Improvements come in many ways, sometimes after much thought and after many experimental failures. Sometimes they flash upon clever inventors, but let us remember this is only after they have spent long years studying the problem. In the case of the steam engine, however, a quite important improvement came very curiously. Humphrey Potter was a lad employed to turn off and on the stop cocks of a Newcomen engine, a monotonous task, for, at every stroke one had to be turned to let steam into the boiler and another for injecting the cold water to condense it, and this had to be done at the right instant or the engine could not move. How to relieve himself from the drudgery became the question. He wished time to play with the other boys whose merriment was often heard at no great distance, and this set him thinking. Humphrey saw that the beam in its movements might serve to open and shut these stop cocks and he promptly began to attach cords to the cocks and then tied them at the proper points to the beam, so that ascending it pulled one cord and descending the other. Thus came to us perhaps not the first automatic device, but no doubt the first of its kind that was ever seen there. The steam engine henceforth was self-attending, providing itself for its own supply of steam and for its condensation with perfect regularity. It had become in this feature automatic. The cords of Potter gave place to vertical rods with small pegs which pressed upward or downward as desired. These have long since been replaced by other devices, but all are only simple modifications of a contrivance devised by the mere lad whose duty it was to turn the stop cocks. It would be interesting to know the kind of man this precocious boy inventor became, or whether he received suitable reward for his important improvement. We search in vain; no mention of him is to be found. Let us, however, do our best to repair the neglect and record that, in the history of the steam engine, Humphrey Potter must ever be honorably associated with famous men as the only famous boy inventor. In the development of the steam engine, we have one purely accidental discovery. In the early Newcomen engines, the head of the piston was covered by a sheet of water to fill the spaces between the circular contour of the movable piston and the internal surface of the cylinder, for there were no cylinder-boring tools in those days, and surfaces of cylinders were most irregular. To the surprise of the engineer, the engine began one day working at greatly increased speed, when it was found that the piston-head had been pierced by accident and that the cold water had passed in small drops into the cylinder and had condensed the steam, thus rapidly making a more perfect vacuum. From this accidental discovery came the improved plan of injecting a shower of cold water through the cylinder, the strokes of the engine being thus greatly increased.