employed for the purpose of producing a vacuum, and that its working
power was in the down stroke, which was effected by the pressure of the
air upon the piston; hence it is now usual to call it the atmospheric
engine. Watt perceived that the air which followed the piston down the
cylinder would cool the latter, and that steam would be wasted by
reheating it. In order, therefore, to avoid this loss of heat, he
resolved to put an air-tight cover upon the cylinder, with a hole and
stuffing-box for the piston-rod to slide through, and to admit steam
above the piston, to act upon it instead of the atmosphere. When the
steam had done its duty in driving down the piston, a communication was
opened between the upper and lower part of the cylinder; and the same
steam, distributing itself equally in both compartments, sufficed to
restore equilibrium. The piston was now drawn up by the weight of the
pump-gear; the steam beneath it was then condensed in the separate
vessel so as to produce a vacuum, and a fresh jet of steam from the
boiler was let in above the piston, which forced it again to the bottom
of the cylinder. From an atmospheric engine it had thus become a true
steam-engine, and with much greater economy of steam than when the air
did half the duty. But it was not only important to keep the air from
flowing down the inside of the cylinder; the air which circulated within
cooled the metal and condensed a portion of the steam within; and this
Watt proposed to remedy by a second cylinder, surrounding the first,
with an interval between the two which was to be kept full of steam.
One by one these various contrivances were struck out, modified,
settled, and reduced to definite plans,--the separate condenser, the air
and water pumps, the use of fat and oil (instead of water, as in the
Newcomen engine) to keep the piston working in the cylinder air-tight,
and the enclosing of the cylinder itself within another to prevent the
loss of heat. These were all emanations from the first idea of inventing
an engine working by a piston, in which the cylinder should be
continually hot and perfectly dry. "When once," says Watt, "the idea of
separate condensation was started, all these improvements followed as
corollaries in quick succession, so that in the course of one or two
days the invention was thus far complete in my mind."
WATT MAKES HIS MODEL.
The next step was to construct a model engine for the purpose of
embodying the invention in a working form. With this object, Watt hired
an old cellar, situated in the first wide entry to the north of the
beef-market in King Street, and then proceeded with his model. He found
it much easier, however, to prepare his plan than to execute it. Like
most ingenious and inventive men, Watt was extremely fastidious; and
this occasioned considerable delay in the execution of the work. His
very inventiveness to some extent proved a hindrance; for new expedients
were perpetually occurring to him, which he thought would be
improvements, and which he, by turns, endeavored to introduce. Some of
these expedients he admits proved fruitless, and all of them occasioned
delay. Another of his chief difficulties was in finding competent
workmen to execute his plans. He himself had been accustomed only to
small metal work, with comparatively delicate tools, and had very little
experience "in the practice of mechanics _in great_" as he termed it. He
was therefore under the necessity of depending, in a great measure, upon
the handiwork of others. But mechanics capable of working out Watt's
designs in metal were then with difficulty to be found. The beautiful
self-action and workmanship which have since been called into being,
principally by his own invention, did not then exist. The only available
hands in Glasgow were the blacksmiths and tinners, little capable of
constructing articles out of their ordinary walks; and even in these
they were often found clumsy, blundering, and incompetent. The result
was, that in consequence of the malconstruction of the larger parts,
Watt's first model was only partially successful. The experiments made
with it, however, served to verify the expectations he had formed, and
to place the advantages of the invention beyond the reach of doubt. On
the exhausting-cock being turned, the piston, when loaded with eighteen
pounds, ascended as quickly as the blow of a hammer; and the moment the
steam-cock was opened, it descended with like rapidity, though the
steam was weak, and the machine snifted at many openings.
