The Steam Engine Familiarly Explained and Illustrated: With an historical sketch of its invention and progressive improvement; its applications to navigation and railways; with plain axioms for railway speculatorsLardner, Dionysius
History
The Steam Engine Familiarly Explained and Illustrated: With an historical sketch of its invention and progressive improvement; its applications to navigation and railways; with plain axioms for railway speculators
Lardner, Dionysius
Steam-engines -- Early works to 1850
(99.) The comparison of steam-transport with the transport by horses,
even when working on a railway, exhibits the advantage of this new
power in a most striking point of view. To comprehend these advantages
fully, it will be necessary to consider the manner in which animal
power is expended as a means of transport. The portion of the strength
of a horse available for the purpose of a load depends on the speed of
a horse's motion. To this speed there is a certain limit, at which the
whole power of the horse will be necessary to move his own body, and
at which, therefore, he is incapable of carrying any load; and, on the
other hand, there is a certain load which the horse is barely able to
support, but incapable of moving with any useful speed. Between these
two limits there is a certain rate of motion at which the useful
effect of the animal is greatest. In horses of the heavier class, this
rate of motion may be taken on the average as that of 2 miles an hour;
and in the lighter description of horses, 2-1/2 miles an hour. Beyond
this speed, the load which they are capable of transporting diminishes
in a very rapid ratio as the speed increases: thus, if 121 express the
load which a horse is able to transport a given distance in a day,
working at the rate of four miles an hour, the same horse will not be
able to transport more than the load expressed by 64, _the same
distance_, at 7 miles an hour; and, at 10 miles an hour, the load
which he can transport will be reduced to 25. The most advantageous
speed at which a horse can work being 2 miles an hour, it is found
that, at this rate, working for 10 hours daily, he can transport 12
tons, on a level railway, a distance of 20 miles; so that the whole
effect of a day's work may be expressed by 240 tons carried 1 mile.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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