CHAPTER XXIII

Experience as Member of the Board of Judges At the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.

One day in April I was surprised to receive by mail a commission as a member of the Board of Judges in Group Twenty of the Philadelphia International Exhibition. I was at a loss to know how I got it, but learned afterwards that I had been appointed on the recommendation of Mr. Holley, who was consulted by the commissioners about the judges in several groups. The exhibition was opened on May 1, but the judges were not to assemble until the 24th, and on that day we had quite a ceremony in the judges’ hall. The American judges were seated at one side of the hall and rose to receive the foreign judges who filed in from some place where they had been corralled, while a fine band played the national airs of all nations that had any airs. After a time spent in welcoming and responsive addresses, we were marched to a large café and given luncheon, after which the different groups were organized. There I had the pleasure of first meeting Mr. James Moore, also Professor Reuleaux of Berlin and Colonel Petroff of St. Petersburg; and Emil Brugsch the interesting Egyptian commissioner, also serving as a judge in our group. I observed that these foreigners used the English language more accurately than I did. We organized by the election as president of Horatio Allen, formerly president of the Novelty Iron Works (then extinct), he being the oldest and the biggest man among us. Under Mr. Allen’s administration we had a fine illustration of how not to do anything—of endless preparation and never getting to work. He had an interminable series of subjects for discussion and was accustomedto say: “These questions must be all settled before we can enter upon the discharge of our duties, gentlemen.” This had the effect upon our foreign judges that they absented themselves from our meetings. I remember Mr. Moore saying to me: “Porter, if you and I had had this work to do we would have had it half done by this time.” Directly after that Mr. Moore resigned, ostensibly pleading want of time to attend to it, but really disgusted at the waste of time. Our work was in a state of chaos. The field was very extensive, as it embraced all exhibits pertaining to steam and water except locomotives. One morning I came to the meeting with a copy of the catalogue on which I had divided the exhibits into three classes, lettered A, B, and C: class A embraced steam-engines and their accessories, class B boilers and their accessories and class C pumps and their accessories; I had prefixed these letters to the names of all our exhibits according to their class. At this meeting, at which I had procured the attendance of the foreign judges, this classification was unanimously adopted, and the judges formed themselves into these classes accordingly. Our work was then undertaken in earnest; it was found to be really too extensive to be accomplished otherwise.

Mr. Charles E. Emery was appointed a judge to fill the vacant place made by Mr. Moore’s resignation, and he proved most efficient. As is well known, medals were not awarded, but brief written reports were made on those exhibits which were deemed most deserving; these reports were signed by all the judges.

ProfessorFrancis Reuleaux

The firm of E. P. Allis & Co. of Milwaukee, exhibited a sawmill. This exhibit consisted of two large circular saws, each driven by a horizontal engine. The two engines were united by a common shaft on the ends of which the cranks were set at right angles with each other. The center lines of these engines were nearly 20 feet apart; the shaft carried two belt drums 8 or 10 feet in diameter, one of them near to the bed of each engine; at the middle of the shaft was a fly-wheel about 16 feet in diameter. The rim of this fly-wheel was in eight or ten segments, with an arm attached to the middle of each segment; the segments were bolted together and the arms were bolted to a hub on the shaft. The saws were set behind the cylinders, and the belts were carried from the drums on the shaft past the cylinders to smaller drums on the saw arbors. On starting these engines the two bearings of the main shaft heated so badly that the engines had to be stopped. The gentleman in charge of the exhibit applied to me for advice. I told him that although his shaft was large it was long, and the weight of the fly-wheel bent it so much that the two journals ran on the inner edges of their bottom boxes, which caused the heating. I told him he did not need the fly-wheel at all; the cranks being quartering, the momentum of the belt-drums was amply sufficient to maintain uniform motion, and I advised him to take off the fly-wheel. This he did at once, leaving only the hub on the shaft; the engines then ran with cold bearings and uniform motion throughout the exhibition. They had made a cut-off gear for these engines, but it was found not to suit the purpose and was taken off. This firm then did a great stroke of business: they came to the sensible conclusion that they could do a great deal better than to attempt to work out a new system of engineering for themselves, so they offered to Mr. Edwin Reynolds, the manager of Mr. Corliss’ works, and to his head draftsman, inducements sufficient for them to leave Mr. Corliss’ employment and take the same positions in the Allis works at Milwaukee for the manufacture of the Corliss engine there. With the magnificent result of this action the engineering world is familiar.

