Loe raamatut: «Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science», lehekülg 3

Tomlinson concludes his description of these interesting processes by informing us that an experienced and skilled workman will make five dips, each containing two octavo pages, in the course of an hour, or, as already stated, at the rate of nearly ten octavo sheets a day.

When the pan is opened, the cake of metal and plaster is removed, and beaten upon its edges with a mallet, to clear away all superfluous metal. The stereotype plate is then taken by the picker, who planes its edges square, "turns" its back flat upon a lathe until the proper thickness is obtained, and removes any minute imperfections arising from specks of dirt and air-bubbles left among the letters in casting the mould. Damaged letters are cut out, and separate types soldered in as substitutes. After all this anxious care to obtain perfection, the plate is pronounced ready for working, and when made up with the other plates into the proper form, it may be worked either at the hand-press or by machine.

Other modes of stereotyping have been introduced, but not one has attained to the popularity of the method we have just described.

The Steam Engine

"It is said that ideas produce revolutions and truly they do – not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical." – Carlyle.

I. – THE MARQUIS OF WORCESTER

As the last century was drawing to its close, two great revolutions were in progress, both of which were destined to exercise a mighty influence upon the years to come, – the one calm, silent, peaceful, the other full of sound and fury, bathed in blood, and crowned with thorns, – the one the fruit of long years of patient thought and work, the other the outcome of long years of oppression, suffering, and sin, – the one was Watt's invention of the steam engine, the other the great popular revolt in France. These are the two great events which set their mark upon our century, gave form and colour to its character, and direction to its aims and aspirations. In the pages of conventional history, of course, the French revolution, with its wild phantasmagoria of retribution, its massacres and martyrdoms, will no doubt have assigned to it the foremost rank as the great feature of the era, —

 
"For ever since historians writ,
And ever since a bard could sing,
Doth each exalt with all his wit
The noble art of murdering."
 

But those who can look below the mere surface of events, and whose fancy is not captivated by the melo-drama of rebellion, and the pageantry of war, will find that Watt's steam machine worked the greatest revolution of modern times, and exercised the deepest, as well as widest and most permanent influence over the whole civilized world.

Like all great discoveries, that of the motive power of steam, and the important uses to which it might be applied, was the work, not of any one mind, but of several minds, each borrowing something from its predecessor, until at last the first vague and uncertain Idea was developed into a practical Reality. Known dimly to the ancients, and probably employed by the priests in their juggleries and pretended miracles, it was not till within the last three centuries that any systematic attempt was made to turn it to useful account.

But before we turn our attention to the persons who made, and, after many failures and discouragements, successfully made this attempt, it will be advisable we should say something as to the principle on which their invention is founded.

The reader knows that gases and vapours, when imprisoned within a narrow space, do struggle as resolutely to escape as did Sterne's starling from his cage. Their force of pressure is enormous, and if confined in a closed vessel, they would speedily rend it into fragments. Let some water boil in a pipkin whose lid fits very tightly; in a few minutes the vapour or steam arising from the boiling water, overcoming the resistance of the lid, raises it, and rushes forth into the atmosphere.

Take a small quantity of water, and pour it into the hollow of a ball of metal. Then with the aid of a cork, worked by a metallic screw, close the opening of the ball hermetically, and place the ball in the heart of a glowing fire. The steam formed by the boiling water in the inside of the metallic bomb, finding no channel of escape, will burst through the bonds that sought to confine it, and hurl afar the fragments with a loud and dangerous explosion.

These well-known facts we adduce simply as a proof of the immense mechanical power possessed by steam when enclosed within a limited area. Now, the questions must have occurred to many, though they were themselves unable to answer them, – Why should all this force be wasted? Can it not be directed to the service and uses of man? In the course of time, however, human intelligence did discover a sufficient reply, and did contrive to utilize this astonishing power by means of the machine now so famous as the Steam Engine.

