The Steam Engine

The steam engine made the Industrial Revolution possible.  Inventers were familiar with the water wheel turning a mill stone for grinding grain and they knew how to construct the mechanisms.  The first steam engine used fire heating water and becoming steam to power the device.

The first steam team engine was patented in 1609 in Spain. A second stream engine that could pump water was patented in 1712. James Watt developed the steam engine in 1781 with enough power to run machines.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine

Thomas Savery, in 1698, patented the first practical, atmospheric pressure, steam engine of 1 horsepower (750 W). It had no piston or moving parts, only taps. It was a fire engine, a kind of thermic syphon, in which steam was admitted to an empty container and then condensed. The vacuum thus created was used to suck water from the sump at the bottom of the mine. The "fire engine" was not very effective and could not work beyond a limited depth of around 30 feet (9.1 m).

Thomas Newcomen, in 1712, developed the first commercially successful piston steam engine of 5 horsepower (3,700 W). Its principle was to condense steam in a cylinder, thus causing atmospheric pressure to drive a piston and produce mechanical work.

James Watt, in 1781, patented a steam engine that produced continued rotary motion with a power of about 10 horsepower (7,500 W). It was the first type of steam engine to make use of steam at a pressure just above atmospheric to drive the piston helped by a partial vacuum. It was an improvement of Newcomen’s engine.

Richard Trevithick, It was only after the invention of the lightweight, high pressure, steam engine by Richard Trevithick, in 1797-1799 that steam engines became small enough to be used in smaller businesses and for use in Steam locomotives.

See also: Steam power during the Industrial Revolution

Steam locomotives

Main articles: Steam locomotive and Traction engine

As the development of steam engines progressed through the 18th century, various attempts were made to apply them to road and railway use. In 1784, William Murdoch, a Scottish inventor, built a prototype steam road locomotive. An early working model of a steam rail locomotive was designed and constructed by steamboat pioneer John Fitch in the United States probably during the 1780s or 1790s. His steam locomotive used interior bladed wheels guided by rails or tracks.

The first full-scale working railway steam locomotive was built by Richard Trevithick in the United Kingdom and, on 21 February 1804, the world's first railway journey took place as Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway from the Pen-y-darren ironworks, near Merthyr Tydfil to Abercynon in south Wales. The design incorporated a number of important innovations that included using high-pressure steam which reduced the weight of the engine and increased its efficiency. Trevithick visited the Newcastle area later in 1804 and the colliery railways in north-east England became the leading centre for experimentation and development of steam locomotives.

Trevithick continued his own experiments using a trio of locomotives, concluding with the Catch Me Who Can in 1808. Only four years later, the successful twin-cylinder locomotive Salamanca by Matthew Murray was used by the edge railedrack and pinion Middleton Railway. 

In 1825 George Stephenson built the Locomotion for the Stockton and Darlington Railway. This was the first public steam railway in the world and then in 1829, he built The Rocket which was entered in and won the Rainhill Trials. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830 making exclusive use of steam power for both passenger and freight trains.

Steam locomotives continued to be manufactured until the late twentieth century in places such as China and the former East Germany (where the DR Class 52.80 was produced).

Source: Wikipedia