Note 77 — Chapter III · THE STEAM ENGINE
Reading edition
On the evidence of a picture purporting to represent the first Newcomen engine, in which mechanisms are shown for operating the cocks automatically, an attempt has been made to prove that the manipulated cocks were a figment and the story of Humphrey Potter a myth. The iconoclast has not been successful. The evidence that the first engines were hand-controlled is very general (see Galloway’s Steam Engine and Its Inventors).