ears later his engine was
improved upon by James Watt, a Glasgow instrument maker. In the year
1777, he gave the world the first steam engine that proved of real
practical value.

But during the centuries of experiments with a "heat-engine," the
political world had greatly changed. The British people had succeeded
the Dutch as the common-carriers of the world's trade. They had opened
up new colonies. They took the raw materials which the colonies produced
to England, and there they turned them into finished products, and
then they exported the finished goods to the four corners of the world.
During the seventeenth century, the people of Georgia and the Carolinas
had begun to grow a new shrub which gave a strange sort of woolly
substance, the so-called "cotton wool." After this had been plucked, it
was sent to England and there the people of Lancastershire wove it into
cloth. This weaving was done by hand and in the homes of the workmen.
Very soon a number of improvements were made in the process of weaving.
In the year 1730, John Kay invented the "fly shuttle." In 1770, James
Hargreaves got a patent on his "spinning jenny." Eli Whitney, an
American, invented the cotton-gin, which separated the cotton from its
seeds, a job which had previously been done by hand at the rate of
only a pound a day. Finally Richard Arkwright and the Reverend Edmund
Cartwright invented large weaving machines, which were driven by water
power. And then, in the eighties of the eighteenth century, just when
the Estates General of France had begun those famous meetings which were
to revolutionise the political system of Europe, the engines of Watt
were arranged in such a way that they could drive the weaving machines
of Arkwright, and this created an economic and social revolution which
has changed human relationship in almost every part of the world.

As soon as the stationary engine had proved a success, the inventors
turned their attention to the problem of propelling boats and carts with
the help of a mechanical contrivance. Watt himself designed plans for
a "steam locomotive," but ere he had perfected his ideas, in the year
1804, a locomotive made by Richard Trevithick carried a load of twenty
tons at Pen-y-darran in the Wales mining district.

At the same time an American jeweller and portrait-painter by the name
of Robert Fulton was in Paris, trying to convince Napoleon that with
the use of his submarine boat, the "Nautilus," and his "st