Machine file

The machine file

Sourced facts about engines, machines and the people behind them. Every fact links to its source, checked 31 Oct 2026.

Steam engines

• A steam engine is a machine that uses steam power to do mechanical work through heat. [source]
• The earliest steam engines were scientific novelties made by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century CE, such as the aeolipile. Nobody tried to put steam to practical use until the 17th century. [source]
• In 1698 Thomas Savery patented a pump that raised water from mines using the suction made by condensing steam. [source]
• Thomas Newcomen was an ironmonger in Dartmouth, Devon. He saw how much it cost to use horses to pump water out of the Cornish tin mines, and spent more than 10 years experimenting with a steam pump. [source]
• In Newcomen’s engine, steam was condensed to make a vacuum in the cylinder, and then the pressure of the air pushed the piston down. [source]
• The first recorded Newcomen engine was put up near Dudley Castle, Staffordshire, in 1712. [source]
• James Watt did not invent the steam engine. In 1765 he came up with the separate condenser to cut the steam wasted by Newcomen’s engine, and he patented it in 1769. [source]
• Watt kept improving his engine, adding the “sun-and-planet” gear (1781), the double-acting engine (1782), parallel motion (1784), a flywheel (1788) and a pressure gauge (1790). [source]
• Watt’s engine could drive rotary machines in factories such as cotton mills. [source]

Simple machines

• Simple machines have few or no moving parts. They change motion and the size of a force so that work gets done. [source]
• There are six simple machines: the inclined plane, lever, wedge, wheel and axle, pulley and screw. [source]
• People have always used levers, to shift heavy stones or as digging sticks. [source]
• The shaduf, an ancient water-lifter, is a long lever pivoted near one end, with a water container on the short arm and counterweights on the long arm. With one, a person could lift several times their own weight. [source]
• Archimedes probably never said “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth”. Britannica calls the story apocryphal. [source]
• Archimedes is said to have used compound pulleys to pull a ship onto dry land, in the 3rd century BCE. [source]
• A set of pulleys, blocks and rope is called a block and tackle. Pulleys with grooved rims are called sheaves. [source]

Gears

• Gears work in pairs. The teeth of one gear catch the teeth of the other, so turning motion passes between them without slipping. [source]
• If the driven gear has twice as many teeth as the small gear (the pinion), it turns at half the speed with twice the turning force. [source]
• In an old watermill, a waterwheel turns a shaft and a series of gears passes the stream’s power to the millstone that grinds flour. [source]

Petrol and diesel engines

• In a piston engine, fuel and air burn inside a cylinder and the hot gas pushes a piston, which is connected to a crankshaft. [source]
• In 1876 Nikolaus Otto built an engine using the four-stroke cycle: four strokes of the piston for each spark of ignition. [source]
• The four-stroke cycle was patented in 1862 by the French engineer Alphonse Beau de Rochas, but it is called the Otto cycle because Otto built the first engine to use it. [source]
• The Wright brothers’ 1903 Flyer had a four-cylinder, four-stroke engine driving two propellers that turned in opposite directions. [source]
• The intake valve on the Wrights’ 1903 engine had no cam to open it. The slightly lower pressure in the cylinder pulled it open against a spring. The brothers called this “automatic”. [source]
• Rudolf Diesel got a German patent for his engine in 1892, and in 1897 he demonstrated a 25-horsepower, four-stroke, single-cylinder version. [source]
• Rudolf Diesel was born in Paris in 1858 and died at sea in the English Channel in 1913. [source]

Jet engines

• The jet engine (gas turbine) was developed separately in Germany and in England during the Second World War. [source]
• A jet engine takes its oxygen from the air around it, so unlike a rocket it can’t work in space. [source]
• All thrust comes from Newton’s third law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. [source]
• Frank Whittle set out his idea for jet propulsion in 1928, in his final-year thesis at the RAF College. He patented a turbo-jet engine in 1930 and ground-tested his first jet engine in 1937. [source]
• The first jet aircraft flight was on 27 August 1939, powered by an engine designed in Germany by Hans Pabst von Ohain. [source]

Electric motors

• An electric motor turns electrical energy into mechanical energy, usually using electromagnetism. [source]
• In 1820 Hans Christian Ørsted announced that an electric current flowing through a wire makes a magnetic field around it. [source]
• Michael Faraday built the first electric motor in 1821. [source]

Bicycles

• The first two-wheeled, rider-powered machine we have firm evidence for is the draisienne, invented by Baron Karl von Drais of Germany. In 1817 he rode it 14 km (9 miles). [source]
• The draisienne was made of wood and had no pedals: the rider sat and pushed along with their feet on the ground. Von Drais called it a Laufmaschine, a “running machine”. [source]
• By 1874 the centre of the bicycle industry had moved from Paris to Coventry. [source]

Clocks and clockwork

• In a clock, the escapement controls how energy from the weight or spring passes to the counting mechanism, letting the gears move in small, even steps. [source]
• The verge escapement, which made the mechanical clock possible, was probably invented in Europe in the 13th century. [source]
• The anchor escapement, invented in England in the 17th century, works with a pendulum. Its pallets are shaped like an upside-down anchor. [source]
• Galileo noticed in about 1583 that a pendulum keeps a steady beat, but Christiaan Huygens built the first clock regulated by a pendulum, in 1656. [source]

Windmills

• A windmill uses sails on a turning shaft to catch the energy of the wind. The sails are set at an angle so that the wind turns them. [source]
• Like waterwheels, windmills were among the first machines to replace human muscle as a source of power. [source]
• Windmills spread across Europe from the 12th century until the early 19th century, then slowly gave way to steam power. [source]

Hydraulics

• Pascal’s principle: push on a liquid shut in a container, and the change in pressure spreads to every part of the liquid without loss. [source]
• In a hydraulic system, if one piston has 10 times the area of another, it pushes with 10 times the force, though the pressure is the same. [source]
• Hydraulic presses range from 1 ton or less to 10,000 tons or more. [source]
• Joseph Bramah, best known for his hydraulic press, also made a lock in 1784 and offered 200 guineas to anyone who could pick it. It held out for 67 years until a mechanic opened it after 51 hours’ work. [source]

Try it: a ruler lever

Lay a ruler across a pencil to make a seesaw. Put a coin near one end and press down on the other end. Now slide the pencil closer to the coin and press again: the further your finger is from the pivot, the less push it takes. That is a lever doing its job, just like a shaduf. [source]

Books and kits for young engineers

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For the workbench or the kitchen table: Model steam engines · Simple machines kits · Gear building sets · Wooden mechanical model kits · Electric motor kits · Pulley sets · How-machines-work books. These are Amazon UK search links, not endorsements of particular products. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.