This narration--sixty years after the events--from Mr. Richard
Trevithick, the eldest son of the engineer, shows that William West
helped in applying high-pressure steam to the Watt low-pressure engine,
and that but few sympathized with the innovators on old customs; but
among them was Captain Jacob Thomas, who successfully fed the old
engine with strong steam.
At that time the Watt engines in Cornwall had been doing seventeen or
eighteen millions; Trevithick's new boilers increased their duty to
forty millions.
"William Pooly[75] was working in Dolcoath before Captain Trevithick's
new boilers were put in, and helped to put them in.
[Footnote 75: William Pooly worked the Dolcoath 76-inch engine in 1869;
his recollections were given in the old engine-house, on the spot once
occupied by Watt and his 63-inch great double engine.]
"The Shammal 45-inch engine was an open-top cylinder, with a chain to
the segment-head wooden beam. So was the 63-inch cylinder Stray Park
engine, then called Wheal Gons[76] in Dolcoath sett, and the Boulton
and Watt 63-inch cylinder double-acting.
[Footnote 76: Smiles speaks of this as Bonze's.]
"There used to be great talking about different boilers; a boiler of
Captain Trevithick's worked with higher steam than the others. Just
before Captain Dick came back to the mine a Boulton and Watt hearse
boiler had been repaired with a new bottom; it was never used. I and
William Causan took a job to cut up the boiler at 1_s._ 6_d._ the
hundredweight; it weighed 17 tons. Jeffrie and Gribble were the mine
engineers; Glanville used to be considered Captain Dick's man in the
mine. You could stand upright on the fire-bars in the middle hollow
of the hearse boiler, and so you could in the outside brick flues;
the middle hollow was like a horse-shoe. When Captain Dick put in his
cylindrical boilers he altered the 63-inch single; there was hardly
anything of her left but the main wall, with the wood bob and a chain
to the piston-rod, and also to the pump-rods. There was an air-pump,
and I think a second-hand cylinder was brought, but it was a 63-inch;
the old Shammal engine had been altered, too.
"The new boiler put in was about 8 feet in diameter and from 30 to
40 feet long, two round tubes went through it; the fire-place in one
end of one tube and in the other end of the other tube; after going
through the tubes the draught went into the brick flues under the
bottom and sides. When the new engine was put in, Gribble said, Why,
these little things will never get steam enough; everybody said so.
"In the Boulton and Watt engines we didn't trouble about feed-pumps
and gauge-cocks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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