Book Description
Miller examines Watt's illustrious engineering career in light of his parallel interest in chemistry, arguing that Watt's conception of steam engineering relied upon chemical understandings.
Author : David Philip Miller
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 40,47 MB
Release : 2015-07-22
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1317314050
Miller examines Watt's illustrious engineering career in light of his parallel interest in chemistry, arguing that Watt's conception of steam engineering relied upon chemical understandings.
Author : David Philip Miller
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 469 pages
File Size : 28,10 MB
Release : 2019-04-18
Category : Science
ISBN : 0822986795
The Life and Legend of James Wattoffers a deeper understanding of the work and character of the great eighteenth-century engineer. Stripping away layers of legend built over generations, David Philip Miller finds behind the heroic engineer a conflicted man often diffident about his achievements but also ruthless in protecting his inventions and ideas, and determined in pursuit of money and fame. A skilled and creative engineer, Watt was also a compulsive experimentalist drawn to natural philosophical inquiry, and a chemistry of heat underlay much of his work, including his steam engineering. But Watt pursued the business of natural philosophy in a way characteristic of his roots in the Scottish “improving” tradition that was in tension with Enlightenment sensibilities. As Miller demonstrates, Watt’s accomplishments relied heavily on collaborations, not always acknowledged, with business partners, employees, philosophical friends, and, not least, his wives, children, and wider family. The legend created in his later years and “afterlife” claimed too much of nineteenth-century technology for Watt, but that legend was, and remains, a powerful cultural force.
Author : Ben Russell
Publisher : Reaktion Books
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 35,52 MB
Release : 2014-08-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1780234023
Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer James Watt (1736–1819) is best known for his pioneering work on the steam engine that became fundamental to the incredible changes and developments wrought by the Industrial Revolution. But in this new biography, Ben Russell tells a much bigger, richer story, peering over Watt’s shoulder to more fully explore the processes he used and how his ephemeral ideas were transformed into tangible artifacts. Over the course of the book, Russell reveals as much about the life of James Watt as he does a history of Britain’s early industrial transformation and the birth of professional engineering. To record this fascinating narrative, Russell draws on a wide range of resources—from archival material to three-dimensional objects to scholarship in a diversity of fields from ceramics to antique machine-making. He explores Watt’s early years and interest in chemistry and examines Watt’s partnership with Matthew Boulton, with whom he would become a successful and wealthy man. In addition to discussing Watt’s work and incredible contributions that changed societies around the world, Russell looks at Britain’s early industrial transformation. Published in association with the Science Museum London, and with seventy illustrations, James Watt is not only an intriguing exploration of the engineer’s life, but also an illuminating journey into the broader practices of invention in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Published in association with the Science Museum, London
Author : James Watt
Publisher :
Page : 536 pages
File Size : 15,88 MB
Release : 1970
Category : Chemists
ISBN :
Author : Malcolm Dick
Publisher :
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 33,21 MB
Release : 2020
Category : Engineers
ISBN : 1789620821
James Watt is celebrated as the inventor of the energy efficient pumping and rotative steam engines. Studies of Watt have focused on his inventiveness, influence and reputation. This book explores new aspects of his work and places him in family, social and intellectual contexts during the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
Author : Jennifer S. Pugh
Publisher :
Page : 12 pages
File Size : 17,38 MB
Release : 1985
Category : Chemistry
ISBN :
Author : Ben Marsden
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 20,7 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780231131728
Discusses the life of scientist James Watt, inventor of the separate-condenser steam engine, and focuses on re-discovering steam, types of steam engines, manufacturing and marketing a steam engine.
Author : Frank Puterbaugh Bachman
Publisher :
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 37,30 MB
Release : 1918
Category : Inventions
ISBN :
Nine remarkable men produced inventions that changed the world. The printing press, the telephone, powered flight, recording and others have made the modern world what it is. But who were the men who had these ideas and made reality of them? As David Angus shows, they were very different quiet, boisterous, confident, withdrawn but all had a moment of vision allied to single-minded determination to battle through numerous prototypes and produced something that really worked. It is a fascinating account for younger listeners.
Author : Trevor Levere
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 43,93 MB
Release : 2016-11-10
Category : History
ISBN : 1315411911
Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808) lived in ‘decidedly interesting times’ in which established orders in politics and science were challenged by revolutionary new ideas. Enthusiastically participating in the heady atmosphere of Enlightenment debate, Beddoes' career suffered from his radical views on politics and science. Denied a professorship at Oxford, he set up a medical practice in Bristol in 1793. Six years later - with support from a range of leading industrialists and scientists including the Wedgwoods, Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, James Keir and others associated with the Lunar Society - he established a Pneumatic Institution for investigating the therapeutic effects of breathing different kinds of ‘air’ on a wide spectrum of diseases. The treatment of the poor, gratis, was an important part of the Pneumatic Institution and Beddoes, who had long concerned himself with their moral and material well-being, published numerous pamphlets and small books about their education, wretched material circumstances, proper nutrition, and the importance of affordable medical facilities. Beddoes’ democratic political concerns reinforced his belief that chemistry and medicine should co-operate to ameliorate the conditions of the poor. But those concerns also polarized the medical profession and the wider community of academic chemists and physicians, many of whom became mistrustful of Beddoes’ projects due to his radical politics. Highlighting the breadth of Beddoes’ concerns in politics, chemistry, medicine, geology, and education (including the use of toys and models), this book reveals how his reforming and radical zeal were exemplified in every aspect of his public and professional life, and made for a remarkably coherent program of change. He was frequently a contrarian, but not without cause, as becomes apparent once he is viewed in the round, as part of the response to the politics and social pressures of the late Enlightenment.
Author : Malcolm Dick
Publisher :
Page : 133 pages
File Size : 40,95 MB
Release : 2019-05
Category : Inventions
ISBN : 9781905036561
James Watt (1736-1819) transformed the steam engine - the most significant invention of the Industrial Revolution. Without Watt there would have been no locomotives, steamships or factories where machines were energised by coal. Watt was, however, much more - a scientist who also developed the concept of horsepower, made the first commercial copying machine and gave his name to a unit of power - the Watt.