Stories of Invention, Told by Inventors and their Friends Part 13

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, princ.i.p.ally 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-c.o.c.k being turned, the piston, when loaded with eighteen pounds, ascended as quickly as the blow of a hammer; and the moment the steam-c.o.c.k 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 a.s.sistant, 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 cla.s.s, 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 ent.i.tled 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, Perier, 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 compet.i.tor, whom they might have brought forward with some shadow of plausibility, is Watt himself. No sooner had that ill.u.s.trious 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 ca.n.a.ls 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 ca.n.a.l, 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 compet.i.tors 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 c.u.mbrous 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 a.s.sociate of Chancellor Livingston and Nicholas Roosevelt. Among the persons employed by this a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation 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 amba.s.sador 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 a.s.sociation 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 Plombieres, 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.

Measures were therefore immediately taken, preparatory to constructing a steamboat on a larger scale in the United States. For this purpose, as the workshops of neither France nor America could at that time furnish an engine of good quality, it became necessary to resort to England for that purpose. Fulton had already experienced the difficulty of being compelled to employ artists unacquainted with the subject. It is, indeed, more than probable, that, had he not, during his residence in Birmingham, made himself familiar, not only with the general features, but with the most minute details of the engine of Watt, the experiment on the Seine could not have been made. In this experiment, and in the previous investigations, it became obvious that the engine of Watt required important modifications in order to adapt it to navigation.

These modifications had been planned by Fulton; but it now became important, that they should be more fully tested. An engine was therefore ordered from Watt and Boulton, without any specification of the object to which it was to be applied; and its form was directed to be varied from their usual models, in conformity to sketches furnished by Fulton.