Footnotes:
[ [1] Article “Government,” in ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’
[ [2] The principle of the Æolipile is the same as that embodied in Avery and Ruthven’s engines for the production of rotary motion. “These engines,” says Bourne, “are more expensive in steam than ordinary engines, and travel at an inconvenient speed; but in other respects they are quite as effectual, and their construction is extremely simple and inexpensive.”
[ [3] See Bennet Woodcroft’s ‘Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria,’ from the original Greek. London, 1851.
[ [4] Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes, avec diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes, &c., par Solomon de Caus, Ingénieur et Architecte du Roy. Frankfort, 1615.
[ [5] De Caus eventually returned to France, and was appointed engineer to the King. During the later years of his life he was employed in carrying out plans for the better supply of Paris with water. The story so often told of De Caus having been shut up in the Bicêtre turns out to be a fiction. Though a Huguenot, he was not persecuted by Richelieu, but was, on the contrary, employed by him; and in 1624 he dedicated to that prelate his treatise entitled ‘Horologes Solitaires.’ Mr. Charles Read, editor of several interesting memoirs of early French Protestants, has recently brought to light and published in the ‘Gazette des Tribunaux’ the proofs of the patronage of De Caus by Richelieu, and reproduced the original documents, which he discovered slumbering in the dust of the State Records at Paris. In 1621 De Caus is found proposing to Louis XIII. to adopt measures for cleansing Paris and the faubourgs of dirt and uncleanness, by a system of reservoirs established at elevated points, and by fountains at various places which he indicated. The king and his council sent the propositions to the chief magistrate of Paris, and Mr. Read transcribes the deliberation which took place on the subject at the City Council, as handed down in the records deposited in the Imperial Archives. De Caus died at Paris, and was buried in the church of La Trinité in February, 1626.
[ [6] Dr. Bayly, in his ‘Apothegms’ (1682), p. 87, describes the fright given to some Puritan visitors on the occasion of their searching Raglan Castle for arms, the Marquis of Worcester being a known Papist. “Having carried them up and down the castle, his lordship at length brought them over a high bridge that arched over the moat between the castle and the great tower, wherein the Lord Herbert had lately contrived certain water-works, which, when the several engines and wheels were set agoing, much quantity of water through the hollow conveyances of the aqueducts was to be let down from the top of an high tower.” When all was ready for the surprise, the water was let in, and it made such a hideous and fearful noise by reason of the hollowness of the tower, and the neighbouring echoes of the castle, that the men stood amazed and terror-struck. At this point up came a man staring and running, who exclaimed, “Look to yourselves, my masters, for the lions are got loose.” Whereupon the Puritans fled down the narrow staircase in such haste that they lost footing and fell, tumbling one over the other, and never halted until they had got the castle out of sight. Mr. Dircks, in his able and exhaustive ‘Life, Times, and Scientific Labours of the Marquis of Worcester,’ London, 1865, says that this hydraulic apparatus “probably depended for its operation on the influence of heat from burning fuel acting on a suitably constructed boiler, and so arranged as to be able to apply the expansive force of steam to the driving of water through vertical pipes to a considerable elevation.” But it does not seem to us that the facts stated are sufficient to warrant this assumption.
[ [7] Mr. Dircks says “it was a machine consisting of a wheel 14 feet in diameter, carrying forty weights of forty pounds each, and is supposed to have rotated on an axle supported on two pillars or upright frames,” as indicated in the ‘Century of Inventions,’ Art. 56.
[ [8] ‘Weld’s Royal Society,’ i. 53.