Various

“ Newcomen brought into existence a new, the modern, type of engine, and effected the greatest revolution that has been recorded in the history of the arts. Without Newcomen, there might have been no Watt; without Watt, there very possibly may not even yet have been brought into existence that giant of our time, whose mighty powers are employed more effectively than ever those of Aladdin's genii, in building palaces, in transporting men and material, in doing the work of the whole world ”

“ One man, with a steam engine at his hand, turns the wheels of a great mill, drives forty thousand spindles, applies a thousand horse power to daily work in the spinning of threads, the weaving of cloth, the impulsion of a steamboat, or the drawing of great masses of hot iron into finest wire. ”

“ For a hundred years, Great Britain has, largely through her encouragement of the inventor and her protection of his mental property by securing the fruits of his labors, in fair portion, to him, gained the power of dictating to the world and has gained an advance that cannot be measured. Watt and Arkwright and Stephenson and Crompton and their ilk, protected by their government and its patent laws, made their country the peaceful conqueror of the world. The story of the work of the inventor is a poem of mighty meaning and of wonderful deeds. ”

“ But the work of these inventors was in itself but little more important than that of the Greek inventor of the steam ælopile, for each brought forward a machine which was, from a business point of view, utterly impracticable, and which, in each case, only served to show that a better device might prove useful and lead the way to its introduction. The merit of the inventors of the eighteenth century was that they were able to lead the way, to point out the path to success, to furnish evidence of the value of the coming, crowning invention. ”

“ Aiding and working hand in hand with those other genii of progress, the inventors of the printing press and of the telegraph, the telephone, and the electric railway, of the modern system of textile manufactures, of iron and steel making, of the mowing machine and the harvester, they have compressed into two centuries the progress of a millennium, destitute of their aid. ”

“ The patent law established Boulton and Watt and the firm paid back the nation with handsome usury, giving it unimaginable profits indirectly through its control of the work of the world and large profits directly through the business brought them from all parts of the then civilized globe. There has never, in the history of the world, been a more impressive illustration of the value to a nation of that generous public policy, that simply just legislation, which gives to the man of brain control of the products of his mind. ”

“ Every wreath of steam rising to the heavens from factory, mill or workshop will be a reminder of Hero of Alexandria, every mine will possess a memorial to Papin, Worcester and Savery; every steamship will bring into grateful memory Fitch and Stevens, and Bell and Fulton; thousands of locomotives, crossing the continents, will perpetuate the thought of the Stephensons and their colleagues in the introduction of the railway ”

“ Boulton & Watt, the capitalist with the inventor, gave the world the steam engine, finally, in such form and in such numbers that its permanent establishment as the servant of man was insured. The capitalist was as essential an element of success as was the inventor, and, in this instance, as in a thousand others, the race is indebted to that much-abused friend of the race, the capitalist, for much that it enjoys of all that it desires. ”

“ One man, by the aid of steam, is able to do the work which required two hundred and fifty men at the beginning of the century. The machinery of Massachusetts alone represents the labor of more than 100,000,000 men, as if one-half of all the workmen of the globe had engaged in her service. ”

“ The purpose of a steam engine is to convert into usefully applicable power the hidden energy of fuel, stored ages ago in the earth, by transformation, through the action of vegetation, from the original form, the heat of the sun, into an available form for reconversion, through thermodynamic operations. In this process of reconversion, whatever the nature of the machine used in the operation, there are invariably wastes, both of heat required for conversion into power and of the power thus produced. ”

“ This came to Watt through Matthew Boulton, a manufacturer of Birmingham, whose father and ancestors had gradually and toilsomely, as always, accumulated the property needed for the prosecution of a great business. The combination of genius and capital is always an essential to success in such cases; and good fortune, a Providence, we may well say, brought together the genius and the capitalist to do their work, hand in hand, of providing the world with the steam engine. ”

“ It is not a thing to be left alone in a dark and dreary corner to take care of itself anyhow year after year. People who treat it so deserve to be disappointed when in May they go to the lily bed and find plenty of leaves, but no flowers, or, if any, a few poor, weak attempts at producing blossoms, which ought to be so beautiful and fragrant. ”

“ We confess that we do not understand why such large sums of money should continue to be spent if the enterprise is not commercially a sound one, nor how men of such eminence in the scientific world as Professor Riedler should, without hesitation, risk their reputation on the correctness of the system, if it were the idle dream of an enthusiast, as many persons—chiefly those interested in electric transmission—have declared it to be. ”

“ A half dozen men in the engine room of an ocean steamer, with a hundred strong laborers in the boiler room and on deck, transports colonies and makes new nations, brings separated peoples together, unites countries on opposite sides of the globe, brings about easy exchanges between pole and equator. ”

“ To-day, thanks to Porter and Allen, to Hartnell, to Hoadley, to Sims, to Thomson, to Sweet, to Ide, and to Ball, we have seen the speed fluctuation restricted to even less than one per cent. of its normal average.
The inventors of the steam engine are, through their representatives of to-day, according to the statisticians, doing the equivalent of twelve times the work of a horse, for every man, woman and child on the globe. ”

“ All the modern sciences and all the modern arts had their reawakening with the seventeenth century. Every aspect of freedom for humanity came into view in those days of a new birth. Both the possibility of the introduction of new sciences and of new arts and the power of utilizing all new intellectual and physical forces came together. ”

“ The invention of the double-acting engine, in which the impulsion of the steam is felt both in driving the piston forward and in forcing it backward, both upward and downward, the application of its force through crank and fly wheel, the creation of an automatic system of governing its speed, and the discovery of the economy due to its complete expansion, were all improvements of the first magnitude, and of the greatest practical importance ”