Let us take a boiler full of water, and bring it up to boiling point by means of a furnace. Attach to this boiler a tube, which guides the steam of the boiler into a hollow metallic cylinder, traversed by a piston rising and sinking in its interior. It is evident that the steam rushing through the tube into the lower part of the cylinder, and underneath the piston, will force the piston, by its pressure, to rise to the top of the cylinder. Now let us check for a moment the influx of the steam below the piston, and turning the stopcock, allow the steam which fills that space to escape outside; and, at the same time, by opening a second tube, let in a supply of steam above the piston: the pressure of the steam, now exercised in a downward direction, will force the piston to the bottom of its course, because there will exist beneath it no resistance capable of opposing the pressure of the steam. If we constantly keep up this alternating motion, the piston now rising and now falling, we are in a position to profit by the force of steam. For if the lever, attached to the rod of the piston at its lower end, is fixed by its upper to a crank of the rotating axle of a workshop or factory, is it not clear that the continuous action of the steam will give this axle a continuous rotatory movement? And this movement may be transmitted, by means of bands and pulleys, to a number of different machines or engines all kept at work by the power of a solitary engine.

This, then, is the principle on which the inventions of Papin, the Marquis of Worcester, Newcomen, and James Watt have been based.

The great astronomer Huyghens conceived the idea of creating a motive machine by exploding a charge of gunpowder under a cylinder traversed by a piston: the air contained in this cylinder, dilated by the heat resulting from the combustion of the powder, escaped into the outer air through a valve, whereupon a partial void existed beneath the piston, or, rather, the air considerably rarified; and from this moment the pressure of the atmospheric air falling on the upper part of the piston, and being but imperfectly counterpoised by the rarified air beneath the piston, precipitated this piston to the bottom of the cylinder. Consequently, said Huyghens, if to the said piston were attached a chain or cord coiling around a pulley, one might raise up the weights placed at the extremity of the cord, and so produce a genuine mechanical effect.

But Experiment, the touchstone of Physical Truth, soon revealed the deficiencies of an apparatus such as Huyghens had suggested. The air beneath the piston was not sufficiently rarified; the void produced was too imperfect. Evidently gunpowder was not the right agent. What was? Denis Papin answered, Steam. And the first Steam Engine ever invented was invented by this ingenious Frenchman.

Papin was born at Blois on the 22nd of August 1645. He died about 1714, but neither the exact date nor the place of his death is known. The lives of most men of genius are heavy with shadows, but Papin's career was more than ordinarily characterized by the incessant pursuit of the evil spirits of adversity and persecution. A Protestant, and devoutly loyal to his creed, he fled from France with thousands of his co-religionists, when Louis XIV. unwisely and unrighteously revoked the Edict of Nantes, which permitted the Huguenots to worship God after their own fashion. And it was abroad, in England, Italy, and Germany, that he realized the majority of his inventions, among which that of the Steam Engine is the most conspicuous.

In 1707 Papin constructed a steam engine on the principle we have already described, and placed it on board a boat provided with wheels. Embarking at Cassel on the river Fulda, he made his way to Münden in Hanover, with the design of entering the waters of the Weser, and thence repairing to England, to make known his discovery, and test its capabilities before the public. But the harsh and ignorant boatmen of the Weser would not permit him to enter the river; and when he indignantly complained, they had the barbarity to break his boat in pieces. This was the crowning misfortune of Papin's life. Thenceforward he seems to have lost all heart and hope. He contrived to reach London, where the Royal Society, of which he was a member, allowed him a small pittance.

In 1690 this ingenious man had devised an engine in which atmospheric vapour instead of steam was the motive agent. At a later period, Newcomen, a native of Dartmouth in Devonshire, conceived the idea of employing the same source of power.

