All about engineering; a book for boys on the great civil and mechanical engineering wonders of the world

Front matter

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Preface

It is in the belief that there are few boys throughout the confines of the British Empire who are not more or less keenly interested in engineering that I have ventured to add one more volume to the many that have appeared during the last few years on various aspects of the subject. The all-comprehensiveness of engineering relieves me of any necessity for having to explain that the book does not pretend to cover the whole field of the subject, even though it could only do so imperfectly. I have treated it rather personally, dealing with those branches that have made the strongest appeal to me, and have been forced, in consequence, to omit all reference to others that some of my readers may justly think should have been included. A word of explanation is necessary, however, as to the almost complete absence of any direct reference to machines as such. I have avoided this aspect of the subject deliberately, because I wished rather to emphasise the character of those great exploits that we group together under the title of engineering works. I have gratefully to acknowledge the courtesy that I have received from editors of many papers, and to give my best thanks to the editors of The Morning Post and The Standard for leave to reprint

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Preface articles of my own that appeared in their columns, to the editors of Engineering for the free use that they allowed me to make of the articles that appeared in their pages on the Panama Canal, and on the harnessing of the Nile, to the editor of The Technical World Magazine for permission to reproduce the most thrilling account that I have ever read of bridge construction, and for much other assistance, and to the editor of Munsey's Magazine for a striking quotation from a most suggestive article on the passing of the horse. I have borrowed my material freely from the experts in different subjects, and am indebted particularly to Mr. Charles Bright's works on the telegraph ; to Sir William Willcocks' accounts of the work done in Egypt and Mesopotamia ; to the works of Alan Stevenson and Price Edwards on lighthouses and seamarks ; to the reports of the National Physical Laboratory ; to H.M. Office of Works, to Messrs. L. B. Mouchel and Partners, Ltd., and to the Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers, Ltd., for information on concrete ; to the books of Mr, E. F. Knight, Mr. G. W. MacGeorge, Mr. Athol Maudslay, Mr. W. A. Forbes and Mr. A. C. Burmester, and to the Roorkee Treatise on Civil Engineering for information on roads, but above all on this subject to the kindness of Colonel R. E. Crompton, who placed much valuable information at my disposal ; to Professor Frederick Soddy, who allowed me to make a long extract from his book on " The Interpretation of Radium " ; to Messrs. J. and H. Maclaren, Messrs. Marshall, Sons and Co., and Messrs. John Fowler

Preface

IX and Co., for information on agricultural machinery ; to Mr. H. W. Hughes, whose " Text-book of Coal Mining " forms the basis of the chapter on Mining ; to Mr. A. Beeby Thompson's " Petroleum Mining and Oil Field Development " ; Mr. Archibald Williams' book on " The Romance of Mining," to which I am indebted for many hints ; to the work of Mr. Philip Phillipps on the Forth Bridge and other bridges ; to Messrs. Griffiths and Co. for their information as to the work of a contractor ; to Sir William Fitzmaurice's account of the London Sewer System ; to Professor John Perry's " Spinning Tops," and to a pamphlet by Dr. James G. Gray and Mr. George Burnside on the Motor Gyrostat ; to Mr. C. Prelini's and Mr. C. S. Hill's work on Tunnelling, and to Mr. Carl Staniforth for kindly giving me a most graphic history of the manufacture of a file, on which my own account is based. My thanks are also due, especially, to my colleague, Mr. E. H. Rann, for the loan of several papers and books from his library, to the Secretary of the University of London, University College, for the information he gave me on the making of an engineer, and to Mr. L. R. Gleason for the many suggestions he put forward while reading the proofs.

My best thanks are also due to Mrs. Marshall and her assistants for the rapidity and care with which they carried through the typing of what must have proved a troublesome manuscript.

Apart from these acknowledgments, I am conscious that I have borrowed also from other sources, as will be

X

Preface seen from the references in the text. I have made a special point, where possible, of quoting from the actual accounts of those engineers who have left records of their own works, as, for instance, in the case of the Severn Tunnel, partly for their intrinsic interest, and partly that those who wish to pursue the subject farther may know where they can get the information at first hand. There must, I am afraid, prove to be cases where I have found it impossible to acknowledge my sources of information, as in the course of reading one acquires facts and forgets whence they have been derived. In conclusion, I would state that I have made every effort to avoid falling into mistakes while treating a technical subject popularly, but in view of the extensiveness of the subject, I would ask my readers' indulgence for any errors that they may detect.

