U n I t 1

Text: Early Steam Engines.

Grammar: The Active Voice.

Vocabulary

to consider	– рассматривать, считать, полагать
to propel	– продвигать вперед, приводить в движение, двигать
pump	– насос
to actuate	– приводить в движение
pressure	– давление
nozzle	– выпускное отверстие
rim	– ободок, край, обод (колеса)
gear	– шестерня, зубчатая передача, передаточный механизм
to reciprocate	– двигаться взад и вперед, иметь возвратно-поступательное движение
reciprocating movement	– поршневое движение
ingenious	– бесхитростный, простодушный
mortar	– ступка
axle	– ось
tricycle	– трехколесная тележка
boiler	– котел
suspended	– подвешенный, висящий
piston	– поршень
con-rod	– стержень
crank	– шатун, коленчатый рычаг
to collide	– сталкиваться
to demolish	– разрушать

Read and translate the text and then do the following exercises.

Text

Early Steam Engines

Perhaps the first person to consider using steam to propel a vehicle was Giovanni Battista della Porta, an Italian scientist from Pesaro who had invented a water pump actuated by steam pressure, and who later suggested the possibility of using a similar mechanism for locomotion.

It was another Italian, Giovanni Branca, who constructed the first real steam engine. The principle was, naturally, very simple – steam, rising from a boiler, passed through a nozzle and struck holes bored in the rim of a wheel. The wheel moved, and through a system of gears, caused the reciprocating movement of two weighted arms. In this way, the ingenious inventor succeeded in replacing the manual labour necessary to actuate a pharmacist’s mortar. Yet another early experimenter was Ferdinand Verbiest, a Jesuit missionary in China, who succeeded in constructing a small model which actually worked, moved by steam pressure produced in a boiler mounted in the vehicle. Here again, steam played on holes bored in a wheel which transmitted motion to the front axle of the four-wheeled vehicle.

Surprisingly enough, the inventor of the first real steam-driven vehicle was not English, but French. It is held by some historians that Captain Nicolas Joseph Cugnot, of the French artillery, had, by 1765, built a steam-driven carriage capable of carrying three passengers at a speed of just over two miles an hour.

By 1769 or 1770, a massive wooden tricycle was ready. It had a double-walled boiler suspended ahead of the single front wheel, from which steam passed to two vertical cylinders and which moved pistons connected by con-rods and cranks to the single wheel. This vehicle weighed five tons and had a maximum speed of around three miles per hour. Its first tests were successful, but later it collided with and demolished a wall. Nothing more was heard of the machine and Cugnot died, forgotten in Brussels in 1804.

The engine of this tractor, perhaps the most important vehicle in the whole story of the power-driven vehicle, was based on a previous invention of Thomas Savery who, in England in the 18th century, had created a somewhat complicated machine powered by steam energy and capable of raising large quantities of liquid.