420

Ramseye’s Patent.

[Book IV.

It may perhaps be said, that steam is not mentioned; still it is clearly im-plied in the second device, and was probably used in the third, fiftb andseventb. The very expression “ to raise water by fire,” is the same thatPorta, Decaus, and other old authors, used when referring to such ap-plications of steam. Worcester , Papin, Savery and Newcomen, all de-scribed their machines as inventions for “ raising water by fireand hencethey were named “ fire water-works,” “ fire machines,” and “ fire engines.”It should moreover be remembered that the Word steam was not then invogue. It is not once used by the translators of the Bible. The fluid wasgenerally referred to as air, or wind, or smoke, according to the appear-ances it presented. “Rarefying water into ayer by fier,” and similar ex-pressions, were common. The idea of air in motion, or wind, was alsoapplied to currents of steam: thus we read of “heating water to makewind,” and eolipiles were designated “ vessels to produce wind.” From theform of clouds which steam assumes when discharged into the atmosphere,it was also named smoke: thus Job calls it, in a passage already quoted;and Porta, in describing the apparatus No. 187, speaks of it both as smokeand air. “ The water [in the bottle] must be kept heated in this way untilno more of it remains; and as long as the water shall smoke, (sfumera)the air will press the water in the box,” &c.—and again, “from that youcan conclude how much water has run out, and into how mucb air it hasbeen changed.” Had Ramseye therefore called bis device a steam ma-chine, its nature would not have been so well understood as by the titlehe gave it, if indeed it could have been comprehended at all by the formerterm. The expression “raising water by fire''’’ appears to have as dis-tinctly indicated, in the 17th Century, a steam-machine, as the term steam-engine does now ; and there is no account extant of any device either pro-posed or used, in that Century, for raising water from wells and mines byfire, except it was by means of steam.

The date of this patent being so near that of the publication of Branca’sbook, it may perhaps be thought that Ramseye derived some crude notionsfrom it of applying a blast of steam to drive mills and raise water, as sug-gested by the Italian ; but we should rather suppose some modification of,or device similar to, Porta’s (see page 408) was intended in No. 2, andthat Nos. 3, 5 and 7 were deduced from it. When once an efficient modeof raising water by steam (like No. 187) was realized, some application ofit to propel machinery would readily occur. We know that both Saveryand Papin and others proposed to work mills, by discharging the waterthey raised upon overshot wheels; and this idea was so obvious and na-tural, that hundreds of persons have proposed it in later times withoutknowing that it had previously been done.

From the Order in which the first three devices are noticed in the privi-lege, it is possible that they were all modifications of the same thing; thatthe second and third were deduced from the first, and consequently in-vented independently of any previous steam machines. The Operation ofmaking saltpetre or nitre consists principally in boiling, in huge vats orcauldrons, the lixivium containing the nitrous earth; and from the largequantities of water and fuel required, was formerly carried on in suchplaces only as afforded these in abundance. At such works, the idea ofemploying the vast volumes of vapor (which escaped uselessly into theair) to raise the hot, and subsequently cold, liquids, would naturally occurto an observing mind, and especially when the subjectof raising water bysteam was exciting attention. Certainly the idea was as likely to occur topractical men while engaged in the manufacture of nitre in the beginmngof the 17th Century, as it was to Worcester and others in the middle of it