CHAPTER VIII 



STEAM AND GASOLINE ENGINES 



Soon shall thy arm, unconquered steam, afar 

 Drag the slow barge or drive the rapid car; 

 Or on wide, waving wings expanded, bear 

 The flying chariot through the fields of air. 



ERASMUS DARWIN (1731-1802). 



No application of fire since man's early discovery of, the 

 methods to produce it at will has been more revolutionary in its 

 effects on society than its application to the production and use 

 of steam in the steam engine. Like so many other great inven- 

 tions the steam engine is a cumulative product. Hero of Alex- 

 ander one or two centuries before Christ devised a metal sphere 

 with radiating elbow-shaped pipes about its equator which, when 

 water was boiled in it, would revolve on its axis, propelled by 

 the jets of steam that came out of the pipes which all opened 

 in the plane of its equator and on the same side of their re- 

 spective radii. But this was a curiosity and served no practical 

 end. Branca, an Italian, early in the seventeenth century made 

 a wheel rotate by jets of steam that struck paddles or blades 

 along its circumference much as a water wheel is made to revolve 

 by the water striking its paddles. He connected this wheel to 

 a contrivance that he used for pulverizing drugs, so his steam 

 engine was actually harnessed to do work. A Frenchman, Denis 

 Papin (1647-1712), devised the piston and cylinder to operate 

 by steam in 1690. Though born at Blois, he lived in London 

 much of his life. He fitted a disk with an attached rod to a 

 cylinder, closed at one end, the rod protruding at the open end. 

 Steam was let into the closed end of the cylinder, and the disk was 

 shoved along toward the open end. He suggested that by 

 spraying water on to the closed end of the cylinder the steam 



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