steam as a function of its volume throughout the cycle. The oldest surviving Watt engine is "Old Bess" of 1777, now in

title: Watt steam engine

text: Crofton still perform this function. The oldest extant rotative steam engine, the Whitbread Engine (from 1785, the third rotative engine ever built), is located in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia. A Boulton-Watt engine of 1788 may be found in the Science Museum, London., while an 1817 blowing engine, formerly used at the Netherton ironworks of M W Grazebrook now decorates Dartmouth Circus, a traffic island at the start of the A38(M) motorway in Birmingham. The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan houses a replica of a 1788 Watt rotative engine. It is a full-scale working model of a Boulton-Watt

title: Watt steam engine

text: condenser that was communicated to the space of the cylinder by the connecting passage. External atmospheric pressure then pushed the piston down the cylinder. The separation of the cylinder and condenser eliminated the loss of heat that occurred when steam was condensed in the working cylinder of a Newcomen engine. This gave the Watt engine greater efficiency than the Newcomen engine, reducing the amount of coal consumed while doing the same amount of work as a Newcomen engine. In Watt's design, the cold water was injected only into the condensation chamber. This type of condenser is known as a "jet

title: Watt steam engine

text: at pressure near and below atmospheric, so that sealing is not a problem. And it is a simple machine, implying cost effectiveness. Researchers from the University of Southampton / UK are currently developing a modern version of Watt's engine in order to generate energy from waste steam and waste heat. They improved the theory, demonstrating that theoretical efficiencies of up to 17.4% (and actual efficiencies of 11%) are possible. In order to demonstrate the principle, a 25 watt experimental model engine was built and tested. The engine incorporates steam expansion as well as new features such as electronic control. The

title: Watt steam engine

text: engine. The American industrialist Henry Ford commissioned the replica engine from the English manufacturer Charles Summerfield in 1932. The museum also holds an original Boulton and Watt atmospheric pump engine, originally used for canal pumping in Birmingham, illustrated below, and in use in situ at the Bowyer Street pumping station from 1796 until 1854, and afterwards removed to Dearborn in 1929. In the 1880s, Hathorn Davey and Co / Leeds produced a 1 hp / 125 rpm atmospheric engine with external condenser but without steam expansion. It has been argued that this was probably the last commercial atmospheric engine to

title: Watt steam engine

text: the Science Museum, London. The oldest working engine in the world is the Smethwick Engine, brought into service in May 1779 and now at Thinktank in Birmingham (formerly at the now defunct Museum of Science and Industry, Birmingham). The oldest still in its original engine house and still capable of doing the job for which it was installed is the 1812 Boulton and Watt engine at the Crofton Pumping Station. This was used to pump water for the Kennet and Avon Canal; on certain weekends throughout the year the modern pumps are switched off and the two steam engines at

title: Watt steam engine

text: been used previously. This was a key moment in the industrial revolution, which could now be located anywhere instead of previously needing a suitable water source and topology. Boulton began developing a multitude of machines that made use of this rotary power, developing the first modern industrialized factory, the Soho Foundry, which in turn produced new steam engine designs. Watt's early engines were like the original Newcomen designs in that they used low-pressure steam and most of the action was caused by atmospheric pressure, due mostly to safety concerns. Looking to improve on their performance, Watt began considering the use

title: Watt steam engine

text: constant power and smoothed the action of the alternating strokes. To its rotating central shaft, belts and gears could be attached to drive a great variety of machinery. Because factory machinery needed to operate at a constant speed, Watt linked a steam regulator valve to a centrifugal governor which he adapted from those used to automatically control the speed of windmills. The centrifugal was not a true speed controller because it could not hold a set speed in response to a change in load. These improvements allowed the steam engine to replace the water wheel and horses as the main

title: Watt steam engine

text: engines, and it was many years before significantly new designs began to replace the basic Watt design. The first steam engines, introduced by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, was of the "atmospheric" design. Steam was introduced into a cylinder which was then cooled by a spray of water. This caused the steam to condense, forming a partial vacuum in the cylinder. Atmospheric pressure on the top pushed the piston down. Watt noticed that the water spray also cooled the cylinder itself, and it required significant amounts of heat to warm it back up to the point where steam could enter the

title: Watt steam engine

text: condenser showed dramatic potential for improvements on the Newcomen engine but Watt was still discouraged by seemingly insurmountable problems before a marketable engine could be perfected. It was only after entering into partnership with Matthew Boulton that such became reality. Watt told Boulton about his ideas on improving the engine, and Boulton, an avid entrepreneur, agreed to fund development of a test engine at Soho, near Birmingham. At last Watt had access to facilities and the practical experience of craftsmen who were soon able to get the first engine working. As fully developed, it used about 75% less fuel than

title: Steam engine

text: the power of steam and atmospheric pressure and knowledge of properties of heat and steam. The experimental measurements made by Watt on a model steam engine led to the development of the separate condenser. Watt independently discovered latent heat, which was confirmed by the original discoverer Joseph Black, who also advised Watt on experimental procedures. Watt was also aware of the change in the boiling point of water with pressure. Otherwise, the improvements to the engine itself were more mechanical in nature. The thermodynamic concepts of the Rankine cycle did give engineers the understanding needed to calculate efficiency which aided

title: Watt steam engine

text: cylinder without immediately condensing again. Watt addressed this by adding a separate water-filled cylinder which was opened once the main cylinder was filled. The steam entered the secondary cylinder and condensed, drawing remaining steam from the main cylinder to continue the process. The end result was the same cycle as Newcomen's design, but without any cooling of the main cylinder which was immediately ready for another stroke. Watt worked on the design over a period of several years, introducing the condenser and improvements to practically every part of the design, notably a lengthy series of trials on ways to seal