Gordon D. Knox.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

1. Historical i

3. Harnessing the Nile : The Great Dams at Assouan

Chapter I

The history of engineering may fairly be regarded as the history of the world's civilisation, and a good case could be made out for the view that it is through the engineering and mechanical skill of the few that man has reached to his present state of pre-eminence. It is a matter that requires no argument to show that the leisure which man has acquired has been won because he has used his brain to supplement the weakness of his physical strength, and it is at first sight an attractive enough view that it is because man exercised his special faculties that they grew and developed and made him pre-eminent. Such an interpretation is not, when rightly considered, inconsistent with the teaching of any school of biology ; it can be brought within the scope of most hypotheses, and I wiU admit at once that I should have been inclined only a year ago to look on this as the simplest way of explaining man's progress, referring the development of man's brain to the fact that the force of circumstances compelled him to use his faculties, and that the race was propagated only or chiefly by those who enjoyed a slight differential advantage in these respects over their fellows. I had the good fortune, however, last year to be present at the British Association meeting at Dundee, when Professor EUiot Smith read his presidential address before the section of Anthropology, In this, if I understood him right, he showed that it was rather the developing brain that moulded man's progress than his environment that forced his brain to undergo development. I must not make Professor Elliot Smith responsible for my own deductions. From the standpoint of my present subject, I should like to argue that the engineer has not only provided us with the material conditions that make civilisation possible, but that by drawing men's minds to things mechanical, he has forced their brains to develop, and in this way, too, has assisted him in his upward progress. The facts, however, do not fit in with this view, and we must avoid the temptation of saying, " so much the worse for the facts," and we shall be rewarded by getting the grander and larger idea that the brain is an organ spontaneously undergoing development, not perhaps independently of man's environment, but compelling him to secure an environment that shall be adapted to his requirements. And it is in performing this task that the engineer finds the scope for his greatest achievements.

Let us go back to the dawn of history. Glancing at the shattered remnants of the Stone Ages, we can catch a glimpse of the days when the engineer had no existence, of the days when the only roads were those trodden down by the feet of men and the hoofs of animals, when the only bridges were the casual tree trunks that had fallen across the stream, when the only dwelling was the natural cave. Of the dawn of engineering we have no record ; it is only in imagination that we can conceive of the birth of the idea of the wheel, of the wedge, and the development of the latter into its more complete and perfect form, the screw. We can speculate, if we care to, as to how men hit on these epoch-making ideas, but we have no knowledge of when or where they arose.

We shall be on surer ground if we try to estimate the engineering conditions of the old world as we know it from the remains that have come down to us from the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks, curiously enough, were not great engineers ; possibly this was because of the contempt with which they regarded experimental investigations, or it may have been because as a race they were unattracted by the mechanical aspects of life. They were cunning artificers. We could realise that, even if we had none of their works of art to serve as a guide, by the account that Homer gives us of the wonderful craftsmanship of Achilles' shield ; and I cannot help thinking that there was something of the engineer in Homer, for he describes the building of Odysseus' boat fondly and appreciatively ; but otherwise, except in architecture, the Greeks left behind them nothing really notable in the way of an engineering feat.

With the Romans it was different. They, if you will, were engineers of no mean order of skill. They built roads that have lasted throughout the ages ; they constructed aqueducts to bring water to their cities ; they drove tunnels through the living rock, having learnt how to soften the rock face at times by burning it, and at times by pouring vinegar on to the heated surface ; they were skilled miners, having learnt this art, perhaps, from the

PhcEnicians ; and that they had born in them the spirit of the engineer is surely shown by the way in which they improvised a navy when they needed one to fight the Carthaginians. As bridge-builders, their skill was unrivalled, and it was a skill that was to be found not only among professional engineers, but among their generals, as those of us who have struggled through the famous account of how Csesar built his bridge across the Rhine have doubtless appreciated with no little bitterness of spirit.

What an amazing thing it was that neither the Greeks nor the Romans ever reached the modern conception of science ! The Romans must again and again, without knowing it, have conducted scientific experiments, but the idea never seems to have struck them that experiment must be the basis of all true knowledge. There must, 1 think, have been exceptions to this sweeping condemnation of the ancients. It is inconceivable to me, at any rate, that men such as Archimedes, to whom, by the way, it is conventional to credit the invention of the screw, should not have deliberately planned experiments. There is no reason, so far as I know, to doubt the story that he succeeded in focusing the rays of the sun on to the mooring ropes of an enemy's fleet and set them afire, and it is impossible to believe that he could have had the knowledge necessary for this feat, or the many others attributed to him, unless he had gained it by experiment. But such men as he were isolated units. No one can accuse Lucretius of having planned an experiment, let alone of having made one, and yet, like the other philosophers, he based a whole system of natural philosophy on first principles evolved from his brain 1