Satisfied that he had laid hold of the right principle of a working
steam-engine, Watt felt impelled to follow it to an issue. He could give
his mind to no other business in peace until this was done. He wrote to
a friend that he was quite barren on every other subject. "My whole
thoughts," said he, "are bent on this machine. I can think of nothing
else." He proceeded to make another and bigger, and, he hoped, a more
satisfactory engine in the following August; and with that object he
removed from the old cellar in King Street to a larger apartment in the
then disused pottery, or delftwork, near the Broomielaw. There he shut
himself up with his assistant, John Gardiner, for the purpose of
erecting his engine. The cylinder was five or six inches in diameter,
with a two-feet stroke. The inner cylinder was enclosed in a wooden
steam-case, and placed inverted, the piston working through a hole in
the bottom of the steam-case. After two months continuous application
and labor it was finished and set to work; but it leaked in all
directions, and the piston was far from air-tight. The condenser also
was in a bad way, and needed many alterations. Nevertheless, the engine
readily worked with ten and a half pounds pressure on the inch, and the
piston lifted a weight of fourteen pounds. The improvement of the
cylinder and piston continued Watt's chief difficulty, and taxed his
ingenuity to the utmost. At so low an ebb was the art of making
cylinders that the one he used was not bored, but hammered, the
collective mechanical skill of Glasgow being then unequal to the boring
of a cylinder of the simplest kind; nor, indeed, did the necessary
appliances for the purpose then exist anywhere else. In the Newcomen
engine a little water was found upon the upper surface of the piston,
and sufficiently filled up the interstices between the piston and the
cylinder. But when Watt employed steam to drive down the piston, he was
deprived of this resource, for the water and steam could not coexist.
Even if he had retained the agency of the air above, the drip of water
from the crevices into the lower part of the cylinder would have been
incompatible with keeping the cylinder hot and dry, and, by turning into
vapor as it fell upon the heated metal, it would have impaired the
vacuum during the descent of the piston.
While he was occupied with this difficulty, and striving to overcome it
by the adoption of new expedients, such as leather collars and improved
workmanship, he wrote to a friend, "My old white-iron man is dead;" the
old white-iron man, or tinner, being his leading mechanic. Unhappily,
also, just as he seemed to have got the engine into working order, the
beam broke, and, having great difficulty in replacing the damaged part,
the accident threatened, together with the loss of his best workman, to
bring the experiment to an end. Though discouraged by these
misadventures, he was far from defeated. But he went on as before,
battling down difficulty inch by inch, and holding good the ground he
had won, becoming every day more strongly convinced that he was in the
right track, and that the important uses of the invention, could he but
find time and means to perfect it, were beyond the reach of doubt. But
how to find the means! Watt himself was a comparatively poor man; having
no money but what he earned by his business of mechanical-instrument
making, which he had for some time been neglecting through his devotion
to the construction of his engine. What he wanted was capital, or the
help of a capitalist willing to advance him the necessary funds to
perfect his invention. To give a fair trial to the new apparatus would
involve an expenditure of several thousand pounds; and who on the spot
could be expected to invest so large a sum in trying a machine so
entirely new, depending for its success on physical principles very
imperfectly understood?
There was no such help to be found in Glasgow. The tobacco lords,[10]
though rich, took no interest in steam power; and the manufacturing
class, though growing in importance, had full employment for their
little capital in their own concerns.
"How Watt succeeded in interesting Dr. Roebuck in his project, and thus
obtained funds to continue his experiments; how he finally joined with
Matthew Boulton in the great firm of Boulton and Watt, manufacturers of
steam-engines; how they pumped out all the water in the Cornish mines;
and how Watt finally attained prosperity as well as success,--is an
interesting story, but rather too long for these winter afternoons; and
as the story of the _invention_ of the steam-engine is substantially
told in the foregoing pages, we must stop our reading here, more
especially as it seems to be tea-time, and I hear Ellen ringing the bell
for supper."
IX.
ROBERT FULTON.
They were to continue their talk and reading by following along the
developments in the use of steam.
