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Steam Engine
History >> Industrial Revolution

The steam engine was one of the most important inventions of the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines were used in all sorts of applications including factories, mines, locomotives, and steamboats.

The Newcomen Steam Engine
by Newton Henry Black
and Harvey Nathaniel Davis (1913)

How does the steam engine work?

Steam engines use hot steam from boiling water to drive a piston (or pistons) back and forth. The movement of the piston was then used topower a machine or turn a wheel. To create the steam, most steam engines heated the water by burning coal.

Why was it important?

The steam engine helped to power the Industrial Revolution. Before steam power, most factories and mills were powered by water, wind, horse, or man. Water was a good source of power, but factories had to be located near a river. Both water and wind power could be unreliable as sometimes rivers could dry up during a drought or freeze during the winter and wind didn't always blow.

Steam power allowed for factories to be located anywhere. It also provided reliable power and could be used to power large machines.

Who invented the steam engine?

One of the first steam engines was invented by Thomas Savery in 1698. It wasn't very useful, but other inventors made improvements over time. The first useful steam engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. The Newcomen engine was used to pump water out of mines.

The Porter-Allen high-speed steam
engine was popular during the
late 1800s and early 1900s
Photo by Ducksters

Steam power really took off with improvements made by James Watt in 1778. The Watt steam engine improved the efficiency of steam engines considerably. His engines could be smaller and use less coal. By the early 1800s, Watt steam engines were used in factories throughout England.

Where was the steam engine used?

Throughout the 1800s, steam engines were improved. They became smaller and more efficient. Large steam engines were used in factories and mills to power machines of all types. Smaller steam engines were used in transportation including trains and steamboats.

Are steam engines still used today?

The steam engine as we think of it from the Industrial Revolution was largely replaced by electricity and the internal combustion engine (gas and diesel). Some old steam engines are still used in certain areas of the world and in antique locomotives.

However, steam power is still heavily used around the world in various applications. Many modern electrical plants use steam generated by burning coal to produce electricity. Also, nuclear power plants use steam generated by nuclear fission to produce electricity.

Locomotive steam engine
Source: State Library of Queensland

Interesting Facts about the Steam Engine and the Industrial Revolution

The unit of power (the Watt) was named after inventor James Watt.

James Watt used the term "horsepower" to describe how much power his engine could produce. He used it to compare his engine to the actual output of how much power horses could produce.

One horsepower is equal to 745.7 Watts.

The first successful commercial steamboat was the Clermont developed by Robert Fulton in 1807.

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History >> Industrial Revolution

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Kids learn about the steam engine and how it helped to power the Industrial Revolution including how it works, why it was important, who invented it, and fun facts. Educational article for students, schools, and teachers.

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Image

Image from Picturenow

Any seagoing vessel drawing energy from a steam-powered engine can be called a steamboat. However, the term most commonly describes the kind of craft propelled by the turning of steam-driven paddle wheels and often found on rivers in the United States in the 19th century. These boats made use of the steam engine invented by the Englishman Thomas Newcomen in the early 18th century and later improved by James Watt of Scotland. Several Americans made efforts to apply this technology to maritime travel. The United States was expanding inland from the Atlantic coast at the time. There was a need for more efficient river transportation, since it took a great deal of muscle power to move a craft against the current.

In 1787, John Fitch demonstrated a working model of the steamboat concept on the Delaware River. The first truly successful design appeared two decades later. It was built by Robert Fulton with the assistance of Robert R. Livingston, the former U.S. minister to France. Fulton's craft made its first voyage in August of 1807, sailing up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, New York, at an impressive speed of eight kilometers (five miles) per hour. Fulton then began making this round trip on a regular basis for paying customers.

Following this introduction, steamboat traffic grew steadily on the Mississippi River and other river systems in the inland United States. There were numerous kinds of steamboats, which had different functions. The most common type on southern rivers was the packet boat. Packet boats carried human passengers as well as commercial cargo, such as bales of cotton from southern plantations. Compared to other types of craft used at the time, such as flatboats, keelboats, and barges, steamboats greatly reduced both the time and expense of shipping goods to distant markets. For this reason, they were enormously important in the growth and consolidation of the U.S. economy before the Civil War.

