Wise Up: Learning to live the Learning Life

Over the 30 years of refining his engine, Watt asked himself the most complex of questions, first exploring the mechanics of the clunky fifty-year-old Newcomen engine, then adapting its design significantly making it both more efficient, and later producing a rotary motion.

• ‘How does the Newcomen engine work?’
• ‘What happens if I change this element?’
• (When presented with a broken Newcomen engine for repair) ‘Why can’t I fix it?!’
• ‘Does latent heat have anything to do with it?’ (Watt was working nearly one hundred years before thermodynamic theory was formalised)
• ‘If I change this piece of the design, will it lose less heat?’
• ‘Does the steam need to be condensed in the engine cylinder, or should it be done elsewhere?’
• ‘Could this engine be applied to other uses using a different motion?’
• ‘Which motion would be most desirable?’
• ‘How could this motion be achieved?’
• (Upon discovering that there was already a patent in place for the solution he needed – the crank) ‘Are there any other ways this motion can be achieved?’

For Watt, the question ‘How does the steam engine work?’ was just as valid as ‘How might the steam engine work?’ – without learning the answer to the first question, he might never have been able to answer the second.