title: History of the steam engine

text: same university. When Watt learned that the University owned a small working model of a Newcomen engine, he pressed to have it returned from London where it was being unsuccessfully repaired. Watt repaired the machine, but found it was barely functional even when fully repaired. After working with the design, Watt concluded that 80% of the steam used by the engine was wasted. Instead of providing motive force, it was instead being used to heat the cylinder. In the Newcomen design, every power stroke was started with a spray of cold water, which not only condensed the steam, but also

title: Marine steam engine

text: Marine steam engine A marine steam engine is a steam engine that is used to power a ship or boat. This article deals mainly with marine steam engines of the reciprocating type, which were in use from the inception of the steamboat in the early 19th century to their last years of large-scale manufacture during World War II. Reciprocating steam engines were progressively replaced in marine applications during the 20th century by steam turbines and marine diesel engines. The first commercially successful steam engine was developed by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. The steam engine improvements brought forth by James Watt

title: Marine steam engine

text: in the later half of the 18th century greatly improved steam engine efficiency and allowed more compact engine arrangements. Successful adaptation of the steam engine to marine applications in England would have to wait until almost a century later after Newcomen, when Scottish engineer William Symington built the world's "first practical steamboat", the "Charlotte Dundas", in 1802. In 1807, the American Robert Fulton built the world's first commercially successful steamboat, simply known as the "North River Steamboat", and powered by a Watt engine. Following Fulton's success, steamboat technology developed rapidly on both sides of the Atlantic. Steamboats initially had a

title: Watt steam engine

text: of higher-pressure steam, as well as designs using multiple cylinders in both the double-acting concept and the multiple-expansion concept. These double-acting engines required the invention of the parallel motion, which allowed the piston rods of the individual cylinders to move in straight lines, keeping the piston true in the cylinder, while the walking beam end moved through an arc, somewhat analogous to a crosshead in later steam engines. In 1698, the English mechanical designer Thomas Savery invented a pumping appliance that used steam to draw water directly from a well by means of a vacuum created by condensing steam. The

title: Steam engine

text: motion to a water pump. Each piston was raised by the steam pressure and returned to its original position by gravity. The two pistons shared a common four way rotary valve connected directly to a steam boiler. The next major step occurred when James Watt developed (1763–1775) an improved version of Newcomen's engine, with a separate condenser. Boulton and Watt's early engines used half as much coal as John Smeaton's improved version of Newcomen's. Newcomen's and Watt's early engines were "atmospheric". They were powered by air pressure pushing a piston into the partial vacuum generated by condensing steam, instead of

title: Watt steam engine

text: from its opposite end. At the bottom of each stroke, steam was allowed to enter the cylinder below the piston. As the piston rose within the cylinder, drawn upward by a counterbalance, it drew in steam at atmospheric pressure. At the top of the stroke the steam valve was closed, and cold water was briefly injected into the cylinder as a means of cooling the steam. This water condensed the steam and created a partial vacuum below the piston. The atmospheric pressure outside the engine was then greater than the pressure within the cylinder, thereby pushing the piston into the

title: Watt steam engine

text: Watt's practice was to help mine-owners and other customers to build engines, supplying men to erect them and some specialised parts. However, their main profit from their patent was derived from charging a licence fee to the engine owners, based on the cost of the fuel they saved. The greater fuel efficiency of their engines meant that they were most attractive in areas where fuel was expensive, particularly Cornwall, for which three engines were ordered in 1777, for the Wheal Busy, Ting Tang, and Chacewater mines. The first Watt engines were atmospheric pressure engines, like the Newcomen engine but with

title: Corliss steam engine

text: Corliss steam engine A Corliss steam engine (or Corliss engine) is a steam engine, fitted with rotary valves and with variable valve timing patented in 1849, invented by and named after the American engineer George Henry Corliss of Providence, Rhode Island. Engines fitted with Corliss valve gear offered the best thermal efficiency of any type of stationary steam engine until the refinement of the uniflow steam engine and steam turbine in the 20th century. Corliss engines were generally about 30 percent more fuel efficient than conventional steam engines with fixed cutoff. This increased efficiency made steam power more economical than

title: History of the steam engine

text: back pressure on the exhaust side of the piston. On 21 February 1804, at the Penydarren ironworks at Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, the first self-propelled railway steam engine or steam locomotive, built by Richard Trevithick, was demonstrated. Around 1811 Richard Trevithick was required to update a Watt pumping engine in order to adapt it to one of his new large cylindrical Cornish boilers. When Trevithick left for South America in 1816, his improvements were continued by William Sims. In a parallel, Arthur Woolf developed a compound engine with two cylinders, so that steam expanded in a high-pressure cylinder before

title: Corliss steam engine

text: fitted with Corliss valve gear. Corliss steam engine A Corliss steam engine (or Corliss engine) is a steam engine, fitted with rotary valves and with variable valve timing patented in 1849, invented by and named after the American engineer George Henry Corliss of Providence, Rhode Island. Engines fitted with Corliss valve gear offered the best thermal efficiency of any type of stationary steam engine until the refinement of the uniflow steam engine and steam turbine in the 20th century. Corliss engines were generally about 30 percent more fuel efficient than conventional steam engines with fixed cutoff. This increased efficiency made

title: Steam engine

text: the development of modern high-pressure and -temperature boilers and the steam turbine. The efficiency of an engine cycle can be calculated by dividing the energy output of mechanical work that the engine produces by the energy input to the engine by the burning fuel. The historical measure of a steam engine's energy efficiency was its "duty". The concept of duty was first introduced by Watt in order to illustrate how much more efficient his engines were over the earlier Newcomen designs. Duty is the number of foot-pounds of work delivered by burning one bushel (94 pounds) of coal. The best

