10 BOILER TESTS. 



test affords, to guide them in the selection or arrangement of a 

 contemplated new boiler plant, or in the renewal of an old 

 plant. Capitalists have called for evaporative tests upon im- 

 proved forms of boilers, in which they have in view the invest- 

 ment of money, that they may learn from outside investigation 

 whether the inventor's claims are well founded, or whether the 

 improvement is of sufficient merit to warrant the investment. 

 Finally, a large class of persons, bent on seeking information, 

 have had boilers tested, so as to find out whether, in one way 

 or another, the evaporative efficiency could be improved. 



In every case, whether the test has been made at the solici- 

 tation of the inventor, the mill-manager, the capitalist or the 

 investigator, there has always been one controlling object in 

 view, on the part of the author, and that is, the determination 

 of the true performance of the boiler, and the work has been 

 undertaken in every instance with the unbiased feeling of a 

 student, interested only in getting at the facts. 



In this work the number of individual tests which have been 

 made has reached a sum between three hundred and fifty and 

 four hundred. Many of them have been made in the New 

 England States. The boilers have been situated in cotton mills, 

 woollen mills, and other textile factories, paper mills, machine 

 shops, lumber mills, rubber works and public buildings. 

 They have embraced plain cylinder boilers, horizontal return 

 tubular boilers, locomotive boilers, vertical tubular boilers, 

 water-tube boilers , sectional boilers and patented boilers of va- 

 rious kinds. They have been set in brick-work, set without 

 brick-work, set according to patented methods and set in the 

 ordinary way. They have been fired with anthracite coal of 

 various kinds and sizes, bituminous coal of various kinds, an- 

 thracite screenings , mixtures of anthracite screenings and bitu- 

 minous coal, petroleum oil and coke. 



The paper is devoted to an analysis of many of these tests. 

 Of the number referred to, those which are omitted are either 

 of a private nature or are devoid of general interest. They 

 were all conducted personally by the author, with the exception 

 of one set of tests, which were made by an assistant who worked 

 under the author's direction. 



