Newcomen, Thomas (1663–1729)

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NEWCOMEN, THOMAS (1663–1729)

Fable or fame? Thomas Newcomen, like many inventors who preceded him in the steam revolution, has been clearly overshadowed in historical circles by the far more famous Scotsman, James Watt, who remains—incorrectly to some—known as the inventor of the steam engine. Watts engines arrived more than fifty years after Newcomen's successful mechanical works, and were considered improved versions of the Englishman's concepts. But this was precisely the basis of many inventors' successes, building upon their predecessors' efforts in the normal course of technological advancement. What is irrefutable is that both men, as well as others, can lay claim as pioneering "fathers" of the Industrial Revolution.

Newcomen came from the ranks of practical tradesmen, unlike many industrial inventors who tended to be noblemen, philosophers and royal protégés. The Newcomen family had had an impressive lineage and had held its manor from the twelfth century until misfortune dropped them into obscurity four centuries later. Yet, a work ethic was instilled by Newcomen's grandfather, who became a merchant venturer (owning several ships), a freeholder of Dartmouth, treasurer for his town, and a staunch Parliamentarian. Elias Newcomen, the father of Thomas, was also a freeholder and a merchant of Dartmouth, trading to distant areas with a ship that he had inherited.

It is reasonably certain that Thomas Newcomen was born in late January or early February 1663 in the family house in Dartmouth in Devon, England. He was schooled at home by the well-known nonconformist scholar, John Flavell, who played a key role in Newcomen's educational thinking. Although throughout his life Newcomen was proud of his common status as an ironmonger, some rivals attempted to credit his success to no more than good luck and chance. Many of his contemporaries doubted that he could be the sole author of so momentous an invention.

But going solo neither accurately summed up the style of Newcomen's inventiveness, nor his ability to learn from others and to work with them. In his teens, he served an apprenticeship before joining his partner, John Calley, in their shop at Dartmouth. By the time Newcomen began solving technical tin mining challenges at the beginning of the eighteenth century, he was already well established as an iron-monger, dealing in annual quantities as high as twenty-five tons per year. He apparently became acquainted with Thomas Savery, or at least his works, observing firsthand the pumping problems in the mines. He may also have read about earlier research on atmospheric pressure done by a Huguenot, Denis Papin, late in the seventeenth century.

Although Newcomen's predecessors may have had superior backgrounds and academic intelligence, his doubters possibly overlooked the practical advantages he and his partner brought to the research table. Through astute knowledge of every variety of metalwork in iron, brass, copper, tin, and lead, he and Calley possessed the right combination of commercial ability and highly practical and versatile craftsmanship. Historical data suggests that these categories may have been deficient among his fore-runners in the matter of applying the principles of steam technology.

Yet, Newcomen's success came with great difficulty and frustration, taking ten years before achieving initial success at a South Staffordshire colliery (mine works) at Dudley Castle in 1712. He perfected a variation of Savery's work by creating a dramatic advance of an internal water injection system to cool the heated steam, creating a far more rapid and effective condensation and ensuing vacuum. There is some historical evidence that the arrival of this particular breakthrough came by fortunate accident, whereby an unintended leak may have led him to design his internal water-cooling system.

In another significant change, he connected one end of a large overhead rocking beam, or "great lever," to this piston. Realizing the risks of high pressure steam, he thus wisely relied on two basic forces to drive his engine—atmospheric pressure to plunge the piston down, and simple gravity to lift it back it up, through the weight of the counterbalancing rocker beam.

By modern standards, it was barely an engine at all, but it met the most important criteria of its time by dramatically meeting the challenge of pumping water from the mines, doing the equivalent work of twenty horses and forty men. The use of his excellent pumping engine spread throughout Europe, with over one hundred engines constructed within the life of the patent, which expired four years after his death on August 5, 1729, at the age of sixty-six. Well over fifteen hundred units were eventually built during the eighteenth century, despite their significant cost (over one thousand pounds), high consumption of fuel, and the requirement of an operating license.

The usefulness of Newcomen engines was both startling and unprecedented, with immediate impact benefiting the mining industry for the next century or more. The record for longevity for a Newcomen-type engine was probably set at the South Liberty colliery of the Ashton Vale Iron Company. It was built around 1750, and was still pumping from a depth of seven hundred feet it was until dismantled in 1900. Another remarkable example was at the Cannel Mine at Bardsley, where a Newcomen engine worked from 1760 to 1830, after which it rested in a derelict state for a full century. In 1930 it was acquired by Henry Ford and shipped to his museum in Dearborn, Michigan where it was restored and re-built.

While not nearly as sophisticated as later engines, the quantity of Newcomen engines built vastly exceeded the hundreds of Watt engines, with the more primitive types often used as substitutes for the newer, far more expensive versions.

Dennis R. Diehl