G.— ENGINEERING. 14.1 



to say, much of the progress of the last three centuries would have been 

 impossible. Before Savery and Newcomen produced the first successful 

 steam engine many experiments on the pressure of the atmosphere, the 

 relation between pressure and volume in gases and the production and 

 the condensation of steam had been made by Porta, de Caus, Torricelli, 

 Papin, Boyle and others ; a group of students had gathered together in 

 London, ' inquisitive into natural philosophy,' and from these gatherings 

 arose the Royal Society ; also Galvani had discovered voltaic electricity 

 with all its potentialities for engineering and the world. Seventy years 

 after Savery's first engine was constructed, the greatest step in the 

 development of the steam engine was made by James Watt, not surely 

 as an invention in the ordinary sense, but as a splendid deduction from 

 the quantitative knowledge of the latent heat of steam obtained from 

 the epoch-making experiments of Black and Watt, and the earlier work 

 of Torricelli, Boyle and others on the pressure of the atmosphere ; with- 

 out these prior experiments it seems very doubtful indeed whether Watt's 

 great invention of the independent condenser and the air pump would 

 have been possible. 



' The invention all admired and each how he 

 To be the inventor missed ; so easy it seemed 

 Once found, which yet unfound, most would have thought 

 Impossible.' 



But though all may have admired, it was by rather a painful process 

 that Watt was able to gather the fruits of his achievement. The ex- 

 perience of the pioneer engineer has not infrequently been that of the 

 servants of an Eastern Caliph, who repressed too great popularity amongst 

 his generals by ordering ' if the enterprise succeed let the booty be equally 

 divided among my whole army : if its success be doubtful let him lose his 

 head.' 



A little more than sixty years after Watt built his first steam engine, 

 Michael Faraday, supplementing by his unique genius the experimental 

 work of many who preceded him, discovered that a magnet could be 

 made to spin round a fixed wire through which a cxirrent of electricity 

 was flowing and a wire containing a current could be made to spin round 

 a fixed magnet. Without these and other equally fundamental experi- 

 ments the wonderful developments of the generation and transmission 

 of power which have taken place during the last fifty years, as well as 

 the aj^plication of electricity to almost every need of the engineer, would 

 have been impossible. 



It is true that Carnot and Clausius came after Watt to perfect thermo- 

 dynamic theory, and the modern theories of electricity were not known 

 when Siemens made his first dynamos, but experimental and mathe- 

 matical science had shown the way to engineering developments of the 

 greatest significance to the life of the world. It has already been noticed 

 that water-wheels were known and used to raise water 2,000 and more 

 years ago, but in the seventeenth century water-wheels were little different 

 from those described by Vitruvius in the first century before Christ and 

 had efficiencies well below 50 per cent. In the latter part of the eighteenth 

 century and the beginning of the nineteenth, organised experiments on 



