by Sue Mackay

Thomas Newcomen (1664-1729) is not a name that is terribly familiar to the people of Britain in the 21st century, yet it was Thomas Newcomen who was in a large way responsible for the way in which this country evolved from a small and predominantly rural community to an industrial power at the heart of the British Empire in the 19th century. He is sometimes referred to as the forefather of the Industrial Revolution.

Newcomen, a Baptist lay preacher and an ironmonger, lived in a tin mining area of Devon, and was very aware of the problems caused by flooding. In 1712 he developed the first engine to use the power of steam in order to carry out heavy work – initially a pump to empty water from the mines. The engine consisted of a simple boiler which produced low pressure steam, which was passed into a cylinder above. A brief jet of cold water was then let into the cylinder, causing the steam to condense and leaving a vacuum, which sucked down a piston. By connecting the piston to a rocking beam, it could pull up a rod connected to a mine drainage pump. This wasn’t tremendously efficient but it would be many years before technology would allow production of more efficient engines worked directly by the force of high-pressure steam. A Newcomen Engine was known to have been in use in the Wheal Vor mine in Cornwall in 1715. There is a working replica of a Newcomen Engine at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley.

In the short term his invention led to a great improvement in the working conditions of miners, but the reason his invention changed the face of Britain is because of what it started. His ideas would be developed by James Watt, who we mostly think of as the father of the steam engine, and by Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson, who pioneered the development of the steam locomotive. By the middle of the 19th century, over a century after Newcomen’s death, cities had grown around manufacturing bases using steam power, and railways enabled an increasingly mobile workforce to leave the villages where their ancestors had lived for centuries and seek work in the new urban industrial centres.

Once people were drawn into the large conurbations, and machines began to be able to do the work formerly done by an unskilled workforce, demand for education and the enfranchisement of the working classes increased. Soon Britain was not only exporting manufactured goods made possible because of steam power, but engineers and scientists inspired by the new technological advances. By the time steam itself was overtaken as a source of power, and steam engines relegated to museums, the principle of a mobile, educated population, with everyone having the right to vote, had been established.

Had it not been for Newcomen, the work of British genealogists might have been easier – everyone would still be living in a village near where they were born. Yet without the Industrial Revolution which the invention of the Newcomen Engine spearheaded, most of us would probably be unable to read this on a computer.