The first of the two periods of application saw the steam-engine adapted simply to the elevation of water and the drainage of mines; during the second period it was adapted to every variety of useful work, and introduced wherever the muscular strength of men and animals, or the power of wind and of falling water, which had previously been the only motors, had found application. A history of the development of industries by the introduction of steam-power during this period, would be no less extended and hardly less interesting than that of the steam-engine itself. The way had been fairly opened by Boulton and Watt; and the year 1800 saw a crowd of engineers and manufacturers entering upon it, eager to reap the harvest of distinction and of pecuniary returns which seemed so promising to all. The last year of the eighteenth century was also the last of the twenty-five years of partnership of Boulton & Watt, and, with it, the patents under which that firm had held the great monopoly of steam-engine building expired. The right to manufacture the modern steam-engine was common to all. Watt had, at the commencement of the new century, retired from active business-life. Boulton remained in business; but he was not the inventor of the new engine, and could not retain, by the exercise of all his remaining power, the privileges previously held by legal authorization. The young Boulton and the young Watt were not the Boulton & Watt of earlier years; and, had they possessed all of the business talent and all of the inventive genius of their fathers, they could not have retained control of a business which was now growing far more rapidly than the facilities for manufacturing could be extended in any single establishment. All over the country, and even on the Continent of Europe, and in America, thousands of mechanics, and many men of mechanical tastes in other professions, were familiar with the principles of the new machine, and were speculating upon its value for all the purposes to which it has since been applied; and a multitude of enthusiastic mechanics, and a larger multitude of visionary and ignorant schemers, were experimenting with every imaginable device, in the vain hope of attaining perpetual motion, and other hardly less absurd results, by its modification and improvement. Steam-engine building establishments sprang up wherever a mechanic had succeeded in erecting a workshop and in acquiring a local reputation as a worker in metal, and many of Watt's workmen went out from Soho to take charge of the work done in these shops. Nearly all of the great establishments which are to-day most noted for their extent and for the importance and magnitude of the work done in them, not only in Great Britain, but in Europe and the United States, came into existence during this second period of the application of the steam-engine as a prime mover.