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
In mines and coal-pits the manner of fixing the engines is this; your
pit being sunk, and a sump, or proper well, or bottom cistern, made to
receive the water coming from the several feeders or springs.
Supposing an engine, carrying three and a quarter inch bore, is to be
fixed to deliver water about seventy feet high, constant running a
full bore; in such case you make a small room in your shaft or pit,
which, together with your shaft or pit, is nine feet square every way.
As for example, suppose your shaft six feet by four, take three feet
out of one side, and five out of another perpendicular nine feet,
making a small floor or platform of boards over that part of the shaft
which goes down to your sump or bottom cistern, so you have a complete
room big enough for your engine, where ten or twelve people may stand
on occasion. This floor may be about eighteen, nineteen, or twenty
feet from the water, at the lowest you ever will draw the water into
the sump or bottom cistern. If your ground be loose, it is convenient
to line this room with brick; if rock, it may support itself. But in
this the miner’s judgment must direct him. That the engine will stand
best in the side of the pit where most is dug away, you may see in the
second figure of the engine, being fixed in a mine. Your pipes, &c.
must be fixed with cramps of iron, wood, or such materials as are
convenient, to the side of the pit or shaft, so as to make it stand as
firm as the very shaft itself. Your furnace must be so contrived, that
your flame take a turn or two round each of the boilers, which any
brick-layer used to furnaces can do; it being performed by running a
row of bricks round them both like a screw or worm, which being
contiguous to the wall of the furnaces and the boilers, makes it, as
it were, a worm-funnel round them both; from whence you may continue
your chimney to the top of your work, which you fasten to the sides of
your shafts in the corners as you please, either with iron or wood, or
both, according to the nature of the ground. And wherever you make a
sudden bend or nook near a right angle in the chimney, have a loose
brick or stone to take out the soot, if any should settle in such
place, which in long working it may do.
SEVERAL OBJECTIONS
AGAINST THE
WORKING THIS ENGINE ANSWERED,
IN
A DIALOGUE
BETWEEN A MINER AND THE AUTHOR.
A DIALOGUE
BETWEEN A MINER AND THE AUTHOR.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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