Kitabı oku: «Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879», sayfa 4
Pneumatic Clocks
To the Editor of the Scientific American:
In the description of the pneumatic clock, copied from La Nature, and published in your journal of date 1st of March, the invention is credited to me. Such is not the case. By an arrangement between Mr. Wenzel, Mr. Brandon of Paris, and myself, patents have been obtained in France, England, etc., for the clock, and issued in my name; but the honor of the invention belongs exclusively to Hermann J. Wenzel, of San Francisco.
Yours faithfully,
E. J. Muybridge.
San Francisco, Cal., February 27, 1879.
The Ice Cave of Decorah, Iowa
To the Editor of the Scientific American:
Some years ago I visited the "Ice Cave" of Decorah, Winneshiek county, Iowa, and having since been unable to receive any explanation of the wonderful phenomenon exhibited by it, I write, hoping that you or some correspondent may explain the paradox.
The thriving town of Decorah lies in a romantic valley of the Upper Iowa River, and the cave is almost within its corporate limits. Following the left bank of the stream, one soon reaches the vicinity, and with a hard scramble through a loose shale, up the side of a precipitous hill, forming the immediate bank of the river, the entrance is gained—an opening 5 feet wide and 8 feet high. These dimensions generally describe the cave's section. From the entrance the course is a steep decline—seldom less than 40°. At times the ceiling is so low that progress on hands and knees is necessary. About 125 feet from the entrance the "Ice Chamber" is reached. At this spot the cave widens into a well proportioned room, 8 by 12 feet. The floor is solid ice of unknown thickness, and on the right hand wall of the room a curtain of ice drops to the floor, from a crevice extending horizontally in the rock at the height of one's eyes. Close examination discovers the water oozing from this crevice, and as it finds its way down the side it freezes in the low temperature of the chamber. Singularly this one crevice, and that no wider than a knife edge, furnishes this, nature's ice house, with the necessary water. It was a hot day in August, the thermometer marking 80° in the shade when the visit was made, and comparatively the cold was intense. In common with all visitors, we detached some large pieces of ice and with them hurriedly departed, glad to regain the warmth of the outside world.
The most remarkable fact in connection with this wonder is that the water only freezes in the summer. As the cold of actual winter comes on the ice of the cave gradually melts, and when the river below is frozen by the fierce cold of Northern Iowa, the ice has disappeared and a muddy slush has taken the place of the frigid floor. I would add that the ice chamber forms the terminus of the cave. Beyond a shallow crevice in the crumbling rock forbids further advance. The rock formation of this region is the Portland sandstone.
Why should the temperature of the ice chamber be such as to freeze the water trickling into it? And above all, why should the ice disappear with the cold of winter?
Mansfield, O. H. M. W.
THE WRITING TELEGRAPH
On the evening of February 26, 1879, the writing telegraph of Mr. E. A. Cowper, of London, was exhibited in operation before the Society of Telegraph Engineers, in that city. It is a curious and remarkable invention. By its use the handwriting of the operator may be transmitted, but a double circuit, that is, two telegraph wires, are used. The operator moves with his hand an upright pointer or stylus, with which he writes the message on paper. The stylus has two arms connected with it, one of which arms, when the stylus makes an upward movement, causes a current to be sent over one wire, while the other arm causes a current to pass over the other wire when the stylus is moved laterally. These two motions are, at the receiving end of the line, made to operate on the needles of galvanometers, and the latter are by silk threads combined or connected with a delicately suspended ink tube, from which a minute stream of ink falls upon the strip of paper below it; the arrangement being such that the combined motions of the galvanometers so move the ink pen as to make it correspond to the motion of the stylus at the sending end. The apparatus is said to work very well, and it is expected that it will form a useful adjunct to the art of telegraphy. We present herewith a facsimile of writing done by this new instrument, which has been worked with success over a line of forty miles length. It is hardly probable that it can compete in rapidity with some of the telegraph instruments now in use; but for many purposes it is likely to become important, while in point of ingenuity it is certainly a great achievement, and the author is deserving of the highest credit.