title: Compound steam engine

text: Compound steam engine A compound steam engine unit is a type of steam engine where steam is expanded in two or more stages. A typical arrangement for a compound engine is that the steam is first expanded in a high-pressure "(HP)" cylinder, then having given up heat and losing pressure, it exhausts directly into one or more larger-volume low-pressure "(LP)" cylinders. Multiple-expansion engines employ additional cylinders, of progressively lower pressure, to extract further energy from the steam. Invented in 1781, this technique was first employed on a Cornish beam engine in 1804. Around 1850, compound engines were first introduced into

title: Watt steam engine

text: the condensation taking place separate from the cylinder. Driving the engines using both low pressure steam and a partial vacuum raised the possibility of reciprocating engine development. An arrangement of valves could alternately admit low pressure steam to the cylinder and then connect with the condenser. Consequently, the direction of the power stroke might be reversed, making it easier to obtain rotary motion. Additional benefits of the double acting engine were increased efficiency, higher speed (greater power) and more regular motion. Before the development of the double acting piston, the linkage to the beam and the piston rod had been

title: Steam engine

text: the pressure of expanding steam. The engine cylinders had to be large because the only usable force acting on them was atmospheric pressure. Watt developed his engine further, modifying it to provide a rotary motion suitable for driving machinery. This enabled factories to be sited away from rivers, and accelerated the pace of the Industrial Revolution. The meaning of high pressure, together with an actual value above ambient, depends on the era in which the term was used. For early use of the term Van Reimsdijk refers to steam being at a sufficiently high pressure that it could be exhausted

title: History of the steam engine

text: the displacement of the cylinder, combustion and evaporation rates and condenser capacity. Maximum theoretical efficiency was limited by the relatively low temperature differential on either side of the piston; this meant that for a Watt engine to provide a usable amount of power, the first production engines had to be very large, and were thus expensive to build and install. Watt developed a double-acting engine in which steam drove the piston in both directions, thereby increasing the engine speed and efficiency. The double-acting principle also significantly increased the output of a given physical sized engine. Boulton & Watt developed the

title: History of the steam engine

text: cooled the walls of the cylinder. This heat had to be replaced before the cylinder would accept steam again. In the Newcomen engine the heat was supplied only by the steam, so when the steam valve was opened again the vast majority condensed on the cold walls as soon as it was admitted to the cylinder. It took a considerable amount of time and steam before the cylinder warmed back up and the steam started to fill it up. Watt solved the problem of the water spray by removing the cold water to a different cylinder, placed beside the power

title: Engine

text: device was described by Taqi al-Din in 1551 and by Giovanni Branca in 1629. In the 13th century, the solid rocket motor was invented in China. Driven by gunpowder, this simplest form of internal combustion engine was unable to deliver sustained power, but was useful for propelling weaponry at high speeds towards enemies in battle and for fireworks. After invention, this innovation spread throughout Europe. The Watt steam engine was the first type of steam engine to make use of steam at a pressure just above atmospheric to drive the piston helped by a partial vacuum. Improving on the design

title: History of the steam engine

text: of the steam. Watt spent considerable effort to find a seal that worked, eventually obtained by using a mixture of tallow and oil. The piston rod also passed through a gland on the top cylinder cover sealed in a similar way. The piston sealing problem was due to having no way to produce a sufficiently round cylinder. Watt tried having cylinders bored from cast iron, but they were too out of round. Watt was forced to use a hammered iron cylinder. The following quotation is from Roe (1916): "When [John] Smeaton first saw the engine he reported to the Society

title: James Watt

text: lived in Regent Place, Birmingham. There is a popular story that Watt was inspired to invent the steam engine by seeing a kettle boiling, the steam forcing the lid to rise and thus showing Watt the power of steam. This story is told in many forms; in some Watt is a young lad, in others he is older, sometimes it's his mother's kettle, sometimes his aunt's. James Watt of course did not actually "invent" the steam engine, as the story implies, but dramatically improved the efficiency of the existing Newcomen engine by adding a separate condenser. This is difficult to

title: Steam engine

text: individual cylinder. A method to lessen the magnitude of energy loss to a very long cylinder was invented in 1804 by British engineer Arthur Woolf, who patented his "Woolf high-pressure compound engine" in 1805. In the compound engine, high-pressure steam from the boiler expands in a high-pressure (HP) cylinder and then enters one or more subsequent lower-pressure (LP) cylinders. The complete expansion of the steam now occurs across multiple cylinders, with the overall temperature drop within each cylinder reduced considerably. By expanding the steam in steps with smaller temperature range (within each cylinder) the condensation and re-evaporation efficiency issue (described

title: Steam engine

text: centrifugal governor was adopted by James Watt for use on a steam engine in 1788 after Watt's partner Boulton saw one on the equipment of a flour mill Boulton & Watt were building. The governor could not actually hold a set speed, because it would assume a new constant speed in response to load changes. The governor was able to handle smaller variations such as those caused by fluctuating heat load to the boiler. Also, there was a tendency for oscillation whenever there was a speed change. As a consequence, engines equipped only with this governor were not suitable for

title: Compound steam engine

text: cooling was invented in 1804 by British engineer Arthur Woolf, who patented his "Woolf high pressure compound engine" in 1805. In the compound engine, high-pressure steam from the boiler first expands in a high-pressure (HP) cylinder and then enters one or more subsequent lower pressure (LP) cylinders. The complete expansion of the steam occurs across multiple cylinders and, as there is less expansion in each cylinder, less heat is lost by the steam in each. This reduces the magnitude of cylinder heating and cooling, making higher expansion ratios practical and increasing the efficiency of the engine. There are other advantages:

