With the introduction of the new form of older energy, electricity,
with the reduction of the lightning into thraldom, has now come a new
impulse affecting all the industries. Through its mysterious, its
still unknown action, steam now reaches out far from its own place,
driving the electric car along miles of rail; giving light throughout
all the country about it, turning night into day, and repressing crime
while encouraging legitimate labor, reaching into distant chambers and
every little workshop, to offer its powerful aid in all the
distributed work of cities. Without the steam engine there would be
little work available for electricity, but the appearance of this, the
latest and most useful handmaid of steam, has given the engine work to
do in an uncounted number of new fields, has called in the inventor
once more to adapt steam to its new work. The "high-speed engine" is
the latest form of the universal helper. And such has been the
readiness and the intelligence of the contemporary inventor that we
now have engines capable of turning their shafts three hundred
rotations a minute and without a perceptible variation of velocity,
whatever the change of load or the suddenness with which it is varied.
In the days of Watt a fluctuation of five per cent. in speed was
thought wonderfully small; in those of Corliss, the variation was
restricted to two per cent.
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