Two hundred and fifty years ago this month, a young Scottish engineer took a Sunday walk across Glasgow Green – and changed the world. Thanks to the idea dreamed up by James Watt that Sunday in May 1765, human beings became masters of power generation and so transformed our planet.
At the time, Watt was merely fixated with the problems posed by the primitive and inefficient steam engines that were then being used to pump water from mines, and had already made several futile attempts to improve them. Then, on his Sunday walk, the idea for a new device – which he later called the separate condenser – popped into his mind.
It was a notion that would have stunning consequences. The separate condenser changed the steam engine from a crude and inefficient machine into one that became the mainstay of the industrial revolution. Britain was transformed from an agricultural country into a nation of manufacturers.
Within a few decades of Watt’s breakthrough, networks of factories and mines, linked by railways, were spreading across the country, triggering a national frenzy for fossil fuels that has since become a global obsession. Steam power no longer dominates global industry but our reliance on fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas still lingers – with growing impacts on the planet.
Indeed, the Nobel-prizewinning chemist Paul Crutzen now argues that the greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels have brought about such profound changes that we must accept the world has entered a new epoch. He calls it the “anthropocene”.
