Thomas Newcomen

Hello! My name is Thomas Newcomen, and I am an inventor. I was born in a town called Dartmouth in England, way back on February 24th, 1664. When I was a young man, I became an ironmonger. That’s a person who sells things made of iron, like tools for building and nails for houses. It was a very useful job, but what I really loved to do was tinker with things. I enjoyed looking at a problem and trying to figure out a clever way to solve it. I spent a lot of my time thinking about how machines could help people with their hard work.

In my part of England, there were many deep mines where brave people dug for coal and tin. But these mines had a very big and very watery problem. As the miners dug deeper into the earth, the holes would often fill up with water. This made it very dangerous and almost impossible for the miners to do their jobs. People tried to get the water out using buckets on long ropes or very simple pumps worked by hand, but it was slow and difficult work. I would see how hard everyone worked and think, 'There must be a better, faster way to get all this water out of the mines.'

I thought a lot about the power of steam, the puffy white cloud you see when water gets very hot. I wondered if I could use steam to do heavy work. My good friend, John Calley, was also a clever thinker, and we worked together to build a brand-new kind of machine. Our machine had a big piston that moved up and down inside a metal tube called a cylinder. First, we would fill the cylinder with hot steam. Then, whoosh! We would spray cold water on the outside of it. The cold water made the steam inside turn back into water, which created an empty space called a vacuum. This vacuum let the air outside push the piston down with great force, which pulled a lever that pumped water up from deep in the mine. In the year 1712, we built our very first working engine near a place called Dudley Castle. It went chug, chug, chug, and it pumped the water right out!

My atmospheric steam engine was used for more than 50 years to keep mines all over England and even in other parts of Europe from flooding. It was one of the very first engines of its kind. My work helped other smart inventors, like James Watt, create even better and more powerful steam engines later on. I lived to be 65 years old. I am so proud that my invention helped make mining safer for many people and was an important first step for all the amazing machines that came after it during a time called the Industrial Revolution.