2010s mobilising big data local's greatest human innovations starts a quarter of a millennium after Engineering's Industrial Revolution
Britain and Scotland never did truly celebrate the start of the 2010s as Industrial Revolution's second quarter of millennium of engineers and economics let alone the 4th G of Moore's post-industrial revolution. It would be nice to blame this on the subprime mess that had depressed the world just when youth needed to be celebrated for new shared economy models freed by mobile devices and GPS and.. But the compound world trade consequences of the island that hubbed industrial revolution out of longitude zero are much more devilishly detailed (infiltrated into people cultures around the world)
the 1760s marked the first decade that watt and smith both at Glasgow University started mediating futures of engineers and markets
James Watt 1736 1819 was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world.While working as an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt became interested in the technology of steam engines. He realised that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and reheating the cylinder. Watt introduced a design enhancement, the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of steam engines. Eventually he adapted his engine to produce rotary motion, greatly broadening its use beyond pumping water.Watt attempted to commercialise his invention, but experienced great financial difficulties until he entered a partnership with Matthew Boulton in 1775. The new firm of Boulton and Watt was eventually highly successful and Watt became a wealthy man. In his retirement, Watt continued to develop new inventions though none was as significant as his steam engine work.He developed the concept of horsepower,[2] and the SI unit of power, the watt, was named after him.
But what you need to know about the historic English mindset is that the England's capital London (and its university HQs eg Oxbridge) never truly celebrated the joy of inventing engines. Their (r)evolution as a flow of innovation opportunities "the industrial revolution" never became a schools curriculum- machines were too dirty and practical thing for intellectual academics, and they certainly never seemed to fit into walled-in classrooms at any grade from 1st to 12th. London's hi society prefered to legislate and make top down administration rules
It fit the empire mindset of london bankers and politicians that you could administer the businesses of engineering not need to be in the middle of inventing them. (Amazingly it wasnt until after world war 2 that two defeated nations- germany and japan leapt ahead from politicians that administered to places where leaders were most valued for imagineering)
So it is that although Britain marketed English as the first global language of Empire it was left to american english to announce the happiness and freedom and indeed American dream of engineering innovations. So i9t was timely that USA declared independence in 1776 from a place where so-called public servants disassociated themselves from exploration of machine apps.
Indeed just as boston was to change the meaning of tea parties as a ritual of high society it fell to new england to become the first metahub for mapping the revolutionary connections of engineering innovations moreover the americans had a continent laboratory to play engineering on and linkin multiple big cities whereas London had a relatively small island . This seat of empire and the hierarchy of the education system the empire spawneed wasnt seen to be distributing knowledge of developing industry across the lands just administering them from a walled in part of colonies capital cities
ENGINES FOR EVERY APPLICATION OF MORE ENERGY THAN HORSE ON LAND AND WIND ON WATER
what are we talking about in terms of how mankind's imagination could apply machines:
first to move things round (marmet distribution), build
second to move people around -trains by7 1820s onwards
in parallel different sources of energy - the locomotive needed coal to steam it and iron rails to map it
some locations could use fixed sources of natrural energy wind (eg windmills) or water (hydrolic power)
civil engineering breakthroughs came with electrictiy and gas to light up and build cities - underground pipes and even underground trains
then to the world of boats and trains the additions of cars and planes and gasoline
and of course communications to move ideas around -audio and then televisual
nowhere did british teachers assemble institutes of technology- it was a hundred years after Glasgow's watt and smith that a hub for every emerging tech we would citr new eng;land bostons start up of MIT in 1861 as a massive leap frorward
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_technology
wikipedia is very interesting on institutes of technology - you can see how pieces started to be hubbed out of parts of europe just before webb but without what bill gates would call the killer app of the steam engine