Newcomen builds the atmospheric steam engine
Thomas Newcomen installed his first commercial steam engine in 1712 at a coal mine in Dudley, England. The engine pumped water out of the mine — a problem that had become acute as miners dug deeper to find more coal. The Newcomen engine was inefficient by later standards (about 1 percent thermal efficiency), but it solved the bottleneck that had been limiting coal output for a century. By 1733, more than 100 Newcomen engines were operating across British coal fields. Coal was now powering its own extraction, in a feedback loop that would scale for the next two centuries.
The deeper coal mines flooded constantly because they sat below the water table. Without mechanical pumping, the coal seams could only be worked to about 60 meters of depth. Newcomen's engine extended that to several hundred meters and unlocked an order of magnitude more accessible coal — the first instance of an energy technology unlocking its own resource base.
01 · Wood, Water & Land
For most of recorded history, energy meant biomass — wood for heat and smelting, water and wind for milling, animals and humans for muscle. Wealth meant land, because land grew the fuel and fed the workers. The first energy crisis in the Western world was a wood crisis: by the early 1600s, England had cut down so much of its forest for shipbuilding, charcoal, and heating that the kingdom was running short of trees. The cure forced upon them — burning the black rocks dug out of mines for warmth — would, within two centuries, rewrite the global ranking of nations.
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