Born in Dartmouth in 1663, Thomas Newcomen made a significant contribution to the industrial revolution with his invention of the atmospheric engine. By 1685 Newcomen had established himself as an ironmonger in his hometown. Some of his biggest customers were the mine owners in Cornwall, who faced considerable difficulties with flooding, as the mines became progressively deeper. The standard methods to remove the water - manual pumping, or teams of horses hauling buckets on a rope - were slow and expensive, and they were looking for an alternative.

In 1712 Newcomen invented the world's first successful atmospheric steam engine. The engine pumped water using a vacuum created by condensed steam. It became an important method of draining water from deep mines and was therefore a vital component in the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Newcomen's invention enabled mines to be drained to greater depths than had previously been economically possible and so helped provide the coal, iron and other metals that were vital to the expansion of industry. The atmospheric engine can, with some justification, claim to be the single most important invention of the Industrial Revolution. While it had an efficiency of only one per cent, it was cheaper than using horses to power a pump.

Newcomen's first working engine was installed at a coal mine at Dudley Castle in Staffordshire in 1712. It had a cylinder 21 inches in diameter and nearly eight feet long, and it worked at twelve strokes a minute, raising ten gallons of water from a depth of 156 feet. The engines were rugged and reliable and worked day and night - a factor which made them phenomenally successful. By the time Thomas Newcomen died in 1729 there were at least 100 of his engines working in Britain and across Europe. They were used throughout the eighteenth century and were still influential into the twentieth. One engine in Pentich was still operating 127 years after it was first installed. However, Newcomen didn't die a wealthy man. He received little credit for his invention, most of the limelight falling onto James Watt who refined Newcomen's idea. The principle was used in the following century to create the 'Atmospheric Railway' where a train ran along lines, being propelled by the pressure difference created in a tube connected to steam engine houses along the route.

The atmospheric engine invented by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, today referred to as a Newcomen steam engine (or simply Newcomen engine), was the first practical device to harness the power of steam to produce mechanical work. Newcomen engines were used throughout Britain and Europe, principally to pump water out of mines, starting in the early 18th century. James Watt's later engine was an improved version. Although Watt is far more famous today, Newcomen rightly deserves the first credit for the widespread introduction of steam power.