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 — John Shaqi
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
On comparing this with the contrivance previously suggested by De
Caus, it will be observed, that even if De Caus knew the physical
agent by which the water was driven upwards in the apparatus contrived
by him, still it was only a means of causing a vessel of boiling water
to empty itself; and before a repetition of the process could be
obtained, the vessel should be refilled, and again boiled. In the
contrivance of Lord Worcester, on the other hand, the agency of the
steam was employed in the same manner as it is in the steam engines of
the present day, being generated in one vessel, and used for
mechanical purposes in another. Nor must this distinction be regarded
as trifling and insignificant, because on it depends the whole
practicability of using steam as a mechanical agent. Had its action
been confined to the vessel in which it was produced, it never could
have been employed for any useful purpose.
SIR SAMUEL MORLAND, 1683.
(28.) It appears, by a MS. in the Harleian Collection in the British
Museum, that a mode of applying steam to raise water was proposed to
Louis XIV. by Sir Samuel Morland. It contains, however, nothing more
than might have been collected from Lord Worcester's description, and
is only curious, because of the knowledge the writer appears to have
had of the expansion which water undergoes in passing into steam. The
following is extracted from the MS.:
"The principles of the new force of fire invented by Chevalier Morland
in 1682, and presented to his Most Christian Majesty in 1683:--'Water
being converted into vapour by the force of fire, these vapours
shortly require a greater space (about 2000 times) than the water
before occupied, and sooner than be constantly confined would split a
piece of cannon. But being duly regulated according to the rules of
statics, and by science reduced to measure, weight, and balance, then
they bear their load peaceably (like good horses,) and thus become of
great use to mankind, particularly for raising water, according to the
following table, which shows the number of pounds that may be raised
1800 times per hour to a height of six inches by cylinders half filled
with water, as well as the different diameters and depths of the said
cylinders.'"
DENIS PAPIN, 1695.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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