Engine (machine)

“ For example, in a machine-work, the steam-engine, which is the prime mover of the various tools, has a flywheel on the crank-shaft to store and restore the periodical excess of energy arising from the variations in the effort exerted by the connecting-rod upon the crank; and each of the slotting machines, punching machines, riveting machines, and other tools has a flywheel of its own to store and restore energy, so as to enable the very different resistances opposed to those tools at different times to be overcome without too great unsteadiness of motion. ”

“ Formerly, the power to drive a machine was derived from a very complicated arrangement of shafting and gearing brought from a distant engine. But by my system I conveyed the power to the machine by means of a steam pipe, which enabled the engine to which it was attached to be driven either fast or slow, or to be stopped or started, just as occasion required. It might be run while all the other machines were at rest; or, in the event of a breakdown of the main engine of the factory, the small engine might still be kept going or even assist in the repairs of the large one. ”

“ The high pressure steam engine, in whatever form it exists, consists of a frame or bed plate carrying two distinct mechanisms, first, the driving or power-transmitting mechanism, and second, the valve gear or valve motion, and to these are added such other mechanisms as the nature of the duty the engine is to perform may require. ”

“ The engine is an engine before the motive power is applied. The bolts, bars, pistons, cranks, shafts, and wheels, are all there. The parts designed to move are ready for action. But all is silent and still. Apply the steam, and it springs, as it were, into a thing of life, and gives forth all its marvelous exhibitions of celerity and power.
So with man. When the breath of life was imparted, which, as we have seen was given in common to all the animal creation, that simply was applied which set the machine in motion. ”

“ The machine is driven by belting from a main shaft, turned by a steam-engine, gas-engine, electro-motor, or other regular source of power, and rotated at such a rate that the main pulley of the machine itself (141⁄2 inches in diameter) shall make about 60 revolutions per minute. Fig. 313a shows the general aspect of the machine and seat for the one operator required, but as we are not undertaking a detailed and complete description of the whole mechanism, no letters of reference are given ”

“ 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. ”

“ I measured the power required by one machine, at the works in London where they were made, indicating their shop engine with the light on and with the light off. To make sure I repeated this three times. I found that one of my engines, 6×12 inches, non-condensing, at 300 revolutions per minute, would drive the two machines, with the steam pressure we were to have, I think 70 pounds, and cut off at one quarter of the stroke, while it was capable of following five eighths of the stroke. ”

“ Had it been otherwise, an animal running on its own wheels would have made its appearance on earth long ago. The shaft of the steam engine could be provided with numerous pulleys, each capable of driving a machine connected with it by a belt. Then arose that marvellous crop of mechanical combinations which brought about the age of mechanism, combinations which, in the last resort, can be reduced to sliding couples and turning couples, and can be catalogued by means of formulæ, like words in a dictionary. ”

“ It runs at three times engine speed, operating directly from the crank shaft through a silent chain drive. Being a single unit machine, it employs but one armature with only one commutator, one set of field windings and one set of brushes for the performance of all of its functions both as a starter and as a generator. ”

“ NO. 2.—IMPROVED ENGINE LATHE.
This again is a highly valuable and ingenious machine; its special operation is, as its name implies, the turning of any iron work to its required round circumference and requisite degree of polish, whether it is a perfect cylinder, or of various diameters at various points.
By it, all round work for engines is formed and finished—as rods, shafts, and the like. The action of the machine is simple, easy and almost noiseless. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Such machines as are used in shaping materials in the construction of the parts of other machines, and also many of those which perform work, such as boring, planing, riveting, etc., formerly only done by hand, and still performed manually to a greater or less extent, are nearly always called machine tools; the term, engine tool, is more in accord with general usage when referring to large and complicated machines. ”

“ In erecting a machine, as in building a house—or, indeed, as in everything that man constructs—the work must be begun at the foundation.
In a machine in which the working parts are carried and contained upon framework, such framework becomes the foundation so far as the erector is concerned.
In a stationary steam engine the cylinder and bed plate form the erector’s foundation while the engine is in the shop, the mason’s foundation being an after consideration.
In a locomotive the boiler is the foundation to which all the other parts are either directly or indirectly affixed. ”

“ In addition to having only a very slow and inefficient engine the early machine suffered from the head resistance it created as it pushed forward through the air, and this check to its progress ate up the little speed its motor could develop. ”

“ In the second place, we have that the amount of load the engine has to pull varies with every varying grade in the railroad track, and the variation is so great that on some descending grades the engine may require no steam whatever, while on ascending grades the utmost power attainable from the engine may be required. ”

“ One of the best known of recent engines is the Allen engine, a steam-engine having the same general arrangement of parts seen in the above illustration, but fitted with a peculiar valve-gear, and having proportions of parts which are especially calculated to secure smoothness of motion and uniformity of pressure on crank-pin and journals, at speeds so high that the inertia of the reciprocating parts becomes a seriously-important element in the calculation of the distribution of stresses and their effect on the dynamics of the machine. ”

