1. Only the last of these was suited at all to the continuous operating of machines, and although waterpower abounded in Lancashire and Scotland and ran grain mills as well as textile mills, it had one great disadvantage：Streams flowed where nature intended them to and water-driven factories had to be located on their banks whether or not the location was desirable for other reasons.
2. Early in the century, a pump had come into use in which expanding steam raised a piston(活塞) in a cylinder(汽缸)，and atmospheric pressure brought it down again when the steam condensed inside the cylinder to form a vacuum．
3. The final step came when steam was introduced into the cylinder to drive the piston backward as well as forward thereby increasing the speed of the engine and cutting its fuel consumption.
4. Coal gas rivaled smoky oil lamps and flickering candles, and early in the new century, well—to—do Londoners grow accustomed to gaslights houses and even streets.
5. Iron manufacturers which had starved for fuel while depending on charcoal also benefited from ever-increasing supplies of coal; blast furnaces with steam-powered bellows turned out more iron and steel for the new machinery．
6. At the same time, operators of the first printing presses run by steam rather than by hand found it possible to produce a thousand pages in an hour rather than thirty．
7. In some industrial regions, heavily laden wagons，with flanged wheels，were being hauled by horses along metal rails; and the stationary steam engine was puffing in the factory and mine.
8. Another generation passed before Inventors succeeded in combining these ingredients by putting the engine on wheels and the wheels on the rails, so as to provide a machine to take the place of the horse.
9. When he grew older William Smith taught himself surveying from books he bought with his small savings and at the age of eighteen he was apprenticed to a surveyor of the local parish.
10. The companies building the canals to transport coal needed surveyors to help them find the coal deposits worth mining as well as to determine the best courses for the canals.
