Thomas Savery

English inventor

• Born: c. 1650
• Birthplace: Shilstone, Devonshire, England
• Died: May 1, 1715
• Place of death: London, England

Savery invented the first steam engine, patented in England in 1699. Thomas Newcomen, whose steam engine was a modified version of Savery’s, worked closely with Savery during the first decade of the eighteenth century.

Early Life

Little is known about the early life of Thomas Savery (SAYV-ree). His father was a prosperous merchant and landowner in the town of Totnes, Devonshire, and Thomas would have had an upbringing similar to those of others in his class. Thomas Savery first appears in historical documents already bearing either the title or the nickname of Captain Savery. It is therefore likely that he served as a military engineer early in his career. It is possible, however, that Savery managed a lead or tin mine in Cornwall: “Captain” was a common appellation for Cornish mine managers.

Whatever Savery’s early occupation may have been, he spent his spare time doing mechanical experiments. In the 1690’s, he invented both a device for polishing glass and a system for rowing ships becalmed by a lack of wind. It consisted of paddle wheels mounted on either side of the vessel, foreshadowing the early steamships of the nineteenth century. The paddle wheels were propelled, however, not by a steam engine but by a capstan turned by the sailors on the vessel. In 1696, Savery received a patent for this invention, but it was never adopted by the British navy.

Life’s Work

Having grown up in Devonshire, close to the tin and lead mines of western England, Savery was no doubt aware of a growing problem in English mining: Water flowed into the mines as the mines went deeper in search of additional material. Savery attempted to address this problem by inventing a steam-driven pump that created a vacuum into which water would be pulled up a pipe. Savery applied for a patent on this device, which was granted on July 25, 1698. At first, the patent ran for just fourteen years, but the following year an act of Parliament extended it for another twenty-one years, until 1733.

The act of Parliament extending Savery’s patent suggests that Savery had friends in high places. His naval device had drawn the attention of King William III. In 1705, he became a fellow of the Royal Society , the body of amateur scientists that dominated the world of British science at that time. Sir Isaac Newton was also a fellow of the Royal Society, having been elected in 1672. Newton was president of the Royal Society when Savery was elected a fellow.

Although Savery’s patent describes his invention in only very general terms, as a machine “for raising water by the impellent force of fire,” he describes the invention in greater detail in his pamphlet “The Miner’s Friend” (1701). This pamphlet includes a drawing showing the mechanism mounted within the line of pipes designed to draw the water out of the mine. It was this feature that in fact made the device less useful in mines, because it limited the vacuum pressure of the pump to the atmospheric pressure. As a result, the maximum lift of the pump was 32 feet (10 meters). For best results, the apparatus would have had to be located within the mine shaft itself, which was extremely dangerous. By providing dual pipes, both below the boiler and above it, Savery increased the lift to slightly above 50 feet (15 meters), but this was still well below the depth of many of the mines severely plagued by flooding.

In 1702, Savery created a company to exploit his invention, but it does not seem to have been a financial success, as he dissolved it in 1705. Though the reason is not known, it seems probable that some of the technical difficulties with the pump had become clear over those three years. One of these difficulties was the extreme inefficiency of alternately heating and cooling the boiler to create the vacuum. (It would be James Watt who would solve this problem, almost a century later.) This defect was magnified by the inability of the metalworkers of the time to build boilers that could withstand a higher than atmospheric pressure, which would have increased the lift; some attempts to do so were made, but they almost invariably resulted in explosions.

Given these difficulties, Savery’s invention appears not to have solved the problem of water in the mines, and although Savery’s reputation lived on, his device was mostly installed in decorative water displays on private estates. Nevertheless, the patent he had secured gave him patent exclusivity on steam engines until 1733. After his death, this exclusivity was transferred to a firm that bought the rights from his widow.

It was Savery’s exclusive right to construct and utilize steam engines that led Thomas Newcomen to associate himself with Savery in 1705, and all of Newcomen’s early achievements were made under the protection of Savery’s patent. Newcomen combined the piston-and-cylinder device of Denis Papin —a Huguenot refugee in England in the 1690’s who worked in close association with Robert Boyle of the Royal Society—with Savery’s pump, but Newcomen separated the two devices. As a result, the pump in the mine would be powered by Papin’s engine, but the engine itself could be located outside the mine, thereby avoiding the inherent risks involved in placing the engine deep within the mine as Savery’s device had done. Moreover, the separation of the engine from the pump meant that the engine could be used as a general source of power for many purposes other than pumping.

It is unlikely that Savery could have achieved what he did without the concurrent work of others, including Otto von Guericke in Germany, Robert Boyle in England (both of whom invented air pumps), and Denis Papin, whose marriage of the piston and cylinder was of critical importance in the working of steam engines. Other developments that took place shortly after the work of these pioneers, notably the increases in metallurgical skills that enabled engineers to create pistons and cylinders that were tightly meshed, made possible the further development of the steam engine. The incremental improvements that characterized the early work on steam engines were emblematic of the Industrial Revolution that was to follow.

Significance

Savery’s work, conducted in close association with the scientific amateurs who constituted most of the membership of the Royal Society at the time (Newton excepted), was a first step in a process that has gone on ever since. The members of the Royal Society sponsored and contributed to a growing understanding of the natural world surrounding them. This increased understanding led to the development of new concepts that could in turn be incorporated into the practical construction of the machines that underpinned the Industrial Revolution. Those who have studied these developments closely have come to realize the long-term nature of the process that started with Thomas Savery and his “steam engine.” Nevertheless, Savery’s was a portentous achievement, as it underlay two centuries of advancement, and the piston-and-cylinder concept used by Savery and intended for industrial purposes is still required for many modern industrial applications.

Bibliography

Briggs, Asa. The Power of Steam: An Illustrated History of the World’s Steam Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. The first chapter of this richly illustrated work discusses the achievements of Savery and Newcomen as predecessors of James Watt, and discusses the problems Savery encountered when he tried to turn his design into an actual industrial pump.

Lynch, William T. Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society of London. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. An important contribution to understanding the role the Royal Society played in early scientific development in the seventeenth century. Although Savery is not specifically mentioned, this study provides the background to his accomplishments.

Rolt, L. T. C. Thomas Newcomen: The Prehistory of the Steam Engine. London: David & Charles, 1963. A valuable discussion of the work of Savery and Newcomen, complete with illustrations that make the essence of their accomplishments clear. There are occasional factual inaccuracies, however, that make it essential to use this book with care.

Rosenband, Leonard. “Classics Revisited: John U. Nef, The Conquest of the Material World.” Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 364-370. An evaluation of the work of one of the earliest writers on mining in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Important for an understanding of the accuracy of Nef’s descriptions.

Sandfort, John F. Heat Engines. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1962. Contains a description of the Savery invention, complete with a drawing based on Savery’s own drawing in “The Miner’s Friend.” Is also useful as setting the entire development of “heat engines” in historical perspective.