title: Watt steam engine

text: be manufactured. As an atmospheric engine, it did not have a pressurized boiler. It was intended for small businesses. Watt's Expansion Engine is generally considered as of historic interest only. There are however some recent developments which may lead to a renaissance of the technology. Today, there is an enormous amount of waste steam and waste heat with temperatures between 100 and 150 °C generated by industry. In addition, solarthermal collectors, geothermal energy sources and biomass reactors produce heat in this temperature range. There are technologies to utilise this energy, in particular the Organic Rankine Cycle. In principle, these are

title: History of the steam engine

text: engines in Cornwall and Newcastle, and building an experimental engine of his own at his home in Austhorpe in 1770. By the time the Watt engine was introduced only a few years later, Smeaton had built dozens of ever-larger engines into the 100 hp range. While working at the University of Glasgow as an instrument maker and repairman in 1759, James Watt was introduced to the power of steam by Professor John Robison. Fascinated, Watt took to reading everything he could on the subject, and independently developed the concept of latent heat, only recently published by Joseph Black at the

title: History of the steam engine

text: weight and adding a weight around the shaft. This significantly improved speed control. Porter's governor became the leading type by 1880. The efficiency of the Porter-Allen engine was good, but not equal to the Corliss engine. The uniflow engine was the most efficient type of high-pressure engine. It was invented in 1911 and was used in ships, but was displaced by steam turbines and later marine diesel engines. History of the steam engine The first recorded rudimentary steam engine was the aeolipile described by Heron of Alexandria in 1st-century Roman Egypt. Several steam-powered devices were later experimented with or proposed,

title: History of the steam engine

text: boiler explosions, which tended to lend weight to Watt's qualms. He founded the Pittsburgh Steam Engine Company in 1811 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company introduced high-pressure steam engines to the riverboat trade in the Mississippi watershed. The first high-pressure steam engine was invented in 1800 by Richard Trevithick. The importance of raising steam under pressure (from a thermodynamic standpoint) is that it attains a higher temperature. Thus, any engine using high-pressure steam operates at a higher temperature and pressure differential than is possible with a low-pressure vacuum engine. The high-pressure engine thus became the basis for most further development of

title: Watt steam engine

text: steam turbines which do not use water but a fluid (a refrigerant) which evaporates at temperatures below 100°C. Such systems are however fairly complex. They work with pressures of 6 to 20 bars, so that the whole system has to be completely sealed. The Expansion Engine can offer significant advantages here, in particular for lower power ratings of 2 to 100 kW: with expansion ratios of 1:5, the theoretical efficiency reaches 15%, which is in the range of ORC systems. The Expansion Engine uses water as working fluid which is simple, cheap, not toxic, nonflammable and not corrosive. It works

title: History of the steam engine

text: high-pressure engines were: The disadvantages were: The main difference between how high-pressure and low-pressure steam engines work is the source of the force that moves the piston. In the engines of Newcomen and Watt, it is the condensation of the steam that creates most of the pressure difference, causing atmospheric pressure (Newcomen) and low-pressure steam, seldom more than 7 psi boiler pressure, plus condenser vacuum (Watt), to move the piston. In a high-pressure engine, most of the pressure difference is provided by the high-pressure steam from the boiler; the low-pressure side of the piston may be at atmospheric pressure or

title: Steam power during the Industrial Revolution

text: wagon. Railroad tracks, which were already in use in mines and various other situations, became the new means of transportation after the first locomotive was invented. Steam power during the Industrial Revolution Improvements to the steam engine were some of the most important technologies of the Industrial Revolution, although steam did not replace water power in importance in Britain until after the Industrial Revolution. From Englishman Thomas Newcomen's atmospheric engine, of 1712, through major developments by Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer James Watt, the steam engine began to be used in many industrial settings, not just in mining, where the

title: Steam engine

text: examples of Newcomen designs had a duty of about 7 million, but most were closer to 5 million. Watt's original low-pressure designs were able to deliver duty as high as 25 million, but averaged about 17. This was a three-fold improvement over the average Newcomen design. Early Watt engines equipped with high-pressure steam improved this to 65 million. No heat engine can be more efficient than the Carnot cycle, in which heat is moved from a high temperature reservoir to one at a low temperature, and the efficiency depends on the temperature difference. For the greatest efficiency, steam engines should

title: Steam engine

text: stations and supplying water to water wheels that powered textile machinery. Savery engine was of low cost. Bento de Moura Portugal introduced an improvement of Savery's construction "to render it capable of working itself", as described by John Smeaton in the Philosophical Transactions published in 1751. It continued to be manufactured until the late 18th century. One engine was still known to be operating in 1820. The first commercially-successful engine that could transmit continuous power to a machine, was the atmospheric engine, invented by Thomas Newcomen around 1712. It improved on Savery's steam pump, using a piston as proposed by

title: History of the steam engine

text: pistons, a variety of rotary power takeoffs and many other improvements. Watt's technology enabled the widespread commercial use of stationary steam engines. Humphrey Gainsborough produced a model condensing steam engine in the 1760s, which he showed to Richard Lovell Edgeworth, a member of the Lunar Society. Gainsborough believed that Watt had used his ideas for the invention; however James Watt was not a member of the Lunar Society at this period and his many accounts explaining the succession of thought processes leading to the final design would tend to belie this story. Power was still limited by the low pressure,

title: History of the steam engine

text: were very large and the type continued to be built right down to the 1890s. The Corliss steam engine (patented 1849) was called the greatest improvement since James Watt. The Corliss engine had greatly improved speed control and better efficiency, making it suitable to all sorts of industrial applications, including spinning. Corliss used separate ports for steam supply and exhaust, which prevented the exhaust from cooling the passage used by the hot steam. Corliss also used partially rotating valves that provided quick action, helping to reduce pressure losses. The valves themselves were also a source of reduced friction, especially compared