But, previously, the value of steam, if employed in this direction, had occurred to the Marquis of Worcester, a nobleman of great ability and a quick imagination, who, for his loyalty to the cause of Charles I., had been confined in the Tower of London as a prisoner. On one occasion, while sitting in his solitary chamber, the tight cover of a kettle full of boiling water was blown off before his eyes; for mere amusement's sake he set it on again, saw it again blown off, and then began to reflect on the capabilities of power thus accidentally revealed to him, and to speculate on its application to mechanical ends. Being of a quick, ingenious turn of mind, he was not long in discovering how it could be directed and controlled. When he published his project – "An Admirable and Most Forcible Way to Drive up Water by Fire" – he was abused and laughed at as being either a madman or an impostor. He persevered, however, and actually had a little engine of some two horse power at work raising water from the Thames at Vauxhall; by means of which, he writes, "a child's force bringeth up a hundred feet high an incredible quantity of water, and I may boldly call it the most stupendous work in the whole world." There is a fervent "Ejaculatory and Extemporary Thanksgiving Prayer" of his extant, composed "when first with his corporeal eyes he did see finished a perfect trial of his water-commanding engine, delightful and useful to whomsoever hath in recommendation either knowledge, profit, or pleasure." This and the rest of his wonderful "Centenary of Inventions," only emptied instead of replenishing his purse. He was reduced to borrow paltry sums from his creditors, and received neither respect for his genius nor sympathy for his misfortunes. He was before his age, and suffered accordingly.

In 1698 his work was taken up by Thomas Savery, a miner, who, through assiduous labour and well-directed study, had become a skilful engineer. He succeeded in constructing an engine on the principle of the pressure of aqueous vapour, and this engine he employed successfully in pumping water out of coal mines. We owe to Savery the invention of a vacuum, which was suggested to him, it is said, in a curious manner: he happened to throw a wine-flask, which he had just drained, upon the fire; a few drops of liquor at the bottom of the flask soon filled it with steam, and, taking it off the fire, he plunged it, mouth downwards, into a basin of cold water that was standing on the table, when, a vacuum being produced, the water immediately rushed up into the flask.

In tracing this lineage of inventive genius, we next come to Thomas Newcomen, a blacksmith, who carried out the principle of the piston in his Atmospheric Engine, for which he took out a patent in 1705. It is but just to recognize that this engine was the first which proved practically and widely useful, and was, in truth, the actual progenitor of the present steam engine. It was chiefly used for working pumps. To one end of a beam moving on a central axis was attached the rod of the pump to be worked; to the other, the rod of the piston moving in the cylinder below. Underneath this cylinder was a boiler, and the two were connected by a pipe provided with a stop-cock to regulate the supply of steam. When the pump-rod was depressed, and the piston raised to the top of the cylinder, which was effected by weights hanging to the pump-end of the beam, the stop-cock was used to cut off the steam, and a supply of cold water injected into the cylinder through a water-pipe connected with the tank or cistern. The steam in the cylinder was immediately condensed; a vacuum created below the piston; the latter was then forced down by atmospheric pressure, bringing with it the end of the beam to which it was attached, and raising the other along with the pump-rod. A fresh supply of steam was admitted below the piston, which was raised by the counterpoise; and thus the motion was constantly renewed. The opening and shutting of the stop-cocks was at first managed by an attendant; but a boy named Potter, who was employed for this purpose, being fonder of play than work, contrived to save himself all trouble in the matter by fastening the handles with pieces of string to some of the cranks and levers. Subsequently, Beighton, an engineer, improved on this idea by substituting levers, acted on by pins in a rod suspended from the beam.

Properly speaking, Newcomen's engine was not a steam, but an atmospheric engine; for though steam was employed, it formed no essential feature of the contrivance, and might have been replaced by an air-pump. All the use that was made of steam was to produce a vacuum underneath the piston, which was pressed down by the weight of the atmosphere, and raised by the counterpoise of the buckets at the other end of the beam. Watt, in bringing the expansive force of steam to bear upon the working of the piston, may be said to have really invented the steam engine. Half a century before the little model came into Watt's hands, Newcomen's engine had been made as complete as its capabilities admitted of; and Watt struck into an entirely new line, and invented an entirely new machine, when he produced his Condensing Engine.

