John Cox Stevens, 1805
Another form of water tube was patented in 1805 by John Cox Stevens, a son of John Stevens. This boiler consisted of twenty vertical tubes, 1¼ inches internal diameter and 40½ inches long, arranged in a circle, the outside diameter of which was approximately 12 inches, connecting a water chamber at the bottom with a steam chamber at the top. The steam and water chambers were annular spaces of small cross section and contained approximately 33 cubic inches. The illustration shows the cap of the steam chamber secured by bolts. The steam outlet pipe “A” is a pipe of one inch diameter, the water entering through a similar aperture at the bottom. One of these boilers was for a long time at the Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken, and is now in the Smithsonian Institute at Washington.
About the same time, Jacob Woolf built a boiler of large horizontal tubes, extending across the furnace and connected at the ends to a longitudinal drum above. The first purely sectional [Pg 24] water-tube boiler was built by Julius Griffith, in 1821. In this boiler, a number of horizontal water tubes were connected to vertical side pipes, the side pipes were connected to horizontal gathering pipes, and these latter in turn to a steam drum.