We had all sorts of queer experiences. One day I was demanded by Mr. Jerome Wheelock to tell himwhythe engine exhibited by him was not aperfectengine. I glanced over the long slender bed, a copy of the Corliss bed without its rigidity, and declined to answer his question. Mr. Emery was more compliant; on receiving the same demand, he kindly pointed out to Mr. Wheelock one respect in which his engine could hardly be considered perfect; the steam was exhausted into a large chamber embracing the lower half of the cylinder from end to end. This comparatively cold bath produced the condensation of a large quantity of the entering steam. From the middle of this chamber a pipe took away the exhaust from the opposite ends of the cylinder alternately. Mr. Wheelock admitted the defect, and said in future he would avoid it, so, as I learned, having two exhaust pipes instead of one, he gave to each pipe one half the area of the single one.

I had the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance with Professor Sweet, who was superintending the exhibit of the mechanical work of his boys at Cornell; this was very creditable and included quite a show of surface plates.

The Corliss engine in this exhibition was far the most imposing, and to the multitude the most attractive single exhibit ever shown anywhere. It consisted of two distinct engines, each having a cylinder 40 inches in diameter, with 10 feet stroke of piston, the motion of which was transmitted through cast-iron walking beams to cranks set at right angles with each other on the opposite ends of a common shaft. This shaft made 36 revolutions per minute and carried a gear-wheel 30 feet in diameter; this wheel engaged with a pinion 10 feet in diameter on the line of shaft under the floor, giving to this shaft a speed of 108 revolutions per minute.

One day I said to Professor Sweet: “Do you know, Professor, that an engine with a single cylinder of the same bore as these and 5 feet stroke directly connected with a line shaft and making 150 revolutions per minute, with a fly-wheel 10 or 12 feet in diameter, would exert more power than is afforded by this monster and would run with far greater economy, because the internal surfaces to be heated by the condensation of the entering steam would be one piston instead of two, two heads instead of four, and 5 feet length of exposed cylinder instead of 20 feet?” He replied: “That is all very true, but how would you get the steam in and out of the cylinder properly with a piston travel of 1500 feet per minute?” I was not prepared to answer that question on the instant, but I afterwards found no difficulty about it.

The accompanying figures illustrate this engine and my high-speed equivalent drawn to the same scale; it will be seen that the small engine occupies about one tenth of the floor space needed for the large one, and would cost less than ten per cent. of the money. It would also have a more nearly uniform motion, the impulses received by the crank being 300 per minute, against only 144 per minute received by both cranks of the large engine, besides which in the latter the full force of the steam is exerted at the commencement of each stroke and falls to nothing at the end, while in the smaller engine, by the inertia of the reciprocating parts, the forces exerted at the opposite ends of the stroke would be practically equalized. The reader will doubtless inquire, as Mr. Green did why, with these enormous advantages, does not everybody use the high-speed engines and every builder make them?

The Corliss Engine Exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition.

Porter-Allen Engine Equal in Power to the Exhibited Corliss Engine.

At this exhibition the Bell telephone was first shown to a select company, among which were President Grant and Dom Pedro, the last emperor of Brazil. This exhibition was given on Sunday, that being the only day when silence could be had. Human speech, both in talking and singing, was transmitted through the whole length of the main building, about 1800 feet; it has since been transmitted somewhat further.

The exhibitors of hand pumps all talked about the ease with which their own pumps could be worked; one man touched bottom in this respect. He had set his pump so that the spout was nearly on a level with the surface of the pool from which it drew its water; he boldly claimed that his pumps required no power at all. I was invited, as I suppose multitudes were, to take hold of the handle and see for myself that his claim was true. I never heard of but one man who I think would be satisfied with this demonstration; that was the engineering editor of the New YorkTribune. Shortly before this he had published an account of a wonderful pump invented by a Mr. George, which he concluded by saying that the superiority of Mr. George’s pump lay in thefact that at each stroke not the whole column of water had to be lifted, but only that which was to be discharged. We had a waterfall maintained by a centrifugal pump, which received its water on one side only; the maker evidently knowing nothing about the method of balancing these pumps by admitting the water equally on the opposite sides.

The boiler-makers abounded. My old acquaintance, the Harrison boiler, turned up. Mr. Allen urged a favorable award to Mr. Harrison because of the motives of humanity by which he knew Mr. Harrison was actuated in designing that boiler. A Mr. Pierce invited all the judges to visit his boiler and hear him explain it. He informed us that this boiler had been the subject of three scientific tests by Professor Thurston, but he did not tell us the results of those tests.

As we were coming away Professor Reuleaux said to me: “Thatisfoolishness, isn’t it?”

