Year 8 know that the first cotton mills stood beside fast rivers, and today they find out what freed them. The teacher talks through a slide deck: Thomas Newcomen's engine of 1712, pumping water out of a coal mine near Dudley and burning so much coal that it was little use away from a pit; James Watt, an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, repairing a model Newcomen engine in the 1760s and seeing that cooling the cylinder on every stroke wasted most of the heat; his separate condenser, patented in 1769; his partnership with Matthew Boulton in Birmingham from 1775; and the 1781 patent for turning the piston's stroke into rotary motion that could drive machinery. Students copy a table from the board into their books, with columns for engine, problem, fix and what it could now do, and fill it in as the story goes. The lesson ends with a written answer: why could a mill owner in 1800 build in the middle of Manchester instead of beside a river?
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