The Steam Engine Explained and Illustrated (Seventh Edition): With an Account of Its Invention and Progressive Improvement, and Its Application to Navigation and Railways; Including Also a Memoir of WattLardner, Dionysius
History
The Steam Engine Explained and Illustrated (Seventh Edition): With an Account of Its Invention and Progressive Improvement, and Its Application to Navigation and Railways; Including Also a Memoir of Watt
Lardner, Dionysius
Steam-engines; Watt, James, 1736-1819
(183.) Two years after the date of the patent of this engine, its
inventor constructed a machine of the same kind for the purpose of
moving carriages on railroads; and applied it successfully, in the
year 1804, on the railroad at Merthyr Tydvil, in South Wales. It
was in principle the same as that already described. The cylinder
however was in a horizontal position, the piston-rod working in
the direction of the line of road: the extremity of the
piston-rod, by means of a connecting rod, worked cranks placed on
the axletree, on which were fixed two cogged wheels: these worked
in others, by which their motion was communicated finally to
cogged wheels fixed on the axle of the hind wheels of the
carriage, by which this axle was kept in a state of revolution.
The hind wheels being fixed on the axletree, and turning with it,
were caused likewise to revolve; and so long as the weight of the
carriage did not exceed that which the friction of the road was
capable of propelling, the carriage would thus be moved forwards.
On this axle was placed a fly-wheel to continue the rotatory
motion at the termination of each stroke. The fore wheels are
described as being capable of turning like the fore wheels of a
carriage, so as to guide the vehicle. The projectors appear to
have contemplated, in the first instance, the use of this carriage
on common roads; but that notion seems to have been abandoned, and
its use was only adopted on the railroad before mentioned. On the
occasion of its first trial, it drew after it as many carriages as
contained ten tons of iron a distance of nine miles; which stage
it performed without any fresh supply of water, and travelled at
the rate of five miles an hour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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