The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  When the informal assembly at Oxford whose meetings were generally led by the clergyman John Wilkins was chartered, two years after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, as the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, each Fellow was explicitly to be a “Gentleman, free, and unconfin’d.”18 Hooke’s need to make a living disqualified him from fellowship, though his talent made him indispensable. The solution—he was appointed to the salaried position of curator of experiments for the Royal Society in 1662—made him the first scientist in British history19 to receive a salary, though the salary in question was long in coming. It took until 1665,20 when Hooke was appointed professor of geometry at Gresham College at an annual stipend of £50 for life; the Royal Society then coughed up another £30, to make good on their original promise to Hooke of £80 a year.

  Robert Hooke’s pioneer status makes him a persuasive bridge between technology and science, which was in 1665—and for decades thereafter, in Britain and everywhere else—still the province of amateurs. Hooke spent his life in an occasionally successful search for both recognition and recompense, attempting, among other things, to turn his Law of Elasticity into ownership of the watch escapement, whose spring-loaded movement was a direct outgrowth of the Law.* When he died, his frugally appointed apartments contained a considerable amount of cash, largely earned from his surveying, contributing to a probably false reputation as a bit of a miser, but his attitude toward invention seems to be, in its way, as significant an innovation as his vacuum pump.

  While Boyle is traditionally remembered as the more important transitional figure in the development of steam power, he exhibited a strong prejudice in favor of those whose experiments were entirely in service of the search for truth, as opposed to those “mere Empiricks”21 and “vulgar chemists” simply trying to “produce effects.” This distinction makes his position clear in the never-ending debate between pure and applied science—really, between science and invention—that was already thousands of years old by Boyle’s day.

  The debate continues into our own day. Which is why it is Robert Hooke’s life, rather than Boyle’s, that leads from Torricelli (whose promising start on the potential uses of vacuum were forestalled by conservative Aristotelianism) and von Guericke (whose undoubted talent for innovation is mostly remembered as a circus act) on the path to engine 42B, and to Rocket.

  The next steps on that path would take the technology of steam and vacuum irrevocably into the world of commerce.

  * Part of the story of the Magdeburg hemispheres remains a bit of a mystery. Even if Gericke had been able to achieve a perfect vacuum—unlikely, with the equipment he had at hand—the total air pressure at sea level on a globe twenty inches in diameter would be a bit less than five thousand pounds—a lot, but not too much for thirty horses.

  * Though it should be noted that in 1676, the French physicist and priest Edmé Mariotte independently discovered “Boyle’s” law, and that in many European countries, the same equation is known as Mariotte’s Law.

  * Tellingly, in order to keep his discovery secret, and so secure his status as its discoverer, he first published the Law in the form of an anagram.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A GREAT COMPANY OF MEN

  concerning the many uses of a piston; how the world’s first scientific society was founded at a college with no students; and the inspirational value of armories, Nonconformist preachers, incomplete patterns, and snifting valves

  MIDWAY ALONG A LINE of statues that overlooks I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre, near the images of René Descartes and Voltaire, a rather forbidding figure looks down on the Napoleon Court. The man’s right hand, as is traditional, is tucked into his coat. His left hand, however, holds a curious contraption, something that looks a bit like a plumber’s helper but is in fact one of history’s most important leaps of mechanical imagination: the world’s first steam-driven piston. The hand holding it belongs to its inventor, Denis Papin, whose ingenuity was critical to the creation of a steam-powered world, and whose life illustrates, as well as anyone’s, the challenges of the inventive life.

  The son of a government official in the city of Blois, Papin, a Huguenot (like many in the city, which had long been a haven for French Calvinists), was trained as a physician at the University of Angers and possibly even practiced as one for a few years, though his later comments suggest he much preferred physics. In 1671, he got the chance1 to act on that preference when he met the Dutch mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens, a founding member of the Académie des Sciences (inaugurated in 1666 as the French equivalent of the Royal Society), who was at Versailles repairing a balky windmill used to power the palace’s fountains. The following year, Huygens, who had been impressed with Papin’s mechanical insights, offered him a job as his secretary, and Papin gave up the healing arts for good, migrating to Paris to work at the Royal Library.

  Huygens was another in a seemingly unending line of seventeenth-century scientists fascinated by vacuum and atmospheric pressure, and Papin’s time with him was evidently both satisfying and productive. The two worked on a number of air pump experiments, and jointly published five papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Académie Royale in 1675, though histories differ on whether they worked together on Huygens’s gunpowder-driven piston, a promising but slightly hazardous technology.

  During Papin’s stay in Paris, life in France was becoming more than slightly hazardous for the nation’s Huguenots, the beginning of a process that would end in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the return of official persecution, in 1685. By then, Papin had accurately read the writing on the wall, and, seeing no future for him in his birth nation, crossed to England in the fall of 1675. He was armed with a letter of introduction from Huygens to Robert Boyle, who was in need of a collaborator to replace Hooke, whose own researches were by then being financed by his employers at Gresham College and the Royal Society. The two evidently hit it off, and Papin joined Boyle as his secretary, though a better term would have been “experimental assistant.”

