Steam Engines - A Thorough And Practical Presentation Of Modern Steam Engine Practice - Couverture souple
Présentation de l'éditeur
CorU ss, which so silently operates the massive electric generators in one of our municipal power plants, or the giant locomotive which pulls theL imited at sixty miles an hour, commands our unstinted admiration. And yet every movement is so free and perfect in its action, every function is performed with such precision and regularity, that we lose sight of the wonderful theoretical and mechanical development which brought these machines to their present state of perfection. The genius of Watt, the father of the steam engine, was so great that his basic conception of this, his greatest invention, and of many of his minor discoveries in connection with it, remain almost as he gave them to the world over a century ago. Yet he was so far in advance of the mechanical development of his time that his workmen could not build engine cyU nders nearer true than three-eighths of an inch. Modern builders demand an accuracy of at least two-thousandths of an inch almost two hundred times greater. But mechanical skiU is not the only particular in which progress has been made. Many minor but important improvements have been brought about by a careful study of the theory of heat engines. The reduction of enormous heat losses, the use of super-heated steam, the idea of compound expansion, the development of valve gears all have helped to make the steam engine well-nigh mechanically perfect and as efficient as is inherently possible. The story has been developed from a historical standpoint and along sound theoretical and practical hnes. It will be found absorbingly interesting and instructive to the stationary engineer as weU as to all who wish to foU ow modern steam engineering development. If the book should prove of real value in stimulating the interest of the trained man or the layman in the technical developments of the day, the publishers wiU feel that its mission has
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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