"Uncle Fritz," said Fanchon, "these agnostics make so much fun of our
dear Harry and Lucy, that they will not let me quote from 'The Botanic
Garden.'"
Emma promised that they would laugh as little as they could.
"'The Botanic Garden,'" said Fanchon, "was a stately, and I am afraid
some of you would say very pompous, poem, written by Dr. Darwin."
"Dr. Darwin write poetry!"
"It is not the Dr. Charles Darwin whom you have heard of; it was his
grandfather," said Uncle Fritz.
And Fanchon went on: "All I ever knew of 'The Botanic Garden' was in the
quotations of our dear Harry and Lucy and Frank. But dear Uncle Fritz
has taken down the book for me, and here it is, with its funny old
pictures of Ladies' Slippers and such things."
"I do not see what Ladies' Slippers have to do with steam-engines," said
Bedford Long, scornfully.
"No!" said Fanchon, laughing; "but I do, and that is the difference
between you and me. Because, you see, I have read 'Harry and Lucy,' and
you have not." And she opened "The Botanic Garden" at the place where
she had put in a mark, and read:--
"Pressed by the ponderous air, the piston falls
Resistless, sliding through its iron walls;
Quick moves the balance beam of giant birth,
Wields its large limbs, and nodding shakes the earth.
The giant power, from earth's remotest caves
Lifts, with strong arm, her dark reluctant waves,
Each caverned rock and hidden depth explores,
Drags her dark coals, and digs her shining ores."
"That is rather stilted poetry," said Uncle Fritz, "but a hundred years
ago people were used to stilted poetry. It describes sufficiently well
the original pumping-engine of Watt, and the lifting of coal from the
shafts of the deep English mines. Now, it was not till Watt had made his
improvements on the pumping-engine,--say in 1788,--that it was possible
to go any farther in the use of steam than its application to such
absolutely stationary purposes. It is therefore, I think, a good deal to
the credit of Dr. Darwin, that within three years after Watt's great
improvement in the condensing-engine the Doctor should have written
this:--
'Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar
Drag the slow barge or drive the rapid car.'
It was twelve years after he wrote this, that Fulton had an experimental
steamboat on the river Seine in France. It was sixteen years after,
that, with one of Watt's own engines, Fulton drove the 'Clermont' from
New York to Albany in thirty-six hours, and revolutionized the world in
doing it.
"Poor James Mackintosh was in virtual exile in Calcutta at that time,
and he wrote this in his journal: 'A boat propelled by steam has gone a
hundred and fifty miles upon the Hudson in thirty-six hours. Four miles
an hour would bring Calcutta within a hundred days of London. Oh that we
had lived a hundred years later!' In less than fifty years after
Mackintosh wrote those words, Calcutta was within thirty days of London.
"When Harry and Lucy read these verses in 1825, the 'rapid car' was
still in the future."
"Yes," said Fanchon; "but Harry says, 'The rapid car is to come, and I
dare say that will be accomplished soon, papa; do not you think it
will?'"
"I have sometimes wondered," said Uncle Fritz, "whether our American
word 'car' where the English say 'wagon' did not come from the 'rapid
car' of Dr. Darwin. Read on, Fanchon." And he put his finger on the
lines which Fanchon read:--
"Or on wide waving wings, expanded, bear
The flying chariot through the fields of air."
"Monsieur ----, the French gentleman, tried a light steam-engine for the
propulsion of a balloon in 1872; but it does not seem to have had power
enough. Messrs. Renard and Krebs, in their successful flight of August
last, used an electric battery.
"But we are getting away from Fulton, who is really the first who drove
the 'slow barge,' and indeed made it a very fast one."
"Did you know him?" asked Emma Fortinbras, whose ideas of chronology are
very vague.
"Oh, no!" said Uncle Fritz; "he died young and before my time. But I did
know a personal companion and friend, nay, a bedfellow of his, Benjamin
Church, who was with him in Paris at one of the crises of his life.
