Reverting again to the example of the gun, it was suggested to push a
piston forward in a tube by the explosion of gunpowder behind it, or to
repeat the Savery experiment with powder instead of steam. These ideas
were those of about 1678-1685. The very earliest cylinder and piston
engine was suggested by Denis Papin in 1690. These early inventors only
went a portion of the way, and almost the entire idea of the
steam-engine is of much later date. Mankind had then a singular gift of
beginning at the wrong end. Every inventor now uses facts that seem to
him to have been always known, and that are his by a kind of intuition.
But they were all acquired by the tedious experience of a past that is
distinguished by a few great names whose owners knew in their time
perhaps one-tenth part as much as the modern inventor does, who is
unconsciously using the facts learned by old experience. But the others
began at the beginning.

[Illustration: EARLY NEWCOMEN PUMPING ENGINE. STEAM-COCK, COLD WATER
COCK AND WASTE-SPIGOT ALL WORKED BY HAND.]

In 1711, almost a hundred years after the arrival at Jamestown and
Plymouth of the fathers of our present civilization, the steam-engine
that is called Newcomen's began to be used for the pumping of water out
of mines. This engine, slightly modified, and especially by the boy who
invented the automatic cut-off for the steam valves, was a most rude and
clumsy machine measured by our ideas. There appears to have been
scarcely a single feature of it that is now visible in a modern engine.
The cylinder was always vertical. It had the upper end open, and was a
round iron vessel in which a plunger moved up and down. Steam was let in
below this plunger, and the walking-beam with which it was connected by
a rod had that end of it raised. When raised the steam was cut off, and
all that was then under the piston was condensed by a jet of cold water.