An inventor named Smith came several times to our judges’ room to urge upon us the merits of his boiler. He had two on exhibition, one in use in the boiler-house and the other in Machinery Hall; these were quite different from each other. One day not long after the close of the exhibition I received a note from a stranger requesting me to call upon him at the Astor House. I thought, “This man doubtless wants an engine, but his time is too precious to come out to Newark,” so at the hour appointed I was there. When I entered the room the first object I saw was a sectional model of this Smith boiler, and I found that the gentleman wanted to know our reasons for overlooking that boiler. I replied to him that I had a question to which I would like an answer at his earliest convenience; we observed that the two boilers exhibited by Mr. Smith were quite different from each other, and I saw that this model differed in essential details from both of them, and I would like to know which one he wished us to approve of and bade him good afternoon.

One day afterwards I happened to be in Mr. Holley’s office in New York when a man came in with a drawing of a boiler which he wished Mr. Holley to recommend. Mr. Holley turned him over to me, and he explained to me that the great novel feature of his boiler was that the feed-water was admitted by spraying it intothe steam space, thus avoiding the cooling of any part of the boiler by its admission at one point; so I found one freak boiler that was not at the exhibition.

We had a fine exhibit of steam fire-engines. I think every maker in this country was represented, and we had a trial of these engines lasting three or four days. The committee desired to make a thorough comparative test of their performance, but the man (a lieutenant in the navy) appointed to keep the record put down so few items that we found we had no record at all. We could only guess how he came to do this.

An exhibitor from Canada brought an engine that presented a very fine appearance; it was made up of a collection of what he believed to be the best features of every steam-engine made in the United States. The experts looked his machine over and saw where he had got every one of them, but his different appropriations did not work well together; his engine broke down every day and he worked all night to be ready for the next day’s trial. It afforded a good commentary on the narrow-minded laws of Canada, which forbade a citizen of the United States from taking out a patent there.

The show of steam-engines was not large, and the indicator was not applied to any engines, so I had no use for the indicators I had imported from England. If I remember rightly, we had only two engines from abroad, one of these sent by the Government of Brazil. This was what was called a “table” engine, in which the cylinder stands on a table in a vertical position and two connecting-rods extend down from the cross-head and connect with the crank under the table. It was copied from a Scotch elementary drawing-book from which I learned mechanical drawing. One of these engines had been made by Mr. Hoe to drive the press of the New YorkDaily Timeswhen that paper was started in 1851 or 1852. The other foreign engine was made by a Brussels manufacturer with the assistance of the Belgian Government. It had an American cut-off which was used by Mr. Delamater on his engines, and it had the eccentric between the main bearing and the crank, giving to the latter therefore three or four inches of unnecessary overhang; it had my condenser, which I learned was then coming into considerable use on the Continent.

Col.Alexis Petroff

The only American engines I now recall besides the Corliss were the Buckeye and the Brown engines, and our awards to these engines did not do them any harm; the Corliss engines were not within our jurisdiction and we were not permitted to say anything about them; Mr. Corliss was not a competitor but a patron of the exhibition.

Mr. Frederick E. Sickels made an extensive exhibit of his various inventions, the models of which had been loaned to him for that purpose by the Patent Office. Only two of these inventions came within our province: the first was what is known as the celebrated trip cut-off, patented by him in the year 1842; the latter an arrangement patented in 1848. The former invention was an improvement on the Stevens cut-off, already in general use in steamboats on our Eastern waters. The Stevens invention was applied to equilibrium valves, rising and falling in a direction vertical to their seats. It enlarged the opening movement of the valve in a degree increasing as the speed of the piston increased, by means of the device known as the wiper cam; but the closing motion of the valve, being the reverse of the opening movement, grew slower and slower, until the valve was gently brought to its seat. It was found that during the closing of the port a great deal of steam blew into the cylinder through the contracting openings, with very little addition to the useful effect. Mr. Sickels conceived the idea of liberating the valve just before the opening movement was completed and letting it fall instantly to its seat, which would effect a sharp cut-off and a great economy in the consumption of steam. This action involved the difficulty that the valves would strike their seats with a violent blow, which would soon destroy both. This difficulty Mr. Sickels met by the invention of the dash-pot. This apparatus performed two functions: when its piston was lifted above the water it left a vacuum under it, so the pressure of the atmosphere on this piston was added to the weight of the valve and the pressure of the steam on it to accelerate its fall. This was arrested by the piston striking the surface of the water just in time to prevent the valve from striking its seat, but not soon enough to prevent the complete closure of the port. This nice point was determined by the ear. The engineerfirst let water out of the dash-pot gradually, until he heard the valve strike its seat faintly; then he admitted water drop by drop, until the sound had died away. For these inventions and for his steam steering gears the judges made an award.

