Thomas Newcomen

English inventor

• Born: January or February, 1663
• Birthplace: Dartmouth, Devon, England
• Died: August 5, 1729
• Place of death: London, England

Newcomen invented and developed the first commercially practical steam engine for pumping water out of British coal and tin mines. His work inaugurated the age of steam power, which made possible the rapid development of the Industrial Revolution.

Early Life

Thomas Newcomen was born shortly after the end of Lord Cromwell’s protectorate and the restoration of King Charles II. The noble lineage of his family has been traced back to Hugo le Newcomen, lord of the manor of Saltfleetby in Lincolnshire, who joined the crusade of King Richard I, known as Richard the Lion-Hearted, to the Holy Land in the twelfth century. After four hundred years of unbroken succession, the Newcomens lost their manor when King Henry VIII confiscated their lands as a result of the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536; the family fled to London and thence to Ireland and Devonshire.

Thomas’s grandfather, Thomas Newcomen, was the son of the famous scholarly rector of Stoke Fleming Church near Dartmouth, the Reverend Elias Newcomen. That grandfather became a merchant adventurer, an owner of several sailing ships, a freeholder of Dartmouth, and treasurer of the town during the English Civil War. Thomas’s father, Elias, also a freeholder and merchant, continued the seafaring trade with the ship Nonsuch, which he inherited from his father. He married Sarah about 1660. The union produced two sons, John Newcomen of Chard, who became an apothecary, and Thomas.

Little is documented about the education of Thomas. One writer of Devon history claims that he was apprenticed to an ironmonger in Exeter. Most likely, he learned to read and write early and probably entered his father’s business. In the 1680’s, he opened his own shop, or took over his father’s business, as a merchant and ironmonger in Dartmouth, dealing in hardware goods and heavy metal products, some made in his own shop.

At the age of forty-two, Thomas married Hannah Waymouth, a farmer’s daughter from Marlborough, near Kingsbridge; they had two sons, Thomas and Elias, and one daughter, Hannah. Two years after his marriage, Newcomen leased a large house that extended between Higher and Lower Streets in Dartmouth, part of which he used for Baptist services for the local congregation, for which he also served as preacher and teacher. Apparently, his religious convictions and leadership ability made Newcomen a respected Baptist preacher among out-of-town congregations of Nonconformists (Protestants who did not attend the established Church of England), for he often preached in churches when away on business trips. In an era when Scripture was the sole source of authority for Protestants and ministers’ sermons were long and detailed, Newcomen’s self-education was remarkable. He was no ordinary blacksmith, nor was he a common lay churchman.

Life’s Work

Biographical data about the first twenty years of Thomas Newcomen’s business career remain very sketchy, and much that has been written must be discarded as undocumented myth or derogatory without fact. The young tradesman kept no diary or journal, left no collection of correspondence, and won no awards during his lifetime—hence the paucity of historical information about the man who invented and improved the first commercially practical steam engine by 1712.

He called himself an “ironmonger,” a British term describing one who operates a shop making or selling iron products or hardware. Town records of Dartmouth list items purchased from him after 1688, including locks, latches, and nails. The treasurer later paid him for repairs on the town clock and for serving as Overseer of the Poor. Yet the scope of his business was far larger than that of a village shop. Conceivably, he served as a wholesale merchant in his port town, buying large tonnages of tin and iron from Devon and the Midlands and reselling smaller lots to other ironmongers or shipping overseas.

Newcomen engaged a fellow Baptist named John Calley (often spelled Caley or Cawley), who was trained as a plumber and glazier, to be his associate in his business and in the development and construction of his steam engines. Calley spent his life working with Newcomen on the atmospheric “fire engines,” the early name for the steam engine. As a plumber, his experience in making metal and wooden pipes provided practical knowledge for making parts for the engines and the long wooden pipes used in the pumps in the mines. Early reports of the Dartmouth steam engines often gave credit to the inventors “Newcomen and Calley.”

The steam engine invented by Newcomen was a significant and different design of the first British steam pump invented by Thomas Savery, who was granted a historic patent on July 25, 1698, for “raising water by the impellent force of fire,” a fourteen-year patent later extended by an Act of Parliament in 1699 until 1733. In contrast to Newcomen’s engine, Savery’s had no heavy mechanical moving parts, but it was dangerous since it lacked any steam safety valves and boilers were not yet capable of containing great steam pressures safely.

Evidence indicates that Newcomen and Calley worked from ten to fourteen years with small-scale models of steam engines before erecting the first known successful atmospheric steam engine in 1712 at the Coneygree Coalworks, Tipton, in southeastern England. Somehow, Newcomen and Calley had been able to devote part of their business time to experimenting with steam power as a means of forcing air out of a piston cylinder in order that atmospheric pressure would press it down again and thereby raise and lower a beam to pump water out of mines. Savery had given up his efforts to make his steam pumps work in mines in 1705.

Because Savery had obtained a master patent in 1698, Newcomen could not patent his engine. No evidence establishes when Newcomen and Savery agreed that Newcomen would build his own engines under the Savery patent, but sometime between 1705 and 1715, when Savery died, such an agreement was made; all early Newcomen engines were protected by the Savery patent of 1698. Savery’s widow turned over her rights to the patent, in return for an annuity, to a joint-stock company known as the Proprietors of the Invention for Raising Water by Fire, one of whom was Newcomen. These proprietors raised œ21,600 and began large-scale building of engines for mines and town water-pumping stations. More than one hundred Newcomen engines were built in England and Europe in the next seventy-five years.

