All the modern sciences and
all the modern arts had their reawakening with the seventeenth
century. Every aspect of freedom for humanity came into view in those
days of a new birth. Both the possibility of the introduction of new
sciences and of new arts and the power of utilizing all new
intellectual and physical forces came together. The steam engine could
not earlier have taken form, and, taking form, it could not have
promoted the advance of civilization in the earlier centuries. The
invention becoming possible of development and application, the
promotion of the arts and of all forms of human activity became a
possible consequence of its final successful introduction into the
rude arts that it was to so effectively promote and improve.
But the work of these inventors was in itself but little more
important than that of the Greek inventor of the steam aelopile, for
each brought forward a machine which was, from a business point of
view, utterly impracticable, and which, in each case, only served to
show that a better device might prove useful and lead the way to its
introduction. The merit of the inventors of the eighteenth century was
that they were _able_ to lead the way, to point out the path to
success, to furnish evidence of the value of the coming, crowning
invention. The "fire engines," as they were then called, of these now
famous men were merely contrivances by the use of which the pressure
of confined steam of high tension could be brought to act on the
surface of a mass of confined water, forcing it downward into pipes
through which it was led off and upward to a higher level; and thus a
mine could be drained, ineffectively and expensively to be sure, but
vastly more satisfactorily than by the animal power of the time.
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