John Smeaton
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John Smeaton was an English civil engineer responsible for the design of bridges, canals, harbours and lighthouses. He was also a capable mechanical engineer and an eminent scholar, who introduced var
Portrait by Mather Brown
John Smeaton by George Romney, 1779 (detail), National Portrait Gallery, London
Smeaton's Lighthouse
Granite bust by Philip Chatfield in Smeaton's Tower Plymouth
James Watt
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James Watt was a Scottish inventor, engineer and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen's 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought b
John Smeaton
…benefits of overshot versus undershot water wheels. Smeaton experimented with the Newcomen steam engine and made marked improvements around the time James Watt was building his first engines (c. late 1770s). Smeaton died after suffering a stroke while walking in the garden of his family home at Austhorpe, and…
Portrait by Carl Frederik von Breda, 1792
Statue of Watt (Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, by Francis Chantrey)
James Watt by John Partridge, after Sir William Beechey (1806)
Bust of Watt in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery