Several ingenious men now turned their attention to the improvement of the steam-engine, with a view to reduce the consumption of fuel, which was found to be so immense as to preclude its use except under very favourable circumstances; and in 1705, Thomas Newcomen, a blacksmith or ironmonger, and John Cawley, a plumber and glazier, patented their atmospheric engine, in which at first condensation was effected by the affusion of cold water upon the external surface of the cylinder, which was introduced into a hollow casing by which it was surrounded. Having accidentally observed that an engine worked several strokes with unusual rapidity without the supply of condensing water, Newcomen found, on examining the piston, a hole in it through which the water poured on to keep it air-tight issued in the form of a little jet, and instantly condensed the steam under it; this led him to abandon the casing and to introduce a pipe furnished with a cock, into the bottom of the cylinder, by which water was supplied from a reservoir. Newcomen’s engine required the constant attendance of some person to open and shut the regulating and condensing valves, a duty which was usually entrusted to boys, called _cock-boys_. It is said that one of these boys, named Humphrey Potter, wishing to join his comrades at play, without exposing himself to the consequences of suspending the performance of the engine, contrived by attaching strings of proper length to the levers which governed the two cocks, to connect them with the beam, so that it should open and close the cocks as it moved up and down, with the most perfect regularity. By this simple contrivance the steam-engine for the first time became an automaton. It was in repairing a working model of a steam-engine on Newcomen’s principle for the lectures of the professor of natural philosophy at the University of Glasgow, that James Watt directed his mind to the prosecution of those inventions and beautiful contrivances, by which he gave to senseless matter an almost instinctive power of self-adjustment, with precision of action more than belongs to any animated being, and which have rendered his name celebrated over the world.