Western Culture Global Presents The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness. #51: Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729) Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729) was an English ironmonger, inventor and a father of the Industrial Revolution. Despite the technological limitations of his time, Newcomen invented the first practical steam engine for pumping water, the Newcomen engine. It was also the first practical engine to use a piston in a cylinder. The engine was widely adopted for water pumping in most of Europe. The importance of Newcomen’s engine goes far beyond its innovative water-pumping ability; the engine demonstrated the profound effect machines could have on production, thus assisting the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In his 1963 book on Newcomen, LTC Rolt sums up Newcomen's achievement: "In the whole history of technology it would be difficult to find a greater single advance than this, nor one with a greater significance for all humanity." Go to #52: Fred Soper Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — Home Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Numerical Order Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Century Top 100 Western Culture Heroes — by Category
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