Introduction — Indisputable Features and Nebulous Contexts: the Steam Engine as a Global Inquisition

摘要

With some reference directly to Donald Cardwell, Floris Cohen has written that one 'indisputable feature of Watt's steam engine - the chief technological motor of industrialization - is that the machine is entirely dependent on a prior awareness of the void and of atmospheric pressure, which are insights gained in the course of the Scientific Revolution'. For such a reason, the history of the steam engine must be traced through the giants — Evangelista Torricelli, Otto von Guericke, Blaise Pascal and Robert Boyle amongst others - for its successful evolution depended on a novel creation of 'artificially produced nature' via the air pump - that is the vacuum could only be intentionally produced in a milieu that regarded as both feasible and desirable the creation of what Sorel called 'artificial nature' as a method of investigation beyond that of searching the phenomena of nature as they presented themselves immediately to the senses - perhaps this was the crucial feature of instrument-based experimentation, and perhaps Torricelli and his broken column of water was the initial key, who went beyond Galileo by realizing that it was the pressure of the atmosphere that enabled a suction pump to work.