Epoch Men.

JAMES WATT. THE UTILIZATION OF STEAM.

STEAM was, for long ages, one of the waste products of nature. It is scarcely a century yet since the means of utilizing it were discovered and invented; and it was yoked in servitude to that mighty and manifold series of mechanical agencies which augments the energies, increases the comforts, and promotes the improvement of the human race. The numerous applications of steam to the useful purposes of life; the various modes in which it can exert a ministry of beneficence in facilitating labour, contributing to happiness, multiplying resources and power, aiding in the amelioration of the working-classes, and making man a more imperious vanquisher of the difficulties which confront him; and the many differing methods in which it enlarges the sphere of human influence, and fits itself in, so directly, to the several purposes of an advanced civilization, could scarcely have been dreamed of by those who watched the rising vapours of the morn on the banks of the green old Nile, on Corinth's shores, or beside the empire-margined Tiber; and indeed that it ever could become the subservient serf of man, and execute not only his bidding, but his work, does not, on an à priori view of the case, seem very probable even to ourselves. Yet the substance of that same retinue of clouds which girds the sun

With pomp, with glory, and magnificence,"

or forms that " pestilent congregation of vapours" which casts its gloom over city and town, as well as hamlet, is, in great part, a similar aëriform mass to that whose force bridges the ocean-spaces between continents; speeds the engine with current swiftness over the iron-lines which link factory-centre to metropolitan populousness, and swinks with almost exhaustless efficacy, as the generator of motions, forces, and means by which the capacity of man, in art and manufactures, in transport and travel, in agriculture and war, in mining, printing, building, and industry generally, has been multiplied to an indefinable extent.

The progress of that marvellous thought by which the industrial power of humanity is so wondrously augmented, from the earliest observation of some reflective man upon the elasticity of vapour, to the moment in which steam was utilized by the genius of Watt, would full surely, if rightly told, form the strangest of "the fairy

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tales of science," and would be a historic truth far surpassing the sublimest reach of fiction.

The world is a vast magazine of precious, aye, of priceless treasures, upon the discovery, use, and proper application of which depend the means of almost every improvement which distinguishes civilization from barbarism. Antediluvian sunshine supplies us now with coals; the plastic hand of science puts into the chemist's laboratory the materials of life and vegetation in pre-Adamite times to work into dyes, dissolvents and astringents; the research and skill of the electrician is expended on phenomena as "old as creation"; the mysteries of the weather are now subjected to the question by barometer and thermometer; the metallurgist labours to select from the old, old earth those ductile, malleable, tenacious, and elastic elements which may be employed in art and manufactures; the industrialist collects the fictile and textile materials which abound in or on the earth, and fashions them into forms, fabrics, and commodities for use or ornament; and the mechanician interpenetrates metallic ores and elastic vapours, running waters and capricious winds, with his contriving mind, and subdues, or subsidizes them to bear the yoke of toil. Then the affiliation of science, discovery, invention, industrial effort, commercial interchange, and human progress, is singularly intimate. So that man's power is, in reality, proportionate to his knowledge, and no new acquisition is granted to him without thought, effort, and self-development.

No less wondrous is the moral fitness with which discoveries, inventions, &c., are made. How strikingly " in the fulness of time" each one is eliminated from the unintelligent forces of creation, and adapted to human purposes! While men were collected in great centres of dominion, and the animal power of their nature alone was developed and active, all labour was handicraft. As civilization widened, the appliances of trade and commerce increased, and nations, by striving to outdo each other in given specialities, expended their entire industrial power on the several products which came more immediately from their own fields, mines, seacoasts, forest-lands, or hills; and art seconded the rivalry thus inaugurated. Land-distance, and the unfriendly ocean separated empires, but ambition and war incited men to discover the means of overcoming these obstacles, and art and commerce widened their reach through the thoroughfares of conquest. Greed of gold, need of space, and want of a home-career, led men to traverse oceans and explore lands, and new worlds broke upon human vision. As the need for scholarship, political wisdom, business aptitudes,-in fact, the necessities of education-extended, the individual capacity for labour was lessened; and in the progress of the ages thoughtful men perceived that intelligence could control and direct many animate and inanimate agencies, and make them labour for the good of humanity. At length, the time came when national industries, commerce, policies, interests, &c., required a greater community of intercourse, and men found need for relief from the

mere drudgery of physical life; and the "Wealth of Nations" appeared to regenerate the one, and steam was directly applied to effect the other.

