United States or Saint Martin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Appold, of London, a gentleman of fortune, but with a strong taste for mechanics, which led him to spend his time and wealth in exercising his mechanical ingenuity. These brakes were so adjusted as to bear only a certain strain, when they released themselves. This ingenious contrivance was applied by Mr. Everett to the paying-out machinery.
In three of them the cable was caught by the grapnel, and in the other the grapnel was fouled by the chain attached to it. That the paying-out machinery used on board the Great Eastern worked perfectly, and can be confidently relied on for laying cables across the Atlantic.
The great cable payed out smoothly as the Irish coast was left behind and the frigate increased her speed. The submarine hill with its dangerous slopes was safely passed, and it was felt that the greatest danger was past. The paying-out machinery seemed to be working perfectly. Telegraphic communication was constantly maintained with the shore end.
I am naturally in good spirits, but keep very quiet, for misfortunes may arise at any instant; moreover to-morrow my paying-out apparatus will be wanted should all go well, and that will be another nervous operation. Fifteen miles are safely in; but no one knows better than I do that nothing is done till all is done. 'June 11.
The new machinery there is but rough, meant for an experiment in shallow water, and here we are in a mile of water. I have made my calculations and find the new paying-out gear cannot possibly answer at this depth, some portion would give way. Luckily, I have brought the old things with me and am getting them rigged up as fast as may be. Bad news from the cable.
If the trouble is not in the tanks, the paying-out machinery must be metamorphosed into a picking-up apparatus, and the cable already laid will be coiled back into the hold until the fault appears, when it will be cut out and the two ends of cable spliced.
They had scarcely begun to breathe freely again, and to congratulate each other on being able to continue the voyage, when they received another shock of alarm by the cable suddenly flying off the drum, while it was being transferred from the picking-up machinery in the bow to the paying-out arrangements in the stern.
The men took up the words at once, and, to this species of spoken chorus, "shove her along, push her through," the snaky coil was sent rattling over the pulley-wheels by the tank and along the wooden gutter prepared for it, to the paying-out wheel at the Chiltern's stern, whence it plunged down into the barge, where other experienced hands coiled it carefully round and round the entire deck.
There was no denying that the defender had a vast advantage over those who might come into his "castle," provided he was really aware of their movements, but it was this doubt that caused the boy his uneasiness. "He must be near the bottom," he concluded, when this paying-out process had continued some minutes longer, and he thought he saw very little of the lasso left. Such was the fact.
The machinery was so adjusted that not more than half that strain could possibly come upon the cable, when the brakes would relax their grasp, the wheels revolve easily, and the cable run out into the sea 'at its own sweet will. The paying-out machine, therefore, we are far from claiming as wholly an American invention. This part of the mechanism was English. The merit of Mr.
Word Of The Day