Steamboats were a fairly dangerous form of transportation, due to their construction and the nature of how they worked. The boilers used to create steam often exploded when they built up too much pressure. Sometimes debris and obstacles-logs or boulders-in the river caused the boats to sink. This meant that steamboats had a short life span of just four to five years on average, making them less cost-effective than other forms of transportation.

In the later years of the 19th century, larger steam-powered ships were commonly used to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The Great Western, one of the earliest oceangoing steam-powered ships, was large enough to accommodate more than 200 passengers. Steamships became the predominant vehicles for transatlantic cargo shipping as well as passenger travel. Millions of Europeans immigrated to the United States aboard steamships.

By 1900, railroads had long since surpassed steamboats as the dominant form of commercial transport in the United States. Most steamboats were eventually retired, except for a few elegant "showboats" that today serve as tourist attractions.

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National Geographic Society

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Jeanna Sullivan, National Geographic Society

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Sarah Appleton, National Geographic Society, National Geographic Society

Margot Willis, National Geographic Society

other

Last Updated

October 10, 2022

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Image Image from Picturenow Any seagoing vessel drawing energy from a steam-powered engine can be called a steamboat. However, the term most commonly describes the kind of craft propelled by the turning of steam-driven paddle wheels and often found on rivers in the United States in the 19th century.

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Cyrus McCormick was an American inventor who revolutionized farming with his invention of the reaper.

He was born on Feb. 15, 1809 on a farm in Rockbridge County, north of Lexington, Va. He had a limited formal education but plenty of knowledge of farming and science.

His father, also named Robert, was a blacksmith as well as a farmer and was also a tinkerer who himself held several patents for labor-saving farm machinery. Young Robert showed a keen mind for scientific improvement, inventing a lightweight cradle for carrying harvested grain when he was just 15. It was the reaper, though, that made him very famous.

The usual process for harvesting grain was for a person carrying a large scythe to mow down grain and then for one or more people walking behind the reaper to tie the grain into bales, which would then be taken away on a cart. This process was very time-consuming and, as a result, limited the size of crop that a farmer could plant and still be able to complete the harvesting by the end of the season.

McCormick's father had worked on such a device for 16 years, beginning when young Robert was 6. In 1831, when Robert was 22, he took over the project and had the final version ready to go in just six weeks. The reaper cut, threshed, and bundled grain at a speed that human threshers could not match. The horse-drawn reaper could cut six acres of oats in an afternoon; by contrast, doing the same amount of work at that time would have taken 12 human workers.

McCormick got a patent for invention in 1834 but then, because of his family's ill fortune, tried to prop up its failing iron foundry. Nothing worked, and the family was very much in debt. McCormock started turning out reapers that he hoped to sell. It took awhile for his invention to catch on, and he spent a few years tinkering. Sales began to pick up in 1841; six years later, McCormick had to open a factory in Chicago in order to keep up with demand. He struggled to compete with other inventors in the field and was dismayed when his patent re-application was denied. He succeeded through a combination of innovation and marketing, employing novel practices like giving performance guarantees and offering lenient terms on credit purchases.

McCormick enjoyed great success in 1851, winning the Gold Medal at London's Crystal Palace Exposition. He was later elected into the French Academy of Science.

He lost his factory in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 but quickly rebuilt and regained his momentum. The McCormick Harvesting Machine Company became the largest manufacturer of farm equipment in the U.S. He found sales success internationally as well, finding markets in faraway places like Russia and new Zealand. His invention encouraged others to innovate and create other labor-saving devices. He is sometimes referred to as the "Father of Agriculture."

McCormick had married Nancy Flower in 1858. They had seven children together. McCormick suffered from paralysis for a few years at the end of his life and had handed over the running of his company to his son Cyrus, Jr., in 1880. McCormick died on May 13, 1884 at his home in Chicago.