One feature that led to the success of the Dartmouth engine allegedly came about by accident, or as a contemporary Swedish visitor, Marten Triewald, wrote, “a special ordering of Providence.” While working on the prototype in their shop, cold water in the leaden jacket that surrounded the cylinder wall suddenly leaked into the steam-filled vessel through a faulty tin-soldered hole and created such a strong vacuum that the piston crashed through the bottom of the cylinder and the chain on the little beam was broken. The astonished inventors had accidentally discovered that injecting cold water directly into the steam-filled piston would bring about quicker condensing of the steam and a resulting greater force of atmospheric pressure to push the piston. When full-size engines were erected at mines, with pistons ranging from 21 inches to 87 inches in diameter by 1733, the tremendous lifting power of Newcomen’s atmospheric steam engines became one of their great selling points.

Success with the first Newcomen engine at the Tipton mine rapidly led to the erection of other engines at coal and tin mines in England. An advertisement in the London Gazette in 1716 referred to “diverse Engines of this Invention new at work in the several Counties of Stafford, Warwick, Cornwall and Flint.” Sometime before 1725, an engine was at work at a mine at Elphingstone in Scotland. Another engine built that year at Edmonstone Colliery, Midlothian, cost more than œ1,000; the brass cylinder was worth one-fourth of that total price, and a royalty of œ80 per year went to the proprietors in London, who granted the license for eight years. Word soon spread to the Continent, and in 1722 the first Newcomen steam engine was erected at Königsberg in the mining district of Upper Hungary (now Czechoslovakia). In 1726, an engine was built to raise water from the Seine River at Passy outside Paris to supply the city with water; it is possible that Newcomen was present at its dedication.

Newcomen died of a fever in London, where he had gone, probably on business, in August, 1729. He was buried in Bunhill Fields; the exact spot is now unknown. Only one document in Newcomen’s handwriting remains and no portrait of him exists. Little is known of his private life. It is doubtful that he benefited much materially from his invention.

At least three Newcomen engines have been preserved as museum pieces: One is in the Science Museum in South Kensington, England; another was re-erected at Dartmouth to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of his birth; and in the United States, Henry Ford in 1930 restored an engine from a mine at Bardsley at his Dearborn Museum in Michigan.

Significance

Thomas Newcomen’s practical atmospheric steam engine found immediate success in Britain and other European countries for the pumping of water out of mines and for raising water for towns. While payment of royalties may have restricted the construction of Newcomen engines before the expiration of the Savery patent in 1733, at least 110 were erected by that date and no less than 1,454 atmospheric engines, including the rotary type, were built in England before 1800. Many Newcomen engines raised water that then turned water wheels to create a rotary power for mills and factories.

Although modern scholarship credits earlier scientists for development of the original ideas of the “heat engine,” or “fire engine,” including Salomon de Caus, David Ramsay, the marquess of Worcester, Samuel Morland, and Denys Papin—who published his paper on his discovery of the idea for a steam engine in 1690—Newcomen was the first to put these borrowed ideas into industrial practice. L. T. C. Rolt called the first Newcomen engine,

with its combination of boiler, cylinder, piston and automatic valve gear… the undoubted sire of the steam engine of modern times. Like Watt’s refinements, the introduction of high-pressure steam was accomplished without making any fundamental change in those major components which the genius of Newcomen first successfully combined.

Rolt also called Newcomen the “first great mechanical engineer.” Thus, although his design involved no new components, Newcomen’s genius was in combining known parts to produce a design that made steam power, and therefore the rapid rise of industry.

Bibliography

Dickinson, H. W. A Short History of the Steam Engine. 2d ed. London: Frank Cass, 1963. Written by an engineering historian, this book contains A. E. Musson’s introduction, which evaluates the claims of other writers and of Dickinson’s conclusions in his 1938 edition. Chapter 3 covers Newcomen’s vacuum engine.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Thomas Newcomen, Engineer, 1663-1729. Rev. ed. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth Newcomen Association, 1975. A readable biography of the inventor, written with an engineer’s concern for strict attention to detail.

Marsden, Ben. Watt’s Perfect Engine: Steam and the Age of Invention. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Despite the book’s title, Marsden emphasizes that Watt did not single-handedly invent the first steam engine. He explains how Newcomen invented a steam engine and how Watt redesigned that engine to make it more efficient.

Petroski, Henry. “Harnessing Steam.” American Scientist 84, no. 1 (January/February, 1996): 15. Petroski recounts how the steam engine was invented, including a description of Newcomen’s engine and its application in the eighteenth century.

“Puffed Up.” Economist 353, no. 8151 (December 31, 1999): 99. A history of the steam engine, describing Newcomen’s invention and how it was used before it was redesigned by Watt. The article also analyzes the impact of the steam engine on the Industrial Revolution and on the millennium ending in 1999.

Rolt, L. T. C., and J. S. Allen. The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen. New York: Science History, 1977. The best story of both the life of Newcomen and the particular steam engine he invented. A fine introduction for amateur or engineer. Includes numerous engravings, drawings, charts, and photographs of steam power equipment as well as a list of all the known engines built by Newcomen and later builders before the Savery patent expired in 1733. Good bibliography.

Thirring, Hans. Energy for Man: Windmills to Nuclear Power. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958. An introductory text on energy sources, with a full chapter devoted to the rise of steam power. The author argues that Watt was a creative genius who was not the inventor, but rather the most important improver of the steam engine.

Von Tunzelmann, G. N. Steam Power and British Industrialization to 1860. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1978. Provides an in-depth economic and social analysis of the role of the steam engine in the Industrial Revolution, suggesting that it was not the major factor but instead played a “shadowy supporting role.” Graphically depicts the relationship of the steam engine to the textile and mining industries, and analyzes the reasons various kinds of steam engines were purchased by manufacturers and mine operators.