“ Newcomen laid down a foundation beneath our whole economic system, out of sight, almost, but the essential base, nevertheless, on which Watt and his successors have carried up the great superstructure which seems to us to-day so imposing; which is so tremendous in magnitude, importance, and result. ”

“ From the stable they are removed as required in the squares to the vinery, where they grow beautifully, not sending up merely fine heads of bloom without a vestige of leaf, but growing as they would in spring out of doors with a mass of foliage, among which one has to search for the spikes of flower, so precious for all sorts of purposes at that early season of the year. ”

“ It had then only operated a pump; it must now turn a mill, grind our grain, spin our threads, weave our cloths, drive our shops and factories, supply the powerful blast of the iron furnace. It must be made to move with the utmost conceivable regularity, and must, with all this, do its work in the development of the hidden energy of the fuel, with the greatest possible economy, through the expansion of its steam. All this was achieved by James Watt. ”

“ A considerable thickness of steel is necessary to aid, by its stiffness, in preventing the very ductile iron from giving back to such an extent as to distort the steel face and thus tear or separate the parts of the plate. The ductile iron gives a very low resisting power, its duty being to hold the steel face up to its work. If now we substitute a soft steel plate in the place of the ductile iron, we will get greater resisting power, but our compound plate then becomes virtually an all-steel one, only differing in process of manufacture. ”

“ The "high-speed engine" is the latest form of the universal helper. And such has been the readiness and the intelligence of the contemporary inventor that we now have engines capable of turning their shafts three hundred rotations a minute and without a perceptible variation of velocity, whatever the change of load or the suddenness with which it is varied. In the days of Watt a fluctuation of five per cent. in speed was thought wonderfully small; in those of Corliss, the variation was restricted to two per cent. ”

“ That machine which effects the most complete transmutation of the heat supplied it into mechanical power, which wastes the least amount of heat supplied and of power produced, is the best engine, and constitutes an advance over every other. ”

“ As the season advances, as every one knows who has attempted to force the lily of the valley, much less time is taken in bringing the flowers to perfection under precisely the same circumstances as those in which the first sods are forced. ”

“ Most of the breeds of dogs, especially those of modern creation, are the work of man, and have been obtained by intercrossing older breeds and discarding all the animals that departed from the type sought. But many of these breeds are also the result of accident, or rather of modifications of certain parts of the organism—of a sort of rachitic or teratological degeneration which has become hereditary and has been due to domestication; for it is proved that the dog is the most anciently domesticated animal, and that its submission to man dates back to more than five thousand years. ”

“ With the introduction of the new form of older energy, electricity, with the reduction of the lightning into thraldom, has now come a new impulse affecting all the industries. Through its mysterious, its still unknown action, steam now reaches out far from its own place, driving the electric car along miles of rail ”

“ An alloy of nickel and steel is now attracting attention and bids fair to give very good results.
The problem to be solved, as far as naval armor is concerned, is to get the greatest amount of protection with the least possible weight and volume, and this reduction of weight and volume must be accomplished, in the main, by reducing the thickness of the plates by increasing the resisting power of the material. In the compound plate great surface hardness is readily and safely attained, but it has not yet been definitely determined what the proper proportionate thickness of iron and steel is. ”

“ Talent and genius must always aid each other. This firm was established in 1764 and its main resources, aside from the bank account, were Watt's patent, about expiring, and Watt's genius, and Boulton's talent as a man of business. The patent was extended for twenty-four years, the new inventions of Watt, now beginning to pour from his prolific brain in a wonderful stream, were also patented, and the whole works were soon employed upon the construction of engines for which numerous orders soon began to pour in upon the now prosperous builders. ”

“ It is to be regretted that the experiments of Professor Riedler could not have been conducted with more perfect appliances, but it must be borne in mind that the utilization of compressed air, especially as regards the motors, is still in a very imperfect stage, and that a great deal remains to be done before the maximum power available at the motor can be obtained. Investigations in this direction for a considerable time to come must be directed, therefore, toward improving the design and construction of the motors and the treatment of the air at the point of delivery into the engine. ”

“ Among the important losses that have to be reckoned with in every system of distributing motive power from a central station—whether by steam or by electricity, water, or compressed air—losses must occur in the mains by which the power generated is transferred from the point of production to that of consumption. ”

“ With inventive genius he combined strong common sense—not always a quality distinguishing the inventor—clear perception, breadth of view, and scientific method and spirit in the treatment of every question. ”

“ Every step taken under their stimulus, and with their help, is a step toward a higher life for all, intellectually and morally as well as physically; every advance in the improvement of their work is a gain to every man, woman, and child; every improvement of the steam engine is a help to the whole world. ”

“ One man on the footboard of the locomotive, one man shoveling into the furnaces the black powder that incloses the energy stored in early geological ages, a half dozen men mounted on the long train of following vehicles, combine to bring to the mill girl in Massachusetts, the miner in Pennsylvania, the sewing woman, and the wealthy merchant, her neighbor in New York, the flour made in Minnesota from the grain harvested a few weeks earlier in Dakota. ”

“ The old brach breed has been modified by the breeders of different countries, either by hygiene or by crossing with ordinary dogs, according to the manner of hunting, according to taste, and even according to fashion. Thus in England, where "time is money" reigns in every thing and where they like to hunt quickly and not leisurely, the brach has been rendered lighter and swifter of foot and has become the pointer. ”