James Watt by Andrew Carnegie (english reading book TXT) 📕

nominal, which Engel says may be taken as one-half the effective power (vide Mulhall, "Steam," p. 546), the real horse-power in 1905 being 150,000,000. One horse-power raises ten tons a height of twelve inches per minute. Working eight hours, this is about 5,000 tons daily, or twelve times a man's work, and as the engine never tires, and can be run constantly, it follows that each horse-power it can exert equals thirty-six men's work; but, allowing for stoppages, let us say thirty men. The engines of a large ocean greyhound of 35,000 horse-power, running constantly from port to port, equal to three relays of twelve men per horse-power, is daily exerting the power of 1,260,000 men, or 105,000 horses. Assuming that all the steam engines in the world upon the average work double the hours of men, then the 150,000,000 horse-power in the world, each equal to two relays of twelve men per horse-power, exerts the power of 3,600,000,000 of men. There are only one-tenth as many male adults in the world, estimating one in five of the population.

If we assume that all steam engines work an average of only eight hours in the twenty-four, as men and horses do (those on duty longer hours are not under continuous exertion), it still follows that the 150,000,000 of effective steam-power, each doing the work of twelve men, equals the work of 1,800,000,000 of men, or of 150,000,000 of horses.

Engel estimated that in 1880 the value of world industries dependent upon steam was thirty-two thousand millions of dollars, and that in 1888 it had reached forty-three thousand millions of dollars. It is to-day doubtless more than sixty thousand millions of dollars, a great increase no doubt over 1880, but the one figure is as astounding as the other, for both mean nothing that can be grasped.

The chief steam-using countries are America, 14,400,000 horse-power in 1888; Britain, 9,200,000 horse-power nominal. If we add the British colonies and dependencies, 7,120,000 horse-power, the English-speaking race had three-fifths of all the steam-power of the world.

In 1840 Britain had only 620,000 horse-power nominal; the United States 760,000; the whole world had only 1,650,000 horse-power. To-day it has 75,000,000 nominal. So rapidly has steam extended its sway over most of the earth in less than the span of a man's life. There has never been any development in the world's history comparable to this, nor can we imagine that such a rapid transformation can ever come in the future. What the future is finally to bring forth even imagination is unable to conceive. No bounds can be set to its forthcoming possible, even probable, wonders, but as such a revolution as steam has brought must come from a superior force capable of displacing steam, this would necessarily be a much longer task than steam had in occupying an entirely new field without a rival.

The contrast between Newcomen and Watt is interesting. The Newcomen engine consumed twenty-eight pounds of coal per horse-power and made not exceeding three to four strokes per minute, the piston moving about fifty feet per minute. To-day, steam marine engines on one and one-third pounds of coal per horse-power—the monster ships using less—make from seventy to ninety revolutions per minute. "Destroyers" reach 400 per minute. Small steam engines, it is stated, have attained 600 revolutions per minute. The piston to-day is supposed to travel moderately when at 1,000 feet per minute, in a cylinder three feet long. This gives 166 revolutions per minute. With coal under the boilers costing one dollar per net ton, from say five pounds of coal for one cent there is one horse-power for three hours, or a day and a night of continuous running for eight cents.

Countless millions of men and of horses would be useless for the work of the steam-engine, for the seemingly miraculous quality steam possesses, that permits concentration, is as requisite as its expansive powers. One hundred thousand horse-power, or several hundred thousand horse-power, is placed under one roof and directed to the task required. Sixty-four thousand horse-power is concentrated in the hold of the great steamships now building. All this stupendous force is evolved, concentrated and regulated by science from the most unpromising of substances, cold water. Nothing man has discovered or imagined is to be named with the steam engine. It has no fellow. Franklin capturing the lightning, Morse annihilating space with the telegraph, Bell transmitting speech through the air by the telephone, are not less mysterious—being more ethereal, perhaps in one sense they are even more so—still, the labor of the world performed by heating cold water places Watt and his steam engine in a class apart by itself. Many are the inventions for applying power; his creates the power it applies.

Whether the steam engine has reached its climax, and gas, oil, or other agents are to be used extensively for power, in the near future, is a question now debated in scientific circles. Much progress has been made in using these substitutes, and more is probable, as one obstacle after another is overcome. Gas especially is coming forward, and oil is freely used. For reasons before stated, it seems to the writer that, where coal is plentiful, the day is distant when steam will not continue to be the principal source of power. It will be a world surpriser that beats one horse-power developed by one pound of coal. The power to do much more than this, however, lies theoretically in gas, but there come these wise words of Arago to mind: "Persons whose whole lives have been devoted to speculative labours are not aware how great the distance is between a scheme, apparently the best concerted, and its realisation." So true! Watt's ideas in the brain, and the steam engine that he had to evolve during nine long years, are somewhat akin to the great gulf between resolve and performance, the "good resolution" that soothes and the "act" that exalts.

The steam engine is Scotland's chief, tho not her only contribution to the material progress of the world. Watt was its inventor, we might almost write Creator, so multiform were the successive steps. Symington by the steamship stretched one arm of it over the water; Stephenson by the locomotive stretched the other over the land. Thus was the world brought under its sway and conditions of human life transformed. Watt and Symington were born in Scotland within a few miles of each other. Stephenson's forbears moved from Scotland south of the line previous to his birth, as Fulton's parents removed from Scotland to America, so that both Stephenson and Fulton could boast with Gladstone that the blood in their veins was Scotch.

The history of the world has no parallel to the change effected by the inventions of these three men. Strange that little Scotland, with only 1,500,000 people, in 1791, about one-half the population of New York City, should have been the mother of such a triad, and that her second "mighty three" (Wallace, Bruce and Burns always first), should have been of the same generation, working upon the earth near each other at the same time. The Watt engine appeared in 1782; the steamship in 1801; the locomotive thirteen years later, in 1814. Thus thirty-two years after its appearance Watt's steam-engine had conquered both sea and land.

The sociologist may theorise, but plain people will remember that men do not gather grapes from thorns, nor figs from thistles. There must be something in the soil which produces such men; something in the poverty that compels exertion; something in the "land of the mountain and the flood" that stirs the imagination; something in the history of centuries of struggle for national and spiritual independence; much in the system of compulsory and universal free education; something of all these elements mingling in the blood that tells, and enables Scotland to contribute so largely to the progress of the world.

Strange reticence is shown by all Watt's historians regarding his religious and political views. Williamson, the earliest author of his memoirs, is full of interesting facts obtained from people in Greenock who had known Watt well. The hesitation shown by him as to Watt's orthodoxy in his otherwise highly eulogistic tribute, attracts attention. He says:

We could desire to know more of the state of those affections which are more purely spiritual by their nature and origin—his disposition to those supreme truths of Revelation, which alone really elevate and purify the soul. In the absence of much information of a very positive kind in regard to such points of character and life, we instinctively revert in a case like this to the principles and maxims of an infantile and early training. Remembering the piety portrayed in the ancestors of this great man, one cannot but cling to the hope that his many virtues reposed on a substratum of more than merely moral excellence. Let us cherish the hope that the calm which rested on the spirit of the pilgrim ... was one that caught its radiance from a far higher sphere than that of the purest human philosophy.

Watt's breaking of the Sabbath before recorded must have seemed to that stern Calvinist a heinous sin, justifying grave doubts of Watt's spiritual condition, his "moral excellence" to the contrary notwithstanding. Williamson's estimate of moral excellence had recently been described by Burns: