The Pumping Engine

> the streams of thought that led from Torricelli to Newcomen were meandering ones

A very interesting history showing the development of ideas, rather than the narrative of a lone inventor.

You hear assertions that there’s less innovation these days because everything now is just an incremental change of a previous idea.

But I notice that any detailed and technical history of past inventions winds up showing a very incremental process, with many more intermediates and branches than you were aware of.

The common narrative of past innovations is mostly a romantic view. It comes from people not wanting to be bothered by a true account of the evolution of technical ideas.

The sufflator is interesting. I'd never heard of it before.

Nice!