Thomas Newcomen: The Baptist Ironmonger Whose Engine Pumped Out the Mines

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Thomas Newcomen was born in 1664 in Dartmouth, Devon, and became an ironmonger selling tools to the mines whose shafts were flooding as coal and tin seams went deeper. A devout Baptist lay preacher, he was barred as a nonconformist from Oxford, Cambridge and public office. Thomas Savery's fire engine used condensing steam to suck water up a pipe, but atmospheric pressure capped the lift at about 34 feet, and Denis Papin had proposed a piston in a cylinder. Around 1712 Newcomen and his partner John Calley, a plumber and glazier, combined the ideas: a spray of cold water condensed steam under a piston, atmospheric pressure drove it down, and a great rocking beam worked a pump hundreds of feet below. The first successful engine ran at a coal works in Tipton.

Shut out of conventional finance, he scaled through Baptist networks under the Proprietors of the Invention for Raising Water by Fire, with Southwark pastor Edward Wallin on the committee. About 125 engines worked across Britain by 1733. Newcomen died in 1729 at Wallin's London home and lies in an unmarked grave. Coalbrookdale's cast iron cylinders later grew to six feet wide, John Smeaton refined the design, and about 600 were running by 1775. James Watt's separate condenser cut fuel waste, yet of more than 2,200 steam engines built in the 18th century, only about 450 were Watt engines.

• His engine reheated the cylinder on every stroke, which mattered little at coal pits with free scrap coal but cost Cornish mines dearly.
• The Hornblower engineering family joined the venture through a Baptist church in Bromsgrove.
• Mine owners dodged Watt's royalties by bolting a small pickle pot condenser onto old Newcomen cylinders.
• An engine at Elsecar Heritage Centre in South Yorkshire still stands on its original site.
• The Black Country Museum runs a working replica.