People interested in the steam engine are well catered for by an enormous variety of books, but these deal almost entirely with transport. The stationary steam engine has been much neglected in modern literature and there is very little available to tell us about the largest and most varied aspects of the use of steam power: how for instance it was put to pumping out mines in the reign of Queen Anne and to providing domestic water supplies in London not long after. All these installations were designed as beam engines; in other words, they had a rocking beam interposed between the piston and the work it had to do and it is this type of engine which this book seeks to introduce. It was made for two centuries and its uses were legion once the industrial revolution was under way. Mills, factories of all kinds, canals, railways and furnaces employed it; all the early steamships used it for motive power and in its last glorious phase gigantic compound engines in cathedral-like structures showing the height of civic pride pumped the water or the sewage for almost every great city.