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Renowned artist Anselm Kiefer goes big with his massive installation in southern France

Lessons from the invention of the thermometer

You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation. This edition went out to over 12,200 subscribers. If you’ve just been forwarded this, you can sign up here: Previously, on

As I noted in Part I, the general idea of using heat and steam for mechanical work had a long and continuous history back to ancient times. But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a machine that does the exact opposite, exploiting the apparent sucking power that occurs when hot steam is rapidly condensed with a spray of cold water. It’s the relative weight of the atmosphere, compared to the sudden vacuum from condensing steam, that does all the work...

In the seventeenth century, Marin Mersenne (1588–1648) was a very central and highly influential figure in the European intellectual and scientific communities; a man, who almost literally knew everybody and was known by everybody in those communities. Today, in the big names, big events, popular versions of the history of science he remains only known…