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 decades it relied solely upon waterpower to run the equipment.

In the 1850s the DuPont Company began investing in steam engines as a supplemental source of power. Steam engines had been around since the early 1700s, but the reluctance to bring a steam engine into a gunpowder factory is understandable -- gunpowder is an explosive that is detonated by fire and sparks, and steam engines use fire (which generates sparks) to convert chemical energy (fuel) into motion through the medium of steam. The steam engine house where I work used to provide power to a building, called the “pack house”, where finished gunpowder was sifted (to remove the dust) and packed into containers for storage and shipment. To reduce the risk of explosion, the pack house stood 70 feet away from the engine house, and an iron line shaft transferred the power between them.

The day’s work begins by checking to see that there is enough water in the boiler and that the ash and cinders have been removed from grate in the firebox. Then I build a fire in the firebox with newspaper, kindling and logs -- we burn coal to keep the boiler hot, but we start the fire with wood because it is easier to ignite. Once the fire gets hot, I spread the burning logs across the whole surface of the grate and sprinkle on a thin layer of coal. The coal ignites, and the coal and wood continue to burn until the wood burns away. I add more coal from time to time and make certain that amount is sufficient and that the layer is thin and even -- too little coal and the fire will burn itself out, too much and the coal with smother the fire.

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Photos of the steam engine at Hagley are posted on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/gil.hahn.3/media_set?set=a.627985140634731.1073741830.100002697535785&type=3