422
Raising Water by Steam, from Kircher. [Book IV.
tinues—“ The larger you make this vessel, the more stränge it will appearin its effects, so the lights [wicks] be proporcionable. Fill the vessellhälfe full of water, and set the lights on fire underneath it, and after ashort time, if you turn the holes that are on the sides of the pipes, thatthey may answer one another, the water being by little and little con-verted into ayer [steam] by the heat of the lights that are underneath, willbreath forth at the mouth of the cock : but if you turn the mouth of thecock the other way, that the holes at the bottom of the pipes may answereach to other, then there being no vent for the ayer to breath out, it willpresse the water and force it to ascend the pipe, and issue out where theayer breathed out before. This is a thing may move great admiracion inthe unskilfull, and such as understand it not. Other devices, and thosemuch more stränge in their effects, may be contrived from hence ,” a
Kircher, in 1641, described in his Ars Magnetiecfi the device for raisingwater figured in the margin, a model of which was foundin his museum after his death. A close vessel containingthe water to be elevated is connected by a pipe that pro-ceeds from its upper part to the top of the boiler, whichis supported on a trevet. When the boiler was heated,steam ascended through the pipe, and accumulating in theupper vessel, forced the water up the jet-pipe as repre.sented.
This, it will be seen, is Porta’s machine (No. 187)adapted to the Operation of raising liquids, which it ex-hibits in a very neat and satisfactory manner. It is nothowever equally clear that Kircher had any idea of adapt-ing the plan to the draining of mines, or other hydraulicpurposes in the arts. Had such been the case, he wouldmost likely have mentioned it in his Mundus Subterraneus,a work published some years afterwards, and in the se-cond volume of which he figures and describes the ordi.nary machines then in use, viz. the bücket and windlass,chain of pots, chain pump, and atmospheric pumps. Theform of the model (an imitation of a vase supported on acolumn) rendered it an appropriate addition to his phi-losophical apparatus.
In 1643, the great discovery of atmospheric pressurewas made ; a discovery whose influence, like that of theatmosphere itself, is feit more or less in every art and everyScience. It led in a very short time to a series of inventions of the highestvalue, among which the reciprocating steam-engine should probably beplaced. We mention it here in chronological Order, that its influence mdeveloping and improving the machine just named may be more readilyappreciated when we come to notice subsequent attempts to impart motionby steam.
No. 190. Kircher.1641.
a John Bäte , who published a treatise onFire-works in 1635, was perhaps the Compilerof this curious volume. Strutt, in his Sports and Pastimes of the People of England,quotes Bate’s book, but it would seem that the same cuts w.ere not in both, for whenspeaking of boys’ kites, Strutt öbserves that the earliest notice of them that he could findin books was in an English and French Dictionary of 1690; whereas there is a figureof a man flying one, with crackers and other fire-works attached to the tail, in the se-cond part of “ Art and Nature. 7 ’ .
b This work was published in quarto, at Rome and Colonne, in 1641; and in folio,at Rome , in 1654. Catalogue of Kircher’s Works at the end of the first volume ofMundus Subterraneus. Amsterdam , 1665.