title: Watt steam engine

text: depth of over 150 feet. The first example from 1712 was able to replace a team of 500 horses that had been used to pump out the mine. Seventy-five Newcomen pumping engines were installed at mines in Britain, France, Holland, Sweden and Russia. In the next fifty years only a few small changes were made to the engine design. It was a great advancement. While Newcomen engines brought practical benefits, they were inefficient in terms of the use of energy to power them. The system of alternately sending jets of steam, then cold water into the cylinder meant that the

title: Watt steam engine

text: were separate, condensation occurred without significant loss of heat from the cylinder. The condenser remained cold and below atmospheric pressure at all times, while the cylinder remained hot at all times. Steam was drawn from the boiler to the cylinder under the piston. When the piston reached the top of the cylinder, the steam inlet valve closed and the valve controlling the passage to the condenser opened. The condenser being at a lower pressure, drew the steam from the cylinder into the condenser where it cooled and condensed from water vapor to liquid water, maintaining a partial vacuum in the

title: Lap Engine

text: its use for a steam engine was covered by James Pickard's patent at this time. Watt was unwilling to pay a license fee to use the crank and so sought an alternative. The sun and planet gear was invented by another Scottish engineer, William Murdoch, an employee of Boulton and Watt. Watt patented it in October 1781. The sun and planet gear is a simple epicyclic gear. The planet is attached rigidly to the end of the connecting rod, hung from the beam. As it rotates it applies a torque to the sun gear, just as for a crank, and

title: James Watt

text: a design enhancement, the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of steam engines. Eventually he adapted his engine to produce rotary motion, greatly broadening its use beyond pumping water. Watt attempted to commercialise his invention, but experienced great financial difficulties until he entered a partnership with Matthew Boulton in 1775. The new firm of Boulton and Watt was eventually highly successful and Watt became a wealthy man. In his retirement, Watt continued to develop new inventions though none was as significant as his steam engine work. He died in 1819

title: Steam engine

text: James Watt made a critical improvement by removing spent steam to a separate vessel for condensation, greatly improving the amount of work obtained per unit of fuel consumed. By the 19th century, stationary steam engines powered the factories of the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines replaced sail for ships, and steam locomotives operated on the railways. Reciprocating piston type steam engines were the dominant source of power until the early 20th century, when advances in the design of electric motors and internal combustion engines gradually resulted in the replacement of reciprocating (piston) steam engines in commercial usage. Steam turbines replaced reciprocating

title: Steam engine

text: (counterflow), entering and exhausting from the same end of the cylinder. The complete engine cycle occupies one rotation of the crank and two piston strokes; the cycle also comprises four "events" – admission, expansion, exhaust, compression. These events are controlled by valves often working inside a "steam chest" adjacent to the cylinder; the valves distribute the steam by opening and closing steam "ports" communicating with the cylinder end(s) and are driven by valve gear, of which there are many types. The simplest valve gears give events of fixed length during the engine cycle and often make the engine rotate in

title: Newcomen atmospheric engine

text: surfaces, while useful work related to the volume, increases in the size of the engine increased efficiency, and Newcomen engines became larger in time. However, efficiency did not matter very much within the context of a colliery, where coal was freely available. Newcomen's engine was only replaced when James Watt improved it in 1769 to avoid this problem (Watt had been asked to repair a model of a Newcomen engine by Glasgow University; a small model that exaggerated the problem). In the Watt steam engine, condensation took place in an exterior condenser unit, attached to the steam cylinder via a

title: Smethwick Engine

text: Smethwick Engine The Smethwick Engine is a Watt steam engine made by Boulton and Watt, which was installed near Birmingham, England, and was brought into service in May 1779. Now at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum, it is the oldest working steam engine and the oldest working engine in the world. Originally, it was one of two steam engines used to pump water back up to the summit level of the BCN Old Main Line (Birmingham Canal) canal at Smethwick, not far from the Soho Foundry where it was made. The other engine, also built by Boulton and Watt, was at

title: James Watt

text: weaving and milling. Although a crank seemed the obvious solution to the conversion Watt and Boulton were stymied by a patent for this, whose holder, James Pickard, and associates proposed to cross-license the external condenser. Watt adamantly opposed this and they circumvented the patent by their sun and planet gear in 1781. Over the next six years, he made a number of other improvements and modifications to the steam engine. A double acting engine, in which the steam acted alternately on the two sides of the piston was one. He described methods for working the steam "expansively" (i.e., using steam

title: James Watt

text: on his own. John Griffiths, who wrote a biography of him in 1992, has argued that Watt's discouraging Murdoch from working with high pressure steam (Watt rightly believed that boilers of the time would be unsafe) on his steam road locomotive experiments delayed its development. Watt patented the application of the sun and planet gear to steam in 1781 and a steam locomotive in 1784, both of which have strong claims to have been invented by Murdoch. The patent was never contested by Murdoch, however, and Boulton and Watt's firm continued to use the sun and planet gear in their

title: Steam engine

text: engines were used in mines and for water supply until the late 19th century. Early builders of stationary steam engines considered that horizontal cylinders would be subject to excessive wear. Their engines were therefore arranged with the piston axis vertical. In time the horizontal arrangement became more popular, allowing compact, but powerful engines to be fitted in smaller spaces. The acme of the horizontal engine was the Corliss steam engine, patented in 1849, which was a four-valve counter flow engine with separate steam admission and exhaust valves and automatic variable steam cutoff. When Corliss was given the Rumford Medal, the

