STEAM AND STEAM ENGINES.
“Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or in wide waving wings expanded bear
The flying chariot through the field of air.”
Thus sang the poet prophet, the good Dr. Darwin of Lichfield, in the
eighteenth century. Newcomen and Watt had not then demonstrated that
steam was not unconquerable, but the hitching it to the slow barge and
the rapid car was yet to come. It has come, and although the prophecy is
yet to be rounded into fulfilment by the driving of the “flying chariot
through the field of air,” that too is to come.
The prophecy of the doctor poet was as suggestive of the practical means
of carrying it into effect as were all the means proposed during the
first seventeen centuries of the Christian Era for conquering steam and
harnessing it as a useful servant to man.
Toys, speculations, dreams, observations, startling experiments, these
often constitute the framework on which is hung the title of Inventor;
but the nineteenth century has demanded a better support for that proud
title. He alone who first transforms his ideas into actual work and
useful service in some field of man’s labor, or clearly teaches others
to do so, is now recognised as the true inventor. Tested by this rule
there was scarcely an inventor in the field of steam in all the long
stretches of time preceding the seventeenth century. And if there were,
they had no recording scribes to embalm their efforts in history.
We shall never know how early man learned the wonderful power of the
spirit that springs from heated water. It was doubtless from some sad
experience in ignorantly attempting to put fetters on it.
The history of steam as a motor generally commences with reference to
that toy called the aeolipile, described by Hero of Alexandria in a
treatise on pneumatics about two centuries before Christ, and which was
the invention of either himself or Ctesibius, his teacher.
This toy consisted of a globe pivoted on two supports, one of which was
a communicating pipe leading into a heated cauldron of water beneath.
The globe was provided with two escape pipes on diametrically opposite
sides and bent so as to discharge in opposite directions. Steam admitted
into the globe from the cauldron escaped through the side pipes, and its
pressure on these pipes caused the globe to rotate.
Hero thus demonstrated that water can be converted into steam and steam
into work.
Since that ancient day Hero’s apparatus has been frequently reinvented
by men ignorant of the early effort, and the principle of the invention
as well as substantially the same form have been put into many practical
uses. Hero in his celebrated treatise described other devices, curious
siphons and pumps. Many of them are supposed to have been used in the
performance of some of the startling religious rites at the altars of
the Greek priests.
From Hero’s day the record drops down to the middle ages, and still it
finds progress in this art confined to a few observations and
speculations. William of Malmesbury in 1150 wrote something on the
subject and called attention to some crude experiments he had heard of
in Germany. Passing from the slumber of the middle ages, we are assured
by some Spanish historians that one Blasco de Garay, in 1543, propelled
a ship having paddle wheels by steam at Barcelona. But the publication
was long after the alleged event, and is regarded as apocryphal.
Observations became more acute in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, experiments more frequent, and publications more full and
numerous.
Cardan Ramelli and Leonardo da Vinci, learned Italians, and the
accomplished Prof. Jacob Besson of Orleans, France, all did much by
their writings to make known theoretically the wonderful powers of
steam, and to suggest modes of its practical operation, in the latter
part of the sixteenth century.
Giambattista della Porta, a gentleman of Naples, possessing high and
varied accomplishments in all the sciences as they were known at that
day, 1601, and who invented the magic-lantern and _camera obscura_, in a
work called _Spiritalia_, described how steam pressure could be employed
to raise a column of water, how a vacuum was produced by the
condensation of steam in a closed vessel, and how the condensing vessel
should be separated from the boiler. Revault in France showed in 1605
how a bombshell might be exploded by steam.
Salomon de Caus, engineer and architect to Louis XIII, in 1615 described
how water might be raised by the expansion of steam.
In 1629 the Italian, Branco, published at Rome an account of the
application of a steam jet upon the vanes of a small wheel to run it,
and told how in other ways Hero’s engine might be employed for useful
purposes.
The first English publication describing a way of applying steam
appeared in 1630 in a patent granted to David Ramseye, for a mode of
raising water thereby. This was followed by patents to Grant in 1632 and
to one Ford in 1640. During that century these crude machines were
called “fire engines.” It seems to have been common in some parts of
Europe during the seventeenth century to use a blast of steam to improve
the draft of chimneys and of blast furnaces. This application of steam
to smoke and smelting has been frequently revived by modern inventors
with much flourish of originality.
