James Watt: Perfecter of the Steam Engine The world we live in today is is fast paced, competitive, and ever evolving. Being accustomed to such a rapidly changing and highly inventive society can make it very difficult to imagine the way people lived centuries ago. Before the Industrial Revolution, most everything was done by hand, required a great deal of time and effort, and was terribly expensive. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intuitive thinkers would invent and perfect machines, tools, and devices, forever changing the ways of the world. In the following paragraphs, James Watt and his steam engine will be discussed in detail, along with their enormous influence in modernizing the world's industries, trade, transportation, and economy. James Watt was born in Scotland in 1736, and died in 1819. His life spanned many of the years in the most dynamic period in the history of the world. Watt also lived in the United Kingdom, which, at the time, was the most rapidly evolving country on earth. Contrary to popular belief, James Watt did not invent the steam engine. In The Scientific Monthly, authors accurately portray Watt as, "a scientist rather than inventor" (Ambrosius and Reed 272). People had been using steam for power several centuries before Watt's time, but "English military engineer and inventor, Thomas Savery, [was] the first to create a specific device to harness and channel the power of steam" (Ambrosius and Reed 272). It was Savery who patented the first crude steam engine in 1698. Several years after Savery, English blacksmith Thomas Newcomen is credited with the invention of the atmospheric steam engine, as a result of his improvements to Savery's design. Decades would pass before the emergence of Watt's entirely redeveloped engine, which greatly surpassed the abilities of previous designs. By studying the flaws in