The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Author:William Rosen [Rosen, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780679603610
Google: L1ZJT0XrFZYC
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-01T05:29:07+00:00

IT IS NO ACCIDENT that “wheels of industry” is such a cliché description of a manufacturing economy, since the application of force in the form of rotational motion is by far the most important component of useful work. In late eighteenth-century Britain, the wheels that mattered most were the ones turning the mills that ground the nation’s grain, and the ones that spun the nation’s cloth. Most of them used water; some used wind. None used steam. In December 1782, Boulton wrote to his partner announcing his plan to change that: “I think that these mills represent31 a field that is endless, and that will be more permanent than these transient mines.”

He was scarcely the first to imagine the potential of a factory powered by steam. England’s manufacturers had been pestering steam engine makers on the subject for years, hoping to be freed from the shackles that bound them to the flow of rivers or wind. Unfortunately, the machines on offer were piston drivers, and using a piston to run a mill was as sensible as driving a cart by hitting it in the backside with a sledgehammer.

One idea for using a steam-driven piston to produce rotation was nearly a century old: converting linear motion into rotation by taking the new machine and using it to run a familiar one, a waterwheel. Sixty years earlier, Thomas Savery had proposed using the water pumped from mines by the steam engine to operate a 36-foot-diameter waterwheel, housed in a mill house along with the pumping engine. In the 1770s, Boulton & Watt borrowed Savery’s idea and recommended using steam engines to pump water not just out of deep mines, but into a reservoir sited well above the engine. Gravity could then pull the water past a waterwheel and so deliver rotational work, and some early steam-powered factories used just such a system, despite its inherent inefficiencies.

And so the challenge of converting the reciprocating motion of the early atmospheric engines into rotary power occupied a fair chunk of the eighteenth century. The fundamental problem of direct conversion was not ignorance; the crank and cam were well known to Newcomen and his successors. In fact, they were known to his predecessors. The teardrop-shaped cam was in use as far back as first-century Greece, and in 1783, John Wilkinson linked a steam engine to his forging hammer by means of a cam and succeeded in raising, and then dropping, the eight-hundred-pound tool. Work that can be transmitted by a cam, however, is the opposite of regular. The transfer of motion from one plane to another—converting the straight-line motion that was intrinsic to any piston-operated engine into the regular power supplied by a rotating wheel—turned out to be as big a challenge as building the steam engine itself. And as important. In the words of the twentieth-century critic Lewis Mumford, “The technical advance which characterizes32 specifically the modern age is that from reciprocating to rotary motions.”

To understand this statement requires (forgive the pun) circling back to

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