XLIV. NORMAN SELFE. 



often sufficed to carry the shafts, and there was necessarily some 

 latitude in measurements and the proportion of parts. We have 

 all heard of the "shilling fit" and the "penny fit" used by the 

 workmen in Smeaton's time to designate the closeness with which 

 the pistons of the early steam engines approached the walls of 

 their cylinders. In those days strips of old beaver hats are said 

 to have been a favourite packing for pistons. There was a stand- 

 ing joke in the fifties against a millwright who had been employed 

 in the Flour Company's mill in Sussex-street, it being said that 

 he was one day proceeding steadily along the street to the shop, 

 with his thumb and forefinger curved into the form of the letter 

 C, and that on being hailed by an acquaintance, he said "Don't 

 stop me, I've got the size of the counter shaft." If only a joke, 

 it still shows the primitive ideas of the day, because such a joke 

 would be impossible now that we work to the thousandth part of 

 an inch with Whit worth and other standard gauges; and have 

 measuring machines which show the expansion of a gauge due to 

 the warmth of the fingers which pick it up. 



Up to the middle of the century the steam engine in general 

 use for land purposes was either of the "Beam" or "Table" type, 

 and a considerable number of them were made in Sydney by Orr, 

 Bourne, Blanche, Russell, Young and Mather, and Struth, who 

 were then the principal manufacturing engineers in the colony. 

 With the advent of the fifties the horizontal engine began to 

 supplant all other kinds of steam engines on shore, and by the end 

 of that decade Messrs. P. N. Russell & Co. had complete sets of 

 working drawings for horizontal engines of all the sizes in general 

 use made by the author to a standard design. From these plans 

 scores of engines were built by the firm before the final winding 

 up of their business. Some years afterwards a more advanced 

 type of horizontal engine was formulated by the author for Mort's 

 Dock Company which it is believed is not yet out of date. By a 

 singular coincidence two engines were recently inspected by the 

 author for intending purchasers, and they proved to be two of 

 these old friends, one nearly forty, and the other twenty-five years 