II. – JAMES WATT

There are few places in our country where human enterprise has effected such vast and marvellous changes within the century as the country traversed by the river Clyde. Where Glasgow now stretches far and wide, with its miles of swarming streets, its countless mills, and warehouses, and foundries, its busy ship-building yards, its harbour thronged with vessels of every size and clime, and its large and wealthy population, there was to be seen, a hundred years ago, only an insignificant little burgh, as dull and quiet as any rural market-town of our own day. There was a little quay at the Broomielaw, seldom used, and partly overgrown with broom. No boat over six tons' burden could get so high up the river, and the appearance of a masted vessel was almost an event. Tobacco was the chief trade of the town; and the tobacco merchants might be seen strutting about at the Cross in their scarlet cloaks, and looking down on the rest of the inhabitants, who got their livelihood, for the most part, by dealing in grindstones, coals, and fish – "Glasgow magistrates," as herrings are popularly called, being in as great repute then as now. There were but scanty means of intercourse with other places, and what did exist were little used, except for goods, which were conveyed on the backs of pack-horses. The caravan then took two days to go to Edinburgh – you can run through now between the two cities in little more than an hour. There is hardly any trade that Glasgow does not prosecute vigorously and successfully. You may see any day you walk down to the Broomielaw, vessels of a thousand tons' burden at anchor there, and the custom duties which were in 1796 little over £100, have now reached an amount exceeding one million!

Glasgow is indebted, in a great part, for the gigantic strides which it has made, to the genius, patience, and perseverance of a man who, in his boyhood, rather more than a hundred years ago, used to be scolded by his aunt for wasting his time, taking off the lid of the kettle, putting it on again, holding now a cup, now a silver spoon over the steam as it rose from the spout, and catching and counting the drops of water it fell into. James Watt was then taking his first elementary lessons in that science, his practical application of which in after life was to revolutionize the whole system of mechanical movement, and place an almost unlimited power at the disposal of the industrial classes.

When a boy, James Watt was delicate and sickly, and so shy and sensitive that his school-days were a misery to him, and he profited but little by his attendance. At home, though, he was a great reader, and picked up a great deal of knowledge for himself, rarely possessed by those of his years. One day a friend was urging his father to send James to school, and not allow him to trifle away his time at home. "Look how the boy is occupied," said his father, "before you condemn him." Though only six years old, he was trying to solve a geometrical problem on the floor with a bit of chalk. As he grew older he took to the study of optics and astronomy, his curiosity being excited by the quadrants and other instruments in his father's shop. By the age of fifteen he had twice gone through De Gravesande's Elements of Natural Philosophy, and he was also well versed in physiology, botany, mineralogy, and antiquarian lore. He was further an expert hand in using the tools in his father's workshop, and could do both carpentry and metal work. After a brief stay with an old mechanic in Glasgow, who, though he dignified himself with the name of "optician," never rose beyond mending spectacles, tuning spinets, and making fiddles and fishing tackle, Watt went at the age of eighteen to London, where he worked so hard, and lived so sparingly in order to relieve his father from the burden of maintaining him, that his health suffered, and he had to recruit it by a return to his native air. During the year spent in the metropolis, however, he managed to learn nearly all that the members of the trade there could teach, and soon showed himself a quick and skilful workman.

In 1757 we find the sign of "James Watt, Mathematical Instrument Maker to the College," stuck up over the entrance to one of the stairs in the quadrangle of Glasgow College. But though under the patronage of the University, his trade was so poor, that thrifty and frugal as he was, he had a hard struggle to live by it. He was ready, however, for any work that came to hand, and would never let a job go past him. To execute an order for an organ which he accepted, he studied harmonics diligently, and though without any ear for music, turned out a capital instrument, with several improvements of his own in its action; and he also undertook the manufacture of guitars, violins, and flutes. All this while he was laying up vast stores of knowledge on all sorts of subjects, civil and military engineering, natural history, languages, literature, and art; and among the professors and students who dropped into his little shop to have a chat with him, he soon came to be regarded as one of the ablest men about the college, while his modesty, candour, and obliging disposition gained him many good friends.