It is with a certain feeling of delight and relief, after a prolonged
search through the centuries for some evidence of harnessing this mighty
agent to man’s use, that we come to the efforts of the good Marquis of
Worcester--Edward Somerset. He it was who in 1655 wrote of the
_Inventions of the Sixteenth Century_. He afterwards amplified this
title by calling his book _A Century of Names and Scantlings of such
Inventions as at present I call to mind to have tried and perfected_,
etc.
There are about one hundred of these “Scantlings,” and his descriptions
of them are very brief but interesting. Some, if revived now and put to
use, would throw proposed flying machines into the background, as they
involved perpetual motion.
But to his honor be it said that he was the first steam-engine builder.
A patent was issued to him in 1663. It was about 1668 that he built and
put in successful operation at Raglan Castle at Vauxhall, near London, a
steam engine to force water upward. He made separate boilers, which he
worked alternately, and conveyed the steam from them to a vessel in
which its pressure operated to force the water up. Unfortunately he did
not leave a description of his inventions sufficiently full to enable
later mechanics to make and use them. He strove in vain to get capital
interested and a company formed to manufacture his engines. The age of
fear and speculation as to steam ceased when the Marquis set his engine
to pumping water, and from that time inventors went on to put the arm of
steam to work.
In 1683 Sir Samuel Morland commenced the construction of the Worcester
engines for use and sale; Hautefeuille of France taught the use of gas,
described how gas as well as steam engines might be constructed, and was
the first to propose the use of the piston. The learned writings of the
great Dutch scientist and inventor, Huygens, on heat and light steam and
gas, also then came forth, and his assistant, the French physicist and
doctor, Denis Papin, in 1690, proposed steam as a universal motive
power, invented a steam engine having a piston and a safety valve, and
even a crude paddle steamer, which it is said was tried in 1707 on the
river Fulda. Then in 1698 came Thomas Savery, who patented a steam
engine that was used in draining mines.
The eighteenth century thus commenced with a practical knowledge of the
power of steam and of means for controlling and working it.
Then followed the combined invention of Newcomen, Cawley and Savery, in
1705, of the most successful pumping engine up to that time. In this
engine a cylinder was employed for receiving the steam from a separate
boiler. There was a piston in the cylinder driven up by the steam
admitted below it, aided by a counterpoise at one end of an engine beam.
The steam was then cut off from the boiler and condensed by the
introduction beneath the piston of a jet of water, and the condensed
steam and water drawn off by a pipe. Atmospheric pressure forced the
piston down. The piston and pump rods were connected to the opposite
ends of a working beam of a pumping engine, as in some modern engines.
Gauge cocks to indicate the height of water, and a safety valve to
regulate the pressure of steam, were employed. Then came the ingenious
improvement of the boy Humphrey Potter, connecting the valve gear with
the engine beam by cords, so as to do automatically what he was set to
do by hand, and the improvement on that of the Beighton plug rod. Still
further improved by others, the Newcomen engine came into use through
out Europe.
Jonathan Hulls patented in England in 1736 a marine steam engine, and in
1737 published a description of a Newcomen engine applied to his system
for towing ships. William Henry, of Pennsylvania, tried a model
steamboat on the Conestoga river in 1763.
This was practically the state of the art, in 1763, when James Watt
entered the field. His brilliant inventions harnessed steam to more than
pumping engines, made it a universal servant in manifold industries, and
started it on a career which has revolutionized the trade and
manufactures of the world.
To understand what the nineteenth century has done in steam motive power
we must first know what Watt did in the eighteenth century, as he then
laid the foundation on which the later inventions have all been built.
Taking up the crude but successful working engine of Newcomen, a model
of which had been sent to him for repairs, he began an exhaustive study
of the properties of steam and of the means for producing and
controlling it. He found it necessary to devise a new system.
Watt saw that the alternate heating and cooling of the cylinder made the
engine work slowly and caused an excessive consumption of steam. He
concluded that “the cylinder should always be as hot as the steam that
entered it.” He therefore closed the cylinder and provided a separate
condensing vessel into which the steam was led after it raised the
piston. He provided an air-tight jacket for the cylinder, to maintain
its heat. He added a tight packing in the cylinder-head for the
piston-rod to move through, and a steam-tight stuffing-box on the top of
the cylinder. He caused the steam to alternately enter below and above
the piston and be alternately condensed to drive the piston down as well
as up, and this made the engine double-acting, increasing its power and
speed. He converted the reciprocating motion of the piston into a rotary
motion by the adoption of the crank, and introduced the well-known
parallel motion, and many other improvements. In short, he demonstrated
for the first time by a practical and efficient engine that the
expansive force of steam could be used to drive all ordinary machinery.
