This is the first comprehensive history of the steam engine in fifty years. It follows the development of reciprocating steam engines, from their earliest forms to the beginning of the twentieth century when they were replaced by steam turbines.

A history of the creation and evolution of the mechanism that brought precision to the steam power and changed the world. Power without control is unusable power, and long after the invention of the steam engine, finding ways of applying that power to tasks where consistency was of paramount importance was the ‘Holy Grail’ which many steam engineers sought to find. It was the centrifugal governor which brought precision to the application of steam power, and its story can be traced back to seventeenth-century Holland and Christiaan Huygens’ development of both the pendulum clock and system controls for windmills, and governors are still at the heart of sophisticated machinery today—albeit electronic rather than mechanical. Without the centrifugal governor, precise control over the increasingly-complex machinery which has been developed over the past two centuries would not have been possible. It was the first device to give the engineman the control they needed. As machine speed increased, the governor had to evolve to keep pace with the demands for greater precision. Over a hundred British patents were applied for in the nineteenth century alone for ‘improvements’ in governor design, many of which could be fitted, or retro-fitted, to engines from every large manufacturer. Some enginemen, on taking up new appointments—their jobs depending on the precision and consistency of their engine’s operation—would even request that the governor be replaced with their preferred model. This book, the first to deal with the subject, tells the story of the evolution of the original ‘spinning-ball’ governor from its first appearance to the point where it became a small device entirely enclosed in a housing to keep it clean, and thus hidden from view. Praise for The Governor “A beautiful, well-produced book that any engineering-minded person with a passion for steam engines will be proud to own. It traces the story of attempts to get the speed of steam engines and other machinery under control. . . . The book is lavishly illustrated with many beautiful photographs of some of the author's favourite machines. . . . I found this a gloriously well-produced book which I devoured enthusiastically! I commend it to anyone with a serious interest in mechanical engineering.” —Richard Gibbon O.B.E. C.Eng F.I.Mech.E former Head of Engineering, National Railway Museum

Award-winning artist and educator Tim Needles brings a fresh approach to STEAM topics, focusing on creativity, innovation and collaboration. There are numerous books on STEAM, but most are either arts and crafts project books designed for children or high-level books that can be weighty and inaccessible for new teachers. This accessible and engaging book offers creative ideas for blending arts and STEM learning (STEAM). It covers the fundamentals of STEAM, with project ideas and best practices, while providing insight from educators in the field. Technologies covered include: coding, robotics, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality, photography, video, animation and digital drawing. In addition, the book addresses several different approaches to bringing STEAM learning to the next level, such as collaboration, global learning, project-based learning, makerspaces and social-emotional learning. The book: • Features a breadth of technology and project possibilities, with project ideas organized by technology type. • Explores long-standing concepts that are relevant regardless of specific advances in technology, providing the pedagogy behind the projects rather than technology for technology’s sake. • Offers a highly visual approach, incorporating photographs and hand-drawn sketchnotes. • Illustrates concepts through author examples as well as a series of interviews featuring STEAM professionals and expert teachers. • Presents topics in a clear, concise manner that's useful for repeated reading and as a practical resource. With its friendly style and visual design, the book is a practical guide for new and emerging educators, and for educators looking for fun and creative ways to invigorate their STEAM curriculum.

"The Most Powerful Idea in the World argues that the very notion of intellectual property drove not only the invention of the steam engine but also the entire Industrial Revolution." -- Back cover.

This book examines how the expansion of a steam-powered Royal Navy from the second half of the nineteenth century had wider ramifications across the British Empire. In particular, it considers how steam propulsion made vessels utterly dependent on a particular resource – coal – and its distribution around the world. In doing so, it shows that the ‘coal question’ was central to imperial defence and the protection of trade, requiring the creation of infrastructures that spanned the globe. This infrastructure required careful management, and the processes involved show the development of bureaucracy and the reliance on the ‘contractor state’ to ensure this was both robust and able to allow swift mobilisation in war. The requirement to stop regularly at foreign stations also brought men of the Royal navy into contact with local coal heavers, as well as indigenous populations and landscapes. These encounters and their dissemination are crucial to our understanding of imperial relationships and imaginations at the height of the imperial age.

Maury Klein is one of America's most acclaimed historians of business and society. In The Power Makers, he offers an epic narrative of his greatest subject yet - the "power revolution" that transformed American life in the course of the nineteenth century. The steam engine; the incandescent bulb; the electric motor-inventions such as these replaced backbreaking toil with machine labor and changed every aspect of daily life in the span of a few generations. The cast of characters includes inventors like James Watt, Elihu Thomson, and Nikola Tesla; entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse; savvy businessmen like J.P. Morgan, Samuel Insull, and Charles Coffin of General Electric. Striding among them like a colossus is the figure of Thomas Edison, who was creative genius and business visionary at once. With consummate skill, Klein recreates their discoveries, their stunning triumphs and frequent failures, and their unceasing, bare-knuckled battles in the marketplace. In Klein's hands, their personalities and discoveries leap off the page. The Power Makers is a dazzling saga of inspired invention, dogged persistence, and business competition at its most naked and cutthroat--a biography of America in its most astonishing decades.

How capitalism first promoted fossil fuels with the rise of steam power The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy—but rather superior control of subordinate labour. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order.