The Steam Engine (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Steam Engine

The properties of this vapor and their applicability to the wants of social life were discovered, will form one of the main subjects of this volume. There is no experiment in the whole range of science which would create more curious wonder than the boiling of water and the production of steam, if it were but novel. That water should be put into a. Close vessel as a heavy fluid, obe dient, like all other solids and liquids, to the law of gravitation, and that after a short period of exposure to heat it should burst out as an elastic, bounding vapor, rising and spreading instead of falling, is a phenomenon quite as surprising as the formation of a solid by the mixture of two liquids, or any other marvel of modern chemistry. But it is generally viewed without interest, be cause it is daily seen, and what little is known about its properties is commonly learned from household tradition, rather than from thought or investigation. Few, however, are so ignorant as not to know that when water has been made hot enough to boil, the heat it continues to receive is employed in converting it into steam, and that this steam has a. Great expansive power. Now it is this property of expansion which gives steam its mechanical force. The same principle which, on a small scale, causes the cover of the tea kettle to rise, will, when steam is generated in larger vessels, and allowed to gather force by accumulation, lift up the most ponderous weights. To the force of this vapor, indeed, there is no limit but the magnitude and strength of the boil ers in which it is generated. If steam, however.

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