
James Watt: A Twelve-Year Flash of Genius - samclemens
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/a-twelve-year-flash-of-genius/
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Animats
This subject is often poorly described, because it's usually written about by
historians, not engineers. Here's a more realistic view.

1765\. Steel is rarer than titanium is now. Cast iron is available, but
brittle and of variable quality. Welded seams are a long way in the future.
Building a pressure vessel is hard, and building one that won't blow up is
harder. Newcomen's engine is an incredibly inefficient one. It's not really
driven by steam power at all; it uses steam and water to create a partial
vacuum, so that atmospheric pressure pushes the very leaky piston into the
partially evacuated cylinder.

Watt realized that cooling the cylinder on every cycle was just silly. Exhaust
the steam for cooling elsewhere. (If you've got the water, don't even bother
condensing it. Few steam locomotives carried condensers and thus required huge
amounts of water.) He also used a little steam pressure on the cylinder; not
much, only a few PSI. That was possible with machining no better than that
used for Newcomen engines.

To go better than that, you have to have better boilers (ones that don't leak
or blow up) and cylinders that don't leak so badly. One of the early specs for
a cylinder/piston fit was that they should fit well enough that a shilling
coin couldn't be pushed between them.

The next big breakthrough was when Wilkenson, who had a cannon-boring business
and knew how to make a big accurate round hole in iron, got one of Watt's
engines for his cannon foundry. Wilkenson saw how badly the thing leaked and
how poorly the piston fit the cylinder. He realized that if he used his
cannon-boring machine to make a steam engine cylinder, the engine would leak
far less and do far more work. So he did, and cut a deal with Watt to make
cylinders.

That made steam engines much more cost-effective and more widely useful, and
launched the steam era. The next century was about getting the temperatures
and pressures up without boiler explosions.

~~~
shasheene
What resources should I consume to get a realistic view of industrial
development ?

~~~
Animats
A good place to start is 1825, with the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Every
railroad before that was a test or demo, but the Stockton and Darlington was
25 miles long, had several locomotives, and carried useful loads. They still
had to use cable systems to get up some hills, though. Think of that as the
public beta of railroads. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1830) can be
thought of as the first production version - everything was moved by steam
locomotives, and for the first time, there were tickets and schedules.

That's a key moment in history. Up until then, technology was a niche item -
clocks, a few clunky steam engines here and there, some textile machinery. The
life of most people hadn't changed much in the previous thousand years. Most
people never got further than 50 miles from their place of birth. Suddenly, in
1830, that all started to change. Fast. Over the next 30 years, railroads went
everywhere. Ordinary people could travel great distances. "Railroads will only
encourage the common people to move about needlessly." \- Lord Wellington.

Next, steel. Read the history of the Bessemer process. Until the 1860s, steel
was an exotic material, used mostly for knives, swords, and some gun barrels.
The early industrial revolution and the early railroad era were built with
iron, not steel. It's amazing how much was done with really crappy metal. Cast
iron is strong in compression but weak in tension, and brittle. Wrought iron
is reasonably strong in tension but easy to bend. Steel is isotropic, equally
strong in compression and tension. The railroad industry adopted steel
rapidly, and locomotives went from wimpy little things to monster machines.
Other steel processes obsoleted the Bessemer process, and steel became widely
available and cheap. Steel is about $100 a ton right now.

The history of the rolling mill is also important. No more banging out sheet
from hot bar stock on an anvil with a hammer. With multiple stands of rolling
mill, ingots went in one end and miles of thin sheet came out the other. It
took a while to get that working right, but once it did, sheet metal was
everywhere.

Then, machining. Few academics write about the history of machine tools.
Lathes and drills go back to antiquity, but a lathe was not a precision
machine until Maudslay built one in 1800 with a slide rest and leadscrew. He
also came up with gauges and techniques for precision turning. This was the
beginning of precision machining. The metal planer was developed around 1810.
Now you could make precision round things and precision flat things. Casting
was well understood, so you could make arbitrary shapes by hand-carving a wood
master, using it to make a negative in sand, and pouring in molten metal.
Casting isn't precise and won't get you a smooth surface, though; if you need
a precision surface, you have to follow up with planing or turning.

Look at machines made in the 19th or early 20th century. You'll see cast or
hammer-forged parts with a little finish machining, and the machining will
almost always be a flat or circular surface. This is why steam locomotive
parts look the way they do.

