890 Transactions of the American Institute. 



These few suppositions and facts may suggest an improved steam 

 tiller or plow, and a great many of the advantages to be gained. 

 But the field is so vast I will not attempt the argument, but submit 

 a model of my method of applying force to resistance, as in steam 

 plowing, in which the powers are so nearly balanced that I must 

 really ask of you, where is the lost power? 



This model is almost an exact imitation of a large machine, built 

 under my superintendence, by the Willard Steam Plow Manufac- 

 turing Company, of Chicago, having an upright boiler thirty inches 

 in diameter, live feet high, with forty-three tubes, and two five-inch 

 cylinders, of eight-inch stroke, designed to make two hundred 

 revolutions per minute, registering ten horse-power. The length 

 of tuck is nineteen and a half feet, extreme width seven feet four 

 inches — the whole weighing nearly or quite five tons, and carrying 

 six cutters or spades of thirteen inches in width, making a complete 

 till, ten inches in depth, six and a half feet wide. 



This work was done in fallow ground, and without cutters or 

 harrow teeth, while the shafts carrying the pitmans and spades 

 were rotated from fifty to eighty times a minute, making a six-inch 

 cut at each revolution, and apparently able to do a great deal more, 

 had her gearing and capacities permitted. 



This work was performed with steam varying from forty to sixty 

 pounds, and when, after pumping cold water in her boiler and her 

 fires extinguished, she still struggled, but succumbed at twenty 

 pounds of steam. Thanksgiving day intervened between this and 

 a northwest snow storm, which closed our field of operations and 

 experiments, as well as our gauge cocks, pumps, pistons and valves 

 with ice, and the season of the inventor, with many regrets. 



FOUNDATIONS. 



The following paper, on the Resistance of Piles, was read by 

 Hamilton E. Towle, Civil Engineer, New York city: 



Sometimes in constructing foundations, the engineer has to pro- 

 vide resistance to a vertical force, acting alternately in either 

 direction. The more frequent cases are those in which the force 

 acts downward from insistent weight, as in the case of piers of 

 bridges, and foundations of fortifications and buildings. Nearlj'' 

 all the published data and results of experiments on foundation 

 piles are with special reference to their capability to resist sinking, 

 and to form a solid support for some weight above; but occasionally 

 the case presents itself in which the foundation must resist an 



