The announcement forms the third of five modes of raising water. " Let there be a globe," he says, " a, having a valve b, to introduce water, and a tube c, soldered into the upper part of the ball, and descending nearly to the bottom : after having filled the ball with water, and well closed the valve, place it on the fire ; then the heat, acting on the ball, will cause the water to ascend through the tube c." Mr. Angier says that this ap paratus is so obviously inferior to that of Porta, which had ap peared only nine years before, that it would be an insult to the reader to say why ; and yet 1\1 r. Arago rests his claim for the invention of the steam engine in France, on the part of De Caus, to this simple contrivance, and gives a diagram of it, not exactly like the one figured by De Caus, from whose work Mr. Angier faithfully copied the annexed figure.
Brancas published an account of his apparatus in 1629, in a work entitled " Le Machine." The boiler a terminates with a bent tube b, from which the steam- issues, and impinges upon the vanes of a wheel c, which receives motion in the direction of the arrow. This principle does not differ from the first apparatus of Hero, and the practical effect would probably be inferior.
The Marquis of Worcester. Newcomen, Savary, and others followed: an account of whose inventions is given in the preceding pages, and numerous other works.
Moreland's work referred to, p. 399, consists of thirty-eight pages in MS., written on vellum, richly illuminated, but the part which has reference to the steam engine occupies only four pages. It is also ac companied by a table of the sizes of cylinders, and the amount of water to be raised by a given force of steam. Moreland was presented to the French monarch in 1682, and the next year, his machine is said to have been exhibited at St. Germains. He can not however be entitled to the merit of an original, his apparatus having been evidently suggested by the work of the Marquis of Worcester.
The ingenious Papin then follows, who is noticed in p. 399 : M. Arago, in the "Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes " for 1829, gives a paper on the early history of the steam engine, and claims for his countryman the honor of completing the invention: but Mr. Ainger has critically analyzed that paper, and asserts that the apparatus, upon which he founds the claim for Papin, was never made as .a working machine ; and does nothing more than illustrate a well known physical fact. That a vacuum was left by condensed steam, was known from the time ofHero at least. That the air, or some other power, would force a liquid or solid body into a vacuum, was equally well known. Mr. Ainger farther asserts that Papin never experimented on such an apparatus as Mr.
Arago ascribes to him ; never even suggested such a one : and that the two diagrams, given by him of Papin's invention in 1690, are portraits of the appa ratus of Newcomen, made fifteen years afterwards, viz. in 1705;* yet notwithstanding this unfair conduct, Mr. Arago complains of professor Robinson, who in his account of the steam engine, merely refers to a work of Papin's published in I707,t nine years after Savary's patent, describing it as his first publication, and actually denies the existence of those of 1690 and 1695, although he might have found an analysis of the latter in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, for March 1697, a whole year before Savary's engine was heard of. In another in stance he is said to have post-dated a little work of Papin's seventeen years, in order to attribute the merit of his observations to Dr. Hooke of England. These misstatements and errors have been copied, by professor Millington, Dr. Lardner (the author of the article on Steam Engines in Rees's Cyclopcedia) and the writer of the preceding article, who acknowledges, p. 400, that he also had been led, upon the authority of Dr. Robinson, to do injustice to the genius of Papin, when he had occasion to discuss the subject in another work. He however most unaccountably omits to notice the invention of a SAFETY VALVE by Papin, to be attached to his digester ; without which, as Mr. Galloway truly remarks, " steam would 'ere this, long have been abandoned, as a most dangerous and ungovernable agent, and entitles him to universal admiration; since it has contributed more than any single addition or improvement to the maturity of the steam engine." In the preceding article of the Encyclopedia, no mention is made of American steam-engines, although Dr. Thornton's account of Fitch's early and success ful experiments in navigating the Delaware with a steam boat was published in the London Monthly Magazine for October 18154 and the history of Oliver Evans's progressive Ittnityledge of the powers of steam ; his various propositions for its use in driving carriages and boats; and the description, with a plate of his Columbian steam engine, was publish ed by Elijah Galloway. in his " History of the Steam Engine," London 1827; a work, by the way, which is overlooked in the reference to those recommended for consultation at the close of the foregoing paper. The great merit of our ingenious countryman Evans, for his numerous mechanical improvements, and for the benefits which he has conferred upon the United States by his steam engine, entitle him to the grati tude of the present and future generations, and to a republication in this work of the record he has left of them.