The Industrial Revolution: The First Steam Engine

The Industrial revolution was a time period where people who worked on the countryside moved into the cities to work manly in the manufacturing area. This revolution started in the UK, through out the duration of the revolution there many new inventions that influenced the modernization of Europe. Most of these inventions led to products to be produced more efficiently, other than that the use of new materials such as iron and coal was very important since these led to the later invention of the steam engine1.

The steam engine is a very old way to produce electricity by using steam as its powering fluid. Thomas Savery built the first steam engine in 1698 to help minors pump out the water from the mines, however this first steam engine was

On the side there is a diagram shown of a Piston Steam Engine. This steam engine is a double-acting steam engine since the valve allows the steam to act on both sides of the piston. If we where to turn on the steam engine the process would be the following; first the high pressure steam would be filled into the top of the smaller cylinder and allowed access into the bigger cylinder through the side valve, the piston would then press the exhaust steam out of the piston and out of the cylinder4. This process works because whilst the one loud of high-pressured steam is still in the cylinder there is another load of steam added leading to the cylinder forcing the first load of steam out. Steam engines are still used on daily bases today and many modern electricity generators are build up on the simple structure of a steam engine, for example coal and nuclear power plants still use the same principle. This also shows how it had a lasting effect on our modern day society and also on the way we still work with a steam engine

Invented by Sir Charles Parsons in 1884 it was a revolution of its own and almost completely replaced the Piston steam engine simply because of its thermal efficiency and its power-to-weight ratio, which was a lot better then the one of the Piston steam engine5. Its efficiency also proves itself because of its rotational movement, which is extremely practical when it comes to driving an electrical generator, which is about 80% of all electrical generators in the whole world. Every steam turbine consist of a view simple parts; spinning in the middle of the steam turbine is a axel called the rotor, basically it takes the power from the turbine to the electricity generator, then there are the blades, the job of the blades is to capture as much steam as possible and converting it into rotational energy, every turbine has a set of blades attached to