Development & Application:

Towards the close of its career, the atmospheric engine was much improved in its mechanical details and its proportions by John Smeaton, who built many large engines of this type during the 1770s. The urgent need for an engine to give rotary motion was making itself felt and this was done with limited success by Wasborough and Pickard using a Newcomen engine to drive a flywheel through a crank. Although the principle of the crank had long been known, Pickard managed to obtain a 12-year patent in 1780 for the specific application of the crank to steam engines; this was a setback to Boulton and Watt who got round the patent by applying the sun and planet motion to their advanced double-acting rotative engine of 1782. By 1725 the Newcomen engine was in common use in mining, particularly collieries. It held its place with little material change for the rest of the century. Use of the Newcomen engine was extended in some places to pump municipal water supply; for instance the first Newcomen engine in France was built at Passy in 1726 to pump water from the Seine to the city of Paris. It was also used to power machinery indirectly, by returning water from below a water wheel to a reservoir above it, so that the same water could again turn the wheel. Among the earliest examples of this was at Coalbrookdale. A horse-powered pump had been installed in 1735 to return water to the pool above the Old Blast Furnace. This was replaced by a Newcomen engine in 1742-3. Several new furnaces built in Shropshire in the 1750s were powered in a similar way, including Horsehay and Ketley Furnaces and Madeley Wood or Bedlam Furnaces. The latter does not seem to have had a pool above the furnace, merely a tank into which the water was pumped. In other industries, engine-pumping was less common, but Richard Arkwright used an engine to provide additional power for his cotton mill. Attempts were made to drive machinery by Newcomen engines, but these were unsuccessful, as the single power stroke produced a very jerky motion.

Successor
The main problem with the Newcomen design was that it was very expensive to operate. After the cylinder was cooled to create the vacuum, the cylinder walls were cold enough to condense some of the steam as it was admitted. This meant that a considerable amount of fuel was being used just to heat the cylinder back to the point where the steam would start to fill it again. As the heat losses were related to the surfaces, while useful work related to the volume, increases in the size of the engine increased efficiency. Newcomen engines became larger in time. However, efficiency did not matter very much within the context of a colliery, where coal was freely available. Newcomen's engine was only replaced when James Watt improved it in 1769 to avoid this problem (Watt had been asked to repair a model of a Newcomen engine by Glasgow University. A model exaggerated the scale problem of the Newcomen engine). In the Watt steam engine, condensation took place in a separate container, attached to the steam cylinder via a pipe. When a valve on the pipe was opened, the vacuum in the condenser would, in turn, evacuate that part of the cylinder below the piston. This eliminated the cooling of the main cylinder, and dramatically reduced fuel use. It also enabled the development of a double-acting cylinder, with upwards and downwards power strokes more suited to transmitting power to a wheel.

Watt's design, introduced in 1769, did not eliminate Newcomen engines immediately. Watt's vigorous defence of his patents resulted in the desire to avoid royalty payments as far as possible. The expiry of the patents led to a rush to install Watt engines in the 1790s, and Newcomen engines were eclipsed, even in collieries.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_steam_engine