title: James Watt

text: steam James Watt carried out many laboratory experiments and his diaries record that in conducting these he used a kettle as a boiler to generate steam. In 1759 Watt's friend, John Robison, called his attention to the use of steam as a source of motive power. The design of the Newcomen engine, in use for almost 50 years for pumping water from mines, had hardly changed from its first implementation. Watt began to experiment with steam, though he had never seen an operating steam engine. He tried constructing a model; it failed to work satisfactorily, but he continued his experiments

title: History of the steam engine

text: reciprocating engine into the rotative type. Unlike the Newcomen engine, the Watt engine could operate smoothly enough to be connected to a drive shaft – via sun and planet gears – to provide rotary power along with double-acting condensing cylinders. The earliest example was built as a demonstrator and was installed in Boulton's factory to work machines for lapping (polishing) buttons or similar. For this reason it was always known as the "Lap Engine". In early steam engines the piston is usually connected by a rod to a balanced beam, rather than directly to a flywheel, and these engines are

title: High-speed steam engine

text: cylinders or horizontally above them. The valvegear driving these valves was usually simple, a single eccentric designed only to run at one speed, in one direction, for a fairly constant load. Although these engines were contemporaneous with sophisticated and efficient valvegears such as the Corliss, these trip valves were incapable of working quickly enough. A key requirement for the high-speed steam engine was accurate control of a constant speed, even under a rapidly changing load. Although the control of steam engines via a centrifugal governor dates back to Watt, this control was inadequate. These early governors operated a throttle valve

title: Watt steam engine

text: hot well by a vacuum pump, which also helped to evacuate the steam from under the power cylinder. The still-warm condensate was recycled as feedwater for the boiler. Watt's next improvement to the Newcomen design was to seal the top of the cylinder and surround the cylinder with a jacket. Steam was passed through the jacket before being admitted below the piston, keeping the piston and cylinder warm to prevent condensation within it. The second improvement was the utilisation of steam expansion against the vacuum on the other side of the piston. The steam supply was cut during the stroke,

title: James Watt

text: and began to read everything he could about the subject. He came to realise the importance of latent heat—the thermal energy released or absorbed during a constant-temperature process—in understanding the engine, which, unknown to Watt, his friend Joseph Black had previously discovered some years before. Understanding of the steam engine was in a very primitive state, for the science of thermodynamics would not be formalised for nearly another 100 years. In 1763, Watt was asked to repair a model Newcomen engine belonging to the university. Even after repair, the engine barely worked. After much experimentation, Watt demonstrated that about three-quarters

title: Beam engine

text: engine was adopted by many mines in Cornwall and elsewhere, but it was relatively inefficient and consumed a large quantity of fuel. The engine was improved by John Smeaton but James Watt resolved the main inefficiencies of the Newcomen engine in his Watt steam engine by the addition of a separate condenser, thus allowing the cylinder to remain hot. Technically this was still an atmospheric engine until (under subsequent patents) he enclosed the upper part of the cylinder, introducing steam to also push the piston down. This made it a true steam engine and arguably confirms him as the inventor

title: HMS James Watt

text: HMS James Watt HMS "James Watt" was a 91-gun steam and sail-powered second rate ship of the line. She had originally been ordered as one of a two ship class, with her sister , under the name HMS "Audacious". She was renamed on 18 November 1847 in honour of James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine. She was the only Royal Navy ship to bear this name. Both ships were reordered as screw propelled ships, "James Watt" in 1849, and "Cressy" in 1852. "James Watt" became one of the four-ship "Agamemnon"-class of ships of the line. They were initially

title: History of the steam engine

text: This boat could typically make 7 to 8 miles per hour, and traveled more than during its short length of service. The Fitch steamboat was not a commercial success, as this route was adequately covered by relatively good wagon roads. In 1802 William Symington built a practical steamboat, and in 1807 Robert Fulton used a Watt steam engine to power the first commercially successful steamboat. Oliver Evans in his turn was in favour of "strong steam" which he applied to boat engines and to stationary uses. He was a pioneer of cylindrical boilers; however Evans' boilers did suffer several serious

title: Steam engine

text: Steam engine A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a cylinder. This pushing force is transformed, by a connecting rod and flywheel, into rotational force for work. The term "steam engine" is generally applied only to reciprocating engines as just described, not to the steam turbine. Steam engines are external combustion engines, where the working fluid is separated from the combustion products. The ideal thermodynamic cycle used to analyze this process is

title: Boulton and Watt

text: Crossley 1984) Boulton and Watt Boulton & Watt was an early British engineering and manufacturing firm in the business of designing and making marine and stationary steam engines. Founded in the English West Midlands around Birmingham in 1775 as a partnership between the English manufacturer Matthew Boulton and the Scottish engineer James Watt, the firm had a major role in the Industrial Revolution and grew to be a major producer of steam engines in the 19th century. The partnership was formed in 1775 to exploit Watt's patent for a steam engine with a separate condenser. This made much more efficient

title: Boulton and Watt

text: Boulton and Watt Boulton & Watt was an early British engineering and manufacturing firm in the business of designing and making marine and stationary steam engines. Founded in the English West Midlands around Birmingham in 1775 as a partnership between the English manufacturer Matthew Boulton and the Scottish engineer James Watt, the firm had a major role in the Industrial Revolution and grew to be a major producer of steam engines in the 19th century. The partnership was formed in 1775 to exploit Watt's patent for a steam engine with a separate condenser. This made much more efficient use of

title: Steam engine

text: called the Rankine cycle. In general usage, the term "steam engine" can refer to either complete steam plants (including boilers etc.) such as railway steam locomotives and portable engines, or may refer to the piston or turbine machinery alone, as in the beam engine and stationary steam engine. Steam-driven devices were known as early as the aeliopile in the first century AD, with a few other uses recorded in the 16th and 17th century. Thomas Savery's dewatering pump used steam pressure operating directly on water. The first commercial engine producing continuous rotary motion was only developed in 1712 by Newcomen.

