He was born in the year 1601, and sprung from a family whose title of nobility dated back to the fourteenth century. He is described by his English biographer as a learned, thoughtful, and studious Roman Catholic; as public-spirited and humane; as a mechanic, patient, skillful, full of resources, and quick to comprehend. He inherited a great estate, not perhaps so very productive in money, but of enormous intrinsic value. There is reason to believe that he began to experiment with steam soon after he came of age. He describes one of his experiments, probably of early date:-- "I have taken a piece of a whole cannon, whereof the end was burst, and filled it with water three quarters full, stopping and screwing up the broken end, as also the touch-hole, and making a constant fire under it. Within twenty-four hours it burst, and made a great crack." That the engine which he constructed was designed to pump water is shown by the very name which he gave it,--"the water-commanding engine,"--and, indeed, it was never used for any other purpose. The plan of it was very simple, and, without improvements, it could have answered its purposes but imperfectly. It consisted of two vessels from which the air was driven alternately by the condensation of steam within them, and into the vacuum thus created the water rushed from the bottom of the mine. He probably had his first machine erected before 1630, when he was still a young man, and he spent his life in endeavors to bring his invention into use. In doing this he expended so large a portion of his fortune, and excited so much ridicule, that he died comparatively poor and friendless. I think it probable, however, that his poverty was due rather to the civil wars, in which his heroic old father and himself were so unfortunate as to be on the losing side. He attempted to form a company for the introduction of his machine, and when he died without having succeeded in this, his widow still persisted in the same object, though without success. He did, however, make several steam-engines besides the one at Raglan Castle; engines which did actually answer the purpose of raising water from considerable depths in a continuous stream. He also erected near London a steam fountain, which he describes. During the next century several important improvements were made in the steam-engine, but without rendering it anything like the useful agent which we now possess. When James Watt began to experiment, about the year 1760, in his little shop near the Glasgow University, the steam-engine was still used only for pumping water, and he soon discovered that it wasted three fourths of the steam. He once related to a friend how the idea of his great improvement, that of saving the waste by a condenser, occurred to his mind. He was then a poor mechanic living upon fourteen shillings a week.