Among his multifarious pursuits, Watt had experimented a little in the powers of steam; but it was not till the winter of 1763-4, when a model of Newcomen's engine was put into his hands for repair, that he took up the matter in earnest. Newcomen's engine was then about the most complete invention of its kind; but its only value was its power of producing a ready vacuum, by rapid condensation on the application of cold; and for practical purposes was neither cheaper nor quicker than animal power. Watt, having repaired the model, found, on setting it agoing, that it would not work satisfactorily. Had it been only a little less clumsy and imperfect, Watt might never have regarded it as more than the "fine plaything," for which he at first took it; but now the difficulties of the task roused him to further efforts. He consulted all the books he could get on the subject, to ascertain how the defects could be remedied; and that source of information exhausted, he commenced a series of experiments, and resolved to work out the problem for himself. Among other experiments, he constructed a boiler which showed by inspection the quantity of water evaporated in a given time, and thereby ascertained the quantity of steam used in every stroke of the engine. He found, to his astonishment, that a small quantity of water in the form of steam heated a large quantity of water injected into the cylinder for the purpose of cooling it; and upon further examination, he ascertained the steam heated six times its weight of well water up to the temperature of the steam itself (212°). After various ineffectual schemes, Watt was forced to the conclusion that, to make a perfect steam engine, two apparently incompatible conditions must be fulfilled – the cylinder must always be as hot as the steam that came rushing into it, and yet, at each descent of the piston, the cylinder must become sufficiently cold to condense the steam. He was at his wit's end how to accomplish this task, when, as he was taking a walk one afternoon, the idea flashed across his mind that, as steam was an elastic vapour, it would expand and rush into a previously exhausted place; and that, therefore, all he had to do to meet the conditions he had laid down, was to produce a vacuum in a separate vessel, and open a communication between this vessel and the cylinder of the steam-engine at the moment when the piston was required to descend, and the steam would disseminate itself and become divided between the cylinder and the adjoining vessel. But as this vessel would be kept cold by an injection of water, the steam would be annihilated as fast as it entered, which would cause a fresh outflow of the remaining steam in the cylinder, till nearly the whole of it was condensed, without the cylinder itself being chilled in the operation. Here was the great key to the problem; and when once the idea of separate condensation was started, many other subordinate improvements, as he said himself, "followed as corollaries in rapid succession, so that in the course of one or two days the invention was thus far complete in his mind".

It cost him ten long weary years of patient speculation and experiment, to carry out the idea, with little hope to buoy him up, for to the last he used to say "his fear was always equal to his hope," – and with all the cares and embarrassments of his precarious trade to perplex and burden him. Even when he had his working model fairly completed, his worst difficulties – the difficulties which most distressed and harassed the shy, sensitive, and retiring Watt – seemed only to have commenced. To give the invention a fair practical trial required an outlay of at least £1000; and one capitalist, who had agreed to join him in the undertaking, had to give it up through some business losses. Still Watt toiled on, always keeping the great object in view, – earning bread for his family (for he was married by this time), by adding land-surveying to his mechanical labours, and, in short, turning his willing hand to any honest job that offered.

He got a patent in 1769, and began building a large engine; but the workmen were new to the task, and when completed, its action was spasmodic and unsatisfactory. "It is a sad thing," he then wrote, "for a man to have his all hanging by a single string. If I had wherewithal to pay for the loss, I don't think I should so much fear a failure; but I cannot bear the thought of other people becoming losers by my scheme, and I have the happy disposition of always painting the worst." And just then, to make matters still more gloomy, he learned that some rascally linen-draper in London was plagiarizing the great invention he had brought forth in such sore and protracted travail. "Of all things in the world," cried poor Watt, sick with hope deferred, and pressed with little carking cares on every side, "there is nothing so foolish as inventing."

When nearly giving way to despair, and on the point of abandoning his invention, Watt was fortunate enough to fall in with Matthew Boulton, one of the great manufacturing potentates of Birmingham, an energetic, far-seeing man, who threw himself into the enterprise with all his spirit; and the fortune of the invention was made. An engine, on the new principle, was set up at Soho; and there Boulton and Watt sold, as the former said to Boswell, "what all the world desires to have, Power;" – the infinite power that animates those mighty engines, which —

 
"England's arms of conquest are,
The trophies of her bloodless war:
Brave weapons these.
Victorious over wave and soil,
With these she sails, she weaves, she tills,
Pierces the everlasting hills,
And spans the seas."
 

