Jason Crawford

And this was Watts, you know, like major contribution.

And in order to get to this, Watt was doing a bunch of experiments with the steam engine and measuring the amount of heat that went into different things and what was going on.

And he noticed that a lot of heat seemed to go into turning water into steam.

And he didn't know what would explain this.

And he goes to his friend, Dr. Joseph Black, who's at the same university.

I think it was the University of Glasgow.

I'm blanking on which university it was.

And Joseph Black is what we would now call a physical chemist and says, aha, yes, you have rediscovered my theory of latent heat and explains to Watt what's going on.

And this understanding was important to Watt's separate condenser and more efficient steam engine.

And it was after Watt that the steam engine really got going and people started applying it to a lot more things.

Decades later, Robert Trevithick is doing experiments with high-pressure steam engines.

Trevithick wants to make a steam engine with a better power-to-weight ratio such that it can actually be used on a vehicle.

Trevithick invents, in the early 1800s, he builds the first working prototype, really, of a locomotive.

And in doing this, he was wondering whether he could dispense with the complexity of the separate condenser and this whole cycle of condensation of the steam by instead of recycling the steam, just venting it in the atmosphere when you were done with it.

And he wasn't sure how this was going to affect the efficiency of his engine.

So he goes to his mathematician friend, Davies Giddey, who understands the physics of gases as it's understood at the time.

And he asks Giddey, yeah, what's going to happen if I just vent to the atmosphere?

And Giddey assures him, oh yeah, you won't lose a whole lot of, you know, if you had something at, if you had an engine at 10 or 15 atmospheres and then you vent the steam out, you're just going to lose one atmosphere of pressure.

It's not going to be a huge deal.

And this allowed Trevithick to invent a high pressure engines with a, you know, with a simplified design.