Geeks in History: Thomas Savery
When one mentions “Steampunk”, the typical imagery is that of Victorian style in dress and design with difficult looking contraptions with visual movable parts. The genre can head from the mundane (such as clocks and whatnot) to fantastical devices that let people fly about in stylish wood, brass, and leather. Don’t forget the goggles! But is it accurate to immediately think of the Victorian era with steam-based technology? Time to dig farther, much farther back, to a man named Thomas Savery, inventor of the steam engine.
Thomas Savery
Thomas Savery (1650–1715), born in Shilston, Devonshire, was an English inventor and a military captain by 1702. He had a number of radical ideas for his time, including a boat propelled by paddles on wheels at both sides, which got him kicked out of the military by the Lord of the Admiralty’s office. They said he was a lunatic for his strange ideas. He was a rather busy man, having also built a clock that is still around today, held several patents such as one for a machine to polish plate glass, and several published works. His most successful invention, however, is the steam engine.
In those days, there was a definite need to keep water out of British mines, and there was no reliable way to pump the water out. One July 2, 1698, he submitted a patent for for the first engine used in this service, though it really wasn’t as reliable as it needed to be. In 1699, he presented his “Fire Engine” to King William III and immediately received the patent. The title is as follows:
“A grant to Thomas Savery of the sole exercise of a new invention by him invented, for raising of water, and occasioning motion to all sorts of mill works, by the important force of fire, which will be of great use for draining mines, serving towns with water, and for the working of all sorts of mills, when they have not the benefit of water nor constant winds; to hold for 14 years; with usual clauses.”
The following year, Parliament extended the patent another twenty-one years. This Act of Parliament was known as the “Fire Engine Act”, and was again extended farther in 1701.
Since his death, Savey’s Engine became the model for many others since, such as the more advanced designs of Denis Papin and Thomas Newcomen, a former partner. Those who came after clearly saw the brilliance in Savey’s invention and made improvements on the technology, paving the way for later uses in manufactured goods like iron and milling and mass transportation such as ships and trains. I wonder what his former military bosses would have thought at the invention of the steamboat, using both the steam engine and those wheeled paddles that had him labeled as a lunatic.
Geeks in History is a biweekly column about notable geeks of the past and how they impacted modern life.
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George
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