Skip to main content

Hacienda La Esperanza Sugar Mill Steam Engine

Location: Manatí, PR, USA
Date: 1861
Category:
Creator(s): Watt, James , Newcomen, Thomas

The La Esperanza sugar mill steam engine is one of the few remaining American links to the pioneer beam engines of the English inventors Thomas Newcomen (1712) and James Watt (1769). The engine was built in 1861 in Cold Spring, New York, by the West Point Foundry. The general arrangement and details, including the Gothic embellishment, are typical of machinery of the period. The straight-line motion of the piston rod is accommodated to the arc of the moving beam end by a parallel motion. Watt regarded this ingenious linkage as the invention of which he was most proud.

The sugar cane plantation was founded in 1850 by Don Jose Ramon Fernandez y Martinez, Marquis of La Esperanza. The Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico restored the machinery as part of a sugar museum.

Tags: Era: 1860-1869
Innovation designated by:
Hacienda La Esperanza Sugar Mill Steam Engine
Public Domain (National Park Service)
Hacienda La Esperanza Sugar Mill Steam Engine
Address:
Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico
Barceloneta
Manatí, PR, USA

Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico

We hope you enjoyed this essay.

Please support America's only magazine of the history of engineering and innovation, and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to Invention & Technology.

Donate

Stay informed - subscribe to our newsletter.
The subscriber's email address.