Cardan Ramelli and Leonardo da Vinci, learned Italians, and the accomplished Prof. Jacob Besson of Orleans, France, all did much by their writings to make known theoretically the wonderful powers of steam, and to suggest modes of its practical operation, in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Giambattista della Porta, a gentleman of Naples, possessing high and varied accomplishments in all the sciences as they were known at that day, 1601, and who invented the magic-lantern and _camera obscura_, in a work called _Spiritalia_, described how steam pressure could be employed to raise a column of water, how a vacuum was produced by the condensation of steam in a closed vessel, and how the condensing vessel should be separated from the boiler. Revault in France showed in 1605 how a bombshell might be exploded by steam. Salomon de Caus, engineer and architect to Louis XIII, in 1615 described how water might be raised by the expansion of steam. In 1629 the Italian, Branco, published at Rome an account of the application of a steam jet upon the vanes of a small wheel to run it, and told how in other ways Hero’s engine might be employed for useful purposes. The first English publication describing a way of applying steam appeared in 1630 in a patent granted to David Ramseye, for a mode of raising water thereby. This was followed by patents to Grant in 1632 and to one Ford in 1640. During that century these crude machines were called “fire engines.” It seems to have been common in some parts of Europe during the seventeenth century to use a blast of steam to improve the draft of chimneys and of blast furnaces. This application of steam to smoke and smelting has been frequently revived by modern inventors with much flourish of originality. It is with a certain feeling of delight and relief, after a prolonged search through the centuries for some evidence of harnessing this mighty agent to man’s use, that we come to the efforts of the good Marquis of Worcester--Edward Somerset. He it was who in 1655 wrote of the _Inventions of the Sixteenth Century_. He afterwards amplified this title by calling his book _A Century of Names and Scantlings of such Inventions as at present I call to mind to have tried and perfected_, etc. There are about one hundred of these “Scantlings,” and his descriptions of them are very brief but interesting. Some, if revived now and put to use, would throw proposed flying machines into the background, as they involved perpetual motion.