12 REPORT— 1888. 



of loss of 6'3-Ij. In the instance of another engine there was a deficiency 

 of air, resulting in the production of carbonic oxide, involving a loss of 

 4) per cent. The various percentages of loss, of which each one seems 

 somewhat unimportant, in the aggregate amounted to 28 per cent., and 

 this with one of the best boilers. This is an admirable instance of the 

 need of attention to apparently small things. 



I have already said that we now know the steam engine is really 

 a heat engine. At the York Meeting of our Association I ventured to 

 predict that, unless some substantive improvement were made in the 

 steam engine (of which improvement, as yet, we have no notion), I 

 believed its days, for small powers, were numbered, and that those who 

 .attended the centenary of the British Association in 1931 would see the 

 present steam engines in museums, treated as things to be respected, 

 and of antiquarian interest to the engineers of those days, such as are 

 the open-topped steam cylinders of Newcomen and of Smeaton to our- 

 selves. I must say I i^ee no reason, after the seven years which have 

 elapsed since the York Meeting, to regret having made that prophecy, or 

 to desire to withdraw it. 



The working of heat engines, without the intervention of the 

 vapour of water, by the combustion of the gases arising from coal, or 

 from coal and from water, is now not merely an established fact, but a 

 recognised and undoubted, commercially econonncal, means of obtaining 

 motive power. Such engines, developing from 1 to 40-horse-power, and 

 worked by the ordinary gas supplied by the gas mains, are in most 

 extensive use in printing works, hotels, clubs, theatres, and even in large 

 private houses, for the working of dynamos to supply electric light. Such 

 engines are also in use in factories, being sometimes driven by the gas 

 obtained from ' culm ' and steam, and are giving forth a horse-power for, 

 it is stated, as small a consumption as one pound of fuel per hour. 



It is hardly necessary to remind you — but let me do it — that, although 

 the saving of half a pound of fuel per horse- power appears to be insigni- 

 ficant, when stated in that bald way, one realises that it is of the highest 

 importance when that half-pound turns out to be 33 per cent, of the 

 whole previous consumption of one of those economical engines to which 

 E have refei-red. 



The gas engine is no new thing. As long ago as 180V, a M. de Rivaz 

 proposed its use for driving a carriage on ordinary roads. For anything 

 [ know he may not have been the first proposer. It need hardly be said 

 that in those days he had not illuminating gas to resort to, and he pro- 

 posed to employ hydrogen. A few years later, a writer in 'Nicholson's 

 Journal,' in an article on ' flying machines,' having given the correct 

 statement that all that is needed to make a successful machine of this 

 description is to find a sufficiently light motor, suggests that the direction in 

 which this may be sought is the employment of illuminating gas, to operate 

 by its explosion on the piston of an engine. The idea of the gas engine 