A Rare Geological Specimen
Rev. R. M. Luther, while absent in attendance upon the Missionary Convention, held in Addison, Vt., obtained through the kindness of the Rev. Mr. Nott a rare and curious geological specimen from the shores of Lake Champlain. It is a slab of limestone, about eleven inches long by six inches wide, which seems to be composed almost entirely of fossils. There is not half an inch square of the surface which does not show a fossil. There are many varieties, some of which have not been identified, but among those which have been are many remains of the Trinucleus conceniricus, some specimens of Petraia, fragments of the Orthis, a number of Discinæ, several well preserved specimens of Leptenæ, and impressions of Lingula. The latter is the only shell which has existed from the first dawn of life until the present time without change. The specimens of existing Lingula are precisely similar to those found in the earliest geological formations. There are also in the slab several rare specimens of seaweed, remains of which are seldom found at so early an age in the geological history of the world. The slab belongs to the lower Silurian formation, the first in which organic remains are found. It is probably from the Trenton epoch of that age. If geologists can be trusted, at the time the little animals, whose remains are thus preserved, were living, the only part of this continent which had appeared above the primeval ocean was a strip of land along the present St. Lawrence River and the northern shores of the great lakes, with a promontory reaching out toward the Adirondacks, and a few islands along what is now the Atlantic coast line.—Bennington (Vt.) Banner.
COWPER'S WRITING TELEGRAPH
The most recent of the brilliant series of telegraphic marvels which has from time to time, and especially of late, engaged the attention of the world, is the "telegraphic pen" of Mr. E. A. Cowper, the well known engineer of Great George street, Westminster. This ingenious apparatus, which constitutes the first real telegraph, was publicly shown by its inventor at the meeting of the Society of Telegraph Engineers on Wednesday, February 26.
There had been no lack of copying telegraphs hitherto. We have Bakewell's, Casselli's, Meyer's, and D'Arlincourt's, so recently tried at our General Post Office by Mr. Preece. All of these instruments telegraph an almost perfect copy of the writing or sketch submitted to them by means of synchronous mechanism. But the process is necessarily complex and slow; whereas by the new device a person may take the writing pencil in his hand, and himself transmit his message in the act of writing it.
The principle which guided Mr. Cowper to a solution of the problem which he has successfully overcome, is the well known mathematical fact that the position of any point in a curve can be determined by its distance from two rectangular co-ordinates. It follows, then, that every position of the point of a pencil, stylus, or pen, as it forms a letter, can be determined by its distance from two fixed lines, say the adjacent edges of the paper. Moreover it is obvious that if these distances could be transmitted by telegraph and recombined so as to give a resultant motion to a duplicate pen, a duplicate copy of the original writing would be produced. But inasmuch as the writing stylus moves continuously over the paper, the process of transmission would require to be a continuous one; that is to say, the current traversing the telegraph line, and conveying the distances in question (or what comes to the same thing, the up and down, and direct sidelong ranges of the stylus) would require to vary continuously in accordance with the range to be transmitted.
Mr. Cowper effects this by employing two separate telegraphic circuits, each with its own wire, battery, sending, and receiving apparatus. One of these circuits is made to transmit the up and down component writing of the pencil's motion, while the other simultaneously transmits its sidelong component. At the receiving station these two components are then recomposed by a pantograph arrangement of taut cords, or levers, and the resultant motion is communicated to the duplicate pen at that place. The plan adopted by Mr. Cowper to transmit each continuously varying component is to cause the resistance of the circuit to vary very closely with the component in question. Fig. 5 shows how the apparatus is theoretically arranged for this purpose. P is the writing style, which is held in the writer's hand in the ordinary way, while he shapes the letters one by one on paper pulled uniformly underneath by means of clockwork. To P are attached, at right angles, two arms, a a, one for each circuit; but as it is only necessary to consider one of the circuits, say that sending up and down motions, we will confine our attention for the present to the arm, a. One pole of the sending battery, B, is connected to the arm, a, the other pole being connected to earth. Now the arm, a, is fitted with a sliding contact at its free extremity, and as the pencil, P, is moved in writing, a slides lengthwise across the edges of a series of thin metal contact plates, C, insulated from each other by paraffined paper. Between each pair of these plates there is a resistance coil, C, and the last of these is connected through the last plate to the line, L. It will be seen that as a slides outward across the plates the current from the battery has to pass through fewer coils, since a short-circuits a number of coils proportional to its motion. But the fewer of these coils in circuit the stronger will be the current in the line; so that the extent of the motion of the arm, a, in the direction of its length, that is to say, the direct component of the motion of the pencil along the line of the arm, a, is attended by a corresponding change in the current traversing the line. If the pencil makes a long up and down stroke there will be a strong current in the line, if a short one there will be a weak current, and so on. A precisely similar arrangement is used to transmit the sidelong motion of the pencil along the line, L.
