1900.] High-Speed Navigation Steam Turbines. 235 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, January 26, 1900. 



Sir Frederick Bramwell, Bart., D.C.L. LL.D. F.P.S., Honorary 

 Secretary and Vice-President, in the Chair. 



The Hon. Charles A. Parsons, M.A. F.R.S. M. Inst. C.E. 



Motive Power — High-Speed Navigation Steam Turbines. 



Twenty centuries ago the political power of Greece was broken, 

 although Grecian civilisation had risen to its zenith. Eome was 

 growing continually stronger, and was rapidly gaining territory by 

 absorbing weaker states. Egypt, older in civilisation than either 

 Greece or Rome, fell, but two centuries later, before the assault of 

 the younger states, and became a Roman province. Her principal 

 city at this time was Alexandria, a great and prosperous city, the 

 centre of the commerce of the world, the home of students and of 

 learned men, its population the wealthiest and most civilised of the 

 then known world. 



It is among the relics of that ancient Egyptian civilisation that 

 we find the first records of the early history of the steam engine. In 

 Alexandria, the home of Euclid, and possibly contemporary with 

 Archimedes, Hero wrote his ' Spiritalia seu Pneumatica.' It is 

 doubtful if Hero was the inventor of the contrivances and apparatus 

 described in his work ; it is more probable that they were devices 

 generally known at the time. Nothing in the text, however, indicates 

 to whom the several machines are to be ascribed. Two of these 

 machines are of special interest. The first utilised the expansive 

 force of air in a closed vessel heated externally, the pneumatic force 

 being applied upon tho surface of water in other vessels, and the 

 hydraulic force utilised for opening the doors of a Grecian temple 

 and working other pseudo-magic contrivances. 



Then after describing several forms of cylindrical boilers, and 

 the use of the steam jet for accelerating combustion, he comes to the 

 first of a type of steam engine, the steam turbine, which is the 

 subject of our discourse this evening. 



This is a veritable steam engine. The cauldron contains water, 

 and is covered by a steam-tight cover, a globe is supported above the 

 cauldron by a pair of tubes, one carrying a pivot, and the other 

 opening directly through the trunnion joint into the sphere ; short 

 bent pipes are attached to diametrically opposite points on the equator. 

 The steam generated in the cauldron passes up into the sphere and 



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