414
EXPOSITION AT VIENNA.
extending to all parts of the world. Austria, Hungary and Russia afford to them a market something like that which we find in the same region for our mowers and reapers.
These portables were very thoroughly built, with large boilers and very large fire-boxes. The engines were almost universally steam-jacketed. Of the eighty or ninety engines in the Machinery Hall by far the majority were slide-valve, with a cut-off on the back of the main valve. Of these, the better class were arranged to alter the cut-off valve by hand. A few were governed by the automatic variations of the cutoff valve, either through a link or through a movement of the eccentric. In three cases of the latter type of engines the governor was placed on thq main shaft, in one way or another, the shaft being also the governor shaft, and the momentum of the balls being resisted, of course, by springs.
Quite a considerable proportion of these engines were built with the Corliss style of frames, which seem to be much in favor in Europe; and some eight were fitted with the Corliss valve and cut-off*, with such variations as the experience of different makers suggested.*
Although the Corliss cut-off and valve have been adopted by at least two English engineering firms, there were no exhibits by them, except of slide-valve engines, and it may be stated generally that the English look much more universally than we, to simplicity and endurance as the first qualities in their machines. The continental builders have quite generally adopted this type for engines, for such purposes as cotton and woollen-mills, and other situations where economy is a serious consideration.
The question of the adoption of steam-jacket was examined by the writer. The English makers, with one exception, had their cylinders on this principle, on every engine which pretended to be built with an eye to economy.f Even their portables were, with the exception of Garrett & Sons’, designed
* The extent to which this engine has been adopted by the continental builders, who have copied it from the English makers, is another example of the necessity to our inventors of a better patent law in Europe. It is true the jury, in this branch, had the grace to give to Mr. Corliss one of the nine diplomas of honor accorded to the United States, although he himself exhibited nothing.
t Mr. Bourne, an eminent English authority, in the last edition of his work on steam- engines, goes so far as to assert that the advantages of any considerable rate of expansion are wholly lost without the use of the steam-jacket.