Fig. 5.
The current from the line, L, flows at the receiving station through a powerful galvanometer, G, to earth. The galvanometer has a stout needle, one tip of which is connected to a duplicate pen, P, by a thread, t, which is kept taut by a second thread stretched by a spring, s'. The current from the line, L', flows through a similar galvanometer, G', to earth. The needle of G' is also connected to the pen, P, by a taut thread, t', stretched by means of the spring, s. Now, since the needle of each of these galvanometers deflects in proportion to the strength of the current flowing through its coil, the points of these two needles keep moving with the varying currents. But since these currents vary the motions of the sending pen, the receiving pen controlled by the united movements of the needles will trace out a close copy of the original writing. We give on another page a facsimile of a sentence written by Mr. Cowper's telegraph.
THE COWPER WRITING TELEGRAPH.
The receiving pen is a fine glass siphon, drawing off aniline ink from a small glass holder. There are thirty-two coils, C, in each circuit, with a corresponding number of contact plates, c, so as to get accuracy of working. A few Daniell's cells are sufficient to operate the apparatus, and writing has been already sent successfully over a line 40 miles in length. The writing may be received either of the same size or larger or smaller than the original, as the case may be. At present the writing must not be too hurried, that is, unless the characters are bold and well formed; but further improvement will, of course, quicken the working of the apparatus.
The engravings, Figs. 1 to 4, illustrate the actual apparatus. Fig. 4 is a plan of the sending instrument, with the writing pencil, a, the traveling paper, b, the light connecting rods or arms, d (which correspond to a in the theoretical diagram above), the series of metal contact plates over which these arms slide, the resistance coils connected to these plates, and the battery and line wires. It will be seen that each arm, d, is connected to its particular battery, and each set of contact plates to its particular line. Fig. 3 is an elevation of the sending instrument, in which a is the pencil as before, c c the contact plates over which the arms, d d, slide, f f the coils, and b the traveling slip of paper.
Fig. 2 is a plan of the receiving instrument, in which h h are the light pivoted needles surrounded by coils of fine insulated copper wires, i i, and controlled in their zero position by the electro-magnets, j j j j, placed underneath, the whole forming a pair of galvanoscopes or current detecters, one for each line. It will be understood that the varying currents from the lines are allowed to flow through the coils, i i, so as to deflect the needles, and that the deflections of the needles follow, so to speak, the variations of the currents. The electro-magnets are magnetized by a local battery; permanent magnets might, however, take their place with a gain in simplicity.
Now the writing pen, k, is connected to the nearest tip of the needle, h, of each galvanoscope by threads, n n, which are kept taut by the fibers, o1 o2 o3, the springs, o, and the pins, o4. In this way the motions of the needles are recombined in the motion of the duplicate pen upon the paper, p.
Fig. 1 is an elevation of the receiving instrument, in which i i are the coils as before, j j j j the controlling electro-magnets, k is the writing siphon dipping with its short leg into the ink well, m, and l is the bridge from which the writing siphon is suspended by means of a thread and spring. The long leg of the siphon reaches down to the surface of the paper, p, which is pulled along beneath it in contact with the film of ink filling the point of the tube. When the siphon is at rest its point marks a zero line along the middle of the paper, but when the receiver is working, the siphon point forms each letter of the message upon the paper as it passes.—Engineering.
ALUMINUM
The splendid exhibit of the French aluminum manufacturers at the late Exhibition has again called attention to that metal, which is so admirably adapted to many purposes on account of its great lightness and its stability under the influence of the atmosphere. While aluminum industry has heretofore been thought to be confined to France solely, we are now told by Mr. C. Bambery, in the Annual Report of the Society of Berlin Instrument Makers, that for some years past aluminum has been extensively manufactured in Berlin.
Three firms especially (Stückradt, Häcke, and Schultze) are engaged in this branch of industry.
