A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Steam Steel and Electricity

J >> James W. Steele >> Steam Steel and Electricity



Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Tonya Allen
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.




STEAM STEEL AND ELECTRICITY

By

JAMES W. STEELE





CONTENTS


THE STORY OF STEAM.

What Steam is.--Steam in Nature.--The Engine in its earlier
forms.--Gradual explosion.--The Hero engine.--The Temple-door
machine.--Ideas of the Middle Ages.--Beginnings of the modern
engine.--Branca's engine.--Savery's engine.--The Papin engine
using cylinder and piston.--Watt's improvements upon the
Newcomen idea.--The crank movement.--The first use of steam
expansively.--The "Governor."--First engine by an American
Inventor.--Its effect upon progress in the United
States.--Simplicity and cheapness of the modern engine.--Actual
construction of the modern engine.--Valves, piston, etc., with
diagrams.

THE AGE OF STEEL.

The various "Ages" in civilization.--Ancient knowledge of the
metals.--The invention and use of Bronze.--What Steel is.--The
"Lost Arts."--Metallurgy and chemistry.--Oriental Steel.--Modern
definition of Steel.--Invention of Cast Steel.--First iron-ore
discoveries in America.--First American Iron-works.--Early
methods without steam.--First American casting.--Effect of iron
industry upon independence.--Water-power.--The trip-hammer.--The
steam-hammer of Nasmyth.--Machine-tools and their
effects.--First rolling-mill.--Product of the iron industry in
1840-50.--The modern nail, and how it came.--Effect of iron upon
architecture.--The "Sky-Scraper."--Gas as fuel in iron
manufactures.--The Steel of the present.--The invention of
Kelley.--The Bessemer process.--The "Converter."--Present
product of Steel.--The Steel-mill.

THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY.

The oldest and the youngest of the sciences.--Origin of the
name.--Ancient ideas of Electricity.--Later experiments.--Crude
notions and wrong conclusions.--First Electric
Machine.--Frictional Electricity.--The Leyden Jar.--Extreme
ideas and Fakerism.--Franklin, his new ideas and their
reception.--Franklin's Kite.--The Man Franklin.--Experiments
after Franklin, leading to our present modern uses.--Galvani and
his discovery.--Volta, and the first "Battery."--How a battery
acts.--The laws of Electricity, and how they were
discovered.--Induction, and its discoverer.--The line at which
modern Electricity begins.--Magnetism and Electricity.--The
Electro-Magnet.--The Molecular theory.--Faraday, and his Law of
Magnetic Force.

MODERN ELECTRICITY.

CHAPTER I. The Four great qualities of Electricity which make
its modern uses possible.--The universal wire.--Conductors and
non conductors.--Electricity an exception in the ordinary Laws
of Nature.--A dual nature: "Positive" and "Negative."--All
modern uses come under the law of Induction.--Some of the laws
of this induction.--Magnets and Magnetism.--Relationship between
the two.--Magnetic "poles."--Practical explanation of the action
of induction.--The Induction Coil.--Dynamic and Static
Electricity.--The Electric Telegraph.--First attempts.--Morse,
and his beginnings.--The first Telegraph Line.--Vail, and the
invention of the dot-and-dash alphabet.--The old instruments and
the new.--The final simplicity of the telegraph.

CHAPTER II. The Ocean Cable.--Differences between land lines and
cables.--The story of the first cable.--Field and his final
success.--The Telephone.--Early attempts.--Description of Bell's
invention.--The Telautograph.--Early attempts and the idea upon
which they were based.--Description of Gray's invention.--How a
Telautograph may be made mechanically.

CHAPTER III. The Electric Light.--Causes of heat and light in
the conductor of a current.--The first Electric Light.--The Arc
Light, and how constructed.--The Incandescent.--The
Dynamo.--Date of the invention.--Successive steps.--Faraday the
discoverer of its principle.--Pixü's
machine.--Pacinatti.--Wilde.--Siemens' and Wheatstone.--The
Motor.--How the Dynamo and Motor came to be coupled.--Review of
first attempts.--Kidder's battery.--Page's machine.--Electric
Railroads.--Electrolysis.--General facts.--Electrical
Measurements.--"Death Current."--Instruments of
Measurement.--Electricity as an Industry.--Medical
Electricity.--Incomplete possibilities.--What the "Storage
Battery" is.

CHAPTER IV. Electrical Invention in the United States.--Review
of the careers of Franklin, Morse, Field, Edison and
others.--Some of the surprising applications of
Electricity.--The Range-Finder.--Cooking and heating by
Electricity.




THE STORY OF STEAM


That which was utterly unknown to the most splendid civilizations of the
past is in our time the chief power of civilization, daily engaged in
making that history of a new era that is yet to be written in words. It
has been demonstrated long since that men's lives are to be influenced
not by theory, or belief, or argument and reason, so much as by that
course of daily life which is not attempted to be governed by argument
and reason, but by great physical facts like steam, electricity and
machinery in their present applications.

