In 1712 Newcomen and his partner, Cawley, contracted to erect an engine at Wolverhampton. Next they erected two engines near Newcastle. The fourth was put up at Leeds in 1714. The fifth was erected in Cornwall at Wheal Fortune in 1720, and was on a larger scale than any previously constructed, having a cylinder of nearly four feet in diameter, and its performance was regarded as extraordinary, since it made fifteen strokes a minute, and drew up at each stroke a hogshead of water from a depth of 180 feet.
Thomas Savery was a captain of military engineers in 1702, and in 1705 he published a translation of Cohorn’s work on fortification. In the same year he was appointed Treasurer of the Hospital for Sick and Wounded Seamen. In 1714, by the favour of Prince George of Denmark, he was given the surveyorship to the waterworks at Hampton Court; but he died in the course of the following year, 15 May, 1715.
The date of Newcomen’s death has been already mentioned. Engines of his pattern continued to be erected long after his death, till there was scarcely a tin or copper mine of any importance in Cornwall that had not one or more of such engines at work, and the gaunt and ugly ruins of the engine-houses disfigure the landscape throughout the mining districts of Cornwall.
In 1882 Louis Figuier produced a five-act play at the Gaieté in Paris on Denis Papin. According to this version, Papin, who was a Huguenot, having fled to London with his family after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, abandoned wife and family to go to Germany, there to pursue his scientific investigations. When skimming a pot, he noticed the force that raised the lid, and conceived the idea of the power of steam.
He next set about contriving a model of a steamboat, and as that was successful, he constructed another on a large scale on the Weser, which was hacked to pieces by the boatmen, who were incited to this act of vandalism by a harpy of the name of Barbara. Papin returned to London, where his wife and son, he learned, had died during his ten years’ absence, and there, when reduced to the utmost distress, he learned that a Dartmouth locksmith named Thomas Newcomer [sic] had invented an engine in which steam was employed as a motive power. Papin then begged his way to Dartmouth, and recognized in Newcomer his son, whom he had supposed to be dead. The young man had been led to this invention by information he had found in drawings and writings of his father that had been left behind when he went to Germany. Papin did not make himself known, however, but allowed his son to reap all the honour and reward of his discovery. In the last scene Newcomer’s pump is being tried on the Thames in the presence of the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London, when Barbara and the Weser boatmen, having crossed the “silver streak” for the purpose, cripple the machine by cutting some cord that prevents the valve opening, and Papin, who has perceived this, rushes forward to avert an explosion, and falls a victim to his generous devotedness, for the boiler bursts just as he reaches it; he dies in his son’s arms, and Newcomer proclaims to the Lord Mayor and the world generally that all the honour of the invention and application of steam is due to his father, a Frenchman—a very satisfactory conclusion for a French audience.[28]
The French continue to claim for their countryman the glory of being the inventor of the modern steam engine. The system of the Marquess of Worcester was propulsion of cold water by the introduction of a blast of steam. Papin suggested the use of a vacuum formed by condensation of steam, so as to work a piston; and this vacuum in a cylinder he formed first by exploding gunpowder in it; and, as this did not answer, by removing the fire every time the condensation was required—a clumsy and impracticable method. Savery formed the vacuum first by dashing cold water against the cylinder, then by forming an outer ring of cold water about the receiver; but this did not answer well, as this body of water rapidly heated. Moreover, he did not adopt the piston, but drew up the water from mines by suction. Then came Newcomen, who adapted the piston in a cylinder to Savery’s engine; and finally Newcomen and Savery together discovered how to chill and condense the steam by an injection of cold water. Papin undoubtedly suggested the leading lines on which the steam engine was to be constructed, but he was unable effectually to apply his ideas or to rectify defects in such machines as he suggested. The solution was due to Newcomen and Savery.