James Watt didn't invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser design made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution. Working in Glasgow, he cut fuel consumption dramatically by keeping the cylinder hot while condensing steam elsewhere, a breakthrough informed by chemist Joseph Black's work on heat.
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Hello, I'm Lois Letchford, author of the book Reversed: A Memoir and literacy problem solver and founder of Teaching Students with Dyslexia reading program. Reading today from the book Eureka! About scientists and people who changed the world. Today I'm reading about— Edison. James Watt, the engineer who was born in 1736 and died in 1819. And the first comment is, the self-trained engineer who gave us the first modern steam engine and ushered in the Industrial Revolution. It's often claimed that the Scottish engineer James Watt invented the steam engine. He didn't, but he improved it so hugely That from being a useful aid in pumping water, it became a device that would spark and sustain the Industrial Revolution. Watt was, Watt was born in Glennoch, a shipbuilding town near Glasgow, Scotland. He left home to spend some time in London learning how to repair machines and instruments. On returning to Glasgow, He set up a repair shop near the city's university. This brought him in contact with a number of notable scientists, some of whom recognized the young man's intellectual spark and provided him with an informal education. One was a physical chemist, Joseph Black, famous for his investigations of carbon dioxide and heat. Black had been the first to recognize that temperature measures just how hot an object is. Equally important is the amount of heat an object contains. Black also discovered latent heat, the heat you need to supply to make water go from solid ice to liquid and from a liquid to a gas. Steam. The information about latent heat was to be invaluable to Watt, as he said about building a better steam engine. So that was the beginning of it, of what Watt did. Watt's first big breakthrough was to introduce a second chamber or a condenser in parallel with the first. The cylinder remained hot at all times Steam from it was directed into the cold second chamber where the chill condensed it. Not only did the new design use a lot less fuel, it worked much faster. Black was the one— was one of those who invested in Watt's endeavours to devise further improvements and turn his small-scale designs into a commercial project. Prospect. So that's Watt doing his steam engine and ushering in the Industrial Revolution. Check out more, find out more about Watt and what he did to change the world for the Industrial Revolution. Hit like, hit subscribe, and share with others.
