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A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a cylinder. This pushing force can be transformed by a connecting rod and crank into rotational force for work.
The company introduced high-pressure steam engines to the riverboat trade in the Mississippi watershed. The first high-pressure steam engine was invented in 1800 by Richard Trevithick. [44] The importance of raising steam under pressure (from a thermodynamic standpoint) is that it attains a higher temperature. Thus, any engine using high ...
Steam engines of this kind propelled the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and the world. The Watt steam engine design was an invention of James Watt that became synonymous with steam engines during the Industrial Revolution, and it was many years before significantly new designs began to replace the basic Watt design.
German physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius restated Carnot's principle known as the Carnot cycle and gave to the theory of heat a truer and sounder basis. His most important paper, "On the Moving Force of Heat", [3] published in 1850, first stated the second law of thermodynamics. In 1865 he introduced the concept of entropy.
Such an engine incorporates a piston acted upon by steam alternately on the two sides, hence doubling its power. The linkage actually used by Watt (also invented by him) in his later rotary beam engines was called the parallel motion linkage, a development of "Watt's linkage", but using the same principle. The piston of the engine is attached ...
(Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, by Francis Chantrey) James Watt FRS, FRSE (/ w ɒ t /; 30 January 1736 (19 January 1736 OS) – 25 August 1819) [a] was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native ...
1st century AD – Hero of Alexandria describes the Aeolipile, as an example of the power of heated air or water.The device consists of a rotating ball spun by steam jets; it produced little power and had no practical application, but is nevertheless the first known device moved by steam pressure.
The atmospheric engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, and is often referred to as the Newcomen fire engine (see below) or simply as a Newcomen engine. The engine was operated by condensing steam drawn into the cylinder, thereby creating a partial vacuum which allowed the atmospheric pressure to push the piston into the cylinder.