Blakey, 1766
As stated in the previous chapter, the first water-tube boiler was built by John Blakey and was patented by him in 1766. Several tubes alternately inclined at opposite angles were arranged in the furnaces, the adjacent tube ends being connected by small pipes. The first successful user of water-tube boilers, however, was James Rumsey, an American inventor, celebrated for his early experiments in steam navigation, and it is he who may be truly classed as the originator of the water-tube boiler. In 1788 he patented, in England, several forms of boilers, some of which were of the water-tube type. One had a fire box with flat top and sides, with horizontal tubes across the fire box connecting the water spaces. Another had a cylindrical fire box surrounded by an annular water space and a coiled tube was placed within the box connecting at its two ends with the water space. This was the first of the “coil boilers”. Another form in the same patent was the vertical tubular boiler, practically as made at the present time.
John Stevens, 1804
The first boiler made of a combination of small tubes, connected at one end to a reservoir, was the invention of another American, John Stevens, in 1804. This boiler was actually employed to generate steam for running a steamboat on the Hudson River, but like all the “porcupine” boilers, of which type it was the first, it did not have the elements of a continued success.
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.