4 



: J 



Figure 56. — Perkins's cone-joint. A steam- 

 tight connection is made by the pierced double 

 conical connector piece inserted in pipe ends 

 held together by yoked flanges. After Robert 

 Meikleham, On the History and Art of Warming 

 and Ventilating Rooms and Buildings, 2 vols. 

 (London, 1845), vo '- a > P- 2 ^4- 



I must not forget another great attraction. He 

 invited visitors to bring with them old steel files and 

 he would saw them into pieces with a soft wrought 

 iron toothless saw. 



I have said that Mr. Perkins received me kindly, 

 and through him and Saxton, who was my almost 

 constant companion during my stay in London, I 

 was favorably introduced to Brunei, Maudslay, 

 Herbert, and many others and I had the opportunity 

 of seeing much that otherwise would have been a 

 sealed book to me. 



On one occasion Mr. Perkins took me to the mansion 



of Sir Sloan to show me how he had heated the 



grand house by a system of hot water circulation. 

 "Time proves everything," was an adage with Perkins, 

 which he repeated many times daily. On showing 

 me the hot water pipes around the washboards of the 

 many apartments he laid great stress on the absolute 

 tightness of all the pipe joints and showed the great 

 value of his double cone connections; here they had 

 been in use for over three years and never a leak. 

 "Time proves all things." 



Here, as we Americans say, I came near putting 

 my foot in it by thoughtlessly remarking, "Yes they 

 even stood Hawkins' high pressure." 



He was ready for me — "Ha-ha you have a good 

 memory, don't you recollect that when his pipe 

 flanges blew off that I invented my double cone junc- 

 tion for him." (I have no recollection of any other 

 connection. They were certainly the same used in 

 the Hawkins experiments as I first saw them.) 



On another occasion he referred to poor Hawkins 

 having had the idea of high pressure steam being 



generated safely by jets of water on highly heated 

 plates of metal, but it was for him, Perkins, to con- 

 ceive the idea of heating confined water to a very 

 high temperature to flash with steam on its escape. 

 These were the precise ideas I had received from the 

 many talks I had with the poor old blind man when 

 a mere boy .... 



Having written so much about Perkins, however 

 out of place it may be, I cannot refrain from giving 

 the estimate that by later thought I would give of 

 the character of mind of this truly great man, for he 

 may be said to have stood alone in his line. At the 

 time of my visit to England, he had been there some 

 thirteen years, the first eight or ten years of which the 

 mechanical world had been kept in a feverish state of 

 excitement by what Perkins was doing and the effect 

 it would have on the mechanical world. 



It was never what he had done but what he was 

 doing. He had undertaken to do far more than his 

 contemporary workers believed to be possible, but 

 the world at large believed and as his patents were 

 issued they were capitalized and money for develop- 

 ments flowed in. There can be no doubt he had the 

 faith himself with which he inspired the public, and 

 when all elaborate efforts to demonstrate proved 

 failures year after year it was natural that his patrons 

 should drop off and he became as bitter against them 

 as he was laudatory at the time he made them the 

 gift of his minor invention, the riveted hose. This 

 was the state of things at the time of my visit to 

 London. 



His own words to me were, "I was deserted when 

 on the eve of perfect success as time will prove. I 

 will be vindicated and all the theories I have ad- 

 vanced will be substantiated." He showed me many 

 of his ingenious devices to overcome difficulties as 

 they arrived. There was a perfect maze of them and 

 if they could be all brought together and exhibited 

 they would establish his character as a man of ex- 

 pedients and extraordinary ingenuity. I will cite but 

 one instance, that of his high temperature steam, 

 which carbonized all piston lubricants. I cannot 

 venture to name all his devices to obviate this — they 

 even went to a great number of experiments in metal 

 alloys for metallic packing that would not need 

 lubricating. 



To sum all up, he certainly filled a useful place in 

 advancing improvements in steam engines, for his 

 schemes set many level headed men to thinking in the 

 right direction. [51] 



133 



