Biography of Thomas Newcomen, Steam Engine Inventor

Thomas Newcomen (February 28, 1663–August 5, 1729) was a blacksmith from Dartmouth, England who assembled the prototype for the first modern steam engine. His machine, built in 1712, was known as the Atmospheric Steam Engine. Fast Facts: Thomas Newcomen Known For: Inventor of the atmospheric steam engineBorn: February 28, 1663 in Dartmouth, EnglandParents: Elias Newcomen and his first wife SarahDied: August 5, 1729 in London, EnglandEducation: Trained as an ironmonger (blacksmith) in ExeterSpouse: Hannah Waymouth (m. July 13, 1705)Children: Thomas (d. 1767), Elias (d. 1765), Hannah Before Thomas Newcomens time, steam engine technology was in its infancy. Inventors such as Edward Somerset of Worcester, Newcomens neighbor Thomas Savery, and French philosopher John Desaguliers were all researching the technology before Thomas Newcomen began his experiments. Their research inspired inventors such as Newcomen and James Watt to invent practical and useful steam-powered machines. Early Life Thomas Newcomen was born on February 28, 1663, one of six children of Elias Newcomen (d. 1702) and his wife Sarah (d. 1666). The family was solidly middle-class: Elias was a freeholder, shipowner, and merchant. After Sarah died, Elias remarried Alice Trenhale on January 6, 1668, and it was Alice that raised Thomas, his two brothers, and three sisters. Thomas likely served as an apprentice at an ironmonger in Exeter: although there is no record of it, he began to trade as a blacksmith in Dartmouth about 1685. Documentary evidence has him purchasing quantities of iron up to 10 tons from various mills between 1694 and 1700, and he mended the Dartmouth Town Clock in 1704. Newcomen had a retail store at the time, selling tools, hinges, nails, and chains. On July 13, 1705, Newcomen married Hannah Waymouth, the daughter of Peter Waymouth of Marlborough. They eventually had three children: Thomas, Elias, and Hannah. Partnership With John Calley Thomas Newcomen was assisted in his steam research by John Calley (c. 1663–1717), a man from Brixton, Devonshire. Both are listed on the patent for the Atmospheric Steam Engine. John Calley (sometimes spelled Cawley) was a glazier—some sources say he was a plumber—who served out an apprenticeship in Newcomens workshops and continued working with him afterward. Together they likely began working on the steam engine in the late 17th century, and by 1707, Newcomen expanded his businesses, taking out or renewing new leases on a number of properties in Dartmouth. Neither Newcomen nor Calley was educated in mechanical engineering, and they corresponded with scientist Robert Hooke, asking him to advise them about their plans to build a steam engine with a steam cylinder containing a piston similar to that of Denis Papins. Hooke advised against their plan, but, fortunately, the obstinate and uneducated mechanics stuck to their plans: In 1698, Newcomen and Calley made an experimental, 7-inch-diameter brass cylinder, sealed with a leather flap around the edge of the piston.  The purpose of the first steam engines like the ones experimented with by Newcomen was to drain water out of coal mines. Thomas Savery Newcomen was considered an eccentric and a schemer by locals, but he did know about the steam engine invented by Thomas Savery (1650–1715). Newcomen visited Saverys home in Modbury, England, 15 miles from where Newcomen lived. Savery hired Newcomen, a skilled blacksmith, and ironmonger, to forge a working model of his engine. Newcomen was allowed to make a copy of the Savery machine for himself, which he set up in his own backyard, where he and Calley worked on improving the Savery design. Although the engine that Newcomen and Calley built was not a total success, they were able to obtain a patent in 1708. That was for an engine combining a steam cylinder and piston, surface condensation, a separate boiler, and separate pumps. Also named on the patent was Thomas Savery, who at that time held the exclusive rights to use surface condensation. The Atmospheric Steam Engine The atmospheric engine, as first designed, used a slow process of condensation by applying condensing water to the exterior of the cylinder, to produce the vacuum, which in turn caused the strokes of the engine to take place at very long intervals. More improvements were made, which immensely increased the rapidity of condensation. Thomas Newcomens first engine produced 6 or 8 strokes a minute, which he improved to 10 or 12 strokes. Newcomens engine passed steam through the cock and up into the cylinder, which equilibrated the pressure of the atmosphere, and allowed the heavy pump rod to fall, and, by the greater weight acting through the beam, to raise the piston to the proper position. The rod carried a counterbalance if needed. The cock then opened, and a jet of water from the reservoir entered the cylinder, producing a vacuum by the condensation of the steam. The pressure of the air above the piston then forced it down, again raising the pump rods, and thus the engine worked on indefinitely. The pipe is used for the purpose of keeping the upper side of the piston covered with water, to prevent air leaks—an invention of Thomas Newcomen. Two gauge-cocks and a safety valve were built in; the pressure used was hardly greater than that of the atmosphere, and the weight of the valve itself was ordinarily sufficient to keep the pipe down. The condensing water, together with the water of condensation, flowed off through the open pipe. Thomas Newcomen modified his steam engine so that it could power the pumps used in mining operations that removed water from mine shafts. He added an overhead beam, from which the piston was suspended at one end and the pump rod at the other. Death Thomas Newcomen died on August 5, 1729, in London at a friends house. His wife Hannah outlived him, she moved to Marlborough, and died in 1756. His son Thomas became a serge maker (cloth maker) in Taunton, and his son Elias became an ironmonger (but not an inventor) like his father. Legacy At first, Thomas Newcomens steam engine was seen as a rehash of earlier ideas. It was compared to a piston engine powered by gunpowder, designed (but never built) by Christian Huyghens, with a substitution of steam for the gasses generated by the explosion of gunpowder. Part of the issue why Newcomens work was not recognized might have been that, compared to the other inventors of the day, Newcomen was a middle-class blacksmith, and the more educated and elite inventors simply couldnt imagine that such a person would be able to invent something new. It was later recognized that Thomas Newcomen and John Calley had improved the method of condensation used in the Savery engine. French inventor and philosopher John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744), wrote that Newcomens steam engine came into extensive use in all the mining districts, particularly in Cornwall, and was also applied to the drainage of wetlands, the supply of water to towns, and ship propulsion. The first steam-powered locomotive was invented in the first decade of the 19th century, based in part on Newcomens technology. Sources Allen, J.S. Newcomen, Thomas (1663–1729). A Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland, Volume 1: 1500–1830. Eds. Skempton, A.W. et al. London: Thomas Telford Publishing and Institution of Civil Engineers, 2002. 476–78.Dickinson, Henry Winram. Newcomen and his Vacuum Engine. A Short History of the Steam Engine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 29–53.Karwatka, Dennis. Thomas Newcomen, Inventor of the Steam Engine. Tech Directions 60.7:9, 2001.  Prosser, R.B. Thomas Newcomen (1663–1729). Dictionary of National Biography Volume 40 Myllar—Nicholls. Ed. Lee, Sidney. London: Smith, Elder Co., 1894. 326–29.

