DID WATT INVENT ENGINE

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 69, 22 March 1928, Page 10

DID WATT INVENT ENGINE

OR ONIfY SCARE IT WORS T

PROFESSOR'S CONTENTION.

Ceorp# Washington and the hatchet, Sir Walter Raleigh and the cloak, and Alfred and the cakes have a new companion in tho historical discard—James' Watt and the kettle. James Watt not only did not obtain the idea of a steam engine from watching a kettle boil but did not invent the steam engine at all, Professor E. W. Andrade asserted in a lecture before the Royal Institution in London.

It was Newcomen who first fashioned a steam engine, the professor declared, and Watt, who was an instrument maker, was engaged in repairing one of Newcomen's models when he "was led to seek for a better design and ultimately invented the condenser—the essential advance which made the steam engine an economic source of power." Anyway, to turn a clumsy and unreliable contrivance into the finished machine which transformed the face of industry) ,and placed England ahead ,of all her rivals as a manufacturing country ought to be fame enough for any one.