title: Steam hammer

text: air/steam hammer can deliver up to 300 blows per minute. The possibility of a steam hammer was noted by James Watt (1736–1819) in his 28 April 1784 patent for an improved steam engine. Watt described "Heavy Hammers or Stampers, for forging or stamping iron, copper, or other metals, or other matters without the intervention of rotative motions or wheels, by fixing the Hammer or Stamper to be so worked, either directly to the piston or piston rod of the engine." Watt's design had the cylinder at one end of a wooden beam and the hammer at the other. The hammer

title: Cutoff (steam engine)

text: maximum start-up forces. But, since there will still be unexploited pressure in the cylinder at the end of the stroke, this is achieved at the expense of engine efficiency. In this situation the steam will still have considerable pressure remaining when it is exhausted resulting in the characteristic “chuff chuff” sound of a steam engine. An early cutoff has greater thermodynamic efficiency but results in a lower Mean effective pressure so less average force on the piston and is used for running the engine at higher speeds. The steam engine is the only thermodynamic engine design that can provide its

title: Steam engine

text: power station (producing several hundred megawatts of electrical output) with steam reheat, economizer etc. will achieve efficiency in the mid 40% range, with the most efficient units approaching 50% thermal efficiency. It is also possible to capture the waste heat using cogeneration in which the waste heat is used for heating a lower boiling point working fluid or as a heat source for district heating via saturated low-pressure steam. Steam engine A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push

title: Compound steam engine

text: in steamships as by exhausting to a condenser the water could be reclaimed to feed the boiler, which was unable to use seawater. Land-based steam engines could simply exhaust much of their steam, as feed water was usually readily available. Prior to and during World War II, the expansion engine dominated marine applications where high vessel speed was not essential. It was superseded by the steam turbine when speed was required, such as for warships and ocean liners. HMS "Dreadnought" of 1905 was the first major warship to replace the proven technology of the reciprocating engine with the then-novel steam

title: Boulton, Watt and Murdoch

text: Boulton, Watt and Murdoch The gilded bronze statue of Boulton, Watt and Murdoch (depicting Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch) by William Bloye and Raymond Forbes-Kings stands on a plinth of Portland stone, outside the old Register Office on Broad Street in Birmingham, England. It is known locally as "The Golden Boys" after its colour, or "The Carpet Salesmen" after the partially rolled-up plan of a steam engine which they are examining. They were most famous for improving and developing the steam engine. Sponsored by an £8,000 bequest from Richard Wheatley in 1939, and £7,500 from the City Council,

title: Steam engine

text: the boiler or steam generator, and the "motor unit", referred to itself as a "steam engine". Stationary steam engines in fixed buildings may have the boiler and engine in separate buildings some distance apart. For portable or mobile use, such as steam locomotives, the two are mounted together. The widely used reciprocating engine typically consisted of a cast iron cylinder, piston, connecting rod and beam or a crank and flywheel, and miscellaneous linkages. Steam was alternately supplied and exhausted by one or more valves. Speed control was either automatic, using a governor, or by a manual valve. The cylinder casting

title: Steam engine

text: applied for propulsion of large ships throughout most of the 20th century. Although the reciprocating steam engine is no longer in widespread commercial use, various companies are exploring or exploiting the potential of the engine as an alternative to internal combustion engines. The company Energiprojekt AB in Sweden has made progress in using modern materials for harnessing the power of steam. The efficiency of Energiprojekt's steam engine reaches some 27–30% on high-pressure engines. It is a single-step, 5-cylinder engine (no compound) with superheated steam and consumes approx. of steam per kWh. There are two fundamental components of a steam plant:

title: Corliss steam engine

text: began to manufacture Corliss engines. Among them, the William A. Harris Steam Engine Company, the Worthington Pump and Machinery Company, and Allis-Chalmers. In general, these machines were referred to as Corliss engines regardless of who made them. The Corliss Centennial Engine was an all-inclusive, specially built rotative beam engine that powered virtually all of the exhibits at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 through shafts totaling over a mile in length. Switched on by President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, the engine was in public view for the duration of the fair. The engine was

title: Economic history of the United Kingdom

text: was undertaken in rural cottages. The steam engine was invented and became a power supply that soon surpassed waterfalls and horsepower. The first practicable steam engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen, and was used for pumping water out of mines. A much more powerful steam engine was invented by James Watt; it had a reciprocating engine capable of powering machinery. The first steam-driven textile mills began to appear in the last quarter of the 18th century, and this transformed the industrial revolution into an urban phenomenon, greatly contributing to the appearance and rapid growth of industrial towns. The progress of

title: Cornish engine

text: boiler pressure would have made an engine more powerful without increasing its efficiency. The key advance was allowing the steam to expand in the cylinder. While James Watt had conceived of the idea of allowing expansive working of steam—and included it in his 1782 patent--, he realized that the low steam pressure of his application made the improvement in efficiency negligible, and so did not pursue it. In a Watt engine, steam is admitted throughout the piston's power stroke. At the end of the stroke, the steam is exhausted, and any remaining energy is wasted in the condenser, where the

title: Watt steam engine

text: action of the beam into a rotating motion was to connect the beam to a wheel by a crank, but because another party had patent rights on the use of the crank, Watt was obliged to come up with another solution. He adopted the epicyclic sun and planet gear system suggested by an employee William Murdoch, only later reverting, once the patent rights had expired, to the more familiar crank seen on most engines today. The main wheel attached to the crank was large and heavy, serving as a flywheel which, once set in motion, by its momentum maintained a

