At the close of the exhibition I went home utterly discouraged. When I went into the shop the first person I met was the foreman of the lower floor, where the engine had been built. I told him of the plight in which I found myself placed and to which I attributed my failure. The fellow gave me the lie direct, saying with a conceited smirk: “It is impossible, Mr. Porter, that any such work as you have described can have gone out of this establishment.” I turned on my heel and left him, and in less than half a minute I saw at a distance of fifty feet a 22-inch piston being finished for an engine we were building for the Tremont and Suffolk Mill. The workman had finished turning the piston and was then cutting the grooves for the rings. The reflection from the surface showed me the same two cones meeting in the middle. I went up to the lathe, the back side of which was toward me, and told the workman to stop his lathe and bring me a straight-edge. This rocked on the edge in the middle of the piston, opening nearly one eighth of an inch on each face alternately. I sent a boy to find the foreman and asked him what he thought of that and left him. I had influence enough to have both the foreman and the workman discharged that night. Think of it; superintendent, general foreman, the foreman of the floor, and workman, altogether, never saw what I detected at a glance from the opposite side of the shop. I want to stop here to express my disgust with the American system of making the tailstock of a lathe adjustable, which enables either an ignorant, careless or malicious workman to ruin his work after this fashion. To their credit, English tools have no such feature. The very next day we received a call from Mr. Bishop, the engineer of the works of Russell & Irwin at New Britain, Conn., to tell us that their engine just put in by us had a very bad thump which he was afraid could not be cured as it was evidently caused by the piston projecting over the admission ports when at the end of its stroke. “Impossible,” I exclaimed; “I never made such an engine in my life.” I should here state that in experimenting with the first little engine that I made before I went to England, I at first made the piston project over the port one quarter of an inch, and the engine thumped. I satisfied myself that this was caused by the impact of the entering steam against the projecting surface of the piston, driving it against the opposite side of the cylinder; this was aggravated in high-speed engines. In this case the engine made 160 revolutions per minute and the steam was admitted through four simultaneous openings, so it entered the cylinder with great velocity. I turned a quarter of an inch off from each face of the piston, and the thump disappeared. I then made it a law from which I never varied, that the piston should come to the admission port and not project over it at all, and this feature was shown in every drawing.