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Powering the Industrial Revolution

In Britain one of the most dramatic changes of the Industrial Revolution was the harnessing（rein） of power. Until

the reign (sovereign power / sovereignty) of George Ⅲ(1760-1820), available sources of power for work and travel had not increased since the

Middle Ages. There were three sources of power: animal or human muscles; the wind, operating on sail or

windmill; and running water. Only the last of these was suited at all to the continuous operating of machines, and

although waterpower abounded in Lancashire(borough / municipality / autonomy/ in northwestern England) and Scotland (country in the northern part of the island of Great Britain,)and ran推動 grain mills as well as textile mills, it had one

great disadvantage: streams flowed where nature intended them to, and water-driven factories had to be located

on their banks whether or not the location was desirable for other reasons不論是不是合適工廠選址. Furthermore, even the most reliable

waterpower varied with the seasons and disappeared in a drought. The new age of machinery（machines collectively）, in short, could not

have been born without a new source of both movable and constant power.

Middle Ages

The source had long been known but not exploited/ exploitation. Early in the eighteenth century, a pump泵ㄅㄥˋ. 唧筒 had come into

use in which expanding steam (evaporation/ give off steam or vapor/ mist) raised a piston (moving cylinder used to compress gas fluid or air)in a cylinder（tube）, and atmospheric pressure brought it down again

when the steam condensed inside the cylinder to form a vacuum （void）. This ─atmospheric engine, 大氣引擎∥invented by Thomas

Savery and vastly improved by his partner, Thomas Newcomen, embodied (incarnate; incorporate, manifest / manifest or personify in concrete form)revolutionary principles 被賦予革命性的工作原理, but it was so

slow and wasteful of fuel that it could not be employed outside the coal mines for which it had been designed. In

the 1760s, James Watt perfected a separate condenser 冷凝器, 電容器(someone or something that condenses{ make denser, compress; make shorter, abridge; concentrate; reduce from a gas to a liquid }; optical device which concentrates light; capacitor; instrument for condensing gas into liquid) for the steam, so that the cylinder did not have to be

cooled at every stroke; then he devised a way to make the piston turn a wheel and thus convert reciprocating

(back and forth) (moving interchangeably backward and forward)motion into rotary motion(circular movement around an axis / axis , ally / Axis Powers,). He thereby transformed an inefficient pump of limited use into a

steam engine of a thousand uses. The final step came when steam was introduced into the cylinder to drive the

piston backward as well as forward, thereby increasing the speed of the engine and cutting its fuel consumption.

Watt's steam engine soon showed what it could do. It liberated industry from dependence on running water.

The engine eliminated water in the mines by driving efficient pumps, which made possible deeper and deeper

mining. The ready availability of coal inspired William Murdoch during the 1790s to develop the first new form of

nighttime illumination (incandescent / fluorescent )to be discovered in a millennium and a half. Coal gas rivaled smoky oil lamps and

flickering candles, and early in the new century, well-to-do Londoners grew accustomed to gaslit houses and even

streets. Iron manufacturers, which had starved for fuel while depending on charcoal, also benefited from

ever-increasing supplies of coal: blast furnaces with steam-powered bellows 風箱turned out more iron and steel for

the new machinery. Steam became the motive force of the Industrial Revolution as coal and iron ore were the raw

materials.

blast furnace 鼓風爐

tall cylindrical furnace used for melting metal and iron from ore by way of heat intensified by a blast of air

By 1800 more than a thousand steam engines were in use in the British Isles, and Britain retained a virtual

monopoly on steam engine production until the 1830s. Steam power did not merely spin cotton and roll iron煉鐵;

early in the new century, it also multiplied ten times over the amount of paper that a single worker could produce

in a day. At the same time, operators of the first printing presses印刷廠 run by steam rather than by hand found it

possible to produce a thousand pages in an hour rather than thirty. Steam also promised /premise / premises to eliminate a

transportation problem not fully solved by either canal boats or turnpikes收費公路. Boats could carry heavy weights, but

canals could not cross hilly terrain; turnpikes could cross the hills, but the roadbeds could not stand up under

great weights. These problems needed still another solution, and the ingredients for it lay close at hand. In some

industrial regions, heavily laden wagons, with flanged(raised edge) wheels, were being hauled by horses along metal rails; and

the stationary steam engine was puffing in the factory and mine. Another generation passed before inventors

succeeded in combining these ingredients, by putting the engine on wheels and the wheels on the rails, so as to

provide a machine to take the place of the horse. Thus the railroad age sprang from what had already happened in

the eighteenth century.

exterritorial / extraterrestrial