Техническое чтение для энергетиков. Бухарова Г.П. - 87 стр.

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89
workers in mass production.
Whitney carried out his contract with the help of a small number of men. But
he used a water-mill as his main source of power in the factory which he built near
New Haven. Legal battles and troubles concerning his cotton gin as well as
increasing ill health sapped his energy and shortened his life; otherwise he would cer-
tainly have become America's first industrial king, ruling over an empire of steam-
powered engineering works.
During the comparatively short time of thirty-five years the genius of James
Watt improved the reciprocating steam-engine so much that throughout the
nineteenth century this prime mover remained basically as he had shaped it –
although it increased a great deal in size, performance, and accuracy of construction.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ILLUMINATION
Perhaps we might in this connection give a brief sketch of the development of
illumination. From his earliest times, Man has had an intense dislike of the dark.
Besides, as soon as he had learnt how to use his brain the long winter nights with
their enforced idleness must have bored him. Lightning, the fire from heaven, gave
him the first 'lamp' in the shape of a burning tree or bush. He prolonged the burning-
time of firewood by dipping it into animal fat, resin, or pitch: thus the torch was
invented. It was in use until well into the nineteenth century; many old town houses
in England still have torch-holders outside their front doors, where the footmen put
their torches as their masters and mistresses stepped out of the carriages.
Rough earthenware, oil lamps were in use in the earliest civilizations; these
lamps, though much refined, were still quite common a hundred years ago. The
Romans are usually credited with the invention of the candle, originally a length of
twisted flax dipped in hot tallow or beeswax which later hardened as it cooled off.
Candles were at first expensive, and only the rich and the Church could aitord them.
As late as the 1820's, stearin candles – cheap and mass manufactured – came into use,
and still later they began to be made of paraffin wax.
By that time, however, a new kind of illumination had been introduced all over
the civilized countries: gaslight. In the 1690's an English scientist Dr. John Clayton
observed that the gases which developed in coal-pits and endangered the lives of the
miners were combustible. He experimented with pieces of coal, which he 'roasted'
over a fire without allowing them to burn up, and found that the resulting gas gave a
pleasant, bright flame. German and French chemists repeated his experiments, but a
hundred years passed after his discovery before gas became a practical form of
illumination.
William Murdock, a Scotsman who started his career as a mechanic, took up
Clayton's idea. He built an iron cauldron in his cottage garden and heated coal in it.
This 'incomplete combustion' produced a mixture of highly inflammable carbon
monoxide and nitrogen. He piped the gas into his house and fixed taps in every room.
Many a night the people of Redruth stood in silent awe around Murdock's cottage,
gazing at the wonderful new lamps which shed a bright light throughout the house.

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