The Watt steam engine design became synonymous with steam engines, and it was many years before significantly new designs began to replace the basic Watt design. The first steam engines, introduced by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, were of the "atmospheric" design. At the end of the power stroke, the weight of the object being moved by the engine pulled the piston to the top of the cylinder as steam was introduced. Then the cylinder was cooled by a spray of water, which caused the steam to condense, forming a partial vacuum in the cylinder. Atmospheric pressure on the top of the piston pushed it down, lifting the work object. James Watt noticed that it required significant amounts of heat to warm the cylinder back up to the point where steam could enter the cylinder without immediately condensing. When the cylinder was warm enough that it became filled with steam the next power stroke could commence. Watt realised that the heat needed to warm the cylinder could be saved by adding a separate condensing cylinder. After the power cylinder was filled with steam, a valve was opened to the secondary cylinder, allowing the steam to flow into...

A Corliss steam engine (or Corliss engine) is a steam engine, fitted with rotary valves and with variable valve timing patented in 1849, invented by and named after the US engineer George Henry Corliss of Providence, Rhode Island. Engines fitted with Corliss valve gear offered the best thermal efficiency of any type of stationary steam engine until the refinement of the uniflow steam engine and steam turbine in the 20th century. Corliss engines were generally about 30 percent more fuel efficient than conventional steam engines with fixed cutoff. This increased efficiency made steam power more economical than water power, allowing industrial development away from millponds.Corliss engines were typically used as stationary engines to provide mechanical power to line shafting in factories and mills and to drive dynamos to generate electricity. Many were quite large, standing many metres tall and developing several hundred horsepower, albeit at low speed, turning massive flywheels weighing several tons at about 100 revolutions per minute. Some of these engines have unusual roles as mechanical legacy systems and because of their relatively high efficiency...

Pre-dreadnought battleships were sea-going battleships built between the mid- to late- 1880s and 1905, before the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906. The pre-dreadnought ships replaced the ironclad battleships of the 1870s and 1880s. Built from steel, protected by case-hardened steel armour, and powered by coal-fired triple-expansion steam engines, pre-dreadnought battleships carried a main battery of very heavy guns in fully-enclosed rotating turrets supported by one or more secondary batteries of lighter weapons. In contrast to the chaotic development of ironclad warships in preceding decades, the 1890s saw navies worldwide start to build battleships to a common design as dozens of ships essentially followed the design of the Royal Navy's Majestic class. The similarity in appearance of battleships in the 1890s was underlined by the increasing number of ships being built. New naval powers such as Germany, Japan, the United States, and to a lesser extent Italy and Austria-Hungary, began to establish themselves with fleets of pre-dreadnoughts. Meanwhile, the battleship fleets of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia expanded...

A line shaft is a power-driven rotating shaft for power transmission that was used extensively from the Industrial Revolution until the early 20th century. Prior to the widespread use of electric motors small enough to be connected directly to each piece of machinery, line shafting was used to distribute power from a large central power source to machinery throughout a workshop or an industrial complex. The central power source could be a water wheel, turbine, windmill, animal power or a steam engine. Power was distributed from the shaft to the machinery by a system of belts, pulleys and gears known as millwork. Operation A typical line shaft would be suspended from the ceiling of one area and would run the length of that area. One pulley on the shaft would receive the power from a parent line shaft elsewhere in the building. The other pulleys would supply power to pulleys on each individual machine or to subsequent line shafts. In manufacturing where there were a large number of machines performing the same tasks, the design of the system...

The Whitbread Engine preserved in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, built in 1785, is one of the first rotative steam engines ever built, and is the oldest surviving. A rotative engine is a type of beam engine where the reciprocating motion of the beam is converted to rotary motion, producing a continuous power source suitable for driving machinery. This engine was designed by the mechanical engineer James Watt, manufactured for the firm Boulton and Watt and originally installed in the Whitbread brewery in London, England. On decommissioning in 1887 it was sent to Australia's Powerhouse Museum (then known as the Technological, Industrial and Sanitary Museum) and has since been restored to full working order. History The engine was ordered by Samuel Whitbread in 1784 to replace a horse wheel at the Chiswell Street premises of his London brewery. It was installed in 1785, the second steam engine to be installed in a brewery, and enabled Whitbread to become the largest brewer in Britain. The horse wheel was retained for many years, serving as a backup in case the steam engine broke down...

CSS Sumter, converted from the 1859-built merchant steamer Habana, was the first steam cruiser of the Confederate States Navy during the American Civil War. She operated as a commerce raider in the Caribbean and in the Atlantic Ocean against Union merchant shipping between July and December 1861, taking eighteen prizes, but was trapped in Gibraltar by Union Navy warships. Decommissioned, she was sold in 1862 to the British office of a Confederate merchant and renamed Gibraltar, successfully running the Union blockade in 1863 and surviving the war. Construction and merchant service before the American Civil War The wood-hulled merchant steamship Habana was built in 1859 at the Philadelphia shipyard of Birely & Lynn for Captain James McConnell's New Orleans & Havana Steam Navigation Co. She was powered by a 400-horsepower steam engine made by Neafie, Levy & Co, also of Philadelphia, driving a single propeller and was also rigged for sail, generally described as bark rigged. She was variously reported...

Charlotte Dundas is regarded as the world's second successful steamboat, the first towing steamboat and the boat that demonstrated the practicality of steam power for ships. Early experiments Development of experimental steam engined paddle boats by William Symington had halted when the sponsor, Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, abandoned the project. Symington had continued building steam pumping engines and mill engines. In 1793 he had developed a drive using a pivoted crosshead beam above the vertical cylinder to transmit power to a crank. Miller's project and Captain John Schank's unsuccessful attempt at a canal steam tug had come to the attention of Thomas, Lord Dundas, Governor of the Forth and Clyde Canal Company, and at a meeting of the canal company's directors on 5 June 1800 approved his proposals on the basis of "a model of a boat by Captain Schank to be worked by a steam engine by Mr Symington". The boat was built by Alexander Hart at Grangemouth to Symington's design with a vertical cylinder engine and crosshead transmitting power to a crank driving the...

A pumpjack is the overground drive for a reciprocating piston pump in an oil well.It is used to mechanically lift liquid out of the well if there is not enough bottom hole pressure for the liquid to flow all the way to the surface. The arrangement is often used for onshore wells. Pumpjacks are common in oil-rich areas. Depending on the size of the pump, it generally produces 5 to 40 litres (1 to 9 imp gal; 1.5 to 10.5 US gal) of liquid at each stroke. Often this is an emulsion of crude oil and water. Pump size is also determined by the depth and weight of the oil to remove, with deeper extraction requiring more power to move the increased weight of the discharge column (discharge head). A beam-type pumpjack converts the rotary motion of the motor to the vertical reciprocating motion necessary to drive the polished-rod and accompanying sucker rod and column (fluid) load. The engineering term for this type of mechanism is a walking beam. It was often employed in stationary and marine steam engine designs in the 18th and 19th centuries. Names...