Notwithstanding this widespread incredulity among engineers, and the apparent novelty of the gas engine idea, fire or combustion engines have been proposed long, long ago.  The first Newcomen steam engine ever set to work was used by a Mr. Back, of Wolverhampton, in the year 1711.  Thirty-one years before this time, in Paris—­year 1680—­Huyghens presented a memoir to the Academy of Sciences describing a method of utilizing the expansive force of gunpowder.  This engineer is notable as being the very first to propose the use of a cylinder and piston, as well as the first combustion engine of a practical kind.

The engine consists of a vertical open topped cylinder, in which works a piston; the piston is connected by a chain passing over a pulley above it to a heavy weight; the upstroke is accomplished by the descent of the weight, which pulls the piston to the top of the cylinder; gunpowder placed in a tray at the bottom of the cylinder is now ignited, and expels the air with which the cylinder is filled through a shifting valve, and, after the products of combustion have cooled, a partial vacuum takes place and the atmospheric pressure forces down the piston to the bottom of its stroke, during which work may be obtained.

On the board I have made a sketch of this engine.  Some years previous to Huyghens’ proposal, the Abbe Hautefeuille (1678) proposed a gunpowder engine without piston for pumping water.  It is similar to Savery’s steam engine, but using the pressure of the explosion instead of the pressure of steam.  This engine, however, had no piston, and was only applicable as a pump.  The Savery principle still survives in the action of the well-known pulsometer steam pump.

Denys Papin, the pupil and assistant of Huyghens, continued experimenting upon the production of motive power, and in 1690 published a description of his attempts at Leipzig, entitled “A New Method of Securing Cheaply Motive Power of Considerable Magnitude.”

He mentions the gunpowder engine, and states that “until now all experiments have been unsuccessful; and after the combustion of the exploded powder there always remains in the cylinder one-fifth of its volume of air.”

For the explosion of the gunpowder he substituted the generation and condensation of steam, heating the bottom of his cylinder by a fire; a small quantity of water contained in it was vaporized, and then on removing the fire the steam condensed and the piston was forced down.  This was substantially the Newcomen steam engine, but without the separate boiler.

Papin died about the year 1710, a disappointed man, about the same time as Newcomen.  Thomas Newcomen, ironmonger and blacksmith, of Dartmouth, England, had first succeeded in getting his engine to work.  The hard fight to wrest from nature a manageable motive power and to harness fire for industrial use was continued by this clever blacksmith, and he succeeded when the more profound but less constructively skillful philosophers had failed.