The steam engine and steamboat both emerged from a visible chain of invention: a series of innovators, aware of earlier work in the field and consciously building on it, adding and subtracting and thus moving the whole process forward by small increments until the machine ran right. The final, laborious success when ultimately achieved was descended from many parents, leading to bitter quarrels and lawsuits over who should get the credit and rewards.
For thousands of years, unconnected individuals had puzzled over how to control and use the power of steam. Nothing important happened until Thomas Newcomen started a chain of invention in 1712. An ironmonger in southwestern England, Newcomen made tools for the tin miners of Cornwall. As mines were dug deeper, they were flooded with groundwater, overwhelming any manual or horse-driven pumps. Newcomen invented a steam-powered mine drainer: a large horizontal beam, pivoting at the middle, linked to a water pump at one end and a vertical piston and cylinder at the other. Steam entered the cylinder at the bottom and drove the piston upward; at the top of the stroke, cold water sprayed into the cylinder below the piston condensed the vapour back into liquid form, creating a partial vacuum which pulled the piston back down to repeat the cycle. The engine worked – but was bulky, expensive, and inefficient. ‘It takes an iron mine to build a Newcomen engine,’ the saying went, ‘and a coal mine to keep it going.’
Skip ahead to a classic moment in the history of modernity. In the winter of 1763-64, a Scottish instrument maker at Glasgow University was asked to repair a model of a Newcomen engine. James Watt, then twenty-eight years old, mended the model and started pondering the general problem of steam power, especially the obvious waste and inefficiency of the Newcomen design. He tried making the boiler surface larger, and placing the fire in the middle of the water supply, and even using wooden pipes and boilers (because they would conduct and lose less heat than metal components). One Sunday early in 1765, while walking across Glasgow green, Watt finally got it: create a separate condenser so the cylinder could remain at essentially the same temperature throughout the cycle, saving time and fuel because no steam would be lost to condensation from entering a cold cylinder. ‘I can think of nothing else but this machine,’ Watt informed a friend. ‘Write me…if any part of what you have to tell me concerns the fire-engine.’
For the next crucial step, moving from inspiration to application, Watt needed help. Beset all his life by poor health and severe headaches, timid by nature and easily discouraged, Watt dealt uncertainly with the world outside his workshop. ‘Jamie is a queer lad,’ noted the wife of an associate. Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham manufacturer, offered to become ‘a midwife to ease you of your burthen’, as he put it to Watt, ‘and to introduce your brat into the world.’ Boulton had more experience than Watt in the metal industry, ready access to money, and many useful contacts. Watt joined Boulton as partners in Birmingham. With a patent obtained in 1769, and later extended, they essentially controlled steamengine technology for the next three decades. Watt and Boulton formed the first and most important of the many talent-meshing teams of engineer and entrepreneur that later propelled the Industrial Revolution.
With Boulton in the background, prodding and executing, Watt made further improvements, notably a double-acting cylinder whereby steam alternately drove the piston in both directions, yielding two power strokes in each cycle. He also devised linkages and gearings to convert the piston’s in-and-out reciprocating action to a rotary motion that could power the machinery of mills and factories. ‘The people in London, Manchester, and Birmingham, are Steam Mill Mad,’ Boulton advised Watt, ‘and therefore let us be wise and take the advantage.’
Amid his great success, Watt never stopped fretting about competitors and potential patent infringers. To protect himself and his inventions from the onrushing progress of modernity, he grew defensive and started resisting improvements. He quashed innovations in his own shop (especially efforts to raise boiler pressures and efficiencies beyond a modest four pounds per square inch), refused to license others to use his refinements, and hounded anybody else who dared to build a steam engine. The exploding genie of constant, rapid technological change – which his steam engine had midwifed – finally turned and overwhelmed him. ‘I do not think that we are safe a day to an end in this enterprizing age,’ he warned Boulton in 1782. ‘One’s thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them.…It is with the utmost difficulty I can hatch anything new.’ Beset by this immobilizing difficulty, losing his fragile nerve, he stopped trying. But his engine and its revolutionary impacts steamed ahead, gathering speed.
From the 1780s on, various lone inventors in France, Great Britain and the United States tried to create a steamboat. For the propelling device, some of these pioneers used an application of the familiar waterpower wheel, which converted a stream of water into rotary motion to run a mill or factory: instead of water moving the wheel, the process was reversed so the engine-driven paddle wheel moved the surrounding water and thus the boat. But a paddle wheel was only one of several unsatisfactory early alternatives. Other propelling mechanisms given trials included a set of vertical oars that imitated manual rowing action (by the American John Fitch, in 1786), a jet of water forcefully expelled at the stern (by another American, James Rumsey, in 1787), and palmipedes, or duck-footed paddles (by the Earl of Stanhope, in London in 1790). None of these early attempts worked very well or led to any ongoing commercial success. Their inventors tinkered in general isolation from each other, without knowing about or profiting from what their predecessors had done. Steamboats as yet lacked a chain of invention.
William Symington started such a chain through his own inventions and by their later impact on others. He was another Scotsman, born in 1764 in Lanarkshire, south of Glasgow. Educated for the ministry, he was instead caught up in the inventive currents then starting to swirl around southern Scotland. ‘My natural turn for mechanical philosophy led me to change my object,’ he recalled, ‘and to direct my studies to the exercise of the profession of a civil engineer.’ He made some improvements in the steam engine – earning the suspicion of James Watt – and crafted a model of a steam carriage for road travel. This model brought him to the attention of Patrick Miller, a retired Edinburgh banker who had devised a manually powered paddleboat.
In 1788 Miller hired Symington to build and install a steam engine in this vessel. Symington used his own design, an engine with two cylinders of four-inch diameter and eighteen-inch stroke. A second version with a larger engine had a successful trial a year later, carrying seven passengers at five miles an hour. But this success drew potential legal action by the ever-vigilant Watt for alleged patent infringement. After Miller lost interest in the experiments and withdrew his financial support, Symington dropped his steamboat efforts for a decade and made a living by building mining machinery.
The expiration of Watt’s patent in 1800 released a flood of pent-up inventive energy. Thomas, Lord Dundas of Kerse, a large shareholder in the Forth