He then secured his inventions by patents against piracy, and sustained
them successfully in many a hard-fought battle. It had taken him the
last quarter of the 18th century to do all these things.
Watt was the proper precursor of the nineteenth century inventions, as
in him were combined the power and attainments of a great scientist and
the genius of a great mechanic. The last eighteen years of his life were
passed in the 19th century, and he was thus enabled to see his
inventions brought within its threshold and applied to those arts which
have made this age so glorious in mechanical achievements.
Watt so fitly represents the class of modern great inventors in his
character and attainments that the description of him by Sir Walter
Scott is here pertinent as a tribute to that class, and as a delineation
of the general character of those benefactors of his race of which he
was so conspicuous an example:--
Says Sir Walter:--
“Amidst this company stood Mr. Watt, the man whose genius discovered
the means of multiplying our national resources to a degree, perhaps,
even beyond his own stupendous powers of calculation and combination;
bringing the treasures of the abyss to the summit of the earth--giving
to the feeble arm of man the momentum of an Afrite--commanding
manufactures to rise--affording means of dispensing with that time and
tide which wait for no man--and of sailing without that wind which
defied the commands and threats of Xerxes himself. This potent
commander of the elements--this abridger of time and space--this
magician, whose cloudy machinery has produced a change in the world,
the effects of which, extraordinary as they are, are perhaps only
beginning to be felt--was not only the most profound man of science,
the most successful combiner of powers and calculator of numbers, as
adapted to practical purposes, was not only one of the most generally
well-informed, but one of the best and kindest of human beings.”
The first practical application of steam as a working force was to
pumping, as has been stated. After Watt’s system was devised,
suggestions and experiments as to road locomotives and carriages were
made, and other applications came thick and fast. A French officer,
Cugnot, in 1769 and 1770, was the first to try the road carriage engine.
Other prominent Frenchmen made encouraging experiments on small
steamboats--followed in 1784-86 by James Rumsey and John Fitch in
America in the same line. Watt patented a road engine in 1784. About the
same time his assistant, Murdock, completed and tried a model locomotive
driven by a “grasshopper” engine. Oliver Evans, the great American
contemporary of Watt, had in 1779 devised a high-pressure non-condensing
steam engine in a form still used. In 1786-7 he obtained in Pennsylvania
and Maryland patents for applying steam to driving flour mills and
propelling waggons. Also about this time, Symington, the Scotchman,
constructed a working model of a steam carriage, which is still
preserved in the museum at South Kensington, London. Symington and his
fellow Scotchmen, Miller and Taylor, in 1788-89 also constructed working
steamboats. In 1796 Richard Trevithick, a Cornish marine captain, was
producing a road locomotive. The century thus opened with activity in
steam motive power. The “scantlings” of the Marquis of Worcester were
now being converted into complete structures. And so great was the
activity and the number of inventors that he is a daring man who would
now decide priority between them. The earliest applications in this
century of steam power were in the line of road engines.
On Christmas eve of 1801, Trevithick made the initial trip with the
first successful steam road locomotive through the streets of Camborne
in Cornwall, carrying passengers. In one of his trips he passed into the
country roads and came to a tollgate through which a frightened keeper
hastily passed him without toll, hailing him as the devil.
Persistent efforts continued to be made to introduce a practical steam
road carriage in England until 1827. After Trevithick followed
Blenkinsop, who made a locomotive which ran ten miles an hour. Then came
Julius Griffith, in 1821, of Brompton, who patented a steam carriage
which was built by Joseph Bramah, one of the ablest mechanics of his
time. Gordon, Brunton and Gurney attempted a curious and amusing steam
carriage, resembling a horse in action--having jointed legs and feet,
but this animal was not successful. Walter Hancock, in 1827, was one of
the most persistent and successful inventors in this line; but bad roads
and an unsympathetic public discouraged inventors in their efforts to
introduce steam road carriages, and their attention was turned to the
locomotive to run on rails or tracks especially prepared for them.
Wooden and iron rails had been introduced a century before for heavy
cars and wagons in pulling loads from mines and elsewhere, but when at
the beginning of the century it had been found that the engines of Watt
could be used to drag such loads, it was deemed necessary to make a rail
having its top surface roughened with ridges and the wheels of the
engine and cars provided with teeth or cogs to prevent anticipated
slipping.
