Nature has not only furnished wind for a motive force, but it has also provided man with water power. The water wheel, with its accompanying dam across the stream, has been in general use from the time of the earliest settlements. The weight of the water turned a wheel, thus developing a force which was employed for sawing lumber or grinding grain. When cotton and woolen manufactories were first introduced, water power was almost universally used.
After wind and water came steam. A very simple steam engine was devised by Hero more than two thousand years ago, but it was of little practical value and was soon forgotten. Not until the beginning of the eighteenth century was a machine invented which could successfully produce motion by steam. This engine, made by an Englishman named Newcomen, was very wasteful and was used only to pump water from mines.
Less than one hundred and fifty years ago a young Scotchman named James Watt set himself to the task of improving the Newcomen engine and of making a steam engine that would furnish power for different purposes. He devoted his whole thought to his work, and after twenty years of study he succeeded. The Watt steam engine is the basis of all engines to-day. James Watt did not discover steam power, but he made the steam engine of real value.
Many of the first engines used in this country for manufacturing purposes were made by Boulton and Watt in Birmingham. The first steam engines made in America were rough and crude, but the improvement in their construction was rapid. At the present time engines of the finest construction, with the latest improvements and adapted to all kinds of work, are made in many establishments all over our land. Engines are made for marine purposes—steamboats, yachts, and war-vessels,—stationary engines for all sorts of manufactures, and locomotives for the railroads. Perhaps the greatest improvements in the manufacture of steam engines have been the result of the talent and genius of George H. Corliss.
In 1825, when George was only eight years of age, his father moved to Greenwich, New York, where the boy grew up to manhood. Here he went to school, was clerk in a country store, and was employed in the first cotton factory built in that State. Little did the people of that country village think that this quiet boy had in him such wonderful mechanical genius as he afterward displayed.
His father's house was situated near the bank of a small stream which was much swollen every springtime by the freshets from the melting snows above. A bridge which spanned this stream was carried away one year by the freshets. Young Corliss, then twenty-one years of age, proposed to build a cantilever bridge. Everybody said that the scheme was impossible; he could not do it, it would be a failure. Nevertheless he succeeded, and the bridge was built. It proved entirely successful. It withstood the freshets and was in service, scarcely needing repairs, for many years.
He went to Providence when he was twenty-seven years of age, and before he was thirty he had established himself as the head of the firm of "Corliss, Nightingale and Company," for the manufacture of steam engines. He was but a little over thirty years old when he patented his great improvements, applied to the steam engine. These improvements were such as to produce uniformity of motion and to prevent the loss of steam. By connecting the valve with an ingenious cut-off, which he invented, he made the engine work with such uniformity that, if all but one of a hundred looms in a factory were suddenly stopped, that one would go on working at the same rate of speed as before.
The improvements which Mr. Corliss effected at once revolutionized the construction of the steam engine. He immediately began the erection of immense buildings for his machine shops, where now are employed more than a thousand men. In 1856 the "Corliss Steam Engine Company" was incorporated, and Mr. Corliss, purchasing the interest of his partners, soon owned all the stock of this company and was both president and treasurer. During a long period of more than forty years Mr. Corliss, who was a large-hearted, benevolent man interested in public affairs relating to city, State, and nation, devoted himself with great industry to the development of his inventions.
