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| Steam-powered generator, 1890s. |
— The Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1824, 513.
What can be more palpably
absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice
as fast as stage coaches! We should as soon expect the people … to suffer themselves
to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s ricochet rockets as to trust themselves to
the mercy of such a machine going at such a rate.
— Letter to the Quarterly Review, March
1825.
Erky-Perky was a worm,
a little worm was he:
He sat upon the railroad track, the train he did not see.
Rumble, rumble, squelch, squelch,
Erky-Perky!
— Anon.
The engine had stopped
to take a supply of water, and several of the gentlemen in the directors' carriage
had jumped out to look about them. Lord Wilton, Count Batthyany, Count Matuscenitz
and Mr. Huskisson among the rest were standing talking in the middle of the road,
when and engine on the other line, which was parading up and down merely to show
its speed, was seen coming down upon them like lightening. The most active of those
in peril sprang back into their seats; Lord Wilton saved his life only by rushing
behind the Duke's carriage, and Count Matuscenitz had but just leaped into it, with
the engine all but touching his heels as he did so; while poor Mr. Huskisson, less
active from the effects of age and ill-health, bewildered, too, by the frantic cries
of, “Stop the engine! Clear the track!”
that resounded on all sides, completely lost his head, looked helplessly to the
right and left, and was instantaneously prostrated by the fatal machine, which dashed
down like a thunderbolt upon him, and passed over his leg, smashing and mangling
it in the most horrible way.
— Lady Wilton (d. 1858), in a letter to actress Fanny Kemble (1809 – 1893).
Have you seen the Bush
by moonlight, from the train, go running by,
Here a patch of glassy water, there a glimpse of mystic sky?
Have you heard the still voice calling, yet so warm and yet so cold:
‘I’m the Mother-Bush that bore you! Come to me when you are old!’
Did you see the bush
below you sweeping darkly to the range,
All unchanged and all unchanging, yet so very old and strange!
Did you hear the Bush a-calling, when your heart was young and bold,
‘I’m the Mother-Bush that nursed you! Come to me when you are old!’
Through the long, vociferous
cutting as the night train swiftly sped,
Did you hear the grey Bush calling from the pine-ridge overhead:
‘You have seen the seas and cities, all seems done, and all seems told;
I’m the Mother-Bush that bore you! Come to me when you are old!’
— Henry Lawson (1867 – 1922), On the Night
Train.
Commuter — one who spends
his life,
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train
And then rides back to shave again.
— E. B. White, ‘Commuter’.
I am selling what the
whole world wants; power.
— Matthew Boulton (1728 – 1809), offering to sell steam engines to Catherine the
Great.
The fundamental concept
in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental
concept in physics.
— Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970), Power: A
New Social Analysis.
Energy is Eternal Delight
— William Blake (1757 – 1827), The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell.
In the seventeenth century
there were, broadly speaking, two altogether different views regarding the nature
of heat. These have been termed the energetic and materialistic interpretations
respectively …
— A. J. Berry, From Classical to Modern Chemistry,
1954, Dover edition 1968, 19.
Temperature gradients
in ordinary [volcanically] quiet areas range from less than 10 to as much as 50
degrees Celsius per kilometre.
— A. E. Benfield, ‘The Earth’s Heat’, Scientific
American Reader (1953), 71.
Heat engines may be
worked backwards, so as by means of work to raise heat from a colder to a hotter
body. this is the principle of the air or ether freezing machines now coming into
extensive use. In this application a small amount of work goes a long way, as the
range of temperature through which the heat has to be raised is small. If the work
required for the freezing machine is obtained from a steam engine, the final result
of the operation is that a fall of heat in the prime mover is made to produce a
rise of heat in the freezing machine, and the question arises whether this operation
may be effected without the intervention of mechanical work.
— John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842 – 1919), in a talk given to
the Royal Institution in 1875.
The workshops, the machines
themselves, show what has been achieved, but results depend on individual effort.
To understand a machine it has to be divined. This is the reason why talent for
mechanics is so rare, and can so easily go astray, and this is why it is hardly
ever manifested without the boldness and the errors which, in the infancy of science,
characterise genius.
— Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743 – 1794), on the
training of technicians, quoted by Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, 67.
The discovery of the
steam engine owed its birth, like most human inventions, to rude attempts that have
been attributed to different persons, while the real author is not certainly known.
It is, however, less in the first attempts that the principal discovery consists
than in the successive improvements that have brought steam engines to the conditions
in which we find them today. There is almost as great a distance between the first
apparatus in which the expansive force of steam was displayed and the existing machine
as between the first raft that man ever made and the modern vessel.
— Nicolas Leonard Sadi Carnot (1796 – 1832), Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, 1824, 5.
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