title: Watt steam engine

text: condenser". The condenser is located in a cold water bath below the cylinder. The volume of water entering the condenser as spray absorbed the latent heat of the steam, and was determined as seven times the volume of the condensed steam. The condensate and the injected water was then removed by the air pump, and the surrounding cold water served to absorb the remaining thermal energy to retain a condenser temperature of 30°C to 45°C and the equivalent pressure of 0.04 to 0.1 bar At each stroke the warm condensate was drawn off from the condenser and sent to a

title: Matthew Piers Watt Boulton

text: had perfected the steam engine during the 1770s which soon set off the Industrial Revolution in England, and later the rest of the world. Matthew Piers Watt was named after his grandfather as well as his grandfather's close business partner, James Watt who had jointly created the Soho Foundry which employed their engines. Boulton's second given name also reflected the family of his great-grandmother, the Piers of Chester, Bull Ring, Birmingham. In 1815–1816 M. P. W.'s father, Matthew Robinson Boulton, bought the Great Tew Estate and manor in the civil parish of Cotswold Hills in Oxfordshire. In 1825 he added

title: Fireman (steam engine)

text: the famous wreck. KFC founder Colonel Sanders worked as a railroad stoker when he was 16 or 17. A 14-year old Martin Luther King Sr. worked as a fireman on the Atlanta railroad. Fireman (steam engine) Fireman or stoker is the job title for someone whose job is to tend the fire for the running of a boiler, to heat a building, power a steam engine, etc. On steam locomotives the term "fireman" is usually used, while on steamships and stationary steam engines, such as those driving saw mills, the term is usually "stoker" (although the British Merchant Navy did

title: Watt steam engine

text: inscribing an arc. To bridge the conflicting actions of the beam and the piston, Watt developed his parallel motion. This masterpiece of engineering uses a four bar linkage coupled with a pantograph to produce the required straight line motion much more cheaply than if he had used a slider type of linkage. He was very proud of his solution. Having the beam connected to the piston shaft by a means that applied force alternately in both directions also meant that it was possible to use the motion of the beam to turn a wheel. The simplest solution to transforming the

title: Lap Engine

text: not invent the steam engine and there is no single 'Watt steam engine' as such. He developed a number of separate innovations, each of which improved the existing engines of the day, beginning with Newcomen's. The Lap Engine of 1788, also the Whitbread Engine (1785), represent survivors of the first engines to show all of Watt's major improvements in one. The rotative beam engine needs a means to convert reciprocating motion of the piston and beam to rotary motion. The crankshaft was well known for centuries before Watt, mostly from its use in mining machinery powered by water wheels. However

title: Cornish engine

text: original locations, the majority having been scrapped when their related industrial firm closed. The Cornish engine developed irregular power throughout the cycle, completely pausing at one point while having rapid motion on the down stroke, making it unsuitable for rotary motion and most industrial applications. The Cornish engine depended on the use of steam pressure above atmospheric pressure, as devised by Richard Trevithick in the 19th century. Trevithick's early "puffer" engines discharged steam into the atmosphere. This differed from the Watt steam engine, which moved the condensing steam from the cylinder to a condenser separate from the cylinder; hence Watt's

title: Steam engine

text: operations requiring constant speed, such as cotton spinning. The governor was improved over time and coupled with variable steam cut off, good speed control in response to changes in load was attainable near the end of the 19th century. In a simple engine, or "single expansion engine" the charge of steam passes through the entire expansion process in an individual cylinder, although a simple engine may have one or more individual cylinders. It is then exhausted directly into the atmosphere or into a condenser. As steam expands in passing through a high-pressure engine, its temperature drops because no heat is

title: Steam engine

text: could be made small enough for transport applications. Thereafter, technological developments and improvements in manufacturing techniques (partly brought about by the adoption of the steam engine as a power source) resulted in the design of more efficient engines that could be smaller, faster, or more powerful, depending on the intended application. The Cornish engine was developed by Trevithick and others in the 1810s. It was a compound cycle engine that used high-pressure steam expansively, then condensed the low-pressure steam, making it relatively efficient. The Cornish engine had irregular motion and torque though the cycle, limiting it mainly to pumping. Cornish

title: Cornish engine

text: than for pumping engines, particularly so for whim engines, whose work was discontinuous. The impetus for the improvement of the steam engine came from Cornwall due to the high price of coal there, but both capital and maintenance costs were higher than a Watt steam engine. This long delayed the installation of Cornish engines outside Cornwall. A secondhand Cornish engine was installed at East London Waterworks in 1838, and compared to a Watt engine with favourable results, because the price of coal in London was even higher than in Cornwall. However, in the main textile manufacturing areas, such as Manchester

title: John Watt (politician)

text: of the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary between 1869 and 1873; and director of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. Watt was born in Edinburgh, Mid-Lothian, Scotland, the eldest son of Alexander Hamilton Watt and his wife Margaret, "née" Gilchrist. His father was related to James Watt, inventor of the steam-engine and namesake of the Watt energy metric. Watt was educated at the University of Edinburgh, matriculating in 1840; he emigrated to Sydney via the "Benares" on 6 December 1842. Watt was appointed a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council in September 1861, but resigned on leaving for England in March

title: Compound steam engine

text: the cylinders arranged in-line, but various other formations were used. In the late 19th century, the Yarrow-Schlick-Tweedy balancing 'system' was used on some marine triple-expansion engines. Y-S-T engines divided the low-pressure expansion stages between two cylinders, one at each end of the engine. This allowed the crankshaft to be better balanced, resulting in a smoother, faster-responding engine which ran with less vibration. This made the 4-cylinder triple-expansion engine popular with large passenger liners (such as the Olympic class), but was ultimately replaced by the virtually vibration-free steam turbine. The development of this type of engine was important for its use