Thomas Newcomen

Later one of Newcomen's business contacts in London, Edward Wallin, was another Baptist minister who had connections with the well-known Doctor John Gill of Horsleydown, Southwark.

Savery had devised a "fire engine", a kind of thermic syphon, in which steam was admitted to an empty container and then condensed.

Newcomen replaced the receiving vessel (where the steam was condensed) with a cylinder containing a piston based on Papin's design.

Newcomen and his partner John Calley built the first successful engine of this type at the Conygree Coalworks near Dudley in the West Midlands.

That society formed a company which had a monopoly on supplying medicines to the Navy providing a close link with Savery, whose will he witnessed.

The Committee of the Proprietors also included Edward Wallin, a Baptist of Swedish descent; and pastor of a church at Maze Pond, Southwark.

Newcomen died at Wallin's house in 1729, and was buried at Bunhill Fields burial ground on the outskirts of the City of London; the exact site of his grave is unknown.

The Newcomen engine held its place without material change for about 75 years, spreading gradually to more areas of the UK and mainland Europe.

New iron casting techniques pioneered by the Coalbrookdale Company in the 1720s allowed bigger cylinders to be used, up to about 6 feet (1.8 m) in diameter by the 1760s.

By 1800, hundreds of non-Watt rotary engines had been built, especially in collieries and ironworks where irregular motion was not a problem but also in textile mills.

Perhaps the last Newcomen-style engine to be used commercially – and the last still remaining on its original site – is at the Elsecar Heritage Centre, near Barnsley in South Yorkshire.

On 23 February 2012 the Royal Mail released a stamp featuring Newcomen's atmospheric steam engine as part its "Britons of Distinction" series.