Steam Steel and Electricity | Page 5

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