Engineering reminiscences contributed to "Power" and "American machinist"

by Charles T. Porter

After our work was finished and I had gone home the awards were made public; to my astonishment the award to Mr. Sickels was not among them, so I wrote to General Walker, who was our medium of communication with the Commission, asking the reason for this omission. He replied that the award had been thrown out by the Committee of Revision. “Committee of Revision!” I had never heard of such a thing. I asked for an explanation and I learned that the judges did not make awards, they only recommended them; the awards were made by the Commission after they had passed the scrutiny of the Committee of Revision. Well, who were the Committee of Revision? I learned that the Commission consisted of two commissioners from each State appointed by the Governor; Mr. Corliss was a commissioner from Rhode Island. At a meeting of the commissioners Mr. Corliss proposed the novel scheme of a Committee of Revision, to which the action of the judges should be submitted for approval before the awards were made. The idea seemed to please the members of the Commission, as tending to magnify their own importance, and it was adopted; as a matter of usual courtesy Mr. Corliss was made chairman of the committee, and the committee threw out the award to Mr. Sickels. I made careful inquiry and could never learn that the Committee of Revision threw out any other award, so it seemed evident that with the throwing out of this award to Mr. Sickels the object of its existence was accomplished.

In the Corliss valve system the liberation of the valve was the fundamental idea; this was applied by him to valves moving in the direction parallel with their seats. It not being necessary to arrest their motion at any precise point, they were caught by air cushions at any points after they had covered their ports. Mr. Corliss had appropriated the liberating idea, according to “the good old rule, the simple plan, that they may take who have the power, and they may keep who can,” and all this machinery had been devised by him to prevent the historical fact that the liberating idea had been invented by Mr. Sickels from appearing in the records of the exhibition. By all this enormous expenditure of ingenuity and influence he succeeded in giving to this fact a prominence and importance which it would never otherwise have had, besides advertising his efforts to suppress it.

Mr. Horatio Allen’s life-long aversion to Mr. Sickels was caused by professional jealousy. Mr. Allen conceived himself to be an inventor, and for years had been cherishing a cut-off invention of his own. The original firm was Stillman, Allen & Co., and for years Mr. Stillman had prevented the Novelty Iron Works from being sacrificed to Mr. Allen’s genius, but later Mr. Allen had obtained supreme control of these works by an affiliation with Brown Brothers, the bankers, his principal stockholders, and Mr. Stillman sold out his interest and retired from the firm. Mr. Allen, having a clear field, now determined to put his invention on the new steamer of the Collins line, the “Adriatic,” and American engineers were amused at the display of this amazing absurdity on the largest possible scale. In this construction there were four valves; each valve was a conical plug about six feet long and had four movements; first it was withdrawn from its seat a distance of three inches so that it could be rotated freely, then it was rotated first to draw off the lap. Up to this point theoretically the port had not been opened, but the steam had been blowing into the cylinder or out of it, as the case might be, through these enormous cracks; the valves then rotated further to produce the opening movement, for either admission or release; the rotation was then reversed until it reached its original position, then the fourth movement brought it to its seat. It is probable that the ship would have gone to sea working steam after this ridiculous fashion, if the complicated mechanism required to produce the four movements had not broken down at the trial of the engines at the dock, beyond the power of Mr. Allen’s genius to remedy; so the valves had to be removed and the Stevens valves and Sickels cut-off were substituted for them. The story that any sane man ever designed a four-motion steam-engine valve, and that he made the first application of it on the largest steamship, except the Great Eastern, then in the world, is such a tax on credulity, that I was glad to find the following corroboration of it in a letter to “Power,” from which I copy the essential portion.

Emil Brugsch

“In one of Mr. Porter’s ‘Reminiscences,’ which I have mislaid, he gives an account of the alterations to the last steamer of the E. K. Collins lines, the ‘Adriatic.’ His description of Horatio Allen’s cock-valves and their motions is absolutely correct. The writer made the greater part of the detail drawings by which the new valves and the Sickels cut-off were placed on the ‘Adriatic.’

Peter Van Brock.

Jefferson, Iowa.”

These engines, as further designed by Mr. Allen, were afterwards described by Zerah Colburn in the London Engineer in his usual caustic style. His description began with this expression: “These engines are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

I had hoped that my old friend Daniel Kinnear Clark might turn up as the English member in our group of judges at the Centennial Exposition, but in this I was disappointed. The English judge in our group was Mr. Barlow, son of the celebrated author of “A Treatise on the Strength of Materials,” which, if I remember rightly, was the first authoritative treatise on that subject. Mr. Barlow, however, was not of much help to us; he came late and attended but one meeting. That, I remember very well, was the meeting at which I presented my classification. He left Philadelphia with his son to visit Niagara Falls, and we never saw him again. I remember his giving me a very cordial invitation to visit him when I should find myself in England.