Visit The Young At Art Museum - 1437 Words

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Brave New World (1932) is one of the most insidiou Essay Example For Students

Brave New World (1932) is one of the most insidiou Essay s works of literature ever written. An exaggeration? Tragically, no. Brave New World has come to serve as the false symbol for any regime of universal happiness. So how does Huxley turn a future where were all notionally happy into the archetypal dystopia? If its technically feasible, whats wrong with using biotechnology to get rid of mental pain altogether?Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and even sinister place. This is because Huxley deliberately endows his ideal society with features likely to alienate his audience. Typically, reading BNW elicits disturbing feelings which the society it depicts has notionally vanquished not a sense of joyful anticipation. Thus BNW doesnt, and isnt intended by its author to, evoke just how wonderful our lives could be if the human genome were rewritten. Lets say our DNA will be spliced and edited so we can all enjoy life-long bliss, awesome peak experiences, and a spectrum of outrageously good designer-drugs. Nor does Huxleys comparatively sympathetic account of the life of the Savage on the Reservation convey just how nasty the old regime of pain, disease and unhappiness can be. If you think it does, then you enjoy an enviably sheltered life and an enviably cosy imagination. For its all sugar-coated pseudo-realism. In BNW, Huxley contrives to exploit the anxieties of his bourgeois audience about both Soviet Communism and Fordist American capitalism. He taps into, and then feeds, our revulsion at Pavlovian-style behavioural conditioning and eugenics. Worse, it is suggested that the price of universal happiness will be the sacrifice of the most hallowed shibboleths of our culture: motherhood, home, family, freedom, even love. The exchange yields an insipid happiness thats unworthy of the name. Its evocation arouses our unease and distaste. In Brave New World, happiness derives from consuming mass-produced goods, sport, promiscuous sex, the feelies, and most famously of all, a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug, soma. As perfect pleasure-drugs go, soma underwhelms. Its not really a utopian wonderdrug at all. It does makes you high. Yet its more akin to a hangoverless tranquill iser or an opiate or a psychic anaesthetising SSRI like Prozac than a truly life-transforming elixir. Third-millennium neuropharmacology, by contrast, will deliver a vastly richer product-range of designer-drugs to order. For a start, soma is a very one-dimensional euphoriant. It gives rise to only a shallow, unempathetic and intellectually uninteresting well-being. Apparently, taking soma doesnt give Bernard Marx, the disaffected sleep-learning specialist, more than a cheap thrill. Nor does it make him happy with his station in life. John the Savage commits suicide soon after taking soma guilt and despair born of serotonin depletion!?. The drug is said to be better than (promiscuous) sex the only sex the brave new worlders practise. But a regimen of soma doesnt deliver anything sublime or life-enriching. It doesnt catalyse any mystical epiphanies or life-defining insights. It doesnt in any way promote personal growth. Instead, it provides a mindless, inauthentic imbecile happiness a vacuous escapism which makes people comfortable with their lack of freedom. If Huxley had wished to tantalise, rather than repel, emotional primitives like us with the biological nirvana soon in prospect, then he could have envisaged utopian wonderdrugs which reinforced or enriched our most cherished ideals. In our imaginations, perhaps we might have been allowed via chemically-enriched brave new worlders to turn ourselves into idealised versions of the sort of people wed most like to be. Behavioural conditioning, too, could have been used by the utopians to sustain, rather than undermine, a more sympathetic ethos of civilised society and a life well led. Likewise, biotechnology could have been exploited in BNW to encode life-long fulfilment and super-intellects for everyone instead of manufacturing a rigid hierarchy of genetically-preordained castes. Huxley, however, has an altogether different agenda in mind. He is seeking to warn us against scientific utopianism. He succeeds all too well. Although we tend to see other people, not least the notional brave new worlders, as the hapless victims of propaganda and disinformation, we may find the manipulated dupes have been us. For Huxley does a ef fective hatchet-job on the very sort of unnatural hedonic engineering that

