1712
Newcomen's Atmospheric Engine
At Dudley Castle in Staffordshire, Thomas Newcomen's steam engine pumped water from a coal mine for the first time. Its giant rocking beam, fed by condensed steam, would soon rise over pits across Britain. Inefficient, colossal, indispensable, it was the first practical power source independent of wind, water, or muscle.
Slave Code Strengthened in Virginia
After the New York revolt and growing Afro-American populations along the Chesapeake, Virginia's House of Burgesses passed new laws codifying lifetime, inheritable bondage for Africans. Manumission was made harder, marriage across color lines criminal. Chattel slavery, as a legal institution, was reaching its grim adult shape. These statutes became templates for slave codes across the southern colonies, hardening racial hierarchy into written law.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau Born in Geneva
The watchmaker's son who would grow up to tell Europe that civilization had corrupted natural man was born in a tall Protestant house above the Rhone. His mother died of childbirth within days. He would be a vagabond, a lover, a composer, a philosopher, a renegade, sometimes all at once.
New York Slave Revolt
Twenty-three enslaved Africans set fire to a building on Maiden Lane and waited with muskets and hatchets. Nine whites died before the militia arrived. Twenty-one of the rebels were executed, some burned alive, some broken on the wheel. The city tightened its slave codes and called it order. The revolt haunted the city's slaveholders and fueled the larger panic of 1741 a generation later.