The present writer has no special information either on steam or steam-engines to place at the disposal of his readers. Precisely the reverse. Though he has read attentively and minutely, and whensoever chance offered, has observed the various mechanical appliances by which steam has been made subservient to the comfort, necessity, or luxury of man, he has never had-or, rather, has never embraced the opportunity of making a special study of the steam-engine. He has his reading and thought, but neither his own experience, nor analogies derived from it, to guide him in this exposition; and though he has sought the best authorities open to him, he fears that in a subject so alien to the usual habits of his life, so far apart from his own specialities, so entirely derived from bookknowledge, and so untested by aught except reference to the worksnot perhaps always thoroughly comprehended-of the chief writers on steam and its applications, he may neither be able to do justice to his theme nor his own ideas. He essays with humility, therefore, the following exposition as the most concise and explicit he can produce of the combined results of reading and reflection regarding the practicalization of steam and steam-power.

Man's progress in the utilization of steam seems to have been very slow. Hero of Alexandria (cir. 120 B.c.), in a work "On Pneumatics," describes two machines of his own invention, in which a rotary motion was conveyed in the one case by the emission of heated air, and in the other by the immission and emission of steam. The latter is the first known attempt to effect the production of motion by the employment of elastic vapour. It was, however, used only as a philosophical toy, and does not seem to have been applied to any merely utilitarian purpose. This plaything is the original of that distinguished species" of mechanism now known as the steam-engine. It was for ages looked upon as a curiosity of mechanics. Nor till the stir and ferment of the Reformation had given men the belief that nothing was impossible, does it appear to have entered into the human mind that the spirals of vapour rising from heated water could become weariless labourers for humanity; and then it was more an outburst of rhetoric than a scientific appraisement of facts. A volume of sermons by Mathesius, published at Sarepta in 1563, contains a suggestion of such a possibility. About thirty years thereafter, the Alexandrian toy was taken as a model for a mechanical turnspit. Baptista Porta in Italy, and David Rivault in France, occupied themselves, as students of the powers, qualities, uses, &c., of steam. Indeed, the need of some new industrial energy appears in the early part of the 17th century to have been simultaneously suggested to several minds. Hence originated the many experiments on heat, air, gases, motion, &c., which are recalled to us by the mere mention of the names of Galileo, Descartes, Torricelli, Wallis, Roëmer, and Leibnitz; Stevinus,

Newton, Castelli, and Guericke; De Caus, the Marquis of Worcester, Huygens, and Boyle.

A century of tentative approaches were made to the solution of the question, each supplying some preliminary to its successful accomplishment, none effecting the required result. The knowledge of the qualities and properties of the materials was requisite before contrivance could efficiently act and superadd to nature such appliances as would fit in with her divinely ordained activities, and cause the ordinary action of the elements involved to achieve a human purpose in harmony with the ever-abiding designs of THE ONE. For this is the great law of discovery-to bring human conceptions into harmony with the Divine plan; and whensoever that is accomplished, the means of touching to their required uses the ordinary elements of nature become self-evident. The science of dynamics might almost be said to have had its origin in the desire to know the laws of force. The Bernouillis, Varignon, Herman, Euler, Segner, and Boscovich, are the chief names to which the scientific correlation of statics and dynamics may be traced. And though the names of Newton, D'Alembert, Venturi, Deluc, &c., may not be omitted from a catalogue of the assistants in the discovery of the true theory of the steam-engine, this distinction belongs, perhaps, more justly to the originators of and active agents in arranging a true theory of heat. Without neglecting to notice the efforts of the Florentine academicians, we may mention the thermometers of Fahrenheit and Reaumur as tending much to the consolidation of this science. But perhaps the greatest achievements in the investigation of the theory of heat were made by Drs. Cullen and Black, professors in the Glasgow University, the latter of whom was a patron of the obscure though ingenious mechanician by whom steam was first utilized. Dr. Black expounded the theory of latent heat; Scheele introduced the idea of the radiation of caloric and all these various efforts combined led to the successful and systematic application of the laws of heat to the furtherance of the mechanical arts, and ultimately to the actual construction of the most marvellous and multiform mechanism of modern days -the steam-engine.

Sir Samuel Morland, master of mechanics to the King of England, made some experiments upon the elasticity of steam before 1682, and projected a scheme for raising water by the force it afforded. Dr. Denys Papin, a native of Blois, who had assisted Boyle in many of his experiments, and who had thus his attention directed to the grand mechanical problem of that time, published in the Acta Eruditorum of Leipsic, in 1685, several communications, which show that he had attained a clear idea of the nature of the material facts upon which the construction of a steam-engine depended, and shortly afterwards made some steps towards the construction of such a mechanism. Steam was now well known to be capable of acting as a motive power; the proper applicability of its force to useful purposes was the great difficulty. To Papin we