Trash Essay Example For Students

Trash Essay Of all the movies that have ever been based on historical events and people, none have matched the accuracy and quality of the motion picture Gandhi. One could almost mistake the factual history of Gandhis life as a summary of the movie plot. The portrayal of Gandhis character was flawless, and was not one hint of the usual dramatics that have ruined the credibility of most historical based films. The storyline in the movie starts off with Gandhi, a young lawyer just out of British law school, on his way to South Africa by train. While on the train, Gandhi is confronted by the conductor, who orders him to move from the first class compartments to the third class storage simply because. The movie Gandhi starts off with the assassination of Gandhi on January 30, 1948. He was killed because of the split of Hindus and Muslims into Pakistan and India, instead of trying to keep the country united (which was impossible at the time). The story then jumps back to Gandhi early in his life, when he is a practicing attorney. He is traveling in South Africa on a train and is thrown off because he refuses to give up his first class seat. The conductor wants him to move because he is Indian. This upsets him and he organizes a burning of the discriminatory codes. The protestors are arrested and released. Gandhi is motivated by religious means; he believes that everyone is equal in Gods eyes. He gets involved in several movements for equality, and he stresses non-violence very strongly. The Indians are very mad because British rule continues to limit their rights. They are supposed to all get fingerprinted, and their marriage laws are invalid. Gandhis followers vow to fight their o ppressors to the death, but he discourages them from violence. He and his wife form a sort of commune of purity. They live off of the land entirely. During one scene, they ask all of Gandhis followers to burn all of their clothes that were made in Britain and wear only what they can make themselves. Gandhi practices this for the rest of his life, usually wearing just a loincloth. In another scene, Gandhi is in jail, and some of his followers are peacefully gathered in a square. The police lock up the square and kill almost everyone, over 1,500 people. Gandhi is disgusted and discouraged. He continues to preach non-violence, but the Indians do have occasional conflict with the police. Gandhis counter to the popular phrase an eye for an eye says that after that, everyone will be blind. Gandhi leads several organized protests against British rule. In one, all Indians stopped doing their work, and the major cities in the country were disabled. Another time, he led a 165-mile walk to the sea to protest the British monopoly on salt. The Indians made their own salt out of the sea. A turning point on the Indian fight for independence was the western press. Reporters witnessed a scene in which Indians tried to get into a factory row by row, and were brutally beaten by soldiers, row by row, as the women pulled the dead and injured away. Also, a reporter for Time magazine met Gandhi when he was in jail, took a lot of pictures of him, and made his plight known to the world. Finally, Gandhi travels to Europe to negotiate Indias freedom. While there, they cover some ground, but the actual release comes several years later, on August 15, 1947. After they are free, there is a civil war between the Hindus and the Muslims. They are forced to move around so they are in separate parts, India and Pakistan, and total chaos breaks out. Gandhi goes on another one of his fasts and refuses to eat until he is convinced all fighting has stopped. This is very difficult, but is accomplishe d. Soon afterwards, however, is his asassination. The movie Gandhi starts off with the assassination of Gandhi on January 30, 1948. He was killed because of the split of Hindus and Muslims into Pakistan and India, instead of trying to keep the country united (which was impossible at the time). The story then jumps back to Gandhi early in his life, when he is a practicing attorney. He is traveling in South Africa on a train and is thrown off because he refuses to give up his first class seat. The conductor wants him to move because he is Indian. This upsets him and he organizes a burning of the discriminatory codes. We are let into Gandhis life at 24yrs of age in the movie Ghandhi, upon which we see him getting kicked off the train. Though he is a stand up citizen and a respected lawyer he is treated with the same disrespect as blacks were during the Rosa Parks incident. We see an immediate racial prejudice .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 , .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 .postImageUrl , .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 , .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5:hover , .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5:visited , .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5:active { border:0!important; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5:active , .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5 .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .uded18723fd5791e367751437622b8da5:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: Hemingway, In The Old Man And The Sea , Examines The Struggles Of Man Essay We will write a custom essay on Trash specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now