From the great days of Rome, we can pass at a stride to the early years of the seventeenth century, Gilbert, it is true, had written a book, " De Magnete," that was destined in a way to form the basis of electrical development ; but men had added little to the traditions of engineering skill the Romans left behind them. Then came the results of the marvellous Elizabethan era, and Bacon crystallised out for the world the principles of inductive logic that turned men's minds from the barren syllogisms and speculations of the schoolmen — as the followers of Aristotle were called — to question Nature herself. Men became curious about all manner of subjects. They met together in a spirit of scientific curiosity, and at last the Royal Society was born, a body formed to find out accurately what was known, and to add to knowledge by making experiments.

It is possible, I think, to assign two chief causes for this development ; the first, unquestionably, was the invention of printing, by which it became easy cheaply to disseminate knowledge, and the other the researches of the alchemists and astrologers. Both of these classes of investigators were forced to observe closely, and the alchemists, at any rate, were obliged, in their researches after transmutation and the philosopher's stone, to conduct experiments. In any case, no matter what the cause, the publication of Bacon's book, the " Novum Organum," marks the commencement of the new era in science. Since Bacon, there has only been the development of a single new idea, and even that, if we look closely enough, is contained in Bacon's work ; it is the importance of accurate measurement. Experiment, observation and measurement constitute the triple foundation on which science and engineering have been based. If you will, you can add a fourth — ^imagination.

It was a long while before the ideas of Bacon bore any practical fruit. The new philosophers had to straighten out the crude ideas that were current before they could give the practical men anything they could take hold of and adapt for everyday use. There was Franklin, for instance, experimenting with electricity to have his lightning conductors described as " devil's rods " ; Newton, evolving his theory of gravitation, but so poor with it all that he had to appeal to the Royal Society to have his subscription remitted ; Boyle, conducting researches on the pressures of gases ; and it was not till about one hundred and fifty years after Bacon had set men on the right track, that the engineer could look to science to assist him in his work.

When the light came at last, it came with a flash; fortunately, too, just about the time when England had a dim glimmering of what it meant to her to find coal and iron together. And with the ideas of science rapidly crystallising out, men woke up to a realisation of the fact that the engineers were admitting them to a wealth of power based on coal and iron and steam. It was a wonderful find when they at last realised what a treasure-house of power they had tapped in coal, and they were able in this mysterious substance to draw upon the rays that the sun had been sending down on to their country in the far distant aeons of the geological past, and not unnaturally, they set to work to spend it freely. It is only now, prodigals that we are, that we are beginning to ask ourselves what we shall do when we come to the end of our capital, hovvT we shall replace it, whether we have a right to use up in these generations a treasure to which we have no more claim than our ancestors and our descendants. The steam-engine arrived ; the canal reached the height of its prosperity, to be ousted in part, at any rate, by the locomotive with the rails that made it possible. And still science was steadily working away perfecting its chemistry, its knowledge of elements and compounds, groping after the fundamental phenomena of electricity, concerning itself with abstract problems, such as the nature of heat, and all the time laying the foundation on which the engineer was destined to build. Meanwhile, the engineer was working out the manufacture of steel and was applying it to all sorts and kinds of machinery, thereby vastly increasing the productivity of the individual worker, and adding to the wealth of the land, not without arousing the furious antagonism of the handicraftsmen displaced^ Slowly the steam locomotive developed, and little more than a hundred years ago, after having conquered on land, it gained an even greater victory on sea.

