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The Modern Practice of Boiler Engineering
The Modern Practice of Boiler Engineering Author:Richard Armstrong Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. ON BOILERS GENERALLY, AND A RADICAL REFORM IN THOSE FOR MARINE PURPOSES SUGGESTED. The main design of this short essay is to impart in few words... more », that information respecting boilers and furnaces, which persons employing steam-engines, desire to possess, but which they have not much time to acquire. While yielding our approbation to all investigations touching the science of steam, which seem likely to illustrate its nature, we are at the same time conscious that the bulk of mankind immersed in active business, have but little time for such speculations; and it is our design rather to state results, and enunciate general laws, such as are found to govern successful practice, than to embark upon the wide sea of theoretical disquisition, or to announce any mere theoretical conclusions. Still less is it our intention to parade the elementary truths of chemistry as baits for the admiration of the ignorant— expanded into all the forms proper to laborious dul- c ness and varied in every phrase of emphatic iteration. That task has already been performed by Mr. Charles Wye Williams in his work on the " Combustion of Coal and the Prevention of Smoke," and the merits in which that work is deficient have been compensated by its artificial notoriety. We should be sorry to deprive Mr. Williams of any portion of the reputation which has cost him so much and the quality of which seems to satisfy his ambition, and there is certainly no danger that in the present work we shall run into any similar extravagance, having so painful an example before us of this species of folly. To theory we take no exception, theory being indeed only the connection of individual facts into such a chain as to constitute a natural law. HAY-STACK BOILER. This boiler is termed the hay-stack boile...« less