Robert Henry Thurston

“ Now, hardly a day passes that does not see several large and powerful steamers leaving the ports of New York and Liverpool to make the same voyages, and their passages are made with such regularity and safety, that travelers can anticipate with confidence the time of their arrival at the termination of their voyage to a day, and can cross with safety and with comparative comfort even amid the storms of winter. Yet all that we to-day see of the extent and the efficiency of steam-navigation has been the work of the present century, and it may well excite our wonder and our admiration. ”

“ The power of the steam-engine, and its inconceivable importance as an agent of civilization, has always been a favorite theme with philosophers and historians as well as poets. As Religion has always been, and still is, the great moral agent in civilizing the world, and as Science is the great intellectual promoter of civilization, so the Steam-Engine is, in modern times, the most important physical agent in that great work. ”

“ Frequently, an important invention is made before the world is ready to receive it, and the unhappy inventor is taught, by his failure, that it is as unfortunate to be in advance of the age as to be behind it.
Inventions only become successful when they are not only needed, but when mankind is so far advanced in intelligence as to appreciate and to express the necessity for them, and at once to make use of them. ”

“ STEAM-NAVIGATION.
72. Among the most interesting of the applications of steam-power, to the political economist and to the historian, as well as to the engineer, is its use in ship-propulsion.
In the modern marine engine we find one of the most important adaptations of steam machinery and the greatest of all the triumphs of the mechanical engineer. ”

“ CHAPTER VIII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE STEAM-ENGINE. Its Application; its Teachings respecting the Construction of the Engine and its Improvement.
“Oftentimes an Uncertaintie hindered our going on so merrily, but by persevering the Difficultie was mastered, and the new Triumph gave stronger Heart unto us.”—Raleigh.
“If everything which we cannot comprehend is to be called an impossibility, how many are daily presented to our eyes! and in contemning as false that which we consider to be impossible, may we not be depreciating a giant’s effort to give an importance to our own weakness?”—Montaigne. ”

“ Judging from the rapid strides the steam-engine has made during the last forty years to become a universal first-mover, and from the experience that has arisen from that extension, we feel convinced that every invention which diminishes its size without impairing its power brings it a step nearer to the assistance of the ‘world’s great laborers,’ the husbandman and the peasant, for whom, as yet, it performs but little. ”

“ The time has gone by when, in any art, the ignorant and merely dexterous workman can compete with even a less skillful shopmate, who possesses and uses brains as well as hands, and knows how to make the one direct and aid the other. We to-day find him occupying a decided vantage-ground who is at the same time familiar with the schools and at home in the workshop. For whatever department in the arts a youth may be designed, he must, to insure success in the future, be taught not "in either the school or the workshop," the alternative formerly offered him, but in the school and the workshop. ”

“ He whose inventive genius, or mechanical skill, contributes to effect either of these objects—to secure either the use of higher steam with safety, or the more effective conversion of heat into mechanical power without waste, or the reduction, by transformation into work, of the temperature of the rejected working-fluid—confers an inestimable boon upon mankind. ”

“ All over the country, and even on the Continent of Europe, and in America, thousands of mechanics, and many men of mechanical tastes in other professions, were familiar with the principles of the new machine, and were speculating upon its value for all the purposes to which it has since been applied; and a multitude of enthusiastic mechanics, and a larger multitude of visionary and ignorant schemers, were experimenting with every imaginable device, in the vain hope of attaining perpetual motion, and other hardly less absurd results, by its modification and improvement. ”

“ In 1815, therefore, we may say that the modern locomotive steam-engine came into existence, for it is this invention of the blast-pipe that gives it its life, and it is the mechanical adaptation of this and of the other organs of the steam-engine to locomotion that gives George Stephenson his greatest claim to distinction. ”

“ The steam-engine had taken a form which made it inconceivably valuable to the world, at a time when no more efficient means of raising water was available at the most valuable mines than horse-power; but the people, greatly as it was needed, were not yet sufficiently intelligent to avail themselves of the great boon, the acceptance of which was urged upon them with all the persistence and earnestness which characterizes every true inventor. ”

“ A machine, receiving at distant times and from many hands new combinations and improvements, and becoming at last of signal benefit to mankind, may be compared to a rivulet, swelled in its course by tributary streams until it rolls along a majestic river, enriching in its progress provinces and kingdoms. ”

“ The Railroad, which now, by the adaptation of steam to the propulsion of its carriages, became the successful rival of the system of transportation of which an account has just been given, was not a new device. It, like all other important changes of method and great inventions, had been growing into form for ages. The ancients were accustomed to lay down blocks of stone as a way upon which their heavily-loaded wagons could be drawn with less resistance than on the common road. ”

“ But it is sufficiently evident that, before the engineer can determine what form of machine will best yield to him full control of these forces of Nature, he must have sufficient knowledge of science to be able to understand what scientific principles are to be rendered available, and what phenomena of Nature are operating in the production of the power which he is to seize upon and usefully to apply. ”

“ There is nothing in the future more sure than the great triumphs which that epoch is to achieve. It has already advanced to some glorious conquests. What miracles of invention now crowd upon us! Look abroad, and contemplate the infinite achievements of the steam-power. ”

