I’ve added a bunch of new resources to the “Steam” reading list, drawn from Google Books’ excellent scans of a series of histories from the early 19th century through the early 20th.
In particular, I’d draw your attention to the biography of Watt, who everyone knows, and Boulton, who far less people know. Watt made the steam engine work, but Boulton put up the money and built the business model — leasing their machines to coal miners — that allowed it to prosper. Boulton was part of the Lunar Society, which was a group of scientific thinkers that modern day investors like Andy Kessler want to claim as their forbears.
I’m interested in all this because the history of green tech is lousy with inventors who built prototypes, mockups, designs, pilot plants, or otherwise showed their ideas would work, but who never got the funding they needed. One type of money seems particularly lacking: commercialization capital, like what Silicon Valley provides today. The investors take on tons of technological risk knowing that if it works, there will be a market (i.e., if you can make ultracheap electricity, people will buy it). Just a flag to keep an eye on that part of the social history of green technology.
Image: CC/Chris Allen. “Grazebrook Engine: This is a Boulton & Watt beam blowing engine re-erected on the Dartmouth Circus Roundabout, on the A38(M) in Birmingham, UK.” It was originally built in 1817.
