It contains the ancestral lands of the Inuvik. On its southern and eastern edge, the Beaufort is bounded by Alaska, Yukon and the Northwest territories. The Beaufort coast contains such ecological treasures as Banks Island, the Mackenzie River delta, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Beaufort Sea is in the true Arctic: the icy expanse above the continents of Asia and North America. The Kulluk, aground on the coast of Sitkalidak Island, near Alaska. There, in its essentially original form, stands the origin of entire industrial revolution, condensed to a single machine.

It looks like a large brick barn with a wooden pumpjack poking out one window. There is one on display in Dudley, which was painstakingly constructed by the Black Country Living Museum in 1986. You can see several working replicas of Newcomen’s device in England today. The piston was connected to a pump, which could be used to suck water from a mineshaft – then as now, a huge problem in soggy places like Newcomen’s home county of Devon. That steam drove a great piston inside a cylinder. I believe no ingenious person will deny this engine to have the preference in all respects, being of more universal use than any yet discovered or invented.Įarly steam engines featured a round boiler that burned coal to generate steam. In his 1702 pamphlet, The Miner’s Friend, Savery speculated that the new device might have wide applications:

The engine was, nevertheless, a marked improvement on the ‘engine to raise water by fire’ invented by Thomas Savery, whose pioneering work – overshadowed by his more famous successors Newcomen, Matthew Boulton and James Watt – is little recognised today. Fed by coal, belching smoke and steam, the amazing machine seemed likely to explode at any moment, as indeed many of its predecessors had – the steam engine being at that stage of its development an imperfect design. It must have struck local peasants as a rather dangerous contraption. In 1712, a Englishman named Thomas Newcomen built a most unusual ‘engyn’ on the estates of Lord Dudley, a Staffordshire grandee.

Klein author this changes everything