Thomas Savery

Thomas Savery was an English engineer and inventor who patented the first commercially used steam-powered device on 2 July 1698, a pump with no moving pistons that used steam pressure and condensation to draw water upward through a pipe. He described the design in his 1702 book The Miner's Friend, or An Engine to Raise Water by Fire, aimed chiefly at draining flooded mines, and the device became known simply as the Savery engine. The pump suffered serious limitations: its joints could not reliably withstand the high-pressure steam it needed, heat was wasted each time water entered the vessel, and it could raise water no more than about thirty feet above the water level, ruling it out for deep mines on its own. These limitations led Thomas Newcomen to develop a piston-driven atmospheric engine built on the earlier piston concept of the French inventor Denis Papin, but Savery's pump remains the first steam engine put to sustained commercial use.