The general-purpose milling machine wasn't developed until 1932. The
Bridgeport milling machine was such a great design that it's still
manufactured and widely used. Now, you could make a huge range of shapes on
one machine.

Along the way, cutting tools got better. You usually cut steel with steel,
which requires clever metallurgy, cutting fluids, edge treatments, suitable
speeds and feeds, and other details people don't think about much unless they
do machine shop work. Getting that all worked out took decades, and all the
details are in a thick book called "Machinery's Handbook", which can be found
in any machine shop.

The first half of the twentieth century was when most of the clever tricks for
making stuff in quantity were worked out. Stamping, progressive stamping, the
automatic screw machine, the four-slide machine, and lots of other techniques
were developed for making vast numbers of identical parts. For the first time
in history, the ability to make stuff outstripped consumption. This is a key
point. Throughout all of human history until then, the big problem was making
enough stuff. During the 20th century, that problem was solved in a big way.
Writers in the 1920s commented on the deluge of banal objects. (Sheet metal
stamping had really taken off, and vast amounts of cheap decorative crap
stamped out of thin sheet steel were everywhere. See a 1920s Sears catalog for
a good selection.)

That's enough to give a sense of where to look for background. I'll stop at
1950, although manufacturing technology certainly hasn't. I've ignored the
whole energy side (electricity, oil, etc.) because that's better known and
well covered in Discovery Channel shows.

~~~
jacobolus
To put the history in context, it’s nice to have some basic understanding of
the physics/engineering involved in holding things together.

As no kind of expert myself, I really enjoyed JE Gordon’s book _The New
Science of Strong Materials_. It’s a nice easy-to-read introduction, I’d guess
about 250 pages long, and talks about not only iron and steel, but also wood,
glass, etc. I also liked his later book _Structures_ , which is somewhat
overlapping in subject but a bit longer, focused more on the engineering and
less on materials per se or historical development.

The two books are from 1968 and 1978, respectively, but age pretty well. Used
copies can likely be found for a few dollars.

[http://amzn.com/0691125481](http://amzn.com/0691125481)
[http://amzn.com/0306812835](http://amzn.com/0306812835)

Someone who knows these fields better can probably recommend more recent
sources.

------
cmarschner
I've been pondering a lot lately about the question: "what took them so
long?". Why wasn't the printing press already invented/discovered by the
Romans? Electricity? The Newton laws? The modern University? The steam engine?
And on a related note, how come there are these "golden eras" where science
advanced tremendously in certain regions at certain times (e.g. Germany
1871-1914 with Planck, Einstein, Röntgen, to name just a few) I have some
ideas, but would welcome your comments/sources...

~~~
Joeri
There was a precursor to the steam engine in ancient Greece [1]. Invention
happened throughout history, but the context has to be there for the invention
to be applied, the inventor to be free to invent and rewarded for doing so,
and the flow of information to occur so other inventors can build on top of
their work.

Case in point, no single individual invented the steam engine, it was a
process that involved dozens of people across decades before a truly useful
steam engine resulted, and the only reason those people could contribute is
because of a society which didn't claim inventions as toys for a palace or
required then to work all day every day as a farmer. See for example the
difference between north and south Korea, same people, same starting point,
different society and government, radically different outcome.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile)

~~~
digi_owl
Not sure if the Korean peninsula is the best example, given the massive trade
embargo going on.

Frankly we may be looking at a variant of learned helplessness on a national
scale, in that if NK leadership is faced with a dilemma they can throw a
proverbial tantrum and get the rest of the world to step in to calm them down
"before the nukes start flying".

That is, the peninsula did not develop in a vacuum. they were part of a larger
power struggle between ideologies.

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colomon
This criticism seems so odd to me. Does the author really believe that people
reading that are going to assume that Watt knew nothing of steam engines, this
idea hit him out of the blue, and he built a working model the next day? Of
course he spent the previous years learning the problem domain. Of course it
took him time to make his idea work.

But neither of those details changes the fact (I guess, the author does not
try to dispute it) that on this stroll, Watt hit upon the key idea which
eventually changed the world from muscle- and wind-powered to machine-powered.

~~~
roel_v
" Does the author really believe that people reading that are going to assume
that Watt knew nothing of steam engines, this idea hit him out of the blue,
and he built a working model the next day?"

This is how many people who have never build or invented anything think these
things happen.

------
njloof
At first glance I feared this was an article about
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Watt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Watt)

