Who invented the steam engine?

a. James Watt
b. George Stephenson
c. Richard Trevithick
d. Thomas Newcomen

e. A Heron from Egypt
Heron (sometimes called Hero) takes the prize, some sixteen hundred years before Newcomen’s engine
of 1711.
Heron lived in Alexandria aroundA.D . 62, and is best known as a mathematician and geometer. He was
also a visionary inventor, and his aeolopile (wind ball) was the first working steam engine. Using the
same principle as jet propulsion, a steam-driven metal sphere spun around at 1,500 rpm. Unfortunately
for Heron, no one was able to see its practical function, so it was considered nothing more than an
amusing novelty.
Amazingly, had Heron but known it, the railway had already been invented seven hundred years earlier
by Periander, tyrant of Corinth. Called the Diolkos (slipway), it ran for four miles across the isthmus of
Corinth in Greece, and consisted of a roadway paved with limestone blocks in which were cut parallel
grooves five feet apart. Trolleys ran along these tracks, on to which ships were loaded. These were
pushed by gangs of slaves, forming a sort of land canal that offered a shortcut between the Aegean and
the Ionian seas.
The Diolkos was in use for some some fifteen hundred years until it fell into disrepair aroundA.D . 900.
The principle of railways was then completely forgotten about for almost another five hundred years, until
people had the idea of using them in mines in the fourteenth century.
The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote a brilliant essay speculating what would have happened if the two
inventions had been combined to create a global Greek empire, based on a fast rail network, Athenian
democracy, and a Buddhist-style religion founded on the teachings of Pythagoras. He briefly mentions a
failed prophet who lived at 4 Railway Cuttings, Nazareth.
Heron also invented the vending machine—for four drachmas you got a shot of holy water—and a
portable device to ensure that no one else could drink the wine you brought along to a bottle party.