2d. No notice is taken of the small size of the balls or of the speed of rotation.
3d. Professor Rankine is not responsible for this absurd piece of reasoning.
4th. It only shows how far the English engineering mind has been from considering the subject of hindrance to the governor action from friction.
My governor works within the law of the conical pendulum. I never dreamed of attempting in this form of governor to avoid it. In fact it is this law which gives to the governor its action. A change of speed is necessary to produce a motion of the counterpoise. But as the governor was designed by me, this change of speed is very small, probably no more than is required for stability, and is not sensible in any way except in the motion of the counterpoise itself, which is simultaneous with the most minute changes of speed.
Quite a variety of modifications of this governor are being made in this country, but I think not elsewhere. The makers have been kind enough to invent the name “the central counterpoise governor.” For this I feel greatly obliged, as I should be mortified to find my name attached to any of them. Their action is always more or less unsatisfactory, sometimes very much so. But I do not think it likely that the secret of the remarkable action of the Porter governor has been detected by any of these people.
I am glad that this was not explained to me at first; if it had been I might not have thought of the single long driving-joint, which is a valuable feature.
When the stone-dressing machine proved to be valueless, as already described, I found myself out of business; but the governor had attracted so much attention and had been so favorably received that I thought I could establish a business of manufacturing these governors, and I am proud to say that the gentlemen already associated with me and who had lost their money in the abandonment of the stone-dressing machine were so decidedly of the same opinion, and I had won their confidence to such an extent, that they furnished the money to enable me to establish this manufacture.
I rented a shop on the second floor of a triangular building on Thirteenth Street, at the junction of Hudson Street and Ninth Avenue, owned by Mr. Herring, the safe-manufacturer, the lower part of which was occupied by him for his own business. This was a large room and had light on three sides.
I proceeded to equip this shop with the necessary tools, some of which I purchased of Mr. Freeland, then considered the best toolmaker in the United States, and who had gone to England and worked for some years as a journeyman in the celebrated Whitworth Works, in Manchester, for the purpose of learning everything that was known there. Those which Mr. Freeland could not supply I obtained from Geo. S. Lincoln & Co., of Hartford, Conn.
During the time these tools were building I was waited upon by Mr. Chas. B. Richards, who was then removing from Hartford to New York to establish himself as a designer of machinery, and who brought me a letter from Geo. S. Lincoln & Co. I was at that time engaged in scheming as well as I could a machine for drilling the arms and balls and counterweight and spindle of my governor, and immediately employed Mr. Richards to assist me in getting out the drawings for this machine. This he did quite to my satisfaction, and the machine was made by Geo. S. Lincoln & Co., Mr. Pratt, for so many years head of the firm of Pratt & Whitney, afterwards the Pratt & Whitney Company, being then their foreman; so that all my tools from that concern were made by Mr. Pratt. He also cut for me superb iron patterns for the governor gears.