Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GAS ENGINE. 219 in very large B. H. Thwaite’s Discovery. iron-making of very large power, as the gas it made was, though cheap, not cheap enough to be used quantities. It remained for a brilliant but unfortunate in- ventor, Mr. Benjamin Howarth Thwaite. to realize that the gas issuing from the top of an blast furnace could be pressed into the service of the gas engine—that the to the presence of dust and carbonic acid gas. Thwaite purposely manufactured a com- pound of the same chemical nature, and set his engine to Successful work on it. It was an anxious Test moment for him, as on the result depended the decision whether the millions of cubic yards of furnace gas going to Fig. 6.—A FOUR-CYLINDER PREMIER GAS ENGINE OF 2,000 H.P. USING BLAST FURNACE GAS. The huge vertical blowing tub delivers 40,000 cubic feet of air per minute at a pressure of 7 to 8 lbs. per square inch. This supply would give a ten-mile-per-hour current in an 8-foot diameter pipe; while the hot gases to which it contributes in the blast furnace would travel at the rate of twenty miles per hour through a pipe of equal size. blast furnace was, in fact, a huge producer. One day in 1894, while he was analyzing a sample of ordinary producer gas, lie was struck by the close resemblance which it bore to blast-furnace gas. The latter had already been turned to account to heat the stoves of cellular brickwork through which blast air is driven on its way to the furnaces, and as fuel under the boilers supplying steam to the blowing engines. For the second purpose, however, it proved very inefficient, owing waste could or could not be used effectively in an engine. Would this gas, scarcely com- bustible under a boiler, burn well in a cylinder when mixed with the necessary amount of air and compressed ? Experiment proved that his reasoned expectations were justified—the gas burned and the engine ran well. Shortly afterwards, Thwaite published an article in the Iron and Coal Trades Review describing the possibilities of the fuel. Sir Lowthian Bell, the great ironmaster, interested