Today, an old book and a new look at creativity and
dissent. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
The eaves of the Louvre in
Paris are lined with statues of famous French
artists and intellectuals. One is Denis Papin.
Papin invented a steam engine at least two decades
before the English did and seventy years before
Watt brought steam power to maturity.
But Papin was a French Protestant -- a Huguenot.
The Huguenots had coexisted with French Catholics
for a century. Then, after a rapid buildup of
anti-Protestant sentiment in the 1680s, Louis XIV
expelled the Huguenots. He drove Papin and 400,000
others off into Germany, England, Canada. Huguenots
found their way to Massachusetts, England, Canada
... Their progeny included revolutionaries like
Alexander Hamilton and Paul Revere. Christian
Huygens, another early experimenter with steam, was
also among the intellectuals forced out of France.
During his peripatetic life, Papin never did bring
the steam engine to fruition. Practical
power-producing engines had to wait another 20
years for a Devonshire blacksmith named Thomas
Newcomen.
I recently caught an odd reflection of all that
when I found a religious monograph from 1686 in a
used bookstore. Such items have little market
value, even when they're this old and in good
condition. But a young cleric named William Wake
wrote this book the year after Papin arrived in
London. And Wake later went on to become Archbishop
of Canterbury.
Wake had just returned from three years as chaplain
to the English ambassador in France. He'd left
along with the Huguenots, and here he tried to
delineate the minor differences between Anglican
and Catholic doctrine. He chided the French for
hardening their position and turning from reason to
assault.
Wake wrote fairly gently. He was still hoping for
reconciliation. By the time he became archbishop,
he was still struggling to reconcile religious
differences -- this time with English dissidents.
And it turns out that the steam-engine inventor
Newcomen was one of those dissidents -- made from
the same technological and spiritual stuff as
Papin.
So religious nonconformity is woven through the
history of steam power and the Industrial
Revolution. This odd book is backdrop to that
drama. As a young man, Wake objected to forces that
were scattering people like Denis Papin and
Christian Huygens.
But those people scattered the way seeds scatter,
and our modern industrial world sprang from those
seeds. As an old man, Wake was still trying to make
peace with dissent. But this time the refugees were
shaking off English orthodoxy and forging a
steam-powered economic revolution away from
Anglican seats of power in London. I find this old
book so appealing because Wake seems to have been
one member of that establishment who valued dissent
-- and the process which lies at the heart of all
creative change.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Wake, W., An Exposition of the Doctrine of the
Church of England in the Several Articles ...
London: Printed for Richard Chiswell at the Rose and
Crown in St. Paul's Church-yard. MDCLXXXVI. (The
edition mentioned in the script above may be read in
Special Collections and Archives, UH Library.)
Also useful were articles from the 1897 and 1911
editions of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica on the Huguenots, the Edict of
Nantes, William Wake, Denis Papin, and Christian
Huygens (who was somewhat older than Papin and who
also did groundwork for the steam engine.)
I am grateful to Catherine Patterson, UH History
Department, for her additional counsel.
Photo by John Lienhard
Denis Papin as he appears on the eaves of the
Louvre holding a steam piston in one hand
Click on the image for an
enlargement.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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