The greatest of these facts of the present civilization are expressed in
the phrase, Steam and Steel. The theme is stupendous. Only the most
prominent of its facts can be given in small space, and those only in
outline. The subject is also old, yet to every boy it must be told
again, and the most ordinary intelligence must have some desire to know
the secrets, if such they are, of that which is unquestionably the
greatest force that ever yielded to the audacity of humanity. It is now
of little avail to know that all the records that men revere, all the
great epics of the world, were written in the absence of the
characteristic forces of modern life. A thousand generations had lived
and died, an immense volume of history had been enacted, the heroes of
all the ages, and almost those of our own time, had fulfilled their
destinies and passed away, before it came about that a mere physical
fact should fill a larger place in our lives than all examples, and that
the evanescent vapor which we call steam should change daily, and
effectively, the courses and modes of human action, and erect life upon
another plane.

It may seem not a little absurd to inquire now "what is steam?"
Everybody knows the answer. The non-technical reader knows that it is
that vapor which, for instance, pervades the kitchen, which issues from
every cooking vessel and waste-pipe, and is always white and visible,
and moist and warm. We may best understand an answer to the question,
perhaps, by remembering that steam is one of the three natural
conditions of water: ice, fluid water, and steam. One or the other of
these conditions always exists, and always under two others: pressure
and heat. When the air around water reaches the temperature of
thirty-two degrees by the scale of Fahrenheit, or ° or zero by the
Centigrade scale, and is exposed to this temperature for a time, it
becomes ice. At two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit it becomes
steam. Between these two temperatures it is water. But the change to
steam which is so rapid and visible at the temperature above mentioned
is taking place slowly all the time when water, in any situation, is
exposed to the air. As the temperature rises the change becomes more
rapid. The steam-making of the arts is merely that of all nature,
hastened artificially and intentionally.

The element of pressure, mentioned above, enters into the proposition
because water boils at a lower temperature, with less heat, when the
weight of the atmosphere is less than normal, as it is at great
elevations, and on days when, as we now express it, there is a low
barometer. Long before any cook could explain the fact it was known that
the water boiling quickly was a sign of storm. It has often been found
by camping-parties on mountains that in an attempt to boil potatoes in a
pot the water would all "boil away," and leave the vegetables uncooked.
The heat required to evaporate it at the elevation was less than that
required to cook in boiling water. It is one of the instances where the
problems of nature intrude themselves prominently into the affairs of
common life without previous notice.

This universal evaporation, under varying circumstances, is probably the
most important agency in nature, and the most continuous and potent.
There was only so much water to begin with. There will never be any less
or any more. The saltness of the sea never varies, because the loss by
evaporation and the new supply through condensation of the
steam--rain--necessarily remain balanced by law forever. The surface of
our world is water in the proportion of three to one. The extent of
nature's steam-making, silent, and mostly invisible, is immeasurable and
remains an undetermined quantity. The three forms of water combine and
work together as though through intentional partnership, and have, thus
combined, already changed the entire land surface of the world from what
it was to what it is, and working ceaselessly through endless cycles
will change it yet more. The exhalations that are steam become the water
in a rock-cleft. It changes to ice with a force almost beyond
measurement in the orderly arrangement of its crystals in compliance
with an immutable law for such arrangement, and rends the rock. The
process goes on. There is no high mountain in any land where water will
not freeze. The water of rain and snow carries away the powdered remains
from year to year, and from age to age. The comminuted ruins of
mountains have made the plains and filled up and choked the mouth of the
Mississippi. The soil that once lay hundreds of miles away has made the
delta of every river that flows into the sea. The endless and resistless
process goes on without ceasing, a force that is never expended, and but
once interrupted within the knowledge of men, then covered a large area
of the world with a sea of ice that buried for ages every living thing.

The common idea of the steam that we make by boiling water is that it is
all water, composed of that and nothing else, and this conception is
gathered from apparent fact. Yet it is not entirely true. Steam is an
invisible vapor in every boiler, and does not become what we know by
sight as steam until it has become partly cooled. As actual steam
uncooled, it is a gas, obeying all the laws of the permanent gases. The
creature of temperature and pressure, it changes from this gaseous form
when their conditions are removed, and in the change becomes visible to
us. Its elasticity, its power of yielding to compression, are enormous,
and it gives back this elasticity of compression with almost
inconceivable readiness and swiftness. To the eye, in watching the
gliding and noiseless movements of one of the great modern engines, the
power of which one has only a vague and inadequate conception seems not
only inexplicable, but gentle. The ponderous iron pieces seem to weigh
nothing. There is a feeling that one might hinder the movement as he
would that of a watch. There is an inability to realize the fact that
one of the mightiest forces of nature is there embodied in an easy,
gliding, noiseless impulse. Yet it is one that would push aside massy
tons of dead weight, that would almost unimpeded crush a hole through
the enclosing wall, that whirls upon the rails the drivers of a
locomotive weighing sixty tons as though there were no weight above
them, no bite upon the rails. There is an enormous concentration of
force somewhere; of a force which perhaps no man can fairly estimate;
and it is under the thin shell we call a boiler. Were it not elastic it
could not be so imprisoned, and when it rebels, when this thin shell is
torn like paper, there is a havoc by which we may at last inadequately
measure the power of steam.

