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
Another method is to place a glass tube (fig. 35.) with one end, T,
entering the boiler above the proper level, and the other end, T´,
entering it below the proper level. It must be evident that the water
in the tube will always stand at the same level as the water in the
boiler; since the lower part has a free communication with that water,
while the surface is submitted to the pressure of the same steam as
the water in the boiler. This, and the last-mentioned gauge, have the
advantage of addressing the eye of the engineer at once, without any
adjustment; whereas the gauge cocks must be both opened, whenever the
depth is to be ascertained.
These gauges, however, require the frequent attention of the
engine-man; and it becomes desirable either to find some more
effectual means of awakening that attention, or to render the supply
of the boiler independent of any attention. In order to enforce the
attention of the engine-man to replenish the boiler when partially
exhausted by evaporation, a tube was sometimes inserted at the lowest
level to which it was intended that the water should be permitted to
fall. This tube was conducted from the boiler into the engine-house,
where it terminated in a mouth-piece or whistle, so that whenever the
water fell below the level at which this tube was inserted in the
boiler, the steam would rush through it, and, issuing with great
velocity at the mouth-piece, would summon the engineer to his duty
with a call that would rouse him even from sleep.
(67.) In the most effectual of these methods, the task of replenishing
the boiler should still be executed by the engineer; and the utmost
that the boiler itself was made to do was to give due notice of the
necessity for the supply of water. The consequence was, among other
inconveniences, that the level of the water was subject to constant
variation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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