CHAPTER 14

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LEARNING FROM

James Watt

Most people believe that James Watt (1736–1819) invented the steam engine—but actually they are mistaken. The first modern steam engine was built by the English blacksmith and ironmonger Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Newcomen’s engine performed a very useful task: it pumped water out of an English mine. However, Newcomen’s machine was highly inefficient, earning it a reputation as a “coal guzzler.” Newcomen’s early design was itself based on experiments by French and English inventors who started testing ways of converting steam into kinetic energy as early as 1700 (almost 30 years before James Wattt’s birth).

In 1764, when Watt set about repairing a Newcomen steam engine, he recognized how inefficient the design was and how much steam was being wasted. This fired his ambition to develop a far better machine. To fulfill that ambition, he even went so far as to study foreign languages so that he could read publications about the steam engines being built in other countries at the time. Incidentally, many people who go on to achieve greatness learn foreign languages so that they can gain access to valuable knowledge. For instance, Arthur Schopenhauer and Peter F. Drucker both learned Spanish so that they could read the original of the excellent Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia, published by Baltasar Gracián in 1647, a book that Schopenhauer later single-mindedly translated into German. The English edition of Gracián’s book, titled The Art of Worldly Wisdom, became a bestseller.¹