Abstract
This chapter starts with Savery’s pump, followed by Newcomen’s pump to remove water from coal mines, Watt’s addition of the condenser, the high-pressure engine, its application to textile manufacturing, railways, and ending with the revolutionary inventions by Kelly, Bessemer (and others) that made carbon steel the overwhelmingly predominant engineering material for (almost) all uses.
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Notes
- 1.
Evidently, the sulfur dioxide had to be removed before the gas could be used commercially. The process probably used at the time was to pass the gas through a slurry of crushed limestone, where the sulfur dioxide combines with calcium forming calcium sulfite.
References
Ferguson, E. (1964). The origins of the steam engine. Scientific American (January).
Kennedy, P. (1989). The rise and fall of the great powers. New York: Vintage Books.
Morrison, E. (1966). Men, machines and modern times. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Ayres, R.U. (2021). The Triumph of Steam and Steel (1820–1876). In: The History and Future of Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71393-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71393-5_9
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