A Short History of the Steam Engine

H. W . Dickinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781138390898
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429751035
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1938, this volume details the steam engine as the most dynamic factor in the Industrial Revolution, freeing humanity from their age-long dependence upon the power of water, wind, and animals, or of their own muscles. Itself the offspring of coal and iron, it made possible the sinking of deeper mines and the casting and forging of greater quantities of iron, from which machines were constructed to be powered by steam in the factories of the rapidly growing industrial areas. Soon the mass-produced goods from these mills were transported by steam locomotives and steamships all over the world. This was the Age of Steam. Even today, steam turbines still drive the dynamos of our electric power stations, whether fuelled by coal, oil or nuclear energy.

Much has been written about the steam engine, but this book, first produced by the late Dr. H.W. Dickinson just before the second World War, is still the best short account. It describes developments from the pioneering efforts of Savery and Newcomen, through the achievements of Watt and Trevethick, down to Parsons and modern times.

PART I THE RECIPROCATING ENGINE

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY

DOI: 10.4324/9780429423123-2

Man’s apprenticeship of toil—Minerals pressed into his service—Dark Ages—Renaissance of learning—Establishment of Scientific Societies—Where was power to be sought?—Discovery that the atmosphere has weight—Von Guericke’s air pump—Scientific speculation—Papin makes a vacuum under a piston by condensing steam—Practical but ineffective efforts of De Caus, Ramsay, Marquis of Worcester, and Morland—Recapitulation.

THE heat engine, undoubtedly the most powerful agent in bringing about the material well-being that everyone shares, or ought to share, to-day, is comparatively a recent comer into the world, being in fact, little more than two and a quarter centuries old. This is such a short time as compared with the eight to twelve thousand years of human civilization that curiosity is aroused, so sophisticated are we to-day, to find an explanation why it was the heat engine did not arrive on the scene earlier. To do so we must cast our thoughts back and try to recapture the outlook of mankind before its introduction, to examine what made the want of it felt, and what were the experiments and reasonings that finally brought the heat engine into being. Let it be said then that during the long period alluded to, a period justly termed by one writer “Man’s apprenticeship of toil”,¹ Man was winning control slowly, but at an ever-increasing rate over the powers of nature. He had learnt to make fire, to shape implements and tools; he had acquired a fund of transmitted empirical knowledge; he had schooled himself in craftsmanship; he had discovered and applied the mechanical powers: the lever, the inclined plane, the wheel and axle, the pulley; he had extended his own bodily powers by domesticating and harnessing animals for draught and other purposes; he had learnt to take advantage of the wind to drive ships by sails, and (much later) to grind his cereals by windmills. Long after he had learnt how to make fire, he began to acquire knowledge of minerals and ores, to make progress in reducing them to the metallic state, and to forge or cast the resultant metals into useful objects. Thus was initiated a subtle change of the most far-reaching consequences. Hitherto man had been an animal like others, finding all he needed for his sustenance reproducible on the earth’s surface. Now he extended the domain required for his support to products below the surface. The former is an economy that can subsist, it will be realized, as long as the earth remains habitable; the latter economy, in which we exist to-day, is bound to be short in duration as compared with the former, because we are using up non-reproducible assets—an arresting thought.

¹ Vowles, The Quest for Power, 1931, p. 1.

Another large factor in material progress that has to be taken into account is division of labour, widening from the family to the tribe, then to other tribes, bringing about the production of commodities by specialization, leading to barter and then to exchange for money, hence giving rise to trade and commerce overland and overseas. The Asiatic trade routes and the Mediterranean afford examples of growth of this kind of commerce for at least two centuries B.C. onwards, to the growth of cities like Bagdad and Alexandria, to the cultivation of learning in schools, and to the spread of technology by the immigration of artisans. Now at last one would imagine that the first glimmerings of steam power should show themselves. This was the case, as the writings of Heron of Alexandria show; but the applications of steam were to produce what we might almost term puerile effects to astonish or awe the ignorant rather than to do useful work.¹ The fact was that the conditions and abundance of slave labour for performing menial tasks obviated any insistent demand for other than animal power, even by the Romans with their far-flung organization.

¹ See p. 185.

The apparent stagnation of the Dark Ages, and the slow recovery of learning during the Middle Ages, interfused and fecundated by the learning of the Arabians based upon Greek thought, brought about the greatest outburst of the human spirit that the world has ever known. We have only to reflect upon the influence of the mariners’ compass, the discovery of a New World, the invention of printing by movable type, and the spread of the art of paper-making in the Western World, to realize what large factors these were in helping to bring about the result. It was a world with a complete change in the attitude of mind and of ideals of life, covering every field of knowledge, art, politics and religion. In the economic sphere the decay of the feudal system had been accompanied by the rise of a commercial class, and this led to the mercantilist policy steadily pursued by sovereigns such as the Tudors and directed towards the attainment of military power. This led to the introduction and fostering by legislative action of new industries, and to the immigration of artisans to carry them on.

In no domain was the outcome of the Renaissance more fruitful than in that of science and technology. The spirit of enquiry was aroused; observation and experiment instead of speculation and dogmatism became the accepted approach to any problem. Throughout Europe, societies and academies for the study of science sprang up by the hundred, as for example our own Royal Society in 1662. This ferment of ideas led to new wants and to attempts to satisfy them. It is significant that the Act consolidating the law laying down the principles for granting of Letters Patent for inventions in this country—the Statute of Monopolies—was passed in 1624.

