And yet perhaps the most direct stimulus of the industrial era occurred in Scotland at the University of Glasgow, when a mostly self-taught instrument maker named James Watt was asked to repair a Newcomen steam engine. He fixed it, but found the engine still put out very little power. So he started fiddling with the machinery and experimenting with steam until he developed a model that used 75 percent less fuel than the Newcomen and was considerably more powerful. More than a decade later, in 1776, as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were signing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia,
...more
