The Story of Mankind [160]
great poverty, having wasted all his money on his inventions.
But at the time of his death, another mechanical enthusiast,
Thomas Newcomen, was working on the problem of a new
steam-pump. Fifty years later his engine was improved upon
by James Watt, a Glasgow instrument maker. In the year
1777, he gave the world the first steam engine that proved of
real practical value.
But during the centuries of experiments with a ``heat-engine,''
the political world had greatly changed. The British
people had succeeded the Dutch as the common-carriers of the
world's trade. They had opened up new colonies. They took
the raw materials which the colonies produced to England,
and there they turned them into finished products, and then
they exported the finished goods to the four corners of the
world. During the seventeenth century, the people of Georgia
and the Carolinas had begun to grow a new shrub which gave
a strange sort of woolly substance, the so-called ``cotton wool.''
After this had been plucked, it was sent to England and there
the people of Lancastershire wove it into cloth. This weaving
was done by hand and in the homes of the workmen. Very soon
a number of improvements were made in the process of weaving.
In the year 1730, John Kay invented the ``fly shuttle.''
In 1770, James Hargreaves got a patent on his ``spinning
jenny.'' Eli Whitney, an American, invented the cotton-gin,
which separated the cotton from its seeds, a job which had
previously been done by hand at the rate of only a pound a day.
Finally Richard Arkwright and the Reverend Edmund Cartwright
invented large weaving machines, which were driven by
water power. And then, in the eighties of the eighteenth
century, just when the Estates General of France had begun
those famous meetings which were to revolutionise the political
system of Europe, the engines of Watt were arranged in such
a way that they could drive the weaving machines of Arkwright,
and this created an economic and social revolution
which has changed human relationship in almost every part
of the world.
As soon as the stationary engine had proved a success, the
inventors turned their attention to the problem of propelling
boats and carts with the help of a mechanical contrivance.
Watt himself designed plans for a ``steam locomotive,'' but
ere he had perfected his ideas, in the year 1804, a locomotive
made by Richard Trevithick carried a load of twenty tons at
Pen-y-darran in the Wales mining district.
At the same time an American jeweller and portrait-painter
by the name of Robert Fulton was in Paris, trying to convince
Napoleon that with the use of his submarine boat, the
``Nautilus,'' and his ``steam-boat,'' the French might be able to
destroy the naval supremacy of England.
Fulton's idea of a steamboat was not original. He had
undoubtedly copied it from John Fitch, a mechanical genius of
Connecticut whose cleverly constructed steamer had first navigated
the Delaware river as early as the year 1787. But Napoleon
and his scientific advisers did not believe in the practical
possibility of a self-propelled boat, and although the Scotch-
built engine of the little craft puffed merrily on the Seine, the
great Emperor neglected to avail himself of this formidable
weapon which might have given him his revenge for Trafalgar.
As for Fulton, he returned to the United States and, being
a practical man of business, he organised a successful steamboat
company together with Robert R. Livingston, a signer of
the Declaration of Independence, who was American Minister
to France when Fulton was in Paris, trying to sell his invention.
The first steamer of this new company, the ``Clermont,''
which was given a monopoly of all the waters of New York
State, equipped with an engine built by Boulton and Watt of
Birmingham in England, began a regular service between New
York and Albany in the year 1807.