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Famous Sons & Daughters No.8: Thomas Newcomen (1663 - 1729)

As a family we felt stupidly proud when, on a recent visit to friends in Washington DC, we came across an exhibit devoted to engineer Thomas Newcomen in the industrial section of the Museum of American History.

He was there because our history is America’s history too – there were lots of similar exhibits showing how artefacts from around the world, like Newcomen’s groundbreaking pumping engine, had helped to shape America.

Of course we knew that this founding father of the industrial revolution was not from America at all, but from Dartmouth.

Thomas Newcomen was born in February 1663 in Dartmouth. Not much is known about his family life, but it is thought he trained as an apprentice blacksmith in the town before establishing himself as an ironmonger, often supplying parts and mending machinery for Cornish tin mine owners.

The mines were blighted by flooding, and as they dug deeper under the ground, and often the seabed, in the quest for tin, the mine owners became ever more anxious to find a solution to the problem which was holding back their progress. Floods could destroy entire mines, killing all those who worked below ground.

The standard methods to remove the water - manual pumping or teams of horses hauling buckets on a rope - were slow and expensive, and they sought an alternative.

Newcomen, who lived and worked beside the old Guildhall in what is now Newcomen Road, and was described as “an eccentric or a schemer” by local people, was fascinated by the problem. He knew that another Devon inventor, Thomas Savery, had been working on a steam engine at Modbury, and set out to meet him.

Savery welcomed Newcomen’s interest and hired the Dartmouth ironmonger for his blacksmithing and iron-forging skills. Together they built Savery’s engine and Newcomen was allowed to make a copy for himself, which he set up in his yard in Dartmouth. He used it to invent a new engine that revolutionised the mines.

The science was beyond that of contemporary engines, which worked by using condensed steam to make a vacuum, such as Thomas Savery’s pump of 1698 which just used the vacuum to pull the water up. Newcomen created his vacuum inside a cylinder and used it to pull down a piston. He then used a lever to transfer the force to the pump shaft that went down the mine. It was the first practical engine to use a piston in a cylinder. Casting the cylinders and getting the pistons to fit was pushing the limit of existing technology, so Newcomen deliberately made the piston marginally smaller than the cylinder and sealed the gap with a ring of wet leather or rope. The pump was reliable and demand was incredibly high.

Savery had patented his engine and held the exclusive rights to use surface condensation. To avoid infringing the patent, Newcomen was forced to go into partnership with him. The Dartmouth engineer was assisted by John Calley. Neither man was well educated and they had no formal training in mechanical engineering. They corresponded with scientist Robert Hooke asking him to advise them about their plans to build a steam engine with a steam cylinder containing a piston. Hooke advised against their plan, but, fortunately, the obstinate and uneducated mechanics stuck to their plans. Their engine, combining a steam cylinder and piston, surface condensation, a separate boiler, and separate pumps, was patented in 1708.

Newcomen’s first working engine was installed at a coalmine at Dudley Castle in Staffordshire in 1712. It had a cylinder 21 inches in diameter and nearly eight feet long, and it worked at twelve strokes a minute, raising ten gallons of water from a depth of 156 feet - approximately 5.5 horse power. While not the most efficient engines, they were rugged and reliable and worked day and night.

The engines were very expensive but were nevertheless very successful. By the time Newcomen died, in London, on August 5th 1729, there were at least one hundred of his engines in Britain and across Europe. They were used throughout the 18th century and were still influential into the 20th century.

One engine at Pentich was still operating 127 years after it was first installed. Perhaps the last Newcomen-style engine to be used commercially - and the last still remaining on its original site - is at Elsecar, near Barnsley in South Yorkshire.

Away from his inventions and foundry, little is known of Newcomen’s personal life, but he came from a family of devout Baptists. His father had been one of a group who brought the well known Puritan, John Flavel, to Dartmouth.

Newcomen was a lay preacher and a teaching elder in the Baptist Church. That he continued in business is almost certainly because the Church could not afford to pay him as a full time elder. Newcomen’s business contacts in London included Edward Wallin, another Baptist minister, and Dr John Gill of Southwark. His connection with the Baptist church at Bromsgrove materially aided the spread of his steam engine through the British canal network, as well as through the mines.

But when he died, aged 66, Thomas Newcomen was not a wealthy man. He received little credit for his invention, with most of the limelight falling on James Watt who refined and promoted Newcomen’s idea.

The principle was used to create the Atmospheric Railway where a train ran along lines, being propelled by the pressure difference created in a tube connected to steam engine houses along the route.

Newcomen’s work is still regarded as pioneering by engineers the world over. The Newcomen Society is the world’s oldest learned society devoted to the study of the history of engineering and technology. The society is based in London and is concerned with all branches of engineering: civil, mechanical, electrical, structural, aeronautical, marine, chemical and manufacturing. Original research papers are given at regular evening meetings held at the Science Museum in London. There are also branches across Europe and in the United States.

In Dartmouth, the Newcomen Engine House in Mayors Avenue is preserved as a memorial to Thomas Newcomen, charting the invention of his engine, his involvement with the Atmospheric Steam Engine, and his part in heralding the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The Dartmouth engine was built at the end of the 18th century and is a direct descendant of his first engine, built in 1712. To find out more information, call 01803 834224.

Further reading: www.bbc.co.uk/history/historicfigures/newcomenthomas;

www.newcomen.com

In print: L.T.C. Rolt, Thomas Newcomen (1963); H.W. Dickinson, A Short History of the Steam Engine (1939).

First published February 2010 By The Dart