About 1698, we begin to encounter the names that are familiar to us in connection with the history of the steam-engine. In that year Thomas Savery obtained a patent for raising water by steam. His was a modification of the idea described above. The boilers used would be of no value now, nevertheless the machine came into considerable use, and the world that learned so gradually became possessed with the idea that there was a utility in the pressure of steam. Savery's engine is said to have grown out of the accident of his throwing a flask containing a little wine on the fire at a tavern. Concluding immediately afterwards that he wanted it, he snatched it off of the fender and plunged it into a basin of water to cool it. The steam inside instantly condensing, the water rushed in and filled it as it cooled. We now come to the beginning of the steam engine as we understand the term; the machine that involves the use of the cylinder and piston. These two features had been used in pumps long before, the atmospheric pump being one of the oldest of modern machines. The vacuum was known and utilized long before the cause of it was known. [Footnote: The discoverer was an Italian, Torricelli, about 1643. Gallileo, his tutor and friend, did not know why water would not rise in a tube more than thirty-three feet. No one knew of the _weight of the atmosphere_, so late as the early days of this republic. Many did not believe the theory long after that time. Torricelli, by his experiments, demonstrated the fact and invented the mercurial barometer, long known as the "Torricellian Tube." This last instrument led to another discovery; that the weight of the atmosphere varied from time to time in the same locality, and that storms and weather changes were indicated by a rising and falling of the column of mercury in the tube of the siphon-barometer. That which we call the "weather-bureau," organized by General Albert J. Myer, United States Army, in 1870, and growing out of the army signal service, of which he was chief, makes its "forecasts" by the use of the telegraph and the barometer. The "low pressure area" follows a path, which means a change of weather on that path. Notices by telegraph define the route, and the coming storm is not foretold, but _foreknown;_ not prophesied, but _ascertained._ If we have been led from the crude pump of Gallileo's time directly to the weather bureau of the present with its invaluable signals to sailors and convenience to everybody, it is no more than is continually to be traced even to the beginning of the wonderful school of modern science.]