Fulton had a little steamboat on the river Seine, as I said just now;
and he had made interest with Napoleon to have it examined by a
scientific committee. Steam power was exactly what Napoleon wanted, to
take his great army across from Boulogne to England. The day came for
the great experiment. Church and Fulton slept, the night before, in the
same bed in their humble lodgings in Paris. At daybreak a messenger
waked them. He had come from the river to say that the weight of boiler
and machinery had been too much for the little boat, that her timbers
had given way, and that the whole had sunk to the bottom of the river.
But for this misfortune, the successful steamboat would have sailed upon
the Seine, and, for aught I know, Napoleon's grandchildren would now be
emperors of England."
Until Watt had completed the structure of the double-acting
condensing-engine, the application of steam to any but the single object
of pumping water had been almost impracticable. It was not enough, in
order to render it applicable to general purposes, that the condensation
of the water should take place in a separate vessel, and that steam
itself should be used, instead of atmospheric pressure, as the moving
power; but it was also necessary that the steam should act as well
during the ascent as during the descent of the piston. Before steam
could be used in moving paddle-wheels, it was in addition necessary that
a ready and convenient mode of making the motion of the piston
continuous and rotary, should be discovered. All these improvements upon
the original form of the steam-engine are due to Watt, and he did not
complete their perfect combination before the year 1786.
Evans, who, in this country, saw the possibility of constructing a
double-acting engine, even before Watt, and had made a model of his
machine, did not succeed in obtaining funds to make an experiment upon a
large scale before 1801. We conceive, therefore, that all those who
projected the application of steam to vessels before 1786, may be
excluded, without ceremony, from the list of those entitled to compete
with Fulton for the honors of invention. No one, indeed, could have seen
the powerful action of a pumping-engine without being convinced that the
energy which was applied so successfully to that single purpose, might
be made applicable to many others; but those who entertained a belief
that the original atmospheric engine, or even the single-acting engine
of Watt, could be applied to propel boats by paddle-wheels, showed a
total ignorance of mechanical principles. This is more particularly the
case with all those whose projects bore the strongest resemblance to the
plan which Fulton afterwards carried successfully into effect. Those who
approached most nearly to the attainment of success, were they who were
farthest removed from the plan of Fulton. His application was founded on
the properties of Watt's double-acting engine, and could not have been
used at all, until that instrument of universal application had received
the last finish of its inventor.
In this list of failures, from proposing to do what the instrument they
employed was incapable of performing, we do not hesitate to include
Savery, Papin, Jonathan Hulls, Périer, the Marquis de Jouffroy, and all
the other names of earlier date than 1786, whom the jealousy of the
French and English nations have drawn from oblivion for the purpose of
contesting the priority of Fulton's claims. The only competitor, whom
they might have brought forward with some shadow of plausibility, is
Watt himself. No sooner had that illustrious inventor completed his
double-acting engine, than he saw at a glance the vast field of its
application. Navigation and locomotion were not omitted; but living in
an inland town, and in a country possessing no rivers of importance, his
views were limited to canals alone. In this direction he saw an
immediate objection to the use of any apparatus, of which so powerful an
agent as his engine should be the mover; for it was clear, that the
injury which would be done to the banks of the canal, would prevent the
possibility of its introduction. Watt, therefore, after having conceived
the idea of a steamboat, laid it aside, as unlikely to be of any
practical value.
The idea of applying steam to navigation was not confined to Europe.
Numerous Americans entertained hopes of attaining the same object, but,
before 1786, with the same want of any reasonable hopes of success.
Their fruitless projects were, however, rebuked by Franklin, who,
reasoning upon the capabilities of the engine in its original form, did
not hesitate to declare all their schemes impracticable; and the
correctness of his judgment is at present unquestionable.
Among those who, before the completion of Watt's invention, attempted
the structure of steamboats, must be named with praise Fitch and Rumsey.
