Month: June 2018

James Watt

Posted on by Dan

James Watt (1736 – 1819) vastly improved the Newcomen engine with a new steam engine of his own in 1781.  Watt’s improvements on the Newcomen’s engine provide one of the first significant examples of the application of cutting edge scientific research towards a technology that benefits society.

James Watt portrait
James Watt

Watt was born in Scotland, was the son of a shipwright, ship owner, and merchant and he never attended university because he was intended to take over the family shipping business when he grew older.  However when the family shipping business failed Watt traveled to London to learn instrument repair and returned to Scotland a year later where he eventually ended up working at Glasglow University as an instrument maker.   It was here that Watt began to experiment with steam power, and in 1763 Watt asked to repair a Newcomen engine from the university.

While fixing the Newcomen engine, which had been in use and remained largely unchanged in its design for over half a century, Watt noticed the huge inefficiency required to fully heat and then fully cool the entire massive cylinder at every stroke of the piston.  His insight was to create two chambers – one which was kept hot all of the time and one which was kept cool all of the time – that was connected by a valve that allowed steam to flow from the hot to the cool cylinder, where once it condensed would create the vacuum required to create the atmospheric pressure necessary to power the engine.  This change dramatically improved the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the steam engine.  He also added subsequent improvements to his engine based on further experiments such as his double acting engine, which was a true steam engine as opposed to an atmospheric engine.

In 1769 Watt was able to patent his engine designs and he went on to have a successful commercial partnership with Matthew Boulton, an English manufacturer.   The Boulton & Watt steam engines were state of the art at the time and helped to advance the Industrial Revolution through their usage in factories and mills.  His legacy as a scientist and inventor is immortalized in the SI unit of power, the watt, being named after him.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Posted on by Dan
Nicolaus Copernicus portrait
Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) can be equated with the person who’s work began the Scientific Revolution in Europe in the sixteenth century.  Although people think of Copernicus as a scientist he was really more of an intermediary between the ancient philosophers and modern scientists.  He did not carry out experiments or make any meaningful observations of the heavens.  Instead he had an idea for a model of the universe that he believed was better than any previous idea, and it happened to turn out to be correct.

Copernicus was born in Torun, a Polish town, and was the son of a wealthy merchant.  He eventually moved to Italy where he studied in universities there and was influenced by the humanist movement occurring at the time.  It was there he read a book by a German mathematician known as Regiomontanus called Epitome of the Almagest, where inconsistencies of the Ptolemaic model were pointed out.  This created doubt in Copernicus’ mind about the accuracy of Earth centered Ptolemaic model of the universe and he began to formulate an outline of a heliocentric model when he had mostly complete by 1510.

Copernicus’ model was much simpler than the Ptolemaic model in that it eliminated the need for the many cumbersome equants, epicycles, and deferrents needed to make the model work.  Despite its elegance, Copernicus delayed in publishing his work until the year that he died in 1543 when he published On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres.  His delay in publishing was probably due to fear of criticism.  While it did provide a workable model of the universe it also raised many questions (both theological and physical) that Copernicus would have had no way of answering.  It was because of these questions that the Copernican model took almost a century to become widely accepted when the invention of the telescope proved inconclusively that his model was correct.