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But by 1765, the fate of Newcomen's engine was sealed. In that year, James Watt, a Scottish instrument maker employed by Glasgow University, began repairing a small model of a Newcomen engine. Watt was perplexed by the large amount of steam consumed by Newcomen's machine and realized that to remedy this inefficiency, he would have to do away with the constant cooling and reheating of the steam cylinder.

To do this, Watt developed a separate condenser, which allowed the steam cylinder to be maintained at a constant temperature and dramatically improved the functionality of Newcomen's engine.

For financial reasons, Watt wasn't immediately able to manufacture his new and improved atmospheric engine. But by 1776, he had formed a partnership with Matthew Boulton, an English manufacturer and engineer.

With financial backing from Boulton, Watt developed a single-acting (and later, a double-acting) rotative steam engine that, along with Watt's signature separate condenser, featured a parallel motion mechanism that doubled the power of the existing steam cylinder. The Boulton-Watt engine was also the first that allowed the machine's operator to control the engine speed with a device called a centrifugal governor.

Watt's improvements to the steam engine, combined with Boulton's vision of a nation powered by steam, facilitated the rapid adoption of steam engines across the United Kingdom and, eventually, the United States. By the 1800s, steam engines were powering mills, factories, breweries and a host of other manufacturing operations. In 1852, the first flight of a steam-powered airship took place. Future improvements of the steam engine led to modern day inventions such as: trains, ships, tractors.

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A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. Since the late 1700s steam engines have become a major source of mechanical power. The first applications were removing water from mines. In 1781 James Watt patented a steam engine that produced continuous rotative motion.

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One of the most significant industrial challenges of the 1700's was the removal of water from mines. Steam was used to pump the water from the mines. One of the fundamental principles used in the development of steam-based power is the principle that condensation of water vapor can create a vacuum.
The steam engine was developed over a period of about a hundred years by three British inventors.
However the first rudimentary steam engine was described by an ancient greek engineer: Hero of Alexandria.

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An ancient Greek inventor, named Hero of Alexandria, designed the world's first primitive steam turbine. Heron's aeolipile consisted of a hollow sphere, mounted on a pair of tubes. Heated from below by fire, the tubes transported steam to the sphere, where it was released through another series of tubes projecting from the sphere's equator. This movement of steam through the device caused the sphere to revolve, demonstrating the potential for using steam as a means of propulsion.

While Hero's aeolipile was created as a novelty, not a means of speeding up production, it is nevertheless the first known device to transform steam into rotary motion.

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The first practical steam engines were developed to solve a very specific problem: how to remove water from flooded mines. As Europeans of the 17th century switched from wood to coal as their main source of fuel, mines were deepened and, as a result, often became flooded after penetrating underground water sources.

A Spanish mining administrator named Jerónimo de Ayanz is thought to have been the first person to solve the problem of flooded mines. In 1606, de Ayanz registered the first patent for a machine that used steam power to propel water from mines. The Spanish inventor used his steam engine to remove water from silver mines in Guadalcanal, Seville.

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In 1698, Thomas Savery, an engineer and inventor, patented a machine that could effectively draw water from flooded mines using steam pressure. Savery used principles set forth by Denis Papin, a French-born British physicist who invented the pressure cooker. Papin's ideas surrounding a cylinder and piston steam engine had not previously been used to build a working engine, but by 1705, Savery had turned Papin's ideas into a useful invention.

Using two steam boilers, Savery devised a nearly continuous system for pumping water from mines. But despite the early success of Savery's system, it was soon discovered that his engine was only capable of drawing water from shallow depths, a problem that needed to be overcome if steam engines were to function in deep mines.

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In 1711 another Englishman, Thomas Newcomen, developed a better way to pump water from mines. His system used a redesigned steam engine that eliminated the need for accumulated steam pressure — a flaw in Savery's system that led to many an unfortunate explosion. Newcomen's "atmospheric" engine was the first commercially successful machine that used steam to operate a water pump.

Despite it's being an improvement on Savery's initial rendering of the steam engine, Newcomen's atmospheric engine also had its flaws. The machine was highly inefficient, requiring a constant flow of cold water to cool the all-important steam cylinder as well as a constant energy source to reheat the cylinder.

Regardless of this major drawback, Newcomen's engine design went unchallenged for the next 50-or-so years and, aside from pumping out mines, was also used to drain wetlands, supply water to towns and even power factories and mills by pumping water from below a water wheel to above it for re-use.