The articles manufactured principally are nautical instruments, as sextants, compasses, etc. The German navy is supplied throughout with aluminum instruments. As a proof of the superiority of German aluminum, it may here be mentioned that the normal sets of weights and balances used by the International Commission for the regulation of weights and measures, which lately was in session at Paris, were obtained from Stückradt, in Berlin, and not from any of the firms at Paris, the reputed seat of aluminum industry.
Aluminum is, in Berlin, generally used pure, and cast pieces only are composed of aluminum containing about 5 per cent of silver.
Nevertheless the use of aluminum will remain limited, even in case the cost of manufacturing it could be materially reduced, until some method shall have been discovered by which aluminum may be soldered.
This difficulty has, in spite of all efforts, not yet been overcome, and for some purposes, to which the metal would otherwise be well adapted, it remains so far unavailable. Here then is a chance for some ingenious mind.
AN IMPROVED DOOR BOLT
The accompanying engraving represents, in perspective and in section, an improved door bolt, recently patented by Mr. Thomas Hoesly, of New Glaras, Wis.
HOESLY'S DOOR BOLT.
The principal features of this bolt will be understood by reference to the engraving. On the plate or body are cast two loops or guides for the bolt, and the plate is slotted under the bolt, and a lug projects into the slot and bears against a spring contained by a small casing riveted to the back of the plate. The end of the bolt is beveled, and its operation is similar to that of the ordinary door latch. Two handles are provided, one of which is of sufficient length to reach through the door, and a pawl or dog accompanies the bolt, which may be attached to the door with a single screw, and is to be used in locking the door. The bolt is very simple and strong, suitable for shops, out-buildings such as barns, stables, etc., and some of the doors of dwellings.
Further information may be obtained by addressing the inventor, as above.
Chimney Flues
Messrs. W. H. Jackson & Co., of this city, whose long experience in treating refractory flues gives weight to their opinion, communicate to the American Architect the following useful information:
To secure a good draught the chimney should be of sufficient size, should be carried up above surrounding objects, should be as straight as possible throughout its length, and should be as smooth as possible inside, to avoid friction. As a draught is caused by unequal temperatures, the chimney should be so arranged as to avoid a rapid radiation of heat. If in an exterior wall there should be at least 8 inches of brickwork between the flue and the exterior surface. For country houses it is much better to have the chimneys run up through the interior, as the flue is more easily kept warm, and the heat that is radiated helps to warm the house. The most frequent cause of a "smoky chimney" is the insufficient size of the flue for the grate or fireplace connected therewith. The flue should not be less than one eighth the capacity of the square of the width and height of the grate or fireplace. That is, if the grate has a front opening 20 inches wide and 26 inches high, the flue should be 8 in. x 8 in.; or, with an opening 36 inches wide and 32 inches high, the flue should be 12 in. x 12 in.; and, to get the best result, the opening into the flue from the grate or fireplace should be of a less number of square inches than the square of the flue, and never larger, as no more air should be admitted at the inlet than can be carried through the flue. Where there is more than one inlet to the same flue, the sum of all the inlets should not more than equal the size of the flue. A number of stoves may be connected with the same flue, one above another, if this rule is observed.
A square flue is better than a narrow one, as in two flues containing the same number of square inches the square flue would have the smallest amount of wall surface, and consequently less friction for the ascending currents, and less absorption of heat by the walls. Chimneys should be closely built, having no cracks nor openings through which external air may be drawn to weaken the draught. If they could be made throughout their length as impervious to air as a tube of glass, with interior surface as smooth, one cause of smoky chimneys would be removed. A downward current of air is frequently caused by some contiguous object higher than the chimney, against which the wind strikes. This higher object may sometimes be quite a distance from the chimney, and still affect it badly. A good chimney top constructed to prevent a down draught will remedy this difficulty. Each grate or fireplace should have a flue to itself. Under very favorable conditions, two grates or fireplaces might be connected with the same flue, but it is not a good plan. We have known grates and fireplaces connected with two flues, where they have been built under a window for instance, and, owing to there being insufficient room for a flue of suitable size, a flue has been run up on each side of the window. This is a very bad plan, and never can work well; it requires too much heat to warm both flues, and if the room in which the grate or fireplace is situated should be pretty close, so that there was no other entrance for air, there is danger that it would circulate down one flue and up the other, forcing smoke out of the fireplace into the room.
