Simple machines (such as levers, pulleys, inclined planes, screws, wheels and axles, and wedges) have been in use since antiquity; complex machines, though more recent inventions, rely largely on combinations and refinements of these basic machines. Since machines change the direction of work or the force required to perform it, machines need energy to function, whether it derived from animal or human muscle, wind or water currents, or heat-generated energy, such as steam. Steam engines were one of the earliest and most important inventions to convert one form of energy to another. Some historians even credit the steam engine with enabling Europe's industrial revolution, which occurred during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The use of steam to power machines initially depended on the ability to create a vacuum. Experiments with vacuums and air pumps began in the 1600s, when the German scientist Otto von Guericke...