Our foreign judges were enthusiastic about them; Horatio Allen had fought Mr. Sickels during his whole business life and would never allow a Sickels cut-off to be applied in the Novelty Iron Works. For example, the directors of the Collins steamship line adopted the Sickels cut-off, but it was put on only two of their ships, the “Arctic” and the “Baltic,” the engines of which were built at the Allaire works. The “Atlantic” and “Pacific,” which were engined at the Novelty Works, did not have it, Mr. Allen absolutely refusing to allow it. To my surprise Mr. Allen signed this award with a cordial expression of admiration of Mr. Sickels’ genius; he had softened in his old age.

The following is a copy of this award.

INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876.

United States Centennial Commission,Philadelphia, 3d August, 1876.

REPORT ON AWARDS.

“Group No. XX.

“Catalogue No. 1027.

“Product, Models of Improvements in Steam-engines.

“Name and address of exhibitor, Frederick E. Sickels.

“The undersigned, having examined the products herein described, respectfully recommend the same to the United States Centennial Commission for Award for the following reasons, viz:

“These exhibits possess great historical interest.

“In the year 1842 Mr. Sickels patented the trip or liberating cut-off, an invention which, in a variety of forms, has come into use wherever steam-engines are made. In applying this invention to poppet valves, Mr. Sickels prevented these valves from striking their seats by his invention of the dash-pot, in which he availed himself of the incompressibility, the indestructibility and the divisibility of water, and which is now employed for this purpose in all such applications.

“In 1848 he patented an improvement in the method of controlling motive power, by which method steam is applied at the present time to various uses, notable among which is the steering of steam vessels, the steersmen turning the wheel precisely as in steering by hand, but all the force being exerted by the steam.

“Charles T. Porter,“Reporting Judge.

“Approval of Group Judges,Horatio Allen, Chas. E. Emery, Emil Brugsch,F. Reuleaux, N. Petroff.”

James Moore

After our work was finished and I had gone home the awards were made public; to my astonishment the award to Mr. Sickels was not among them, so I wrote to General Walker, who was our medium of communication with the Commission, asking the reason for this omission. He replied that the award had been thrown out by the Committee of Revision. “Committee of Revision!” I had never heard of such a thing. I asked for an explanation and I learned that the judges did not make awards, they only recommended them; the awards were made by the Commission after they had passed the scrutiny of the Committee of Revision. Well, who were the Committee of Revision? I learned that the Commission consisted of two commissioners from each State appointed by the Governor; Mr. Corliss was a commissioner from Rhode Island. At a meeting of the commissioners Mr. Corliss proposed the novel scheme of a Committee of Revision, to which the action of the judges should be submitted for approval before the awards were made. The idea seemed to please the members of the Commission, as tending to magnify their own importance, and it was adopted; as a matter of usual courtesy Mr. Corliss was made chairman of the committee, and the committee threw out the award to Mr. Sickels. I made careful inquiry and could never learn that the Committee of Revision threw out any other award, so it seemed evident that with the throwing out of this award to Mr. Sickels the object of its existence was accomplished.

In the Corliss valve system the liberation of the valve was the fundamental idea; this was applied by him to valves moving in the direction parallel with their seats. It not being necessary to arrest their motion at any precise point, they were caught by air cushions at any points after they had covered their ports. Mr. Corliss had appropriated the liberating idea, according to “the good old rule, the simple plan, that they may take who have thepower, and they may keep who can,” and all this machinery had been devised by him to prevent the historical fact that the liberating idea had been invented by Mr. Sickels from appearing in the records of the exhibition. By all this enormous expenditure of ingenuity and influence he succeeded in giving to this fact a prominence and importance which it would never otherwise have had, besides advertising his efforts to suppress it.

