Chariton courier. (Keytesville, Chariton County, Mo.) 1878-current, 1879-08-02
The Steam Engine of the Future.

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Supposing a good and cheap small
engine to be available-an engine that
will be strong, simple, safe, light, noise
less, and economical in fuel-not only
would all its industrial applications be
extended, but it would find a new and
wide sphere of usefulness in ministering
to domestic wants, one of the most wide
ly pervading of which is the want of a
motive power. In American hotels
steam engines have long been employed
for brushing boots and cleaning knives
They are docile and inexpensive Helots
of the age, and the domestic production
of the electric light is new and import
ant sphere for their energies. But, be-
sides these functions, g domestic engine
may be employed in roasting meat,
driving washing-machines and mangles,
driving sewing-machines, in brushing
hair, in preparing aerated waters, and
in the country for pumping, for saving
wood, and for performing many
other laborious operations. A
steam engine may be made
to cool houses in summer and to warm
them in winter, to maintain fountains
in conservatories, to work punkas, to
produce ice, and to create and maintain
vacuum in safes for the preservation
of meat. For such purposes the engines
must obviously be of the simplest, most
compact, and most inexpensive charac-
ter, and should lie attached to the boil
er, so that the whole may be lifted in q
piece, like a hall stove. The boiler
should be provided with a self acting
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gas, which has only to be lighted to en-
able the engine to be put into operation.
Gas companies will find ample compen-
sation for the loss of their lighting func
ton in the creation of a new heating
function which will become larger and
more remunerative than the lighting
has ever been. Instead of extracting
from the Coal only the illuminating
gases, the whole fuel should be turned
into combustible gas by the aid of su-
perheated steam, and all the fires of
houses could be maintained by this
cheap gas burning in jets amid pumice,
which it would keep red-hot. There
would then be neither dust from CRATES
nor smoke from chimneys, and the gas
works would supply the fuel that is
necessary for the generation of the elec-
trio light. The application of the steam
engine to the propulsion of carriages,
omnibuses ard cabs is now only him
dered by its too heavy weight and too
high cost. Asphalt pavcments, which
are Objectionable for horses, afford for
steam. carriages surface as eligible for
easy traction as a railway, and without
any countervailing fault. All wheeled
vehicles, whether required to travel at a
high or a low speed, will be propelled
by steam instead of horses as soon as
the stea N engine is made sufficiently
light and sufficiently cheap to warrant
the substitution. Life-boats, instead of
being open boats propelled by num-
Der of men, should be decked
boats propelled by a steam-engine
and managed by only two men, one to
steer the boat and the other to attend
to the engine. Such boats should be
propelled by water-jet which will al
ways act, whatever may be the rough
ness of the sea and whether the stern of
the boat is in or out of the water. The
use of the steam engine for irrigation in
connection with the centrifugal pump is
an application of which the sphere is
limited only by the cost and the deficient
portability of the apparatus. To render
the class of small engines so much more
portable, so much more simple and so
much less costly as to remove the ex-
isting impediments to their use may
certainly be accounted one of the most
important problems of the present time,
and trust it is not presumptuous to
hope that the curiosity hints here given
NAV accelerate the desired solution
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