Industrial Revolutionaries

The Industrial Revolutionaries
By Gavin Weightman
Grove, 422 pages, $27.50

Originally powered by falling water, the factories sprang up where the water was, often deep in the countryside. The steam engine, first made practical by Thomas Newcomen and then made vastly more fuel efficient by James Watt, made work-doing energy cheap for the first time in human history. With the steam engine, factories could be located where labor was most available, and Britain's urban industrial cities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, quickly expanded.

Soon after the turn of the 19th century a new type of steam engine, using high pressure, proved far more powerful per unit of weight than Watt's engine. At first, the new steam engines were employed to power ships, because the machinery was too heavy for the tracks used by horse-drawn railways.