where does the term boiler plate come from
Boilerplate text "Boiler plate" originally referred to the rolled steel used to make water boilers[1][2] but is used in the media to refer to hackneyed or unoriginal writing. The term refers to the metal printing plates of pre-prepared text such as advertisements or syndicated columns that were distributed to small, local newspapers. These printing plates came to be known as 'boilerplates' by analogy. One large supplier to newspapers of this kind of boilerplate was the Western Newspaper Union, which supplied "ready-to-print stories [which] contained national or international news" to papers with smaller geographic footprints, which could include advertisements pre-printed next to the conventional content.[3]
Steam power during the Industrial Revolution The first safe and successful steam power plant was introduced by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Newcomen apprently conceived his machine quite independently of Savery, but as the latter had taken out a very wide-ranging patent, Newcomen and his associates were obliged to come to an arrangement with him, marketing the engine until 1733 under a joint patent.[2] Newcomen's engine appears to have been based on Papin's experiments carried out 30Â years earlier, and employed a piston and cylinder, one end of which was open to the atmosphere above the piston. Steam just above atmospheric pressure (all that the boiler could stand) was introduced into the lower half of the cylinder beneath the piston during the gravity-induced upstroke; the steam was then condensed by a jet of cold water injected into the steam space to produce a partial vacuum; the pressure differential between the atmosphere and the vacuum on either side of the piston displaced it downwards into the cylinder, raising the opposite end of a rocking beam to which was attached a gang of gravity-actuated reciprocating force pumps housed in the mineshaft. The engine's downward power stroke raised the pump, priming it and preparing the pumping stroke. At first the phases were controlled by hand, but within ten years an escapement mechanism had been devised worked by of a vertical plug tree suspended from the rocking beam which rendered the engine self-acting.