Steam Tamer James Watt
Watt was born in Scotland in 1736. Often ill as a child, he attended school only intermittently. His education was a home-schooled affair—some of it taught by his parents, others by himself, thanks to his innate intelligence. At 18, the young man came to London, where he spent a year learning the craft of making and repairing measuring instruments. In addition to his inquisitive mind, James had a gifted hand, and the combination of these two qualities ultimately made him a man of international renown.
Watt began his career as a mechanic at the University of Glasgow, where he served as a maker of mathematical instruments and managed a small workshop. This now-forgotten craft required not only a thorough understanding of the workings of any mechanism but also a certain amount of scientific knowledge. Admittedly, not everyone can make a theodolite, construct a large church organ, or repair a monumental tower clock. To Watt, such work seemed like a simple, straightforward undertaking; it seemed there was no broken mechanism in the world that his skilled hands couldn't restore to life.
Constantly surrounded by scientific circles and naturally inquisitive, Watt soon became a well-rounded individual, familiarizing himself with the fundamentals of the natural sciences of the time and even casually learning several foreign languages. In his spare time, he dabbled in philosophy and music. Over the years, the young master developed into a true scientist and engineer, and his small workshop soon became a kind of club where young scientists would gather in the evenings to discuss ideas and then immediately test their validity through experimentation.
The young master greatly enjoyed his work at the university, but his finances were in a dire state, as the gift of making money had not been bestowed upon this talented man by the Almighty. Yet, ultimately, the Lord took pity on Watt: his friend Craig proposed a joint venture, shouldering the costs of setting up a new independent workshop and handling administrative duties, leaving his partner free to devote his leisure time entirely to his favorite pastime—designing and repairing mechanisms. The new venture was successful; Craig proved a skilled administrator, and the workshop soon became immensely popular in the city, literally inundated with orders.
One day, one of the professors approached Watt with a request to figure out why the model of Newcomen's primitive steam-atmospheric engine, which had recently been handed over to the university, stubbornly refused to work.
The engineer took on the task with his usual thoroughness and, unexpectedly captivated by the engine's design, not only identified its mechanical flaws but also made significant improvements. In Newcomen's engine, steam condensed in the cylinder as a result of water injected inside, and the piston made its power stroke from top to bottom thanks to the vacuum created within the cylinder (hence the name "atmospheric").
Watt introduced an additional device into the design – a steam condenser, which significantly increased the engine’s efficiency.
Gradually, the steam engine completely consumed the master's thoughts, and Watt began conducting various experiments to better understand the properties of steam and the processes that occur after it enters the cylinder. The success of his work was significantly aided by the assistance of the physicist Black, who became his mentor and "scientific consultant." This work increasingly captivated the mechanic, and soon he abandoned all other work and devoted himself exclusively to his "fire engines."
Thus, after two years of research, Watt invented his own steam engine, which he modestly called an "improved Newcomen engine." The engine surpassed its primitive prototype in design and efficiency, although it still operated on the intermittent principle (the piston only made its power stroke when moving from TDC to BDC, driven by the force generated by the vacuum in the cylinder).
But Watt's luck ran out for a long time; he couldn't build a properly functioning prototype to clearly demonstrate the advantages of his invention to industrialists. He ultimately spent all his savings on constructing experimental designs, went into debt, and then his wife died, leaving the inventor with two young children to raise. At that time, Watt was driven to utter despair and, in his demented state, almost fled to Russia, where he was offered the chance to found and manage a steam engine factory. But friends dissuaded him from traveling to what he considered a completely barbaric country, where (in their opinion) he would surely be devoured by hungry wolves. Thus, unfortunate circumstances prevented Russia from becoming the birthplace of the first mass-produced steam engines.
In short, at first the steam engine brought nothing but trouble to the inventor.
But then Watt finally got lucky: his longtime acquaintance, industrial engineer Matthew Bolton, persuaded the inventor to start a joint venture and offered financial support. And if it weren't for Bolton, the undeservedly forgotten history, Watt, overwhelmed by life's hardships, would never have realized his brilliant ideas. The first so-called "single-action engine" (intermittent action) was designed by the inventor in 1765, but more or less regular production of steam engines of this design was not established until 10 years later. The engines produced by Watt and Bolton were quite primitive and were used only as driving mechanisms for pumps to drain water from coal mines.
