Thomas Newcomen

Thomas Newcomen ( born February 26, 1663 Dartmouth; † August 5, 1729 in London ) was an English inventor.

Life

Newcomen was a blacksmith and ironmonger and had some big mining companies as customers. With the advance of such mines in ever greater depths, it became necessary to construct efficient machines for pumping out the invading groundwater.

In 10 years of working Newcomen invented the atmospheric steam engine for the drainage in mines that had the steam engine by Thomas Savery clearly superior. But Savery an extensive patent had on his invention, Newcomen could not patent his machine. That's why he teamed up with Savery together to form a partnership.

His machine used a water injection to allow for cooling the steam in the cylinder and condense it. This created a vacuum in the cylinder space, so that the pressure acting on the piston from the outside air pressure or atmospheric pressure of the outside air that again pushed into the cylinder. The formerly standard machines waited for the condensation just until the volume contents in the cylinder space above the material of the piston and the cylinder as a heat conductor - due to the colder outdoor air - naturally cooled down again - so Newcomen's invention enabled significantly higher piston strokes.

The first Newcomen engine was installed in 1712 in a coal mine in Staffordshire. She appeared without crankshaft and flywheel on a balancing of the driven pumps. The connection between the piston and the balancing is achieved by a chain. The efficiency of the engine was only 0.5 percent. Nevertheless, the steam engines of Newcomen were ousted only toward the end of the 18th century by the steam engines of James Watt.

Initially, the valves are operated for the admission of the steam into the cylinder and injecting the cooling water with a hand of a child. One of these boys, Humphrey Potter, who was also employed at such a machine to open and close the valves, came (1712 or 1713) - probably out of convenience - to make the job easier (and because he wanted to play with the other boys ) on the idea of ​​letting get the actuation of the valves by the transition of the machine itself. He combined in a suitable manner the up and down continuous balancing ( beam ) by line to the taps and had thus, without even being aware of it himself, made ​​the invention of the automatic control.