We have in modern times applied the word "engine" almost exclusively to
the machine which is moved by the pressure of steam. Yet we might go
further, since one of the first examples of a pressure engine, older
than the steam machine by nearly four hundred years, is the gun. Reduced
to its principle this is an engine whose operation depends upon the
expansion of gas in a cylinder, the piston being a projectile. The same
principle applies in all the machines we know as "engines." An
air-engine works through the expansion of air in a cylinder by heat. A
gas-engine, now of common use, by the expansion, which is explosion,
caused by burning a mixture of coal-gas and air, and the steam-engine,
the universal power generator of modern life, works by the expansion of
the vapor of water as it is generated by heat. Steam may be considered a
species of _gradual_ explosion applied to the uses of industry. It
often becomes a real one, complying with all the conditions, and as
destructive as dynamite.

It cannot be certainly known how long men have experimented with the
expansive force of steam. The first feeble attempt to purloin the power
of the geyser was probably by Hero, of Alexandria, about a hundred and
thirty years before Christ. His machine was also the first known
illustration of what is now called the "turbine" principle; the
principle of _reaction_ in mechanics. [Footnote: This principle is
often a puzzle to students. There is an old story of the man who put a
bellows in his boat to make wind against the sail, and the wind did not
affect the sail, but the boat went backward in an opposite direction
from the nozzle of the bellows. There is probably no better illustration
of reaction than the "kick" of a gun, which most persons know about. The
recoil of a six-pound field piece is usually from six to twelve feet. It
can be understood by supposing a gun to be loaded with powder and an
iron rod longer than the barrel to be left on the charge. If the outer
end of this rod were then placed against a tree, and the gun were fired,
it is manifest that the gun would become the projectile, and be fired
off of the rod backward or burst. In ordinary cases the air in the bore,
and immediately outside of the muzzle, acts comparatively, and in a
measure, as the supposed rod against the tree would. It gives way, and
is elastic, but not as quickly as the force of the explosion acts, and
the gun is pushed backwards. It is the turbine principle, running into
hundreds of uses in mechanics.] He made a closed vessel from whose
opposite sides radiated two hollow arms with holes in their sides, the
holes being on opposite sides of the tubes from each other. This vessel
he mounted on an upright spindle, and put water in it and heated the
water. The steam issuing from the holes in the arms drove them backward.
The principle of the action of Hero's machine has been accepted for two
thousand years, though never in a steam-engine. It exists under all
circumstances similar to his. In water, in the turbine wheel, it has
been made most efficacious. The power applied now for the harnessing of
Niagara for the purpose of sending electric currents hundreds of miles
is the turbine wheel.

[Illustration: THE SUPPOSED HERO ENGINE.]

Hero appears to the popular imagination as the greatest inventor of the
past. Every school boy knows him. Archimedes, the Greek, was the
greater, and a hundred and fifty years the earlier, and was the author
of the significance of the word "Eureka," as we use it now. But Hero was
the pioneer in steam. He made the first steam-engine, and is immortal
through a toy.

The first _practical_ device in which expansion was used seems to
have been for the exploiting of an ecclesiastical trick intended to
impress the populace. There is a saying by an antique wit that no two
priests or augurs could ever meet and look at each other without a
knowing wink of recognition. Hero is said to have been the author of
this contrivance also. The temple doors would open by themselves when
the fire burned on the altar, and would close again when that fire was
extinguished, and the worshippers would think it a miracle. It is
interesting because it contained the principle upon which was afterwards
attempted to be made the first working low-pressure or atmospheric
steam-engine. Yet it was not steam, but air, that was used. A hollow
altar containing air was heated by the fire being kindled upon it. The
air expanded and passed through a pipe into a vessel below containing
water. It pressed the water out through another pipe into a bucket
which, being thereby made heavier, pulled open the temple doors. When
the fire went out again there was a partial vacuum in the vessel that
had held the water at first, and the water was sucked back through the
pipe out of the bucket. That became lighter again and allowed the doors
to close with a counter-weight. All that was then necessary to convince
the populace of the genuineness of the seeming miracle was to keep them
from understanding it. The machinery was under the floor. There have
been thousands of miracles since then performed by natural agencies, and
there have passed many ages since Hero's machine during which not to
understand a thing was to believe it to be supernatural.

[Illustration: THE TEMPLE-DOOR TRICK.]

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. [Footnote: 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.

[Illustration: EARLY NEWCOMEN PUMPING ENGINE. STEAM-COCK, COLD WATER
COCK AND WASTE-SPIGOT ALL WORKED BY HAND.]

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. [Footnote: 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.]

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.