“Proceeding further with the experiment, if, instead of allowing the
steam to blow into the water, you confine it until it gets to some
pressure, then blow it into the water, it takes the same weight to
raise the temperature to the same degree. This means that the total
heat remains practically the same, no matter at what pressure.
“This is James Watt’s discovery, and it led him to the use of
high-pressure steam, used expansively.”
Newcomen, in making his steam-engine, had simply made additions to
Papin’s model. Watt had already done much more, for in trying to find
how the engine might be made of greater service he had discovered at
the outset the principle of the latent heat of steam. He knew that in
Newcomen’s engine four-fifths of all the steam used was lost in
heating the cold cylinder, and that only one-fifth was actually used
in moving the piston. It was easy to see how this loss occurred. The
cylinder was cooled at the top because it was open to the air, and was
cooled at the bottom in condensing the steam that had driven the
piston up so as to create a vacuum which would lower the piston for
another stroke. Watt knew that what he wanted was a plan by which the
cylinder could always be kept as hot as the steam that went into it.
How was he to obtain this? He solved it by the invention of the
“separate condenser.” This is how he tells of his discovery. “I had
gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon, early in 1765. I had
entered the green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street and had
passed the old washing-house, when the idea came into my mind that as
steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a
communication were made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel
it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling
the cylinder. I then saw that I must get rid of the condensed steam
and injection-water if I used a jet as in Newcomen’s engine. Two ways
of doing this occurred to me. First, the water might be run off by a
descending pipe, if an offlet could be got at the depth of thirty-five
or thirty-six feet, and any air might be extracted by a small pump.
The second was to make the pump large enough to extract both water and
air.... I had not walked farther than the golf-house when the whole
thing was arranged in my mind.”
This was the discovery that gave us practically the modern
steam-engine, with its countless uses in unnumbered fields. Newcomen’s
engine was limited to the pressure of the atmosphere, Watt’s could use
the tremendous force of steam under higher and higher pressure. He led
the steam out of the cylinder and condensed it in a separate vessel,
thereby leaving the cylinder hot. He closed the cylinder top, and
prevented the loss of steam. The invention may seem simple enough as
we study it, but as a matter of fact it was the attainment of this
result of keeping the cylinder as hot as the steam that enters it that
has given us our steam-engine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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