The change that we have remarked upon, from a purely agricultural to an accessory mineral economy, had not proceeded far before the exhaustion of surface ore deposits led to search for the source of such ores in the mineral veins. Then began outcrop or adit working, and the sinking of pits to obtain access to the mineral seams. This form of mining did not progress far before that bugbear of the miner—water—was encountered. For the higher seams, adit drainage was possible, but for situations below natural drainage level, existing appliances—hand pumps, animal-driven chains of buckets and such like—had to be employed, but they were woefully inadequate besides being inefficient. Plainly some more powerful agent than that of animals was needed. The problem was to draw water from a considerable depth, or to force it to a moderate height, or perhaps to do both.

But in which of the hundred and one possible directions could help be sought? To the Greek mind there were four elements: earth, air, fire and water, and one or more of these must be enlisted; but where to begin? Earth connoted the material that was to be won from the ground, water certainly could be utilized to raise other water by means of a waterwheel, but this was clumsy and only rarely were the necessary conditions to be found together at any one place. There remained air and fire. The former and its effects when in motion were matters of everyday observation; the wind, as we have said, had been harnessed to do work by means of the windmill as early as the twelfth century, but its power can be exerted only in high places generally far removed from mines and is intermittent. The use of fire to heat water in a vessel, giving rise to ebullition and the disappearance of the water in the form of visible vapour, gives the impression of considerable energy, but it does not suggest a means of controlling it, still less of raising water by its means. It was known also that if water were heated in a confined space a pressure would be reached that could force out a jet of steam or water through a tube or else, if there were no outlet, become destructive in its effects. The pressure of steam must therefore have been deemed a likely avenue to explore. We may cite, for example, the laboratory experiment, for it seems to have been nothing more, of Giambattista della Porta (1538–1615), natural philosopher of Naples. In his apparatus, described and illustrated in his Spiritali, 1606 (see Fig. 1), he employs a fireplace E generating steam, in what looks like a retort, or it may be a wine flask D, communicating with a closed chamber B above the surface of water therein contained; the steam forces out the water through the tube C. The size of the apparatus may be inferred from Porta’s statement that the retort held two ounces of water. We have singled out Porta because he shows another laboratory experiment. A retort or wine flask A, like the one in the preceding experiment, when full of steam is plunged under water contained in a bowl, a vacuum is formed and water is drawn up into the flask. Porta is the first writer, so far as is known to the author, to show that water could be raised in this way. There is no evidence that these experiments had any practical outcome; all we can say is that they showed great originality.

Fig. 1. Della Porta’s steam pressure apparatus.

From his Spiritali, 1606.

The pressure of steam was not, however, the only avenue to explore. Gunpowder was already applied in fire-arms, and its explosive effect was an obvious source of energy, could some way be found of moderating its violence and repeating the action regularly: even so the way to apply the resulting pressure to raise water was only a speculation.

Then there was the air of the atmosphere; here, had it been understood, was the key to the problem of making a steam engine. The great discovery about the atmosphere, namely, that it had weight, is said to have been the outcome of attempts in 1641 by the engineers of Cosmo de’ Medici II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, to make a special sucking pump to draw water from a depth, under the bucket, of about 50 ft. They found of course that try as they would, they could not get water to follow the bucket to a greater height than about 28 ft. from the surface of the water, as in fact they knew from previous experience. The accepted view of the time was that nature abhorred a vacuum; but, if that were the case, there seemed no reason why there should be a limit to the height the water would follow the bucket. Galilei (1564–1642), appealed to for an explanation, suggested lamely that nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum ceased when the bucket reached a height of 28 ft. above the water! This dictum may have satisfied the engineers, but we doubt it; it certainly did not satisfy the philosopher himself, and he was led to carry out some experiments which, however, didnot resolve hisdoubts. He confided his speculations to his amanuensis and pupil Evangelista Torricelli (1608–47) who repeated the pump experiment, without, however, getting the water to rise any higher than before. Hence he deduced that the atmosphere had weight and that 28 ft. was the height of a column of water that the weight of the atmosphere balanced, and hence that the latter would balance a proportionately shorter column of a heavier liquid. He tried this with mercury in a closed tube, inverted into a basin of the same liquid, and found his surmise was correct—the mercury would not stand higher than about 28 in. As the specific gravity of mercury is about fourteen times that of water, the theory was strikingly proved; incidentally this was the invention of the mercurial barometer. Torricelli published his result in 1643, and his surprising experiments were everywhere repeated, among others by Blaise Pascal (1623–62), French divine and savant. He carried the experiment a stage further; he reasoned that, the higher one ascended in the atmosphere, the lower should be its pressure. In 1647 he induced his brother-in-law, Florin Périer, to take a mercurial barometer to the top of the Puy de Dôme in Auvergne, a height of 4800 ft. (1465 m.). The result was as anticipated—as Périer ascended, the mercury fell steadily and at the top was roughly 3 in. lower than at the bottom. The fact was thus established that the pressure of the atmosphere varied inversely as the height. At sea-level the pressure of the atmosphere was equal to between 14 and 15 lb. on the square inch.

Another experimenter with the pressure of the atmosphere was Otto von Guericke (1602–86), burgomaster of Magdeburg. About 1650 he applied existing knowledge about pumps t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures in the text, Tailpiece and Tables
• Preface
• New Introduction
• Part I. The Reciprocating Engine
• Part II. The Steam Turbine
• Conclusion
• Index