Thomas Newcomen Facts
Thomas Newcomen Facts
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| Interesting Thomas Newcomen Facts: |
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| Thomas Newcomen was born in Dartmouth, England. |
| As mines became progressively deeper, flooding became a major problem and resulted in the death of miners. |
| The usual method of removing the water was to use horses to pull buckets of water out of the mine but this was very slow. |
| Thomas Savery and Denis Papin invented a steam syphon pump but it was not efficient. |
| The Savery engine used steam to create a vacuum which lifted water from a mine. |
| Around 1712 he developed the steam driven water pump. |
| It could not operate below thirty feet and was not very effective. |
| Newcomen replaced the simple steam condensation cylinder with a piston cylinder and added a lever to transfer the force of the piston to the pump shaft. |
| In the new design used the vacuum to pull down a piston rather than drawing in the water directly. |
| Newcomen developed this new engine with his partner, John Calley. |
| Because Savery already had a patent on a steam driven water pump, Newcomen went into partnership with him. |
| The first Newcomen engine was used at the Conygree Coalworks near Dudley. |
| Its cylinder was almost eight feet long and twenty-one inches in diameter. |
| By 1733 over 100 Newcomen engines were in use in Britain and in Europe. |
| Some of their locations were in coal mines in Warwickshire and near Newcastle upon Tyne and in tin and copper mines in Cornwall. |
| The Newcomen engine was used unchanged for almost 75 years and almost 2000 of them were built. |
| In 1964 the Newcomen Society of London created a museum at Dartmouth with a working Newcomen engine that was built about 1725. |
| Very little is known of Newcomen's personal life except that he was a lay minister in the Baptist church. |
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