Heat (19 page)

The trouble with mines—aside from cave-ins and deadly vapors and labor unrest and explosions—was their tendency to flood. Dig a hole in the ground, and eventually it fills with groundwater.

When miners tunneled into the sea or into the bottom of a lake or river or into an abandoned flooded shaft, water rushed in, fast and deadly. Near the end of June 1833, two men were fishing in the river Garnock in Scotland. They watched water disappearing into the riverbed. The flow grew stronger. The following afternoon, a hole joining the river to the underlying mines suddenly enlarged, draining the entire river. A boat was sucked into the vortex. Where there had been six feet of water, there was now mud.

More often flooding was slow and insidious, a matter of seeping groundwater or rainwater permeating down from above, through the soil. Shafts were sometimes lined with wood or brick or cast iron to seal them from seeps, yet the water would find a way into the mines. For mines dug near cliffs or bluffs, the solution was a simple drainage tunnel running downhill and out. Often drainage tunnels were narrow, no broader than a man’s shoulders and four feet tall. Some of these tunnels were miles long.

As the miners dug deeper, drainage tunnels became inadequate. Chain pumps were used, with plates attached to the chain in such a way that the chain drew them up into a pipe where they would carry water upward. Egyptian wheels—a string of buckets—were also used. In both cases, power was supplied by humans and horses and donkeys or, where circumstances allowed, waterwheels fitted to streams or windmills.

In 1610, Sir George Selby took the problem of flooding to Parliament. Mining at Newcastle, he said, was coming to and end. Just as the smelters were becoming dependent on coal instead of charcoal, Selby predicted a coal shortage. He predicted an energy crisis.

Enter the Englishman Thomas Savery. By his own account, he drank most of a bottle of wine, then tossed the empty bottle into the fire. He watched the dregs of the wine boiling. With a gloved hand, he reached into the fire, extracted the bottle, turned it neck down, and plunged it into cold water. The loss of heat caused the gas inside to contract, creating a partial vacuum. The bottle sucked in water. In 1698, Savery patented his so-called Fire Engine, marketed as the Miner’s Friend. From the patent: “A grant to Thomas Savery of the sole exercise of a new invention by him invented, for raising of water, and occasioning motion to all sorts of mill works, by the important force of fire, which will be of great use for draining mines, serving towns with water, and for the working of all sorts of mills, when they have not the benefit of water nor constant winds; to hold for 14 years; with usual clauses.”

Despite the patent, Savery was not the first to apply heat to water. He was not the first to put steam to work. As early as 120 BC, not long before the time of the Yde Girl but in a more technologically advanced part of the world, Hero of Alexandria used steam to turn a hollow sphere, with the steam expelled through vents to create propulsion. In 1543 the Spaniard Blasco de Garay reportedly propelled a ship with steam-driven paddle wheels. In 1629 the Italian Giovanni Branca described what might be thought of as the predecessor to the steam turbine—a wheel with panels or vanes driven by steam. And in 1655 Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, published a book describing one hundred inventions, among them “a Bridge portable in a Cart with six horses, which in a few hours may be placed over a River half a mile broad,” a device to “safely and speedily make an approach to a Castle or Town-wall, and over the very Ditch at Noon-day,” and a steam engine almost identical to the one Savery patented forty-three years later.

And from Samuel Morland, writing in 1683: “Water being converted into vapour by the force of fire, these vapours shortly require a greater space (about 2,000 times) than the water before occupied, and sooner than be constantly confined would split a piece of cannon. But being duly regulated according to the rules of statics, and by science reduced to measure, weight, and balance, then they bear their load peaceably (like good horses), and thus become of great use to mankind, particularly for raising water, according to the following table, which shows the number of pounds that may be raised 1,800 times per hour to a height of six inches by cylinders half filled with water.” What he meant was that steam was powerful but could be controlled, like good horses.

Savery, like Morland, thought of power in terms of horses, of horsepower. And he knew that horses needed breaks. They needed time to sleep. They needed time to recover from injuries. To get two horsepower all day long, day after day, required as many as ten or twelve horses, with two working while the others rested. “So that an engine which will raise as much water as two horses,” he wrote, “there must be constantly kept ten or twelve horses for doing the same.”