In England, Blackett and George Stephenson discovered that the adhesion
of smooth wheels to smooth rails was sufficient. Without overlooking the
fact that William Hendley built and operated a locomotive called the
_Puffing Billy_ in 1803, and Hackworth one a little later, yet to the
genius of Stephenson is due chiefly the successful introduction of the
modern locomotive. His labours and inventions continued from 1812 for
twenty years, and culminated at two great trials: the first one on the
Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1829, when he competed with
Hackworth and Braithwaite and Ericsson, and with the _Rocket_ won the
race; and the second at the opening of the same road in 1830, when with
the _Northumbrian_, at the head of seven other locomotives and a long
train of twenty-eight carriages, in which were seated six hundred
passengers, he ran the train successfully between the two towns.
On this occasion Mr. Huskisson, Home Secretary in the British Cabinet,
while the cars were stopping to water the engines, and he was out on the
track talking with the Duke of Wellington, was knocked down by one of
the engines and had one of his legs crushed. Placed on board of the
_Northumbrian_, it was driven at the rate of thirty-six miles an hour by
Stephenson to Eccles. Mr. Huskisson died there that night. This was its
first victim, and the greatest speed yet attained by a locomotive.
The year 1829 therefore can be regarded as the commencement of the life
of the locomotive for transportation of passengers. The steam blast
thrown into the smokestack by Hackworth, the tubular boiler of Seguin
and the link motion of Stephenson were then, as they now are, the
essential features of locomotives.
In the meantime America had not been idle. The James Watt of America,
Oliver Evans, in 1804 completed a flat-bottomed boat to be used in
dredging at the Philadelphia docks, and mounting it on wheels drove it
by its own steam engine through the streets to the river bank. Launching
the craft, he propelled it down the river by using the same engine to
drive the paddle wheels. He gave to this engine the strange name of
_Oruktor Amphibolos_.
John C. Stevens of New Jersey was, in 1812, urging the legislature of
the State of New York to build railways, and asserting that he could see
nothing to hinder a steam carriage from moving with a velocity of one
hundred miles an hour. In 1829 George Stephenson in England had made for
American parties a locomotive called _The Stourbridge Lion_, which in
that year was brought to America and used on the Delaware and Hudson R.
R. by Horatio Allen. Peter Cooper in the same year constructed a
locomotive for short curves, for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
Returning now to steam navigation:--Symington again entered the field in
1801-2 and constructed for Lord Dundas a steamboat, named after his
wife, the _Charlotte Dundas_, for towing on a canal, which was
successfully operated.
Robert Fulton, an American artist, and subsequently a civil engineer,
built a steamboat on the Seine in 1803, assisted by R. Livingston, then
American Minister to France. Then in 1806 Fulton, having returned to the
United States, commenced to build another steamboat, in which he was
again assisted by Livingston, and in which he placed machinery made by
Boulton and Watt in England. This steamboat, named the _Clermont_, was
130 ft. long, 18 ft. beam, 7 ft. depth and 160 tons burden. It made its
first trip on the Hudson, from New York to Albany and return, in August,
1807, and subsequently made regular trips. It was the first commercially
successful steamboat ever made, as George Stephenson’s was the first
commercially successful locomotive. In the meantime Col. John Stevens of
New Jersey was also at work on a steamboat, and had in 1804 built such a
boat at his shops, having a screw propeller and a flue boiler. Almost
simultaneously with Fulton he brought out the _Phœnix_, a side-wheel
steamer having hollow water lines and provided with feathering paddle
wheels, and as Fulton and Livingston had a monopoly of the Hudson,
Stevens took his boat by sea from New York around to Delaware bay and up
the Delaware river. This was in 1808, and was the first sea voyage ever
made by a steam vessel.
Transatlantic steamship navigation was started in 1819. A Mr.
Scarborough of Savannah, Ga., in 1818 purchased a ship of about three
hundred and fifty tons burden, which was named the _Savannah_. Equipped
with engine and machinery it steamed out of New York Harbour on the 27th
day of March, 1819, and successfully reached Savannah, Georgia. On the
20th of May in the same year she left Savannah for Liverpool, making the
trip in 22 days. From Liverpool she went to Copenhagen, Stockholm, St.
Petersburg, Cronstadt and Arundel, and from the latter port returned to
Savannah, making the passage in twenty-five days.
