James Watt's Steam Engine
A fundamental change in working principles was brought about by James Watt. With the close collaboration of Matthew Boulton, he had succeeded by 1778 in perfecting his steam engine which incorporated a series of radical improvements, notably, the use of a steam jacket around the cylinder to keep it at the temperature of the steam and, most importantly, a steam condenser chamber separate from the piston chamber. These improvements increased engine efficiency by a factor of about five, saving 75% on coal costs.
The Newcomen engine could not, at the time, be easily adapted to drive a rotating wheel, although Wasborough and Pickard did succeed in doing so in about 1780. However by 1783 the more economical Watt steam engine had been fully developed into a double-acting rotative type with a centrifugal governor, parallel motion and flywheel which meant that it could be used to directly drive the rotary machinery of a factory or mill. Both of Watt's basic engine types were commercially very successful.
By 1800, the firm Boulton & Watt had constructed 496 engines, with 164 driving reciprocating pumps, 24 serving blast furnaces, and 308 powering mill machinery; most of the engines generated from 5 to 10 hp. An estimate of the total power that could be produced by all these engines was about 11,200 hp. This was still only a small fraction of the total power generated in Britain by waterwheels (120,000 hp) and by windmills (15,000 hp). Newcomen and other steam engines generated at the same time about 24,000 hp.
Read more about this topic: Steam Power During The Industrial Revolution
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