Will It Go?
A Massachusetts young man, George John Altham, announces that he is going to revolutionize travel and transportation, and run an ordinary street car at an expense of thirty pounds of petroleum a day. His idea is a caloric engine, with complications and frills-a good many of them. To begin: Into a powerful reservoir, which combines the functions of boiler and furnace in one, is introduced kerosene in jets. It is ignited here and forms the usual products of combustion, chief of which are carbonic acid gas and water. Water is also introduced in fine spray from another channel, and instantly converted by the heat from the burning oil into steam.
The jet of mingled gas and steam is forced through a cylinder into a vessel containing glycerine. The gas, glycerine and steam are thoroughly mingled, and then forced upon a sort of double turbine wheel which revolves with great force and makes the thing go. At least its inventor says it will go. If it will, a vast amount of trouble, coal smoke, soot, dead weight prespiring labor and tons of ashes, furnaces, boilers, etc. will be done away with.
~ The Kaleidoscope, San Bernadino, California, Saturday, July 4th, 1891.
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