Gil Hahn's Blog, page 6

Steam Engine - Part 2

The boiler starts each day with about 300 gallons of water. The fire in the firebox heats the water adjacent to it, and the smoke and hot gas from the fire pass through the water in the boiler through 54 pipes called fire tubes. The idea behind the fire tubes is that they increase the surface area where the heat from the fire can transfer to the water in the boiler. The fire tubes empty into a chamber called a smoke box at the other end of the boiler from the fire box, and the smoke exits int...

Steam Engine - Part 1

I have three offices. One is where I hold down my day job. The second is my home office where I do much of my reading and writing. And the third is at the Hagley Museum where I work a couple of weekend days each month operating a nineteenth century steam engine.

The Hagley Museum, located not far from downtown Wilmington, Delaware, preserves the remains of the original DuPont gunpowder factory that started business in 1802. The factory is located on the Brandywine Creek, and for about four dec...

Pony Express

Where the telegraph line ended in 1860, older methods of communications prevailed. The Pony Express was a delivery system that used a relay chain of riders and horses to carry the mail between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California. Service began on April 3, 1860 and continued until October 1861. Initially the stations were set 25 miles apart, with a fresh horse supplied at each station and a fresh rider after three stations, or about 75 miles. Later, intermediate stations were estab...

Anticipations of the Future

One of the more curious oddities of the year 1860 was the publication of a novel entitled Anticipations of the Future: To Serve as Lessons for the Present Time. Although his name was omitted from the volume, the author was Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia planter who was a noted fire eater, the political activists who favored southern independence.

Anticipation of the Future is composed excerpts of letters written by an Englishman in the United States for publication in the Times of London over the y...

Candles Part 3 - Natural Philosophy

Over the winter of 1860-1861, as the secession crisis was tearing the American Republic into pieces, Michael Faraday, one of the most renowned scientists of the day, delivered a series of six lectures on science at the Royal Institute to audiences consisting principally of children. The Royal Institute had offered such lectures during the Christmas holidays since 1825, and Mr. Faraday delivered 19 of the lectures series between 1829 and 1860.
Mr. Faraday’s lectures were accompanied by demonstr...

Candles Part 2 - Philology

If asked to "snuff the candle", would you trim the wick or extinguish the light? As noted previously, a substantial number of the candles made and consumed in the United States in 1860 had wicks that needed to be trimmed frequently in order to keep the light from dimming.

According to an 1860 American dictionary, "snuff" as a noun referred to (1) the burnt wick of a candle (that is, the partially consumed portion that needed to be trimmed) and (2) pulverized tobacco. As a verb it meant (1) to...

Candles Part 1 - Technology

In 1860 the sources of illumination were solid, liquid and gaseous.

The solid source of illumination was candles composed of tallow, stearin, spermaceti or wax. The 1860 census data does not provide sufficient information to determine how much of each was produced. Moreover, the census data lumped the majority of candle production with soap production without indicating how much to attribute to illumination and how much to cleansing. Tallow was made by melting (rendering) the fat of animals, p...

International Travel

One traveler in the mid-1850s observed that "many mercantile men cross the Atlantic twice annually on business and think nothing of it". For the first-time traveler, or for the emigrant who expected to settle permanently in a new country, the undertaking was more momentous. Many emigrants, to conserve their funds, chose passage in steerage of a sailing ship, a vast open space beneath the main deck. In the mid-1850s the emigrant paid from 4 to 5 for a journey that lasted around 2 months. He re...

Broadway Vistas

Visitors to the United States in the 1850s often visited New York City, and narratives of these travels often focused on Broadway:

"Were there any thing like uniformity in the design of its long lines of buildings, Broadway would be one of the three or four most magnificent streets in the world. Even without any general design – for each man builds exactly as he pleases – the street, in its details, surpasses any single street that England or the British Isles can show. From the Battery facing...

Literary Critics at Walden Pond

Henry D. Thoreau's Walden: or, Life in the Woods (published 1854) fared well with the critics. Walden is an account of how Mr. Thoreau built a cabin in a woods he did not own and lived in it simply and inexpensively for two and a half years, but it offers a sharp critique of the assumptions and conventions of American society. Putnam's Monthly Magazine observed,

"There is much excellent good sense delivered in a very comprehensive and by no means unpleasant style in Mr. Thoreau's book, let peo...