Mr. Horatio Allen’s life-long aversion to Mr. Sickels was caused by professional jealousy. Mr. Allen conceived himself to be an inventor, and for years had been cherishing a cut-off invention of his own. The original firm was Stillman, Allen & Co., and for years Mr. Stillman had prevented the Novelty Iron Works from being sacrificed to Mr. Allen’s genius, but later Mr. Allen had obtained supreme control of these works by an affiliation with Brown Brothers, the bankers, his principal stockholders, and Mr. Stillman sold out his interest and retired from the firm. Mr. Allen, having a clear field, now determined to put his invention on the new steamer of the Collins line, the “Adriatic,” and American engineers were amused at the display of this amazing absurdity on the largest possible scale. In this construction there were four valves; each valve was a conical plug about six feet long and had four movements; first it was withdrawn from its seat a distance of three inches so that it could be rotated freely, then it was rotated first to draw off the lap. Up to this point theoretically the port had not been opened, but the steam had been blowing into the cylinder or out of it, as the case might be, through these enormous cracks; the valves then rotated further to produce the opening movement, for either admission or release; the rotation was then reversed until it reached its original position, then the fourth movement brought it to its seat. It is probable that the ship would have gone to sea working steam after this ridiculous fashion, if the complicated mechanism required to produce the four movements had not broken down at the trial of the engines at the dock, beyond the power of Mr. Allen’s genius to remedy; so the valves had to be removed and the Stevens valves and Sickels cut-off were substituted for them. The story that any sane man ever designed a four-motion steam-engine valve, and that he made the first application of it on the largest steamship, except the Great Eastern, then in the world, is such a tax on credulity, that I was glad to find the following corroboration of it in a letter to “Power,” from which I copy the essential portion.

Emil Brugsch

“In one of Mr. Porter’s ‘Reminiscences,’ which I have mislaid, he gives an account of the alterations to the last steamer of the E. K. Collins lines, the ‘Adriatic.’ His description of Horatio Allen’s cock-valves and their motions is absolutely correct. The writer made the greater part of the detail drawings by which the new valves and the Sickels cut-off were placed on the ‘Adriatic.’Peter Van Brock.Jefferson, Iowa.”

Peter Van Brock.

Jefferson, Iowa.”

These engines, as further designed by Mr. Allen, were afterwards described by Zerah Colburn in the LondonEngineerin his usual caustic style. His description began with this expression: “These engines are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

I had hoped that my old friend Daniel Kinnear Clark might turn up as the English member in our group of judges at the Centennial Exposition, but in this I was disappointed. The English judge in our group was Mr. Barlow, son of the celebrated author of “A Treatise on the Strength of Materials,” which, if I remember rightly, was the first authoritative treatise on that subject. Mr. Barlow, however, was not of much help to us; he came late and attended but one meeting. That, I remember very well, was the meeting at which I presented my classification. He left Philadelphia with his son to visit Niagara Falls, and we never saw him again. I remember his giving me a very cordial invitation to visit him when I should find myself in England.

Two of my English engineering acquaintances appeared at this exhibition. One of them was a judge in the group which embraced sewing machines. I remember asking him what was the most interesting mechanical device he had seen at the exhibition; he told me it was the automatic tension in the Wilcox & Gibbs sewing machine. In a walk with him through Machinery Hall one day, I called his attention to a locomotive built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works. After looking it over cursorily he remarked that he did not see anything particular in it. I could not help replying, “That may not be the fault of the locomotive.” I had thought hima light weight in England, and that superficial remark confirmed my opinion. The other friend, as I am proud to call him, I have always considered mechanically the most interesting man I ever met. It was Mr. Smith, of Smith & Coventry, the machine-tool builders of Salford. Mr. Smith was the brains of the concern. He had come over to learn what America could teach him, and the only thing he took back, so far as I know, was the twist-drill, the manufacture of which was begun by that firm after his return. I shall have something to add later to what I have already said respecting his wonderful improvements in machine tools. In one of the pleasant walks we took together, our attention was arrested by the exhibit of Riehlé Brothers, the celebrated scale manufacturers of Philadelphia. Among other novel and interesting features of their exhibit this firm showed a ³⁄₄-inch bolt broken by a stress applied to it through a nut of only one half the standard thickness, or three eighths of an inch deep, and that run on loosely by hand. This astonishing revelation drew from Mr. Smith the ejaculation, “Why, old Whitworth lied.” Mr. Whitworth had stated that he had ascertained by experiment that a nut to be as strong as the bolt must have a depth equal to the diameter of the bolt, and this had been accepted as mechanical truth by the entire engineering world, no one ever thinking to make the simple measurement which would show that the force required to strip the threads of any bolt in a nut of this standard depth would be nearly three times the strength of the bolt. He was, of course, highly interested in the wonderful steelyards made by this firm, which would weigh anything that could be lifted by a crane. His only discovery respecting machine tools was, that their manufacture in the United States was generally very inferior.

It was fortunate that I had prepared the drawings according to my revised model for three or four sizes of the engines, as otherwise I should not have been able to accept the position offered me at the Philadelphia exposition. I received two more orders before May 24, and two more during the summer, but with the preparations I had made and Mr. Goodfellow’s familiarity with the work, everything went on smoothly during my absence.

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