Talk:Thomas Newcomen/Material from Wikipedia user Dr. Gabriel Gojon/The Newcomen Fraud
The Newcomen Fraud In 1712, Papin apparently vanished without a trace-- not even a death notice. That same year, as the witchhunt against Leibniz was reaching frenzied heights in England, Thomas Newcomen suddenly appeared to build his fabled fire engine "near Dudley Castle." Newcomen's engine was simply a scaled up atmospheric steam pump that was based completely on a combination of two of Papin's earlier ideas:(1) the use of steam to create a vacuum and drive a piston (1690); (2) the use of a lever mechanism to transmit power from one pump to another (1687).
In Newcomen's atavistic design, steam enters a cylinder under a piston from a separate boiler (see Figure 9). Cold water is poured over the cylinder or is sprayed inside of it, condensing the steam and creating a vacuum; the piston is forced downwards by atmospheric pressure. In turn, a piston rod pulls down one end of a balance beam that operates an ordinary mine pump attached to the other end of the beam, and placed down a mine shaft. Steam reenters the cylinder, merely counterbalancing atmospheric pressure; the piston is then raised back to the top of the cylinder by the weight of the water pump apparatus, and the cycle is repeated.
Compared to the level of conception and design achieved by Papin, Newcomen's "exotic lever" is manifestly primitive, and a great step backwards. Not only is the force of the engine limited to mere atmospheric pressure, and the design limited to raising water from mines, but Newcomen still insisted on alternately cooling off and heating up the same cylinder, wasting tremendous amounts of steam, and consuming massive quantities of coal. For this reason, his engine was used mainly by the owners of the coal mines themselves, who could afford the fuel.
The calculated result was a near 100-year containment of steam technology, which was overcome only by the intervention of Leibniz's intellectual heirs in America.
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