“ Thus, step by step, Newcomen's engine grew in power and efficiency, and became more and more complete as a self-acting machine. It will be observed that, like all other inventions, it was not the product of any one man's ingenuity, but of many. One contributed one improvement, and another another. The essential features of the atmospheric engine were not new. The piston and cylinder had been known as long ago as the time of Hero. The expansive force of steam and the creation of a vacuum by its condensation had been known to the Marquis of Worcester, Savery, Papin, and many more. ”

“ Among the upper-ground workmen employed at the coal-pits, the principal are the firemen, enginemen, and brakes-men, who fire and work the engines, and superintend the p. 8machinery by means of which the collieries are worked. Previous to the introduction of the steam-engine the usual machine employed for the purpose was what is called a “gin.” The gin consists of a large drum placed horizontally, round which ropes attached to buckets and corves are wound, which are thus drawn up or sent down the shafts by a horse travelling in a circular track or “gin race.” ”

“ The engine illustrated in Figs. 53 to 66 will give sufficient scope for energy and handiness with drill and soldering iron. The writer made an engine of the same kind, differing only from that shown in the design of the crosshead guides, without the assistance of a lathe, except for turning the piston and fly wheel—the last bought in the rough. Files, drills, taps, a hack saw, and a soldering iron did all the rest of the work.
Solder plays so important a part in the assembling of the many pieces of the engine that, if the machine fell into the fire, a rapid disintegration would follow. ”

“ The place to be assigned to a fly-wheel relatively to the other parts of the machinery is determined by the purpose for which it is used. If it be intended to equalise the action, it should be near the working point. Thus, in a steam-engine, it is placed on the crank which turns the axle by which the power of the engine is transmitted to the object it is finally designed to affect. On the contrary, in handmills, such as those commonly used for grinding coffee, &c., it is placed upon the axis of the winch by which the machine is worked. ”

“ In all the foregoing chapters we have been considering only the muscular engines of the human machine, counting them over and comparing their construction and their mechanism with those of the internal-combustion engine of a motor cycle. But of the levers or crank-pins through which muscular engines exert their power we have said nothing hitherto. Nor shall we get any help by now spending time on the levers of a motor cycle. We have already confessed that they are arranged in a way which is quite different from that which we find in the human machine. ”

“ We have now closed for an engine complete, of the power of twelve mules at a time, with suitable duplicates, chains, &c., for 210l. I very much wish for your engine to be set to work by your own workmen, to show the planters the simplicity and easy management of the machine, and also save the expense of an engineer, which will tend to promote their use. The engine will be set to work before it is sent off, and every possible care taken to execute it in the most perfect order. ”

“ So delicate are the movements of the machine that it must be protected from variations of temperature, which would contract or expand its parts; so the room in which it stands is kept at an even heat by automatic apparatus, and to make things doubly sure the engine is further sheltered in a large case having double walls inter-packed with cotton wool. ”

“ Machinery has given us one great delusion. People have imagined that when a machine was operated by a steam engine or by an electric motor, the steam engine or the electric motor actually did all the work, and the people who were attending it while it operated were more or less negligible. ”

“ The guide bar of the doubling machine is moved with a slower traverse than in the engine; otherwise, in consequence of the different obliquities of the paths, the single threads would be readily broken, h, h, is a pair of smooth rods of iron or brass, placed parallel to each of the two sides of the machine, and made fast to the standards H, H, which are screwed to brackets projecting from the frames A, A′. ”

“ It is necessary, therefore, that, in putting an engine together, each part be properly fitted to its place, and that it be subsequently adjusted in its fit and position with relation to the other parts to which it is connected. ”

“ Indeed, each machine not only beats, scutches, but blows. Fig. 318. exhibits a longitudinal section of a good blowing engine of modern construction. The machine is about 18 or 19 feet long, and three feet across within the case. The whole frame is made of cast-iron, lined with boards, forming a close box, which has merely openings for introducing the raw cotton wool, for taking out the cleansed wool, and removing the dust as it collects at the bottom. ”

“ There are theories to account for these not uncommon differences, the most popular and plausible being that the better machine is so merely because of some extra skill and minute care in her and her engine's building, last touches of exactness and perfection in the finish of their parts and their assembling. ”

“ In the routine method of starting a machine, chocks are placed in front of the wheels and the engine is given a short full-power run and a longer easier one to warm the engine and be sure all is well; then the chocks are pulled away and she rolls off, gathering speed as she goes, until she has enough for her pilot to lift her into the air. ”

“ A machine which weighs about four and a half tons, including one ton of copper wire, and which requires an eight-horse steam-engine to keep its armature in rotation, must necessarily produce tremendous effects. ”

“ The machine occupies altogether a space of 31 ft. by 16 ft., and its height is 18 ft. A steam engine of eight horse-power is sufficient to drive the ten-cylinder machine, which is then capable of producing 25,000 impressions per hour. The mechanism of the larger machines is precisely similar to that of the two-cylinder machine, except such additional devices as are necessary to carry the paper to and from the main cylinder at four, six, eight, or ten points of its circumference. ”