James Watt and the Steam Engine

Before the invention of the steam engine, people used the power provided by animals, wind and water to farm, mill flour and transport goods and people from place to place. But none of these sources of energy were as reliable or perpetually renewable as steam. The invention of the steam engine helped drive the Industrial Revolution, which created new jobs for people and drew them to urban centers. Scotsman James Watt helped take us from the farm to the factory and into the modern world. Though a truly awful businessman, he was the ingenious engineering power behind the industrial revolution. James Watt was the father of the industrial revolution. His crucial role in transforming our world from one based on agriculture to one based on engineering and technology is recognized in the unit of power: the watt.

The Coming of Steam

The first working steam engine had been patented in 1698 and by the time of Watt's birth, Newcomen engines were pumping water from mines all over the country. In around 1764, Watt was given a model Newcomen engine to repair. He realized that it was hopelessly inefficient and began to work to improve the design. James Watt created the first truly reliable steam engine in 1775. Other, less efficient models had been developed in the 1600s. Watt’s version included a crankshaft and gears and is the foundation for modern steam engines. This invention made locomotives and many of the textile machines possible.

Society Shifts

The invention of a practical steam engine had an immediate effect on employment, first in Great Britain and later around the world. England had huge natural resources of coal that could fuel steam engines, and this drove the creation of mills and factories that turned out the goods that people had been creating by hand. Ships and trains powered by steam moved manufactured goods and people from place to place quickly and more efficiently. Western society, which had long been agrarian, began to center on cities as laborers who had worked in cottage industries or on farms moved there in search of jobs.

The Growing Middle Class and Working Poor

Steam, as it drove the Industrial Revolution, had differing effects on people's lives. A middle class sprang up around the factories, mills, transportation hubs, and financial centers created by the Industrial Revolution; these people worked less and enjoyed an improved standard of living. But those who worked in "the dark satanic mills," as the English poet William Blake called the factories, labored at low wages and for long hours under working conditions that were unhealthy and dangerous.

A Laboring Class of Children

Another change in working habits was the fact that young children began working along with adults in textile mills. Since the repetitive tasks they did there were considered easy, they could be paid less. In 1841, the British census found that the three most common occupations for boys were agricultural laborer, domestic servant and cotton manufacturer -- the latter two driven by the need of the new middle class for servants, and of the mills for cheap labor. In the burgeoning coal mines providing the fuel that fed the steam engines, a third of the workers were boys and girls under the age of 18.

Quick Guide to James Watt’s Inventions and Discoveries

• Radically improved the steam engine, starting the industrial revolution.

• Continued to produce a stream of new ideas and inventions, which eventually resulted in an engine that needed 80% less fuel than earlier engines.

• Introduced the word horsepower to describe an engine’s power output. We now generally use watts to measure power, although engine power is still often rated in horsepower.

• Was the first person to propose that water was made of hydrogen combined with oxygen.

• Invented the world’s first copying machine – similar in function to a photocopier – to make copies of correspondence, pages of books, and pictures.

James Watt’s Steam Engine