A revolution was started in ship-building, to be followed by a still more stupendous change when ships were built of steel instead of wood. And, electricity was creeping in, indicating in no way at the outset the developments that were to be. The telegraph lines were laid, first overland and then under water — a triumph so great, that to the present day several people, with no justification, refuse to believe as regards the lirs't Atlantic cable that any message but the first ever went across the wires ; and in the 'fifties men made the great discovery that the various forms of energy could be expressed in terms of each other, and could be converted the one into the other. How the world has leapt ahead since those days. Electricity, revolting like Jove against his father, Saturn, now threatens to oust steam, at any rate, as a direct motive power, from the field. The engineers with their modern appliances have developed the internal combustion engine where the explosive mixture of air and gas exercises a direct drive on the piston. Coal has been forced to give up its gas, and this, too, has been used as a direct source of power. With the vast forces at our command, we have not hesitated to build mighty vessels, to attempt great feats that our ancestors would have found beyond their strength. We are starting to harness the great waterfalls, and are pressing them into our service. We have not hesitated to sever the two Americas, calling again on another branch of science — medicine — to make it possible. We have thrown great dams across the rivers and brought prosperity to countries that we found overburdened with debt. We have set lights in the midst of the sea to guide our vessels safely to port. We have thrown bridges over chasms and over straits where formerly men had to be content to make long journeys to pass round. Even the Alps have been pierced by our tunnels. The world has been linked into a conglomerate whole by the railways and the telegraphs that we have laid across its surface. We have rescued our sunken treasures from the deep, brought waters to our cities from vast distances, or carried our pipes over miles of dry and thirsty deserts. We have attempted and are on thexway to achieve the very conquest of the air itself. These are but a few of the feats of which our engineers can boast, and they look forward to still greater triumphs. Let me quote to you what an enthusiastic American, Mr. Herbert N, Casson, has to say of one aspect of the future in Munsey's Magazine. With pardonable zeal, he writes of the achievement as if it were American, and America has, indeed, made her contributions of moment to the history of engineering.

" This," he states, " is the day of big units. One freightcar carries forty tons. One Erie canal-boat carries a hundred thousand bushels of wheat. One grain ship on the Great Lakes carries two hundred and fifty thousand bushels. One train carries the grain that was grown on six thousand acres. One grain elevator holds six million bushels. One flour-mill at Minneapolis fills seventeen thousand barrels with flour in a single twenty-four-hour day. One single steel girder in the Woolworth Building in New York was so heavy that sixteen horses were required to haul it from the freight yard. One single copper mine — the Red Jacket — has engines of eight thousand horse-power, which hoist ten-ton cars of ore to the surface of the ground in ninety seconds from five thousand feet below. One single iron-ore steamer — the Augustus B. Wolvin — loads ten thousand tons in eighty-nine minutes, and unloads them in four hours. One single passenger steamship — the Lusitania, or Mauretania — hurls herself through the waters of the Atlantic with the power of seventy thousand horses. This is the day of tonnage. The average American iron and steel plant in 1870 produced a little more than four thousand tons ; in 1913 the average plant will produce about sixty thousand tons. The output of Pittsburg alone is equal, in tonnage, to a Great Pyramid every four weeks. It means in just a single year thirty-five thousand trains of cars, fifty cars to a train, fifty tons to a car. Ninety million tons a year.

All the horses and mules in the United States could not budge the annual tonnage of Pittsburg.

" One single American company — the United States Steel Corporation— smelts in one year twenty-five million tons of iron ore ; and it handles this stupendous output from ore-bed to finished product without the use of horses. If the iron and steel business were on a horse-power basis, steel rails would not sell for twenty-eight dollars a ton — less than one and one-half cents per pound.

" Talk about tonnage ! So vast have our American industrial enterprises become that the total freight now carried by rail and ship is fully two billion tons a year."

Or you may look at the matter differently and consider the chief underlying aims of modern engineering to be to enable a man to be in different places at one and the same time, and to transport him from place to place with the minimum expenditure of time. Consider the telegraph and telephone, for instance ! The personality of a single man can be exerted in a single hour in every business centre of the world if he has the service of the telephone and cable companies. The Press, with its vast collecting and distributing agencies, endorses the view that the essence of our engineer-built civilisation is the immediate and universal distribution of news, the annihilation, in fact, of space and time. Primitive man, by his weapons, by his sling and his arrow, groping at this idea, made possible his ascent from the brute. Civilised man, carrying the process farther, has attained an eminence and a dominance over Nature that would have been unthinkable to any age save that in which we live.

Great Britain need grudge no other nation a fair recog-

Historical ii

nition of their achievements. In the following pages, you will read of the exploits of some of our great engineers, and of the mighty feats they have carried through all over the world. We can be proud of our engineers, and of what they have done. They have led the world since the days when the art of engineering revived, and, for my part, I am confident that the work we still have to do in the world is not yet accomplished. If, however, we are to retain our pride of place, it can only be by merit, by doing the work that lies to our hand honestly as good craftsmen and as good artists, and by showing that same enterprise in the future that our ancestors showed in the past, when by their deeds they raised England and the Empire to the premier place among the powers.