Another important achievement of the prudent Bolton was his encouragement to Watt to extend the expiring term of his condenser patent. And in 1775, under the influence of the eloquent industrialist, the English Parliament, having considered all the circumstances, extended the term for 25 years. This, according to many historians, completely tied the hands of other steam engine inventors and significantly delayed the development of this important undertaking.
Further improvement of the machine required the use of a mechanism to convert the piston's reciprocating motion into the rotary motion of the wheel. Although such a mechanism existed in ancient times and was used on lathes, a certain Piccard managed to patent it as his own invention. Unwilling to bow to an adventurer and acquire a patent, the brilliant Watt, to demonstrate the difference between an inventor and a swindler, developed and patented five different mechanisms to solve this technical problem. But years later, he finally returned to the time-tested crank mechanism. However, even here, he showed his ingenuity and introduced an additional improvement to the drive, later known as the "Watt parallelogram," and also invented the centrifugal governor, which is still used in machines of this type today.
In 1782, Watt made the most important invention of his life, where his brilliant ideas found their final embodiment in metal - he designed the so-called "double-acting steam engine", which at that time was still equipped with a planetary-solar transmission mechanism (it was used in a steam mill).
Unlike earlier designs, where the piston only produced useful work on one stroke and wasted the second, in the new machine, work was performed to rotate the drive wheel on every piston stroke. And in this Watt machine, the piston's power stroke was achieved thanks to steam pressure, not vacuum. Simply put, in Newcomen's machine, the piston was pulled by negative pressure, while in Watt's machine, it was pushed by positive pressure.
The role of this machine turned out to be colossal; its design not only became the basis for steam engines produced later, but also served as the initial model for Lenoir’s development of the first mass-produced internal combustion engine.
A further development of the inventor's creativity was a machine with a crank transmission:
By 1880, Watt's primary patents had expired, and the creative initiatives of other inventors, previously stifled by them, were given the opportunity to develop further. Over the years, the machine's design was improved, specifically, the finicky valves were replaced with a single component—a sliding valve—and the lever mechanism transmitting force from the piston to the drive shaft was redesigned. Ultimately, the machine acquired the following design.
Disc piston 6 divided the cylinder into two chambers. First, steam, pumped from a separate steam boiler, was fed under high pressure through pipe 1 to distributor (spool valve) 3, from which it entered the cylinder chamber (left in the figure) through the inlet port, exerting pressure on piston 6 and moving it to the far right. During its stroke, the piston, via drive mechanism 7-11, spun flywheel 12.
After the piston reached its far right position, valve 4, which functions as the valve timing mechanism, shifted to the left, closing the left intake port and simultaneously opening the exhaust steam vent from left chamber 5 through pipe 2. This vent also cleared the intake port of the right chamber, allowing a fresh batch of steam to enter the cylinder and pressurize the piston. The piston performed a second stroke and, returning to its original position, again drove the flywheel through the drive mechanism, which completed one revolution in two piston strokes. This was the dual action of the machine.
Further evidence that James Watt was not only a mechanic but also a scientist is provided by his invention of a universal measure of steam engine performance: horsepower, defined by the inventor as the force required to lift a 76,04 kg load 1 meter in 1 second. This unit, developed by Watt through numerous experiments with the strongest London horses, allowed buyers to easily determine which machine from the available selection would be needed to complete the planned task.
The above shows that Watt was an extraordinary person, and his contribution to the development of world technology is truly priceless.
Despite the rapid development of internal combustion engines in the following centuries, they never completely replaced steam engines. These ancient creations of human hands have undergone a number of improvements and have survived to this day. For example, their descendants, steam turbines, are used worldwide in combined heat and power plants (CHP), where the steam energy is first used to generate electricity and, after being discharged from the engine, is used to produce hot water, which is then used for various purposes, such as heating buildings.
The inventor's name was later immortalized many decades after his death in the unit of power measurement, the watt, introduced in 1882.
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