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@ gentoobro
2025-02-13 01:32:43
All the history you've been told is a fucking lie.
The steam engine was invented by William Murdoch and Richard Trevithick just before 1800. They were harassed and hampered by a piece-of-shit patent troll named James Watt who was actively trying to suppress the development of a steam engine while promoting his own barely-functional contraption which was a minor improvement over the one that Thomas Newcomen ripped off of Denis Papin (a true genius) and patented without any credit or compensation. Similar to Edison, Watt would go around claiming that real steam engines were dAnGeRoUs and should be banned. Between Watt and Newcomen, humanity was likely set back decades by patent trolling.
Those machines prior to Murdoch and Trevithick weren't powered by steam expansion and were closer in form to a terrible sterling engine; they wouldn't be considered "steam engines" by the modern definition of the word, and were so weak that they couldn't even function at all at high altitude, much less power a locomotive at sea level. They also couldn't run at a consistent speed, which prevented them from being used for factories. Instead, factories used them to pump water (their only real use, and even then only barely) into a reservoir which then fed a water wheel.