But Scottish waters, and the waters around other coasts of the British
Islands, had been traversed by steamboats before this celebrated trip of
the _Savannah_. Bell’s steamboat between Glasgow and Greenock in 1812
was followed by five others in 1814; and seven steamboats plied on the
Thames in 1817.
So the locomotives and the steamboats and steamships continued to
multiply, and when the first forty years of the century had been reached
the Iron Horse was fairly installed on the fields of Europe and America,
and the rivers and the oceans were ploughed by its sisters, the steam
vessels.
It was in 1840 that the famous Cunard line of transatlantic steamers was
established, soon followed by the Collins line and others.
A few years before, John C. Stevens in America and John Ericsson in
England had brought forward the screw propeller; and Ericsson was the
first to couple the engine to the propeller shaft. It succeeded the
successful paddle wheels of Fulton in America and Bell in England.
The nineteenth century is the age of kinetic energy: the energy of
either solid, liquid, gaseous or electrical matter transformed into
useful work.
It has been stated by that eminent specialist in steam engineering,
Prof. R. H. Thurston, that “the steam engine is a machine which is
especially designed to transform energy originally dormant or potential
into active and useful available kinetic energy;” and that the great
problem in this branch of science is “to construct a machine which shall
in the most perfect manner possible convert the kinetic energy of heat
into mechanical power, the heat being derived from the combustion of
fuel, and steam being the receiver and conveyor of that heat.”
Watt and his contemporaries regarded heat as a material substance called
“Phlogiston.” The modern kinetic theory of heat was a subsequent
discovery, as elsewhere explained.
The inventors of the last part of the eighteenth century and of the
nineteenth century have directed their best labours to construct an
engine as above defined by Thurston.
First as to the boiler: Efforts were made first to get away from the
little old spherical boiler of Hero. In the 18th century Smeaton devised
the horizontal lengthened cylindrical boiler traversed by a flue. Oliver
Evans followed with two longitudinal flues. Nathan Read of Salem,
Massachusetts, in 1791, invented a tubular boiler in which the flues and
gases are conducted through tubes passing through the boiler into the
smokestack. Such boilers are adapted for portable stationary engines,
locomotives, fire and marine engines, and the fire is built within the
boiler frame. Then in the 19th century came the use of sectional
boilers--a combination of small vessels instead of a large common one,
increasing the strength while diminishing capacity--to obtain high
pressure of steam. Then came improved weighted and other safety valves
to regulate and control this pressure. The compound or double cylinder
high-pressure engine of Hornblower of England, in 1781, and the
high-pressure non-condensing steam engine devised by Evans in 1779, were
reconstructed and improved in the early part of the century.
To give perfect motion and the slightest friction to the piston; to
regulate the supply of steam to the engine by proper valves; to
determine such supply by many varieties of governors and thus control
the speed; to devise valve gear which distributes the steam through its
cycles of motion by which to admit the steam alternately to each end of
the steam cylinder as the piston moves backward and forward, and exhaust
valves to open and close the parts through which the steam escapes; to
automatically operate such valves; to condense the escaping steam and to
remove the water of condensation; to devise powerful steam brakes--these
are some of the important details on which inventors have exercised
their keenest wits. Then again the extensive inventions of the century
have given rise to a great classification to designate their forms or
their uses: condensing and non-condensing, high-pressure or
low-pressure--the former term being applied to engines supplied with
steam of 50 lbs. pressure to the square inch and upward, and the latter
to engines working under 40 lbs. pressure--and the low pressure are
nearly always the condensing and the high pressure the non-condensing;
reciprocating and rotary--the latter having a piston attached to a shaft
and revolving within a cylinder of which the axis is parallel with the
axis of rotation of the piston.
Direct acting, where the piston rod acts directly upon the connecting
rod and through it upon the crank, without the intervention of a beam or
lever; oscillating, in which the piston rods are attached directly to
the crank pin and as the crank revolves the cylinder oscillates upon
trunnions, one on each side of it, through which the steam enters and
leaves the steam chest.
Then as to their use, engines are known as stationary, pumping,
portable, locomotive or marine.
The best-known engine of the stationary kind is the Corliss, which is
very extensively used in the United States and Europe.