“ In management, there is an immense field for improvement, which improvement we may feel assured will rapidly take place, as it is now becoming well understood that care, skill, and intelligence, are absolutely essential to economical management, as well as to safety, and that they repay liberally all the expenditure of time and money that is requisite to secure them. It is truer of labor than of anything else in the market that "the best is the cheapest." ”

“ When a new form of steam-engine is likely to be introduced, if at all, can be scarcely even conjectured. It seems evident that its success is to be secured, if a revolution is ever to occur, by the adoption of high steam-pressures, of great piston speeds, by care and skill in design, by the use of exceptionally excellent materials of construction, [481] by great perfection of workmanship, and by intelligence in its management. ”

“ The great geological changes which buried these forests under superincumbent strata of rock and earth resulted in the formation of coal-beds, and the storage, during many succeeding ages, of a vast amount of carbon, of which the affinity for oxygen remained unsatisfied until finally uncovered by the hand of man. Thus we owe to the heat and light of the sun, as was pointed out by George Stephenson, the incalculable store of potential energy upon which the human race is so dependent for life and all its necessaries, comforts, and luxuries. ”

“ The genius of Worcester, and Morland, and Savery, and Desaguliers, had, in the first period of the [145] application of the power of steam to useful work, effected a beginning which, looked upon from a point of view which exhibits its importance as the first step toward the wonderful results to-day familiar to every one, appears in its true light, and entitles those great men to even greater honor than has been accorded them. ”

“ If, in any engine, a reversal effects complete inversion of all the physical and mechanical details of its operation, it is a perfect engine, and produces maximum effect with any given quantity of heat and with any fixed limits of range of temperature. ”

“ Steam-engine building establishments sprang up wherever a mechanic had succeeded in erecting a workshop and in acquiring a local reputation as a worker in metal, and many of Watt’s workmen went out from Soho to take charge of the work done in these shops. Nearly all of the great establishments which are to-day most noted for their extent and for the importance and magnitude of the work done in them, not only in Great Britain, but in Europe and the United States, came into existence during this second period of the application of the steam-engine as a prime mover. ”

“ They are now fully-developed and well-established systems of natural philosophy. Yet, like that of the steam-engine and of its companion heat-engines, their growth has by no means ceased; and, while the student of science cannot do more than indicate the direction of their progress, he can readily believe that the beginning of the end is not yet reached in their movement toward completeness, either in the determination of facts or in the codification of their laws. ”

“ Hautefeuille, if we may judge from evidence at hand, was the first to propose the use of a piston in a heat-engine, and his gunpowder-engine seems to have been the first machine which would be called a heat-engine by the modern mechanic. The earlier “machines” or “engines,” including that of Hero and those of the Marquis of Worcester, would rather be denominated “apparatus,” as that term is used by the physicist or the chemist, than a machine or an engine, as the terms are used by the engineer. ”

“ The maximum conductivity of flow of heat for any given material is secured by so designing the boiler as to secure rapid, steady, and complete circulation of the water within it. The maximum rapidity of transfer throughout the whole area of heating-surface is secured, usually, by taking the feed-water into the boiler as nearly as possible at the point where the gases are discharged into the chimney-flue, withdrawing the steam nearer the point of maximum temperature of flues, and securing opposite directions of flow for the gases on the one side and the water on the other. ”

“ Force is that which produces, or tends to produce, motion, or change of motion, in bodies. It is measured statically by the weight that will counterpoise it, or by the pressure which it will produce, and dynamically by the velocity which it will produce, acting in the unit of time on the unit of mass. ”

“ Steam-boilers.—The steam supplied to the forms of stationary engine which have been described is generated in steam-boilers of exceedingly varied forms. The type used is determined by the extent to which their cost is increased in the endeavor to economize fuel by the pressure of steam carried, by the greater or less necessity of providing against risk of explosion, by the character of the feed-water to be used, by the facilities which may exist for keeping in good repair, and even by the character of the men in whose hands the apparatus is likely to be placed. ”

“ Scientific research, as we have seen, has proved that, in all known varieties of heat-engine, a large loss of effect is unavoidable from the fact that we cannot, in the ordinary steam-engine, reduce the lower limit of temperature, in working, below a point which is far above the absolute zero of temperature—far above that point at which bodies have no heat-motion. ”

“ When a fire is made on the altar, the heat produced expands the confined air, and the liquid is driven up the tube, issuing from the vessel in the hand of the figure standing by the altar, which thus seems to be offering a libation. This toy embodies the essential principle of all modern heat-engines—the change of energy from the form known as heat-energy into mechanical energy, or work. It is not at all improbable that this prototype of the modern wonder-working machine may have been known centuries before the time of Hero. ”

“ The coal carried by a steam-vessel is not only an item of great importance in consequence of its first cost, but, displacing its weight or bulk of freight which might otherwise be carried, it represents so much non-paying cargo, and is to be charged with the full cost of transportation in addition to first cost. The best of steam-coal is therefore usually chosen for steamers making long voyages, and the necessity of obtaining the most economical engines is at once seen, and is fully appreciated by steamship proprietors. ”