On occasion I have found myself in these pages pointing out the confusion expressed by some between the scientific units the "watt" (as in "a brazillion megawatts of solar energy") and the "joule." Both units are named for great British scientists. The "joule," a unit of
energy is named for "James Joule" who found the precise relationship between work and heat as well as work and electricity, laying the foundation for what we now know as the first law of thermodynamics.
(Here - for a diversion - is a picture of the most famous piece of Joule's actual apparatus:
With this he showed the equivalence between gravitational energy and heat.)
The "watt," a unit of
power on the other hand is named for
James Watt, who preceded Joule. Watt was the person who perfected the first truly cyclical heat engine, the steam engine. No telling of the tale of coal would be complete without reference to James Watt, and in her book,
Coal, A Human History (Perseus Books, Copyright 2003) Barbara Freese does not disappoint in this regard.
After first describing briefly the first practical steam engine, the Newcomen engine, Freese writes thusly of Watt:
Watt thrived in mathematics, though, and studied the art of making mathematical instruments. It was in this capacity that he was asked in his late twenties to fix a small model of a Newcomen engine kept at Glasgow University.
Like the larger version, the model was extremely wasteful, needing lots of coal to keep it going. Watt realized that as steam was injected and then cooled with water, heat was wasted in the constant reheating and cooling of the cylinder...
...one day...the solution suddenly flashed into his mind...
...but turning...his idea into a working steam engine would prove to be an ordeal...
...Then Watt found a new partner, the irrepressible Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton, and one of the most celebrated business partnerships in history was launched. Boulton was more than a manufacturer; he was an industrial visionary who had surrounded himself with people who shared his fascination with technology and his faith in how it could transform the world...
...Boulton's manufactory was called Soho, and there his skilled artisans made an odd assortment of precision crafted goods ranging from fancy decorative items...to serious scientific instruments...Soho became a symbol of modern, high-quality (sic) British manufacturing , and it actually drew tourists; Catherine the Great was among the man...
Boulton had a longstanding interest in steam engines, in part because the water wheels that powered Soho were unreliable. He had earlier performed his own unsuccessful experiments with the steam engine, and he even corresponded with his friend Benjamin Franklin on engine design. Boulton knew of Watt's work in Scotland and decided to back him...
The bold is mine. The excerpts of the work are found on pages 61-64.
So again we see that the then
existing renewable energy in the middle of the 18th century could not supply Britain's economy.
It is important to note as we face the stark reality that the fossil fuel driven heat engine has become too dangerous and now must be replaced, the biggest difference between those times and these times. In 1800, the population of the United Kingdom
including all of Ireland was 16.3 million, up from around 6 million a century earlier.
In 2001 including Northern Ireland, but
excluding the independent Republic to the South was 58.8 million.