The Industrial Revolution began in Britain

As the dominate player in global trade in the 1700s, Britain embraced technologies that increased product quality and decreased manufacturing costs. The drive to effect both led to the replacement of hands with machines and so launched the Industrial Revolution.

The incentive to invent the steam engine appeared in the mines

The Industrial Revolution demanded coal and metals and this, in turn, demanded mining and the associated technologies that could drive down mining costs.  One significant cost concerned the presence of water in the mines.  Once the mine hit water, the water needed to be pumped out to enable further mining.  The conventional approach was to use horses to lift the water out.  The steam engine offered a lower-cost option.  But realization of this option wasn’t easy.  Indeed, the rise of the steam engine in Britain required the entrepreneurial spirit and inventive genius of, among others, Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729), the business team of James Watt (1736-1819) and Matthew Boulton (1728-1809), and Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) and his fellow Cornish engineers.

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As often happens, new technologies by the doers outpace the accompanying new theories by the thinkers.  The development of the steam engine flourished in Britain in the absence of any fundamental understanding behind it.  It would take many years for the theoreticians to catch up.  Learn more about this evolutionary path in my book my book Block by Block – The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Thermodynamics. Thank you for listening! 

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