Painting with Fire by Matthew C. Hunter;

Author:Matthew C. Hunter; [Hunter, Matthew C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHO000000 Photography / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Air in an Age of Steam

When J. M. W. Turner painted the burning of the Houses of Parliament in the mid-1830s, he was depicting more than architectural destruction (see plate 19). Possibly imagining divine retribution visited on a seat of government then enacting a controversial amendment to the Poor Law, Turner’s cataclysmic renderings of fire and smoke rising over water effectively visualize a new science of matter.129 So has claimed historian of science Michel Serres. Where Enlightenment science and art reduced space to linear order, Serres proposes, Turner “enters the boiler, the stove and the furnace. He sees matter transformed by fire; the world’s new matter at work, with geometry cut down to size. The whole order is turned upside down, materials and paint triumph over drawing, geometry, and form.”130 Ushering the railroad and the steamship into his pictures, Turner not only registers revolutionary applications of James Watt’s steam engine but anticipates the new science of heat and energy.131 Turner is “the introduction of igneous matter into culture; the first real genius of thermodynamics.”132

A familiar narrative in the history of science traces that thermodynamic lineage back through James Watt himself. Such arguments typically turn on the improvements Watt made to a model of the Newcomen steam engine he was charged to repair in his capacity as instrument maker at University of Glasgow in the early 1760s. In the Newcomen engine’s standard operation, water heated into steam by a boiler would rush into a metal cylinder, driving up a plunger. Cold water injected into the cylinder then condensed the steam, creating a vacuum and drawing the plunger down. But this cycle, alternating heating and cooling, wasted steam and fuel. Watt’s solution was the introduction of a second cylinder: an independent condenser (fig. 4.22). Connected by valves of ever-greater sophistication as his research progressed, Watt’s piston would remain constantly hot, the condenser constantly cold, with near-vacuum conditions obtaining in both to maximize their power and efficiency. Harnessing the expansive power of steam in ruthlessly efficient ways, historian of technology Donald Cardwell has argued, Watt “foreshadowed the progressive improvement of heat-engines and the postulation of Sadi Carnot of a general theory of the motive power of heat. With astonishing insight Watt had laid one of the cornerstones of thermodynamics.”133

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