Steam, Steel and Electricity

by James W. Steele

From the time of Hero until the seventeenth century there is no record of any attempt being made to utilize steam-pressure for a practical purpose. The fact seems strange only because steam-power is so prominent a fact with ourselves. The ages that intervened were, as a whole, times of the densest superstition. The human mind was active, but it was entirely occupied with miracle and semi-miracle; in astrology, magic and alchemy; in trying to find the key to the supernatural. Every thinker, every educated man, every man who knew more than the rest, was bent upon finding this key for himself, so that he might use it for his own advantage. During all those ages there was no idea of the natural sciences. The key they lacked, and never found, that would have opened all, is the fact that in the realm of science and experiment there is no supernatural, and only eternal law; that cause produces its effect invariably. Even Kepler, the discoverer of the three great laws that stand as the foundation of the Copernican system of the universe, was in his investigations under the influence of astrological and cabalistic superstitions. Footnote: Kepler, a German, lived between 1571 and 1630. His life was full of vicissitudes, in the midst of which he performed an astonishing Even the science of amount of intellectual labor, with lasting results. He was the personal friend of Galileo and Tycho Brahe, and his life may be said to have been spent in finding the abstract intelligible reason for the actual disposition of the solar system, in which physical cause should take the place of arbitrary hypothesis. He did this.] medicine was, during those ages, a magical art, and the idea of cure by medicine, that drugs actually cure, is existent to this day as a remnant of the Middle Ages. A man's death-offense might be that he knew more than he could make others understand about the then secrets of nature. Yet he himself might believe more or less in magic. No one was untouched; all intellect was more or less enslaved.

And when experiments at last began to be made in the mechanisms by which steam might be utilized they were such as boys now make for amusement; such as throwing a steam-jet against the vanes of a paddle-wheel. Such was Branca's engine, made nine years after the landing of our forefathers at Plymouth, and thought worthy of a description and record. The next attempt was much more practical, but cannot be accurately assigned. It consisted of two chambers, from each of which alternately water was forced by steam, and which were filled again by cooling off and the forming of a vacuum where the steam had been. One chamber worked while the other cooled. It was an immense advance in the direction of utility.

About 1698, we begin to encounter the names that are familiar to us in connection with the history of the steam-engine. In that year Thomas Savery obtained a patent for raising water by steam. His was a modification of the idea described above. The boilers used would be of no value now, nevertheless the machine came into considerable use, and the world that learned so gradually became possessed with the idea that there was a utility in the pressure of steam. Savery's engine is said to have grown out of the accident of his throwing a flask containing a little wine on the fire at a tavern. Concluding immediately afterwards that he wanted it, he snatched it off of the fender and plunged it into a basin of water to cool it. The steam inside instantly condensing, the water rushed in and filled it as it cooled.

We now come to the beginning of the steam engine as we understand the term; the machine that involves the use of the cylinder and piston. These two features had been used in pumps long before, the atmospheric pump being one of the oldest of modern machines. The vacuum was known and utilized long before the cause of it was known. [[2]]

[2.]The discoverer was an Italian, Torricelli, about 1643. Gallileo, his tutor and friend, did not know why water would not rise in a tube more than thirty-three feet. No one knew of the weight of the atmosphere, so late as the early days of this republic. Many did not believe the theory long after that time. Torricelli, by his experiments, demonstrated the fact and invented the mercurial barometer, long known as the "Torricellian Tube." This last instrument led to another discovery; that the weight of the atmosphere varied from time to time in the same locality, and that storms and weather changes were indicated by a rising and falling of the column of mercury in the tube of the siphon-barometer. That which we call the "weather-bureau," organized by General Albert J. Myer, United States Army, in 1870, and growing out of the army signal service, of which he was chief, makes its "forecasts" by the use of the telegraph and the barometer. The "low pressure area" follows a path, which means a change of weather on that path. Notices by telegraph define the route, and the coming storm is not foretold, but foreknown; not prophesied, but ascertained. If we have been led from the crude pump of Gallileo's time directly to the weather bureau of the present with its invaluable signals to sailors and convenience to everybody, it is no more than is continually to be traced even to the beginning of the wonderful school of modern science.

But in the beginning it was not proposed to use steam in connection with the cylinder and piston which now really constitutes the steam-engine. Reverting again to the example of the gun, it was suggested to push a piston forward in a tube by the explosion of gunpowder behind it, or to repeat the Savery experiment with powder instead of steam. These ideas were those of about 1678-1685. The very earliest cylinder and piston engine was suggested by Denis Papin in 1690. These early inventors only went a portion of the way, and almost the entire idea of the steam-engine is of much later date. Mankind had then a singular gift of beginning at the wrong end. Every inventor now uses facts that seem to him to have been always known, and that are his by a kind of intuition. But they were all acquired by the tedious experience of a past that is distinguished by a few great names whose owners knew in their time perhaps one-tenth part as much as the modern inventor does, who is unconsciously using the facts learned by old experience. But the others began at the beginning.

In 1711, almost a hundred years after the arrival at Jamestown and Plymouth of the fathers of our present civilization, the steam-engine that is called Newcomen's began to be used for the pumping of water out of mines. This engine, slightly modified, and especially by the boy who invented the automatic cut-off for the steam valves, was a most rude and clumsy machine measured by our ideas. There appears to have been scarcely a single feature of it that is now visible in a modern engine. The cylinder was always vertical. It had the upper end open, and was a round iron vessel in which a plunger moved up and down. Steam was let in below this plunger, and the walking-beam with which it was connected by a rod had that end of it raised. When raised the steam was cut off, and all that was then under the piston was condensed by a jet of cold water. The outside air-pressure then acted upon it and pushed it down again. In this down-stroke by air-pressure the work was done. The far end of the walking-beam was even counter-weighted to help the steam-pressure. The elastic force of compressed steam was not depended upon, was hardly even known, in this first working and practical engine of the world. Every engine of that time was an experimental structure by itself. The boiler, as we use it, was unknown. Often it was square, stayed and braced against pressure in a most complicated way. Yet the Newcomen engine held its place for about seventy-five years; a very long time in our conception, and in view of the vast possibilities that we now know were before the science. [[3]]

[3.] As late as 1880, the steam-engine illustrated and described in the "natural philosophy" text books was still the Newcomen, or Newcomen-Watt engine, and this while that engine was almost unknown in ordinary circumstances, and double-acting high-pressure engines were in operation everywhere. This last, without which not much could be done that is now done, was evidently for a long time after it came into use regarded as a dangerous and unphilosophical experiment, hardly scientific, and not destined to be permanently adopted.