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"No ordinary plant such as we use could run for centuries without attention," he replied. "This is a highly advanced heat-engine something like a thermo-couple, you know. This whole thing is simply the hot end, connected to the cold end on Titan by a beam instead of wires. When it's working, this metal must cool off something fierce.
It'd help a lot if this outfit were sending out a few thousand kilo-franks instead of standing idle." "How would that help?" "It's a heat-engine, you know works by absorbing heat. The cold air sinks I imagine it pretty nearly blows a gale down the side of this cone when it's working and hot air rushes in to take its place.
At this point we see entering into Ericsson's life an idea which never left him, which controlled much of his work in mid-life, and which attracted no small part of his attention throughout his closing years. This idea was the discovery of some form of heat-engine which should be more economical than the steam-engine, especially as it was in his day.
But during the centuries of experiments with a "heat-engine," the political world had greatly changed. The British people had succeeded the Dutch as the common-carriers of the world's trade. They had opened up new colonies.
In every heat-engine, therefore, there must be a fall from a higher to a lower temperature; otherwise no work would be done. If the water in the condenser of a steam-engine were as hot as that in the boiler, there would be equal pressure on both sides of the piston, and consequently the engine would remain at rest.
For the electric engine which can be run by waterpower is a clean and companionable servant of mankind but the "heat-engine," the marvel of the eighteenth century, is a noisy and dirty creature for ever filling the world with ridiculous smoke-stacks and with dust and soot and asking that it be fed with coal which has to be dug out of mines at great inconvenience and risk to thousands of people.
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