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The Choice Between High-Pressure and Low-Pressure Steam Power in America in the Early Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Harlan I. Halsey
Harlan I. Halsey
Affiliation:
Senior Economist, SRI International, Menlo Park, California 94025
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Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, five versions of stationary steam engines were in widespread use. In America, the high-pressure engine was dominant in the West, but on the eastern seaboard the low-pressure engine was viable. In Britain, the low-pressure engine was overwhelmingly dominant. Here we analyze the evidence on cost and performance of high- and low-pressure engines, and show that fuel-price and interest-rate differentials were sufficient to explain the distribution of steam engine types in America.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , December 1981 , pp. 723 - 744
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1981

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References

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2 The last Cornish pumping engine survived until 1946, long after the commercial demise of the Watt and Newcomen engines, and in fact long beyond the commercial era of the high-pressure steam engine. Thus the modern conception of the Cornish pumping engine as a low-pressure engine developed. In Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century, condensing Cornish engines operating at pressures near 40 pounds per square inch were thought of as high-pressure engines, but they were usually referred to (simply) as Cornish engines. The invention of the Cornish engine was widely attributed to Richard Trevithick. The confusion between the noncondensing high-pressure engine invented by Trevithick about 1803, which operated at pressures above 100 pounds per square inch, and the Comish engine whose development was begun by Trevithick and others about 1810 explains how “Trevithick's engine” could be widely adopted in Britain and yet almost all steam engines in Britain could be low-pressure by 1830.Google Scholar

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14 Ibid., p. 223.

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