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The seventh patent issued by the United States, to Samuel Mulliken of Philadelphia, was for a threshing machine. The portable horse-power treadmill, invented in 1830 by Hiram A. and John A. Pitts of Winthrop, Maine, was presently coupled with a thresher, or "separator," and this outfit, with its men and horses, moving from farm to farm, soon became an autumn feature of every neighborhood.
Though he exulted, and made sage speculations about locomotive horse-power, as their train climbed the Maine mountain-ridge and from the summit he looked down the shining way among the pines; though he remarked, "Well, by golly!" when he discovered that the station at Katadumcook, the end of the line, was an aged freight-car; Babbitt's moment of impassioned release came when they sat on a tiny wharf on Lake Sunasquam, awaiting the launch from the hotel.
Machines and engines before the war were chiefly French. It is interesting to note those with which No. 3 Squadron, one of the first to be formed, commenced its career in May, 1912. They consisted of one 50 horse-power Gnome Nieuport, one Deperdussin, which by the way was privately owned, one Gnome Bristol, two Gnome Bleriot monoplanes, one Avro and one Bristol box-kite biplane.
A rotary called the Fredericson engine was said to give an output of 70 brake horse-power with five cylinders 4.5 inches diameter by 4.75 inches stroke, running at 1,000 revolutions per minute. Another, the Roberts two-stroke cycle engine, yielded 100 brake horse-power from six cylinders of the stepped piston design; two carburettors, each supplying three cylinders, were fitted to this engine.
Their displacement was but 122 tons, their engines for surface navigation were of 160 horse-power, gasoline, and for underwater navigation 70 horse-power, electric. They carried but one torpedo tube and two extra torpedoes and had a radius of action of but 300 miles. At that time in fact the naval theory was that submarines were coast defence vessels altogether.
When I first went to Belgium I was given a sixty horse-power touring car, and when the weather turned unpleasant I asked for and was given a limousine that was big enough to sleep in, and when I found this too clumsy, the commandant of the Parc des Automobiles obligingly exchanged it for a ninety horse-power berline. They were most accommodating, those Belgians.
How easy now, choosing her own moment, to say what would dispel forever the man's odd little power of causing her to worry.... The streets were slippery, the journey was from pole to pole of the town and yet five minutes sufficed for it, bringing Settlementers to their destination. So easily does forty horse-power traverse the mile between Houses of Heth and Houses of Dabney.
The extreme sharpness of the stem and stern, combined with great capacity, seems to answer every requirement; and he will be surprised to learn that the draught of these steamers is but sixteen feet when deeply laden, and that their engines of thirteen hundred horse-power are expected to give them a speed of fifteen knots per hour.
Enormous hammers or pounders they are, with shanks as well as heads of malleable-iron, each weighing, shank and head together, seven hundredweight. They are fearful things, these stamps; iron in spirit as well as in body, for they go on for ever night and day wrought by a steam-engine of one hundred horse-power, as enduring as themselves.
Against the great expense of such a project is set the tremendous possibilities in the development of water-power. Of the theoretical sixty millions of horse-power in the current of the Mississippi, it is estimated that about six and a half millions can be economically developed throughout the year, while twelve millions could be developed during six months or more without storage reservoirs.
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