The Miner's Friend; Or, An Engine to Raise Water by FireSavery, Thomas
Science
The Miner's Friend; Or, An Engine to Raise Water by Fire
Savery, Thomas
Mine pumps -- Early works to 1800
The coals used in this engine is of as little value as the coals
commonly burned on the mouths of the coal-pits are; for an engine of a
three-inch bore, or thereabout, working the water up sixty feet high,
requires a fire-place of not above twenty inches deep, and about
fourteen or fifteen inches wide, which will occasion so small a
consumption, that in a coal-pit it is of no account, as we have
experienced. And in all parts of England, where there are mines, coals
are so cheap, that the charge of them is not to be mentioned, when we
consider the vast quantity of water raised by the inconsiderable value
of the coals used and burnt in so small a furnace. What the quantity
of coals used for one engine in a year is cannot easily be
ascertained, because of the different nature of the several sorts of
coals.
As for the cure of damps by this engine, the air perpetually crowding
into the ash-hole and fire-place, as it is natural for it to do, and
with a most impetuous force discharged with the smoke at the top of
the chimney, the contiguous air is successively following it; so that
not only all steams or vapours whatsoever, that may or can arise, must
naturally force its way through the fire, and so be discharged at the
top with the smoke, but this motion of the fire will occasion the
fresh air to descend from above down all the pits, and every where
else in the mine, but down the chimney; provided you have a heading
drift, or passage from all the shafts or pits in the work, to that
place where the engine stands; whether the mouth of the said pit and
chimney be lower or higher than the mouths of any of the rest of the
pits or shafts in the same work it matters not, for here will be a
perpetual circulation of the air, and with that swiftness as is hardly
to be believed. This I have tried and know to be true, so leave the
ingenious miner to his own judgment, whether, when all the air is in a
swift motion, that any stagnation of air (which has always been
adjudged the cause of damps) can happen in any pit.
CHAPTER THIRD.
THE MANNER OF FIXING THE ENGINE FOR WATER-MILLS, PALACES, AND
GENTLEMEN’S SEATS, AND DRAINING FENS, AND SUPPLYING HOUSES WITH WATER
IN GENERAL.
* * * * *
THE
MANNER OF FIXING THE ENGINE
FOR WATER-MILLS, PALACES, AND GENTLEMEN’S SEATS, AND DRAINING FENS,
AND SUPPLYING HOUSES WITH WATER IN GENERAL.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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