They, unlike those whose names have been cited, were well aware of the
real difficulties which they were to overcome; and both were the authors
of plans which, if the engine had been incapable of further improvement,
might have had a partial and limited success. Fitch's trial was made in
1783, and Rumsey's in 1787. The latter date is subsequent to Watt's
double-acting engine; but as the project consisted merely in pumping in
water, to be afterwards forced out at the stern, the single-acting
engine was probably employed. Evans, whose engine might have answered
the purpose, was employed in the daily business of millwright; and
although he might, at any time, have driven these competitors from the
field, he took no steps to apply his dormant invention.
Fitch, who had watched the graceful and rapid way of the Indian canoe,
saw in the oscillating motion of the old pumping-engine the means of
impelling paddles in a manner similar to that given them by the human
arm. This idea is extremely ingenious, and was applied in a simple and
beautiful manner. But the engine was yet too feeble and cumbrous to
yield an adequate force; and when it received its great improvement from
Watt, a more efficient mode of propulsion had become practicable, and
must have superseded Fitch's paddles had they even come into general
use.
The experiments of Fitch and Rumsey in the United States, although
generally considered unsuccessful, did not deter others from similar
attempts. The great rivers and arms of the sea which intersect the
Atlantic coast, and, still more, the innumerable navigable arms of the
Father of Waters, appeared to call upon the ingenious machinist to
contrive means for their more convenient navigation.
The improvement of the engine by Watt was now familiarly known; and it
was evident that it possessed sufficient powers for the purpose. The
only difficulty which existed, was in the mode of applying it. The first
person who entered into the inquiry was John Stevens, of Hokoken, who
commenced his researches in 1791. In these he was steadily engaged for
nine years, when he became the associate of Chancellor Livingston and
Nicholas Roosevelt. Among the persons employed by this association was
Brunel, who has since become distinguished in Europe as the inventor of
the block machinery used in the British navy-yards, and as the engineer
of the tunnel beneath the Thames.
Even with the aid of such talent, the efforts of this association were
unsuccessful,--as we now know, from no error in principle, but from
defects in the boat to which it was applied. The appointment of
Livingston as ambassador to France broke up this joint effort; and, like
all previous schemes, it was considered abortive, and contributed to
throw discredit upon all undertakings of the kind. A grant of exclusive
privileges on the waters of the State of New York was made to this
association without any difficulty, it being believed that the scheme
was little short of madness.
Livingston, on his arrival in France, found Fulton domiciliated with
Joel Barlow. The conformity in their pursuits led to intimacy, and
Fulton speedily communicated to Livingston the scheme[11] which he had
laid before Earl Stanhope in 1793. Livingston was so well pleased with
it that he at once offered to provide the funds necessary for an
experiment, and to enter into a contract for Fulton's aid in introducing
the method into the United States, provided the experiment were
successful.
Fulton had, in his early discussion with Lord Stanhope, repudiated the
idea of an apparatus acting on the principle of the foot of an aquatic
bird, and had proposed paddle-wheels in its stead. On resuming his
inquiries after his arrangements with Livingston, it occurred to him to
compose wheels with a set of paddles revolving upon an endless chain
extending from the stem to the stern of the boat. It is probable that
the apparent want of success which had attended the experiments of
Symington[12] led him to doubt the correctness of his original views.
That such doubt should be entirely removed, he had recourse to a series
of experiments upon a small scale. These were performed at Plombières, a
French watering-place, where he spent the summer of 1802. In these
experiments the superiority of the paddle-wheel over every other method
of propulsion that had yet been proposed, was fully established. His
original impressions being thus confirmed, he proceeded, late in the
year 1803, to construct a working model of his intended boat, which
model was deposited with a commission of French _savans_. He at the same
time began building a vessel sixty-six feet in length and eight feet in
width. To this an engine was adapted; and the experiment made with it
was so satisfactory, as to leave little doubt of final success.