  While Papin was no Hooke (this is scarcely an insult: by 1675, Hooke had explained the twinkling of stars, described the earth’s elliptical orbit, rebuilt the fire-destroyed Royal College of Physicians, disputed with Sir Isaac Newton over the discovery of the diffraction of light, and invented the anemometer, and he still had twenty productive years in front of him), he did excel at both experimental design and mechanical gadgetry. Most famously, in 1681 he invented a steam digester, or “machine for softening bones” as he described it, which was essentially a pressure cooker designed to clean bones rapidly for medical study.

  The subsequent pattern of Papin’s life would be familiar to any contemporary academic in search of a tenure-track position. In 1679, before the steam digester made him briefly famous, Papin was hired by his predecessor, Robert Hooke, as a secretary at the Royal Society at an annual salary of £20; he left there in 1681 for a new job as “director of experiments” at the Accademia Publicca di Scienze in Venice, yet another Royal Society imitator. After the Accademia failed, Papin returned to England, and Hooke, for three more years, this time as “Temporary Curator of Experiments” at the Royal Society, leaving that to become professor of mathematics at the University of Marburg.

  Papin’s contributions might have had an even larger impact had he enjoyed, like Boyle, the income from lands acquired by the Earl of Cork. And they are not small even so. In the 1686 issue of Philosophical Transactions,2 Papin describes (though evidently did not actually construct) an early air gun, probably a direct outgrowth of his gunpowder-piston experiments with his onetime mentor, Huygens. His digester featured a brilliantly innovative safety valve: When the pressure inside the chamber of Papin’s invention grew high enough, it would overcome the weight of a hinged and weighted stopper and open a path to the outside, but when the pressure subsided, the stopper’s weight would cause it to sink back to its normal position.

  Most significantly for the
evolution of the steam engine, in 1690 he published, in the Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig, a design of a true atmospheric engine: one that used the vacuum created by steam condensation to let atmospheric pressure drive a piston—the same one carried by his statue at the Louvre. Papin’s great insight was recognizing that the weight of the atmosphere on the top of an open cylinder, which is apparent only when a vacuum is created at the cylinder’s bottom, could also drive something mechanical within the cylinder. He wrote, “Since it is a property of water3 that a small quantity of it turned into vapour by heat has an elastic force like that of air, but upon cold supervening is again resolved in water, so that no trace of the said elastic force remains, I conclude that machines could be constructed wherein water, by the help of no very intense heat, and at little cost, could produce that perfect vacuum which could by no means be obtained by gunpowder.”

  By 1707, he was corresponding with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician, engineer, and philosopher,* about the possibilities of an engine driven by steam pressure, all while trying to keep his head above water as a poorly paid councillor to Charles-August, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, a German principality located on the Prussian border. Keeping the landgrave interested proved a challenge all its own: Papin built him a centrifugal pump (evidently to water the landgrave’s gardens) and a furnace air blower that became known as the “Hessian bellows.” He even tried to design a hydraulic perpetual motion machine based on the belief that pressure from one large cylinder would provide a never-ending source of pressure on a smaller cylinder. By the time he built a demonstration submarine4 for his patron, however, the landgrave had already lost interest in it, and in Papin, who returned to England for the final time, spending his last years in unsuccessful attempts to promote a pension from the Royal Society and dying in poverty in 1712.

  Papin was by all accounts a difficult man who lived a difficult life, and it is impossible to tell which was cause and which effect. He spent virtually all his adult years as a refugee, partly because of his religion—the late seventeenth century was no time to be a French Protestant—but even more because he was enormously rich in talents for which no market yet existed. He was an industrial scientist before there was an industry to employ him, which made him, in consequence, completely dependent on patronage. His correspondence is evenly divided between generous sharing of his scientific discoveries and pleas for pensions, the latter wearing out his welcome in half a dozen countries. Papin’s career, even more than Hooke’s, illustrates the challenges faced by the most talented scientists if they lacked an independent source of income. The archetype—innovative talent supported either by patronage (governmental or aristocratic) or by inheritance—was as old as humanity and still quite sturdy.

  Before he became an object lesson in the difficulties of making a living as a seventeenth-century inventor, however, Papin made one final connection on the route to engine 42B, and to Rocket. In 1705, Leibniz, then a courtier in the north German city of Hanover, received a sketch of a new machine for using steam to raise water, which he immediately sent to Papin in Hesse. The sketch had come from London.

