The Sun.
London, England, 1865-12-25 00:00:00

If any excuse can be offered for this apathy, it may
be said that the passions and interests connected
with the war, together with those yet m )re embar-
rassing that arose from the transitions fl cm war to
peace, caused such disturbance in th, circulating
medium and in the general interes's of commerce
and industry, that it became very diffi mit to awaken
public attention to the great scandal of relying
solely upon the gallows for preventing forgeries. It
has been above shown that Perkins's invention was
not for engraving on steel plates for printing, nor for
engraving upon steel at all, but rather for en-
graving on soft iron of homogeneous structure. It
was found that all wrought iron is more or less
fibrous and unfit to receive delicate engravings, and
that by decarbonating the surface of cast steel a pure
iron surface was obtained, and this being engraved
on,was case hardened and used for transferring and
printing, as before stated. This should be kept in
view, because many persons have supposed that the
invention of Perkins was merely the substitution of
steel in the place of copper for engraving upon ;
such a substitution of the one metal for the other
would not be an invention in any fair sense of the
word. But this method of obtaining soft iron sur-
faces to receive the work, converting these surfaces
back int, steel, and then transferring the engrav-
ings to other plates for engraving, comprised to-
gether a series of novel processes which confer last-
ing honour upon the inventor. After the transition
period, having better hopes of success, I recom-
mended Mr. Perkins to come over himself to explain
his system, and aid the artists here in putting it into
operation. Accordingly in the year 1820 Mr. Perkins
came to England, and being over sanguine, brought
a large staff of able artists, mechanics, &c. ; but he
could not bring any money to aid in establishing
his intended works in London. He had assumed
that capital could always be obtained in England
for conducting any safe and profitable schemes.
Now, the matter of proving his to be such was not
easy to establish with the moneyed class ; so to me
alone, not of that class, he had to look for the entire
expense of his mission, and this I could only bear
for a few months. After some time the late Mr.
Charles Heath, the eminent engraver, was induced
to join Mr. Perkins, and become a partner in the
engraving works, which were then commenced in
Fleet-street, and are still continued by their suc-
cessors. Besides the printing on paper, Mr. Perkins's
system of transferring has been since very exten-
sively employed for calico printing, and in later
years we have also seen his process employed to a
vast extent in many other departments of the gra-
phic art, such as Post-office and receipt stamps, and
other prints that are required in greater numbers
than could be produced by other than steel plates
or stamps. His system of engraving on steel has at
length become a great artistic power, , the wide-
spread increase of which has given employment to
labour and capital to a vast extent on the several
branches of art before stated, and from which I be-
lieve many large fortunes have been made, but little
other than toil and trouble ever accrued to the in-
ventor of them. When any important discoveries
in physical science are made they never die, what-
ever happen to their authors. The new facts brought
before the public go forth like seeds cast upon a
fertile soil, yielding the fruits of continual progress
among the families of men who seek improvement.
It seems only just then that each generation should
transmit to the next some record of the names of
those contemporaries to whose genius and talents all
nations are indebted for such discoveries. Where-
fore, in addition to the four distinguished inven-
tors brought to the notice of this Society in my for-
mer papers, I have in the present one aimed to place
that of Jacob Perkins as a worthy contributor to
the advance of those branches of art to which his
inventions have been applied.—On the Compression
of Water : In tracing the progress of steel engrav-
ing I had no thought of giving a general account of
Mr. Perkins's researches in physical science, yet it
may not be out of place to notice one or two other
of his discoveries. His experiments on the compres-
sibility of water (made some time before he left
America) were to test the correctness of the doctrine
founded on the Florentine experiments, that water
was a non-elastic body, which was then generally
taught in the schools and elementary works. At
that time Mr. Perkins had never heard of the ex-
periments of Canton (made some 50 years before),
which had established the compressibility of water.
Although by Mr. Perkins's experiments its discovery
was not new, yet they were of high scientific value,
because of the different compressing forces em-
ployed by him and by Canton, the latter having ap-
plied the pressure from half an atmosphere to two
atmospheres, say from 7flb to 301 b a square inch,
whilst that employed by Perkins was from 50 to
400 atmospheres, or from 7501 b to 6,0001 b per inch.
The same rate of compression appeared in all his
experiments, which corresponded with that shown
by Canton's experiments, and in all of which the
water was compressed in volume directly as the
compressing forces. The apparatus employed by
Perkins was first a cast-iron cylinder, about Sin.
thick, with a movable top of equal strength ; this,
filled with water, had a force pump (as in the hy-
draulic press) to measure the pressure within by
the leverage and size of the induction pipe. 2. A
small brass cylinder, with a piston to slide in it,
water tight, about fin. diameter, and to have a
column of water 10in. long under the piston. The
piston rod, graduated to divisions of 100 to the
inch, had a sliding ring on it, to be pressed upon
the rod as it was forced down upon the enclosed
water, thus marking in the 100ths of an inch the
descent of the rod ; the brass cylinder, being under
the same pressure inside and out, was not subject
to any strain to alter its capacity. 3. When the
external pressure was removed, the water in the
brass cylinder expanding to its original length and
raising the piston rod, would of course mark the
greatest compression effected. In each experiment
the diminished bulk of water was directly as the
pressure applied, and under the pressure of 100 at-
mospheres the bulk of the water was reduced one
part in a hundred, and, as before mentioned, this
rate proved to be the same as that shown by the
experiments of Canton. Some time after Professor
Oersted made similar experiments by employing a
stout glass vessel and using a column of mercury
to give the pressure, having the like inside cylinder
as that of Perkins to mark the result, which con-
firmed the same rate as that shown by Perkins and
Canton.—On Perkins's Steam Gun : Mr. Per-
kins conceived the idea of employing steam at
a very high pressure for discharging projec-
tiles with greater rapidity and effect than
could be done by the common use of gunpowder.
To effect this object he devised a plan for heating
water more intensely than could be done by any
boilers then known, viz., that of employing a great
number of iron or copper tubes, with their ends
fastened
into plates, with chambers or cavities for
receiving the water at one end and emitting the
steam at the other. This apparatus was placed in
the midst of a furnace for the heat to act directly
on the water in the tubes, and thus, as Mr. Perkins
phrased it, the water could be made red hot and
flash into steam with a force exceeding that of gun-
powder. Then a gun barrel, with its breech oppo-
site the valve opening from the steam chamber,
and an apparatus for conducting the balls into the
space between the breech of the barrel and the out-
let of the steam, and, the valve opening at the
same time, the steam issued and propelled the balls
through the gun in rapid succession with a force
about equal to common powder, which could be
continued as long as the heat of the furnace could
keep up the pressure. He found that from 50 to
100 balls per minute were shot forth to a target,
about 100 yards, with a force nearly equal to that
of a common musket ; and of course by having 10
such guns fixed :to the same furnace, from 500
to 1,000 balls might be discharged per minute. His
experiments were witnessed by the Duke of Wel-
lington and many other eminent men, who took
much interest in them. The non-adoption of his
system arose from several radical defects in it—
first, the danger from fire of having such a cum-
brous furnace on a ship ; second, the time required
to get up the steam in case of sudden encounter
with an enemy, which might lead to a surrender be-
ftoerrye
;a
third,
shot could be thrown from the steam bat-
by unequal heating the tubes some-
times gave way, allowing the water to escape, and
though the quantity being small would not cause