Despite all the earlier work, despite Savery’s patent, steam as a mode of power did not take off right way. It took Thomas Newcomen’s engine, the atmospheric engine built in 1712, to catch on. The atmospheric engine was the first steam engine to put horses out of work. Steam from a boiler filled a cylinder, lifting a piston upward. The volume of water as steam was two thousand times that of water as liquid. The cylinder full of steam was cooled, condensing the steam into water and creating a partial vacuum. Air pressure—atmospheric pressure—pushed the piston down. Steam powered each upward stroke of the piston, and atmospheric pressure powered each downward stroke.

Newcomen’s atmospheric engine was a fuel hog, but since its main use was in dewatering mines, coal was readily at hand. This reality stalled improvements.

But James Watt recognized the inefficiency of the atmospheric engine. He saw that repeatedly cooling and reheating the steam in the cylinder accounted for three-quarters of the fuel use. Although the miners already owned atmospheric engines, Watt moved ahead, designing an engine with a separate condenser—a vessel attached to the piston in which the steam could be cooled and condensed without cooling the piston itself, doing away with the repeated cooling and reheating of the atmospheric engine’s cylinder. When Watt completed his first engine in 1775, it included other improvements, but the key was the separate condenser and its fuel savings.

Watt’s engine was to the atmospheric engine as a hybrid car is to an SUV. But so what if Watt’s engine used less coal? With the dewatering power of the atmospheric engine, there was plenty of coal. Why upgrade when fuel was cheap? From Dionysius Lardner and James Renwick, in their 1856 book
The Steam Engine Familiarly Explained
: “Notwithstanding the manifest superiority of these engines over the old atmospheric engines; yet such were the influence of prejudice and the dislike of what is new, that Watt found great difficulties in getting them into general use.”

Watt and his business partner Matthew Boulton developed a marketing scheme. They would supply their engine to miners, and in exchange the miners would pay a licensing fee computed as a portion of fuel savings. It was the equivalent of leasing a hybrid car in exchange for a portion of the savings on gasoline.

Watt and Boulton accumulated a fortune. And because their engine needed less coal, it could be used to provide power well removed from mines. It could be used to power mills and factories. Watt and Boulton had harnessed heat. They came up with an economical method of turning coal into work.

The steam engine moved from stationary duties to mobile duties, to ships and trains. George Stephenson, a miner from a miner’s family, raised in the poverty of mining, came across one of Watt’s engines in Scotland. In 1813, with the help of a blacksmith, Stephenson built his first engine. This was at a time when the mines still relied on horses to haul coal from the tunnels. This was the time of the early steam-driven carts and suggestions that wheels should be fitted with hooflike spikes to ensure traction. It was also a time of serious concerns regarding the usefulness of trains for passengers. It was a time when futurists conceptualized passenger trains but wondered if they would be useful, if enough people would regularly want to go to the same place at the same time.

Stephenson’s
Blücher,
his first train engine, went to work in 1814, hauling thirty tons of coal uphill at the pace of a brisk walk. He built more engines. In 1829, with his son, he built the
Rocket.
The
Rocket
was entered into a contest. The contest was held to find an engine that could be put into general use, that could be supported by investors seeking to change the world and in so doing make a bit of money. The
Rocket
won, hands down, covering thirty miles in two hours, fourteen minutes, and eight seconds, at one point hitting twenty-nine miles per hour. Its secret: heat from the coal fire was distributed to the boiler through twenty-five tubes, each three inches in diameter, winding back and forth through the firebox, drawing as much heat as possible as quickly as possible into the water inside the tubes. The
Rocket
captured heat as no other engine had before.

Watt and Stephenson changed the world. Or, closer to the point, Watt and Stephenson contributed to the changing world, but their names took hold, became iconic, became part of the technological revolution that would, over the next century and a half, pump three hundred billion tons of carbon out of the earth and into the air.

Ralph Waldo Emerson died in 1882, five decades after the
Rocket
’s twenty-nine-miles-per-hour speed record, fourteen years after Tyndall wrote his biography of Faraday, and fifteen years before Yde Girl’s mummified remains were discovered by peat miners in the Netherlands. Before he died, Emerson wrote about coal. “For coal is a portable climate,” he wrote. “It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta; and with its comfort brings its industrial power.”

With my family, I drive sixty miles due east, crossing into Germany, to Essen, the site of the Ruhr Museum, a world heritage site that started life as a coal-washing plant, part of the
Zollverein
coal mine, shaft number 12. Some of the docents are retired miners.