Lives of Boulton and Watt. Principally from the Original Soho Mss.: Comprising also a history of the invention and introduction of the steam engineSmiles, Samuel
History
Lives of Boulton and Watt. Principally from the Original Soho Mss.: Comprising also a history of the invention and introduction of the steam engine
[6] Dr. Bayly, in his ‘Apothegms’ (1682), p. 87, describes the
fright given to some Puritan visitors on the occasion of their
searching Raglan Castle for arms, the Marquis of Worcester
being a known Papist. “Having carried them up and down the
castle, his lordship at length brought them over a high bridge
that arched over the moat between the castle and the great
tower, wherein the Lord Herbert had lately contrived certain
water-works, which, when the several engines and wheels were set
agoing, much quantity of water through the hollow conveyances
of the aqueducts was to be let down from the top of an high
tower.” When all was ready for the surprise, the water was let
in, and it made such a hideous and fearful noise by reason of
the hollowness of the tower, and the neighbouring echoes of
the castle, that the men stood amazed and terror-struck. At
this point up came a man staring and running, who exclaimed,
“Look to yourselves, my masters, for the lions are got loose.”
Whereupon the Puritans fled down the narrow staircase in such
haste that they lost footing and fell, tumbling one over the
other, and never halted until they had got the castle out of
sight. Mr. Dircks, in his able and exhaustive ‘Life, Times, and
Scientific Labours of the Marquis of Worcester,’ London, 1865,
says that this hydraulic apparatus “probably depended for its
operation on the influence of heat from burning fuel acting on
a suitably constructed boiler, and so arranged as to be able
to apply the expansive force of steam to the driving of water
through vertical pipes to a considerable elevation.” But it does
not seem to us that the facts stated are sufficient to warrant
this assumption.
[7] Mr. Dircks says “it was a machine consisting of a wheel 14
feet in diameter, carrying forty weights of forty pounds each,
and is supposed to have rotated on an axle supported on two
pillars or upright frames,” as indicated in the ‘Century of
Inventions,’ Art. 56.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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