A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine

by Robert Henry Thurston

The inductive method, which built up all the older sciences, and which has created all those of recent development, consists, first, in the discovery and quantitative determination of facts; secondly, when a sufficient number of facts have been thus observed and defined, in the grouping of those facts, and the detection, by a study of their mutual relations, of the natural laws which give rise to or regulate them. This simple method is that—and the only—method by which science advances. By this method, and by it only, do we acquire connected and systematic knowledge of all the phenomena of Nature of which the physical sciences are cognizant. It is only by the application of this Aristotelian method and philosophy that we can hope to acquire exact scientific knowledge of existing phenomena, or to become able to anticipate the phenomena which are to distinguish the future. The Aristotelian method of observing facts, and of inductive reasoning with those facts as a basis, has taught the chemist the properties of the known elementary substances and their characteristic behavior under ascertained conditions, and has taught him the laws of combination and the effects of their union, enabling him to predict the changes and the phenomena, chemical and physical, which inevitably follow their contact under any specified set of conditions.

It is this process which has enabled the physicist to ascertain the methods of molecular motion which give us light, heat, or electricity, and the range of action and the laws which govern the transfer of energy from one of these modes of motion to another. It was this method of study which enabled James Watt to detect and to remedy the defects of the Newcomen engine, and it is by the Aristotelian philosophy that the engineer of to-day is taught to construct the modern steamship, and to predict, before the keel is laid or a blow struck in the workshop or the ship-yard, what will be the weight of the vessel, its cargo-carrying capacity, the necessary size and power of its engines, the quantity of coal which they will require per day while crossing the ocean, the depth at which the great hull will float in the water, and the exact speed that the vessel will attain when the engines are exerting their thousand or their ten thousand horse-power.

It was at Alexandria that this mighty philosophy was first given a field in which to work effectively. Here Ptolemy studied astronomy and “natural philosophy;” Archimedes applied himself to the studies which attract the mathematician and engineer; Euclid taught his royal pupil those elements of geometry which have remained standard twenty-two centuries; Eratosthenes and Hipparchus studied and taught astronomy, and inaugurated the existing system of quantitative investigation, proving the spherical form of the earth; and Ctesibius and Hero studied pneumatics and experimented with the germs of the steam-engine and of less important machines.

When, seven centuries later, the destruction of this splendid institution was signalized by the death of that brilliant scholar and heathen teacher of philosophy, Hypatia, at the hands of the more heathenish fanatics who tore her in pieces at the foot of the cross, and by the dispersion of the library left by Cæsar’s soldiers in the Serapeum, a true philosophy had been created, and the inductive method was destined to live and to overcome every obstacle in the path of enlightenment and civilization. The fall of the Alexandrian Museum, sad as was the event, could not destroy the new philosophical method. Its fruits ripened slowly but surely, and we are to-day gathering a plentiful harvest.

Science, literature, and the arts, all remained dormant for several centuries after the catastrophe which deprived them of the light in which they had flourished so many centuries. The armies of the caliphs made complete the shameful work of destruction begun by the armies of Cæsar, and the Alexandrian Library, partly destroyed by the Romans, was completely dispersed by the Patriarchs and their ignorant and fanatical followers; and finally all the scattered remnants were burned by the Saracens. But when the thirst for conquest had become satiated or appeased, the followers of the caliphs turned their attention to intellectual pursuits, and the ninth century of the Christian era saw once more such a collection of philosophical writings, collected at Bagdad, as could only be gathered by the power and wealth of the later conquerors of the world. Philosophy once again resumed its empire, and another race commenced the study of the mathematics of India and of Greece, the astronomy of Chaldea, and of all the sciences which originated in Greece and in Egypt. By the conquest of Spain by the Saracens, the new civilization was imported into Western Europe and libraries were gathered together under the Moorish rulers, one of which numbered more than a half-million volumes. Wherever Saracen armies had extended Mohammedan rule, schools and colleges, libraries and collections of philosophical apparatus, were scattered in strange profusion; and students, teachers, philosophers, of all—the speculative as well as the Aristotelian—schools, gathered together at these intellectual ganglia, as enthusiastic in their work as were their Alexandrian predecessors. The endowment of colleges, that truest gauge of the intelligence of the wealthy classes of any community, became as common—perhaps more so—as at the present time, and provision was made for the education of rich and poor alike. The mathematical sciences, and the wonderful and beautiful phenomena which—but a thousand years later—were afterward grouped into a science and called chemistry, were especially attractive to the Arabian scholars, and technical applications of discovered facts and laws assisted in a wonderfully rapid development of arts and manufactures.

When, a thousand years after Christ, the centre of intellectual activity and of material civilization had drifted westward into Andalusia, the foundation of every modern physical science except that now just taking shape—the all-grasping science of energetics—had been laid with experimentally derived facts; and in mathematics there had been erected a symmetrical and elegant superstructure. Even that underlying principle of all the sciences, the principle of the persistence of energy, had been, perhaps unwittingly, enunciated.

Distinguished historians have shown how the progress of civilization in Europe resulted in the creation, during the middle ages, of the now great middle class, which, holding the control of political power, governs every civilized nation, and has come into power so gradually that it was only after centuries that its influence was seen and felt. This, which Buckle[104] calls the intellectual class, first became active, independently of the military and of the clergy, in the fourteenth century. In the two succeeding centuries this class gained power and influence; and in the seventeenth century we find a magnificent advance in all branches of science, literature, and art, marking the complete emancipation of the intellect from the artificial conditions which had so long repressed its every effort at advancement.

Another great social revolution thus occurred, following another period of centuries of intellectual stagnation. The Saracen invaders were driven from Europe; the Crusaders invaded Palestine, in the vain effort to recover from the hands of the infidels the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy Land; and intestine broils and inter-state conflicts, as well as these greater social movements, withdrew the minds of men once more from the arts of peace and the pursuits of scholars. It is not, then, until the beginning of the seventeenth century—the time of Galileo and of Newton—that we find the nations of Europe sufficiently quiet and secure to permit general attention to intellectual vocations, although it was a half-century earlier (1543) that Copernicus left to the world that legacy which revolutionized the theories of the astronomers and established as correct the hypothesis which made the sun the centre of the solar system.

Galileo now began to overturn the speculations of the deductive philosophers, and to proclaim the still disputed principle that the book of Nature is a trustworthy commentary in the study of theological and revealed truths, so far as they affect or are affected by science; he suffered martyrdom when he proclaimed the fact that God’s laws, as they now stand, had been instituted without deference to the preconceived notions of the most ignorant of men. Bruno had a few years earlier (1600) been burned at the stake for a similar offense.

Galileo was perhaps the first, too, to combine invariably in application the idea of Plato, the philosophy of Aristotle, and the methods of modern experimentation, to form the now universal scientific method of experimental philosophy. He showed plainly how the grouping of ascertained facts, in natural sequence, leads to the revelation of the law of that sequence, and indicated the existence of a principle which is now known as the law of continuity—the law that in all the operations of Nature there is to be seen an unbroken chain of effect leading from the present back into a known or an unknown past, toward a cause which may or may not be determinable by science or known to history.