  THE TALLEST SKYSCRAPER IN the City of London, known variously as Tower 42 and NatWest Tower, occupies a site in Bishopsgate that was the former home of what was once London’s only university: Gresham College, founded by a bequest from the will of Sir Thomas Gresham as a sort of scholarly Shangri-La, a college with neither students nor degrees. Instead, it houses scholars who offer lectures to any member of the public who cares to attend, and has been doing so ever since 1597. When Christopher Wren was tapped, in 1660, for the first lecture to what was to become the Royal Society, he was the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and consequently that was where the lecture was given. The Royal Society called Gresham home for the next forty years, except for a brief period when fire and plague chased them out of London altogether.

  Thus it was at Gresham College on June 14, 1699, that the Royal Society assembled for a demonstration of what was described as “a new Invention for Raiseing of Water and occasioning Motion to all Sorts of Mill Work by the Impellent Force of Fire which will be of great use and Advantage for Drayning Mines”—in plain English, a steam engine. Its inventor was a military engineer named Thomas Savery.

  The need for “drayning mines” was a relatively recent phenomenon, a direct consequence of the replacement of charcoal by pitcoal as the preferred fuel for space heating and for smelting metal. The preference was due less to the superiority of the mineral over wood, than to the fact that the raw material for charcoal was disappearing far faster than it could ever be produced. However, the deeper one digs for pitcoal, the greater the chance of finding water that needs “drayning,” either by digging drainage tunnels, or adits—expensive, and only practical where the topography permits—or building pumps. The most powerful pumps in use in seventeenth-century England were operated by waterwheels, but nothing obliged rivers and streams to be convenient to mines; finding an alternative machine that could overcome water’s tendency to seek the lowest level of any excavation meant that vacuum was no longer a purely philosophical concept.

  Savery was not the first to realize that, just as turning water into steam created pressure, converting it back into water produced the opposite: a vacuum. By the middle of the seventeenth century, large numbers of people started to sense the enormous potential of a steam-created vacuum for pulling wealth out of the ground in the form not only of coal but also of copper, tin, and silver. Some of the attempts were made by Italians: in 1606, a Neapolitan engineer named Giambattista della Porta designed a machine to pump water out of a closed container using steam; some by Frenchmen: in 1609 or 1610, Salomon de Caus, an ambitious gardener who specialized in designing fountains, traveled from Dieppe to England, where he built a number of steam-driven toys at one of the residences of the Prince of Wales. And some were Englishmen, like the now forgotten David Ramsay, who supposedly invented, in 1631, a device “to Raise Water from Lowe Pitts by Fire,”5 or the Marquess of Worcester, whose “water-forcing engine” dates from 1663.

  The inability of della Porta, de Caus, and others to produce a working steam pump was, in some sense, as valuable as success might have been, since they failed publicly enough that others were able to learn from their failures. Thomas Savery was one of them, and it is worth noting that his own experiments were financed not by a wealthy aristocrat, but by a national government.

  This is a poorly understood aspect of the Industrial Revolution. It doesn’t fit very well with either a heroic entrepreneurial history in which visionary innovators, usually working alone, develop the ideas, machines, and institutions of progress, or a deterministic one, in which technological progress is a function of predictable natural laws. The messy truth turns out to be that the innovative culture that blossomed in eighteenth-century Britain depended both on individuals looking out for their own interests, and on recognizing a national interest in innovation. When Savery started investigating the “impellent force of fire,” he was almost certainly working on his own behalf. But he did so at an English government facility: the Royal Office of Ordnance, which supported a large number of workshops and factories around London, and whose sole purpose was improving the technology of war. And so they did; though the cannon of the era were still mostly manufactured by private contractors located in the Weald, an ironworking center forty miles south of London, the Office of Ordnance tested them, and, more significantly for an engineer like Savery, “was responsible for the design and fabrication6 of various military engines … cranes, devices for mechanically hurling projectiles, gun carriages … and pontoon bridges for spanning streams.” Sometime around 1639, the original Lambeth works of the Office of Ordnance had been expanded to include part of an ancient estate known variously as Fauxhall or Vauxhall, and made “a place of resort for artists, mechanics,7 &c [where] experiments and trials of profitable inventions should be carried on”—a sort of seventeenth-century equivalent of the U.S. Department of Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, whose self-described mission is “to prevent technological surprise to the U.S. [and] to create technological surprise to our enemies.”*

  As with DARPA—which is where, among other things, the predecessor of the Internet was invented—engineers at Vauxhall produced technological surprises for the civilian world as well as the military. British monarchs, after all, had interests in mining as well as conquest, so it is no coincidence that one of Savery’s predecessors at Vauxhall, Samuel Moreland (or Morland), an engineer in the employ of Charles II, made some sort of fire-driven water pump, “a new invention for raising any quantity of water to any height by the help of fire alone,” in 1675. Moreland left behind not only his notes about the pump (since vanished) but something far more useful: a calculation of the volume of steam—about two thousand times that of water.