Talk:Thomas Newcomen/Material from Wikipedia user Dr. Gabriel Gojon/The French Academy of Sciences

¨The French Academy of Sciences The project of discovering and perfecting a new source of power capable of effecting a dramatic human advance, was first initiated as a directed national effort by Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), the minister of the young French King Louis XIV. In 1666, Colbert established the Academy of Sciences at Paris for this purpose, recruiting the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695) as its first president. Huygens's proposed 1666 program included "research into the power of gunpowder of which a small portion is enclosed in a very thick iron or copper case. Research also into the power of water converted by fire into steam," as well as experiments with vacuum pumps, wind-powered engines, and the communication of force by the collision of bodies.

In 1672, Huygens acquired two young students and collaborators: German diplomat Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1714), and Denis Papin (1647- 1712?), a medical doctor introduced into the Academy by Madame Colbert. Within a year, Huygens and his new colleagues had successfully modified the von Guerike air pump into an engine capable of transforming the force of exploding gunpowder into useful work.

Huygens proposed to create a vacuum within a cylinder under a piston, by exploding a charge of gunpowder at the cylinder's base (see Figure 1). After the air was expelled through two valves fitted with leather collars, the collars collapsed, preventing air from reentering the cylinder. The pressure of the atmosphere then pushed the piston downwards into the cylinder, the motion of the piston being applied to perform work.

After successfully demonstrating a model gunpowder engine to Colbert, Huygens wrote:

"The violent action of the powder is by this discovery restricted to a movement which limits itself as does that of a great weight. And not only can it serve all purposes to which weight is applied, but also in most cases where man or animal power is needed, such as that it could be applied to raise great stones for building, to erect obelisks, to raise water for fountains or to work mills to grind grain .... It can also be used as a very powerful projector of such a nature that it would be possible by this means to construct weapons which would discharge cannon balls, great arrows, and bomb shells .... And, unlike the artillery of today these engines would be easy to transport, because in this discovery lightness is combined with power. "This last characteristic is very important, and by this means permits the discovery of new kinds of vehicles on land and water.

"And although it may sound contradictory, it seems not impossible to devise some vehicle to move through the air ...."

While Papin advanced Huygens's work with improved engineering designs, Leibniz proceeded, in deliberate fashion, to discover and develop the science of dynamics, and its mathematical tool, the Calculus. Leibniz wrote that in his youth, he freed himself from "the yoke of Aristotle," rejecting scholasticism in favor of the materialist notion of "atoms and the void." Accepting Descartes's notion of matter as mere passive "extension", Leibniz attempted to work out a complete physical theory in his 1670 New Physical Hypotheses. However, he found that the assumption of a passive, inert matter, whose essence consists in merely taking up space, resulted in absurdities.

Consider the case, he wrote, of a small body, A, moving in a straight line with velocity V. Suppose that A encounters a much larger body, B, at rest. Leibniz concluded, that since there is nothing in the concept of mere extension to account for inertia, the body A will carry the body B along with it, without losing any of its velocity:

"This is a consequence which is entirely irreconcilable with experiments.... All of this shows that there is in matter something else than the purely Geometrical, that is, than just extension and bare change. And in considering the matter closely, we perceive that we must add to them some higher or metaphysical notion, namely, that of substance, action, and force." [emphasis in original] As opposed to the Newtonian dogma of "hard atoms" interacting in the "vacuum" of empty space, Leibniz proposed to study the supposedly "impenetrable" interior of things (much as 20th century scientists have explored the interior of the atom), thus leading to the discovery of new and greater sources of power. This project led Leibniz to discover the grounds for universal progress, and the basis for a new science -- dynamics. For Leibniz, matter cannot be divided linearly, like marks on a ruler, but rather in a manner suggestive of the Riemannian conception of nested manifolds, or "Worlds within Worlds." Thus, Leibniz develops his own concept of "infinite divisibility" in the Monadology:

"Each portion of matter is not only divisible ad infinitum, as the ancients recognized, but also each part is actually endlessly subdivided into parts, of which each has some motion of its own; otherwise it would be impossible for each portion of matter to express the whole universe. "66. Whence we see that there is a world of creatures, of living beings, of animals, of entelechies, of souls, in the smallest particle of matter.

"67. Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors is also such a garden or such a pond.

"68. And although the earth and air which lies between the plants of the garden, or the water between the fish of the pond, is neither plant nor fish, they yet contain more of them, but for the most part so tiny as to be imperceptible to us.

"69. Therefore there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion except in appearance ...."

Such an endless subdivision, Leibniz said, can account for the "perpetual and very free progress of the whole universe": Even if many substances have already reached great perfection, nevertheless on account of the infinite divisibility of the continuum, there always remain in the depths of things slumbering parts which must yet be awakened and become greater and better, and, in a word, attain a better culture. And hence progress never comes to an end. [emphasis added]