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Power of Productivity
The story of modern productivity as we understand it today is very much linked to urbanisation and industrialisation in the 18th century.
Before the creation of the steam engine and the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1769 in Great Britain, most of humanity’s population for the thousands of year’s lived in rural areas and the countryside or small communities.
Thomas Newcomen developed the first commercially successful engine to transmit continuous power to a machine in 1712.
James Watt made a critical improvement in 1764 by removing spent steam to a separate vessel for condensation, greatly improving the amount of work obtained per unit of fuel consumed.
Before 1000, it’s estimated that the share of the world population in urban settings did not reach 5%. By 1800, this share reached around 8%; by 1900, it had increased to around 16%.
The history of the development of the steam engine shows that other civilisations created it.
However, the technology was never successfully implemented on a broader scale for various reasons.
China had a complex machine run off steam power during the Song Dynasty, 960–1279 AD.
However, that machine was different from the machine developed by the Scotsman James Watt and was still not the first…
