Five years earlier, Thomas Savery, an English inventor and engineer, in 1698 invented the first commercially used steam-powered device, a steam pump which is often referred to as the "Savery engine".
Newcomen was born in Dartmouth, Britain, on 28 February 1664. His father was a merchant and ship owner, and Thomas became a blacksmith and ironworker. As an ironmonger at Dartmouth, Newcomen became aware of the high cost of using the power of horses to pump water out of the Cornish tin mines.
With his assistant John Calley (or Cawley), a plumber and glazier by trade, he experimented for more than 10 years to develop a properly working engine. It was superior to the crude pump of Thomas Savery.
His engine is called an "atmospheric engines" because the steam was under only slight pressure. The real driving force of these engines was a vacuum created when steam is condensed back into water. The partial vacuum then allowed the atmospheric pressure to push the piston into the cylinder.
It was installed in 1712 at the Coneygree Coal Works in the West Midlands, England, pumping water from the mine. Newcomen's Dudley Castle beam engine is generally accepted as the first successful Newcomen engine. Newcomen engines were successful partly because they were very safe to operate.
As Savery had obtained a broad patent for his pump in 1698, Newcomen could not patent his engine. Newcomen and his partner John Calley persuaded Savery to join forces with them to exploit their invention until the expiration of Savery's patent in 1733.
Newcomen design was built in large numbers from 1712 until about the 1820s and continued to be used until about 1930.
Thomas Newcomen’s Engine
