FIG. 227.—WELSBACH GAS BURNER.
The Welsbach burner for improving the quality of gaslight, and economizing its consumption, is also well and favorably known. It utilizes the Bunsen burner principle to make a very perfect combustion of the gas, with the greatest possible heat and the least smoke, and then directs its great heat on to a refractory body which will not burn, but glows with a brilliant white incandescence. The Welsbach burner was brought out in 1885. The United States patent therefor was granted October 7, 1890, to Carl Auer Von Welsbach, No. 438,125. The Welsbach light is a development of the Drummond, or limelight, invented by Lieut. Drummond, of England, in 1826. This latter exposed a piece of quick lime to the intensely hot flame of the oxy-hydrogen blow pipe, which was invented by Dr. Robt. Hare in 1802. The piece of lime glows with an intense brilliancy approximating that of the electric light. The Welsbach burner, see [Fig. 227], operates on the same general principle, except that the refractory body, which is heated to incandescence, is a tubular sleeve of netted fabric first steeped in a solution of the salts of refractory earths, and then incinerated by heat to burn out the textile fibre and leave the refractory earthy oxides as a skeleton of the fabric, and which is called a “mantle.” This mantle is suspended above the flame arising from a proper admixture of air and gas, and is heated thereby to a brilliant incandescence which furnishes the light. In the Welsbach burner the light seen does not proceed directly from the combustion of the gas, but from the white hot mantle. The light is a very pure white one, does not distort or falsify colors, and effects a great saving of gas. An important improvement upon the mantle is covered by Rawson’s patent, July 30, 1889, No. 407,963, for coating the mantles with paraffine or analogous material to toughen them and prevent them from breaking in packing and transportation.
Natural Gas.—No review of gas lighting would be complete without some reference to the development incident to the use of the natural gas flowing from the internal reservoirs of the earth. Such gas has been known and utilized for centuries in China, and was conveyed by the Chinese in bamboo pipes to points of utilization. The discovery of coal oil in the United States in 1859, and the great advances made in the methods and apparatus for sinking oil wells, have resulted in the discovery of numerous wells of natural gas, whose values were quickly perceived and utilized by their owners. The village of Fredonia, N. Y., was probably the first to be lighted by natural gas, and a flow from a well at West Bloomfield, N. Y., opened in 1865, was carried in a wooden main more than twenty miles to the city of Rochester. Many wells of natural gas have since been found at various points, and so extensive has been its use for cooking, heating, lighting and metallurgical processes, that thousands of patents have been taken for various forms of burners, pressure regulators and other appliances for utilizing the same. The annual production of natural gas in the United States for 1888 was valued at $22,629,875. There has, however, been a steady decrease in the past ten years. The amount produced in 1897 was $13,826,422. The insatiable demands of modern civilization must some day exhaust the supply, and what will take place when the subterranean chambers are relieved of their burden is a question for the geologists to answer.
[CHAPTER XXVII.]
Civil Engineering.
[Great Bridges]—[Pneumatic Caissons]—[Tunnels]—[The Beach Tunnel Shield]—[Suez Canal]—[Dredges]—[The Lidgerwood Cableway]—[Canal Locks]—[Artesian Wells]—[Compressed Air Rock Drills]—[Blasting]—[Mississippi Jetties]—[Iron and Steel Buildings]—[Eiffel Tower]—[Washington’s Monument]—[The United States Capitol].
Almost entirely of an outdoor character, and necessarily on public exhibition, the engineering achievements of the Nineteenth Century have always been conspicuously in evidence, challenging the admiration of the public eye. They represent man’s attack upon the obstacles presented by nature to his irrepressible spirit of progress. Difficulties apparently insuperable have confronted him, only to melt away under his persistent genius until nothing seems impossible. He has connected continents with the telegraph, has crosshatched the land with railroads, penetrated the bowels of the earth with artesian wells, opened communication between oceans with the Suez Canal, reclaimed territory from the sea in Holland, pierced mountain ranges with tunnels, drained marshes, irrigated deserts, reared lofty structures of masonry and steel, spanned waters with magnificent bridges, opened channel-ways to the sea, built beacons for the mariner, and breakwaters for the storm beaten ship.