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ANNI MIRABILES: 1712

What was the most important year ever? Andrew Marr suggests it was probably 1776, but Robert Butler, a contributor to Intelligent Life, points to the start of the industrial revolution ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

It was a jet of cold water that changed the world forever. In 1712 an English ironmonger from Devon, Thomas Newcomen, showed that if you trapped steam in a cylinder and squirted cold water from the outside, the drop in temperature would create a vacuum, and the vacuum could draw down a piston, which if linked to a lever, could drive a pump. That pump could extract water from mines, which transformed mining as an industry.

The atmospheric steam engine can claim to be the single most important invention of the industrial revolution. Newcomen and his assistant, a plumber named John Calley, came up with their engine 50 years before James Watt designed his--a machine that did a job that had previously required 500 horses.

This set the world, as Bill McKibben explains in "Deep Economy", on an intense 300-year path of fossil-fuel consumption that would replace manual labour in many areas, create the modern city, power the transport that would conquer oceans and continents, and introduce untold improvements to our standards of living. "The steam engine marked the decisive turning point in human history," observes Jeffrey Sachs, an economist.

But it came at a price. Two illustrations tell this story: one is the original design as depicted in the "Diagrammatic View of Newcomen's Atmospheric or Fire Engine (1712)" complete with handwritten captions and arrows. At the bottom right-hand side of the page it shows the fire that heats the water. On the bottom left-hand side, it shows the mine pump leading to the coal. It was burning fossil fuel to extract more fossil fuel.

The other illustration is the graph that shows the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 in parts per million from the year 1000 to the present day. For 700 years the line of dots fluctuates a little around the 280 mark and then, from the 1750s onwards, the dots start a vertiginous climb to the present level of 385. And that has led to melting ice sheets, desertification, acidification of oceans, rising
sea levels and--in late June--the arrest of Daryl Hannah.

Other writers have cast their votes for the most important year ever (eg, 5BC, 1204, 1439, 1791). See our poll in the right-hand column and cast your own.

Picture credit: kevindooley (via Flickr)

(Robert Butler is a former theatre critic. He now blogs on the arts and the environment at the Ashden Directory and writes the Going Green column in Intelligent Life. His last column was about making energy personal.)