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
(30.) The discovery of the method of producing a vacuum by the
condensation of steam was reproduced before 1688, by Captain Thomas
Savery, to whom a patent was granted in that year for a steam engine
to be applied to the raising of water, &c. Savery proposed to combine
the machine described by the Marquis of Worcester, with an apparatus
for raising water by suction into a vacuum produced by the
condensation of steam.
Savery appears to have been ignorant of the publication of Papin, in
1695, and states that his discovery of the condensing principle arises
from the following circumstance:--
Having drunk a flask of Florence at a tavern and flung the empty flask
on the fire, he called for a basin of water to wash his hands. A small
quantity which remained in the flask began to boil and steam issued
from its mouth. It occurred to him to try what effect would be
produced by inverting the flask and plunging its mouth in the cold
water. Putting on a thick glove to defend his hand from the heat, he
seized the flask, and the moment he plunged its mouth in the water,
the liquid immediately rushed up into the flask and filled it. (21.)
Savery stated that this circumstance immediately suggested to him the
possibility of giving effect to the atmospheric pressure by creating a
vacuum in this manner. He thought that if, instead of exhausting the
barrel of a pump by the usual laborious method of a piston and sucker,
it was exhausted by first filling it with steam and then condensing
the same steam, the atmospheric pressure would force the water from
the well into the pump-barrel and into any vessel connected with it,
provided that vessel were not more than about 34 feet above the
elevation of the water in the well. He perceived, also, that, having
lifted the water to this height, he might use the elastic force of
steam in the manner described by the Marquis of Worcester to raise the
same water to a still greater elevation, and that the same steam which
accomplished this mechanical effect would serve by its subsequent
condensation to repeat the vacuum and draw up more water. It was on
this principle that Savery constructed the first engine in which steam
was ever brought into practical operation.
CHAPTER III.
ENGINES OF SAVERY AND NEWCOMEN.
Savery's Engine. -- Boilers and their appendages. -- Working
apparatus. -- Mode of Operation. -- Defects of the Engine. --
Newcomen and Cawley. -- Atmospheric Engine. -- Accidental
Discovery of Condensation by Jet. -- Potter's Discovery of the
Method of Working the Valves.
(31.) The steam engine contrived by Savery, like every other which has
since been constructed, consists of two parts essentially distinct.
The first is that which is employed to generate the steam, which is
called the boiler, and the second, that in which the steam is applied
as a moving power.
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