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Cyrus McCormick and the Invention of the Reaper

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Cyrus McCormick was an American inventor who revolutionized farming with his invention of the reaper. He was born on Feb. 15, 1809 on a farm in Rockbridge County, north of Lexington, Va. He had a limited formal education but plenty of knowledge of farming and science.

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Cotton gin

In the late 17th century, US-born inventor Eli Whitney changed the cotton industry by inventing the cotton gin to quicken the process of eliminating husks and seeds from cotton fiber.

Whitney initially discovered cotton when he moved to Georgia in 1793 after it was introduced as a significant market crop in the state. While Sea Island cotton had a successful plantation along the coast since 1775, it did not gain much popularity because of its inability to be grown upland.

Short-staple cotton was grown upland, but early efforts by the farmers to make a revenue from this variety were denied by the monotonous task of eliminating the sticky green seeds from the cotton fibers. Back then, the seeds could only be removed by hand, which proved inefficient and slow.

In 1793, Whitney used his skills in New England textile machinery to develop a working cotton gin that could come up with up to 50 pounds of cotton daily. Smaller cotton engines were operated manually, while larger varieties were powered by water or horses.

Whitney used a combination of miniature wire hooks and a wire screen to ensure that the cotton pulls through while brushes regularly eliminated the loose cotton lint to avoid jams. Even though the development of the tool revolutionized the cotton industry, Whitney made little money for the cotton gin because of patent-infringement issues.

The patent laws of the Colonial American period had several loopholes that made it difficult for Whitney to protect his rights as the inventor. Although the rules were changed a few years later, Whitney's patent expired he could make much profit from the cotton gin.

Other than that, the invention of the cotton gin justified Southern planters to broaden slavery even as a growing number of Americans supported its abolition. According to several historians, the cotton gin also played a critical role to the start of the American civil war.

While the ratio of the slave population to the total population remained steady from 1790 to 1860, the percentage of slaves in the South saw a dramatic increase. By the end of the antebellum era, the state of Georgia had more slaveholders and slaves than any country in the Lower South.

Nonetheless, the economic impact of the cotton gin was vast after its invention as it yielded massive profits for America. By the mid-19th century, cotton became the leading export of America as it supplied three-quarters of the cotton in the world.

Fun and Interesting Facts about the Cotton Gin

Eli Whitney and his business partner Phineas Miller originally planned to install a massive amount of gins across Georgia and the rest of the South and charge planters a fee for using the gins.

The cotton gin was invented during the American Industrial Revolution.

The licensing troubles of the cotton gin were the initial test of whether the new patent system of the nation could determine what a patent could and could not operate.

Catherine Greene provided Whitney and Miller with the funds to create the first cotton gin in Colonial America.

Some scholars believe Catherine Greene originally developed the cotton gin. These historians added that Eli Whitney only applied for the patent since women were not allowed to file for patents at that time.

Whitney created two variations of the cotton gins. A large cotton gin could be driven using water or horsepower and a small modification that can be hand-cranked.

Eli Whitney was also credited as the pioneer of American manufacturing for the development of the cotton gin.

Several historians have also credited William Longstreet, Robert Watkins, and Scottish immigrant Robert Watkins with the saws that made the cotton gin a commercial success.

Q & A

Who funded the development of the cotton gin?
Catherine Greene, who is the hostess of Eli Whitney, funded the development of the cotton gin.

Who is the pioneer of American manufacturing?
Eli Whitney is the pioneer of American manufacturing.

When is the cotton gin invented?
The cotton gin was invented during the American Industrial Revolution.

Who was the business partner of Eli Whitney?
Phineas Miller was the business partner of Eli Whitney. Both Miller and Whitney originally had plans of charging farmers for using the cotton gin.

Where is the first cotton gin invented?
The first cotton gin was invented in the state of Georgia.

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In the late 17th century, US-born inventor Eli Whitney changed the cotton industry by inventing the cotton gin to quicken the process of eliminating husks and seeds from cotton fiber. Whitney initially discovered cotton when he moved to Georgia in 1793 after it was introduced as a significant market crop in the state.

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How inventions change history (for better and for worse) - Kenneth C. Davis

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