Specification of Arthur Woolf : steam and other boilers.

  • Woolf, Arthur.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Specification of Arthur Woolf : steam and other boilers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Woolf s Improved Apparatus for Converting Water, $c. into Steam. even without condensing the steam, but by simply allowing it to escape into the atmosphere after it has done its office, as proposed by Mr. James Watt, in the Specification of his Patent, dated January Fifth, One thousand seven hundred and sixty-nine, where lie says, engines may be worked by the force of steam only, by discharging the steam into the open air. In all 5 cases where it is desireable to heat or boil water or other fluids and sub¬ stances without the direct application of fire to the vessel or vessels containing them, which in such cases become secondary boilers, the use of my apparatus will produce effects superior to any obtainable by other means, no more being necessary than to make tfie vessel or secondary boiler, containing the water or 10 other fluids and the substances immersed or dissolved in or blended or mixed with the water or other fluid, to communicate by means of a tube or tubes with the prime boiler constructed in the manner before described. In such cases, as in making extracts of every kind for the various purposes of arts and manu¬ factures, and for the simple boiling of water or watery fluids, the steam should 15 go directly into the vessel or secondary boiler, whose contents are to be heated or boiled, and the orifice or orifices of the pipe or pipes through which the steam is conveyed should go to a considerable depth in the fluid, that the steam may be the better able to give off its heat and be condensed before it can reach the surface; and in every such case an allowance should be made for the increase 20 which will be made to the quantity of liquid in the vessel to be heated, by the quantity of steam which, will be condensed in the same before the process be ended. The vessels into which the steam is thrown may be either open or close as the nature of circumstances may require, but where extracts are to be made from vegetable or other matters from which extracts are or may be made, 25 as from hops, bark, drugs, and dye stuffs, for brewing, tanning, dying, and other processes, the material will be much more completely exhausted of all their valuable parts, and in many instances they will be completely dissolved, by employing close vessels, which in that case must be made very strong, a thing not difficult to be accomplished, when it is recollected that they may be 30 at a distance from, and consequently out of the power of being deranged by, the fire, and that they may be surrounded with, and as it were buried in, massy stone or brick wrork, in addition to other and obvious means of securing them. My apparatus so employed becomes in fact an improved Papins digester on a small scale. I do not wish to be understood as claiming the merit of having 35 been the first who applied steam in the manner just described to boil water and other fluids, but merely as pointing out an important use to which my apparatus is applicable, and in which the effect obtained will be much greater than by any other means.