Watt's engine, once fairly started, was not long in making its way into general use. The first steam-engine used in Manchester was erected in 1790; and now it is estimated that in that district, within a radius of ten miles, there are in constant work more than fifty thousand boilers, giving a total power of upwards of one million horses. And the united steam power of Great Britain is considered equal to the manual labour of upwards of four hundred millions of men, or more than double the number of males on the face of the earth. From the factory at Soho, Watt's improved engines were dispersed all over the country, especially in Cornwall – the firm receiving the value of a third part of the coal saved by the use of the new machine. In one mine, where there were three pumps at work, the proprietors thought it worth while, it is said, to purchase the rights of the inventors, at the price of £2500 yearly for each engine. The saving, therefore, on the three engines, in fuel alone, must have been at least £7500 a year.

In the first year of the present century, Watt withdrew himself entirely from business; but though he lived in retirement, he did not let his busy mind get rusty or sluggish for want of exercise. At one time he took it into his head that his faculties were declining, and though upwards of seventy years of age, he resolved to test his mental powers by taking up some new subject of study. It was no easy matter to find one quite new to him, so wide and comprehensive had been his range of study; but at length the Anglo-Saxon tongue occurred to him, and he immediately applied himself to master it, the facility with which he did so, dispelling all doubt as to the failing of his stupendous intellect. He thus busied himself in various useful and entertaining pursuits, till close upon his death, which took place in 1819.

Extraordinary as was Watt's inventive genius, his wide range of knowledge, theoretic and practical, was equally so. Great as is the "idea" with which his name is chiefly associated, he was not a man of one idea, but of a thousand. There was hardly a subject which came under his notice which he did not master; and, as was said of him, "it seemed as if every subject casually started by him had been that he had been occupied in studying." He had no doubt a rapid faculty of acquiring knowledge; but he owed the versatility and copiousness of his attainments above all to his unwearied industry. He was always at work on something or other, and he may truly be called one of those who —

 
"Could Time's hour-glass fall,
Would, as for seed of stars, stoop for the sand,
And by incessant labour gather all."
 

In a recent volume of memoirs by Mrs. Schimmel Pennick, we find the following graphic sketch of this extraordinary man: – "He was one of the most complete specimens of the melancholic temperament. His head was generally bent forward or leaning on his hand in meditation, his shoulders stooping, and his chest falling in, his limbs lank and unmuscular, and his complexion sallow. His utterance was slow and impassioned, deep and low in tone, with a broad Scotch accent; his manners gentle, modest, and unassuming. In a company where he was not known, unless spoken to, he might have tranquilly passed the whole time in pursuing his own meditations. When he entered the room, men of letters, men of science, many military men, artists, ladies, and even little children, thronged around him. I remember a celebrated Swedish artist being instructed by him that rat's whiskers made the most pliant painting-brushes; ladies would appeal to him on the best modes of devising grates, curing smoking chimneys, warming their houses, and obtaining fast colours."

His reading was singularly extensive and diversified. He perused almost every work that came in his way, and used to say that he never opened a book, no matter what its subject or worth, without learning something from it. He had a vivid imagination, was passionately fond of fiction, and was a very gifted story-teller himself. When a boy, staying with his aunt in Glasgow, he used every night to enthral the attention of the little circle with some exciting narrative, which they would not go to bed till they had heard the end of; and kept them in such a state of tremor and excitement, that his aunt used to threaten to send him away.

Since Watt's time, innumerable patents have been taken out for improvements in the steam engine; but his great invention forms the basis of nearly all of them, and the alterations refer rather to details than principles of action. The application of steam to locomotive purposes, however, led to the construction of the high pressure engine, in which the cumbrous condensing apparatus is dispensed with, and motion imparted to the piston by the elastic power of the steam being greater than that of the atmosphere.