Among other later improvements is the duplex pumping engine, in which
one engine controls the valve of the other; compensating devices for
steam pumping, by which power is accumulated by making the first half of
the stroke of the steam piston assist in moving the piston the other
half of the stroke during the expansion of steam; steam or air hand
hammers on which the piston is the hammer and strikes a tool projecting
through the head into the cylinder; rock drilling, in which the movement
of the valves is operated by the piston at any portion of its stroke;
shaft governors, in which the eccentric for operating the engine valves
is moved around or across the main or auxiliary shaft; multiple
cylinders, in which several cylinders, either single or double, are
arranged to co-operate with a common shaft; impact rotary, known as
steam turbines, a revival in some respects of Hero’s engine. And then,
finally, the delicate and ingenious bicycle and automobile steam
engines.
Then there are steam sanding devices for locomotives by which sand is
automatically fed to the rails at the same time the air brake is
applied.
Starting valves used for starting compound locomotives on ascending
steep grades, in which both low and high pressure cylinders are supplied
with live steam, and when the steam, exhausted from either high or low
pressure cylinders into the receivers, has reached a predetermined
pressure, the engine works on the compound principle. Single acting
compound engines, in which two or more cylinders are arranged tandem,
the steam acting only in one direction, and the exhaust steam of one
acting upon the piston in the cylinder next of the series, are arranged
in pairs, so that while one is acting downward the other is acting
upward.
Throttle valves automatically closed upon the bursting of a pipe, or the
breaking of machinery, are operated by electricity, automatically, or by
hand at a distance.
Napoleon, upon his disastrous retreat from Moscow, anxious to reach
Paris as soon as possible, left his army on the way, provided himself
with a travelling and sleeping carriage, and with relays of fresh horses
at different points managed, by extraordinary strenuous efforts day and
night, to travel from Smorgoni to Paris, a distance of 1000 miles,
between the 5th and 10th of December, 1812. This was at the average rate
of about two hundred miles a day, or eight or nine miles an hour. It was
a most remarkable ride for any age by horse conveyance.
Within the span of a man’s life after that event any one could take a
trip of that distance in twenty-four hours, with great ease and comfort,
eating and sleeping on the car, and with convenient telegraph and
telephone stations along the route by which to comunicate by pen, or
word of mouth, with distant friends at either end of the journey.
If Napoleon had deemed it best to have continued his journey across the
Atlantic to America he would have been compelled to pass several weeks
on an uncomfortable sailing vessel. Now, a floating palace would await
him which would carry him across in less than six days.
Should mankind be seized with a sudden desire to replace all the
locomotives in the world by horse power it would be utterly impossible
to do it. It was recently estimated that there were one hundred and
fifty thousand locomotives in use on the railroads of the world; and as
a fair average would give them five hundred horse power each, it will be
seen that they are the equivalent of seventy-five million horses.
Space and time will not admit of minute descriptions, or hardly a
mention, of the almost innumerable improvements of the century in steam.
Having seen the principles on which these inventions have been
constructed, enumerated the leading ones and glanced at the most
prominent facts in their history, we must refer the seeker for more
particulars to those publications of modern patent offices, in which
each regiment and company of this vast army is embalmed in its own
especial and ponderous volume.
A survey of the field will call to mind, however, the eloquent words of
Daniel Webster:--
“And, last of all, with inimitable power, and with a ‘whirlwind sound’
comes the potent agency of steam. In comparison with the past, what
centuries of improvement has this single agent compressed in the short
compass of fifty years! Everywhere practicable, everywhere efficient, it
has an arm a thousand times stronger than that of Hercules, and to which
human ingenuity is capable of fitting a thousand times as many hands as
belonged to Briareus. Steam is found triumphant in operation on the
seas; and under the influence of its strong propulsion, the gallant
ship,
‘Against the wind, against the tide
Still steadies with an upright keel.’
It is on the rivers, and the boatman may repose upon his oars; it is on
highways, and exerts itself along the courses of land conveyances; it is
at the bottom of mines, a thousand feet below the earth’s surface; it is
in the mills and in the workshops of the trades. It rows, it pumps, it
excavates, it carries, it draws, it lifts, it hammers, it spins, it
weaves, it prints. It seems to say to men, at least to the class of
artisans: ‘Leave off your manual labour, give up your bodily toil;
bestow but your skill and reason to the directing of my power and I will
bear the toil, with no muscle to grow weary, no nerve to relax, no
breast to feel faintness!’ What further improvement may still be made in
the use of this astonishing power it is impossible to know, and it were
vain to conjecture. What we do know is that it has most essentially
altered the face of affairs, and that no visible limit yet appears
beyond which its progress is seen to be impossible.”