Chapter II

Few great undertakings become familiar in our mouths as household words unless they appeal to our imagination both by their grandiose conception and by their intrinsic importance. The fame of the Panama Canal as a colossal undertaking has been a matter of common knowledge for over thirty years, and by the time the lines that I am writing now appear in print it seems likely that the world will have learnt that their three-century-old dream has materialised as a fact, and that the great ships will be passing to and fro on the narrow thread of water that now for the first time unites two mighty oceans. The achievement rightly fires the imagination. Rumours from the Canal Zone tell of the great forces used in rending the native earth ; of the mighty engines toiling and groaning and clattering incessantly at their tasks ; of the labourers swung across the vast cut lOO feet up in the air in cement buckets, taking this aerial pathway to their homes as unconcernedly as the suburbanite calls at the station for his train ; of the gallant fight put up against accident, disease and the forces of Nature — all with the glamour of the tropics flung athwart the scene. So much for the one aspect of the work. The other is the saving in human effort that the completed Canal will for all time ensure. Ships now have a perilous passage to travel if they wish to pass from the Atlantic to the Pacific, so much so that it has been said that no man is a seaman till he has thrice rounded the notorious Cape Horn, the southern Hmit of South America. Here are a few distances as they stand by to-day's route, and as they will be when this book is in your hand :

New York to San Francisco .

New York to Peru New York to Auckland New York to Sydney . .

Or take another table. Panama is the centre of the Pacific coast. Let us consider the distance it is from the chief ports of the world to Panama, first via Cape Horn and then via the Canal. They are as follows :

Via Cape Horn

Via Panama

9,700

3.359 ..

11,771 ..

8,610 „

13.051 „

9.709 ..

To Panama

Via

Via

Saving from

Cape Horn the Canal by Canal

Antwerp . .

Charleston

. 10,803

1,611

9.192 »

Galveston . .

. 11,391 ..

1,545 .,

9,846 „

Genoa

. 11,143 .,

5,229 „

5,914 ,.

Hamburg . .

. 11,614

5.054 ..

6,560 „

Havana

. 10,682 „

1,425 ,.

9.257 »

Havre

. 11,156 „

4,648 „

6,508 „

Liverpool . .

. 11,261

4.575 ..

6,686 „

Marseilles . .

. 10,985

5.071 ..

5,914 „

New Orleans

. 10,286 ,,

1,425 „

8,861 „

New York

. 10,851 „

2,017

8,834 ,.

Southampton

4,608 „

6,529 „

With these figures before you, you will not find it difficult to beheve that the building of the Panama Canal is the greatest engineering achievement of the world. The idea of severing the two Americas by driving a waterway straight from the shores of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific has appealed to the imagination of man since the day that it was proposed in 1520 — some thirty years after the existence of the New World became known to the Old. For over three centuries the project remained a dream, the idle fancy of the visionary, and it was not till the nineteenth century — the century above all its predecessors of practical achievement — that a serious survey was made to consider whether the undertaking might not be feasible. To the Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who triumphantly severed the isthmus joining Africa and Asia by the Suez Canal, but who died a broken-hearted man when catastrophe overtook his operations at Panama, belongs the credit of having converted the world to a belief in the possibility of the scheme. The problem was a stupendous one. From deep water to deep water the distance through which the monster ditch has had to be dug is 50 miles — more than twice the distance it is from Dover to Calais. On either side, the mean sea-level is the same ; but while the Atlantic Ocean has a lazily rising tide that swings through a bare range of 2 feet, the high level of the Pacific towers 20 feet above its low level. The land at Panama is rocky and mountainous. A section of the route shows how the hills to be traversed rise over 300 feet above the level of the sea ; but any sketch is silent as to the fact that the work has all to be done with the broiling heat of a tropical sun beating down on the workmen, and it tells nothing of malaria or of the dreaded yellow fever, the terror of merchantman, man-of-war and buccaneer, that swept away the labourers and the engineers who tried to carry out the designs of the inspired Frenchman, the great de Lesseps.

Of the different routes proposed, of the controversies, of the financial difficulties, of the startling way in which the Republic of Panama carried out a bloodless revolution to secure the adoption of the route running through their country, and of the earlier attempts I have no space to write. Of the many dramatic incidents that heralded the birth of the Canal, none is more so than the fact that this great undertaking, designed to facilitate the peaceful flow of commerce, was finally decided on by the needs of war. In the spring of 1890 war broke out between the United States and Spain. At the time, the battleship Oregon, perhaps the finest in the United States Navy, was at San Francisco, and in order to get to the scene of operations, she had to undertake the long and perilous journey of 13,400 miles round Cape Horn, instead of the 4,600 miles that would have been necessary had the Canal been open. The incident struck popular American sentiment, and at once the people of the States clamoured that their Government should undertake the building of the Canal.