PREFACE

TO THE SECOND AMERICAN EDITION.

IN the preface of the publisher of the first American edition of this work, some statements relative to its origin, together with a concise biographical sketch of its author, have been presented to the publick. That preface, however, having been written before my return from England, and without my knowledge, cannot be supposed to be perfectly correct in all its particulars; and though I highly appreciate the friendly motives which appear to have actuated the publisher in penning it, yet I hope he will pardon me if, instead of an advocate, I now appear in propria persona and explain a little more at large the topicks and events of which he has taken notice.

Previous to my journey to England, for the purposes hereafter to be stated, my life had been checkered with but little variety; and I shall merely state such prominent events as may be necessary to account for my having made my literary debut in the uncommon character of an American author in London.

My father is a clergyman, who has been settled in Walpole, in New Hampshire, more than forty years. He is by no means in affluent circumstances, and I am the eldest of eight children yet living. I acquired a collegiate education, and graduated at Dartmouth college in New Hampshire, in August 1796. The expenses of my education were principally defrayed by my own exertions. During the vacations I eked out my finances by instructing a village school, and added sometimes a pittance to my purse by teaching psalmody a number of evenings in each week, after having finished my daily avocations as a pedagogue. In the autumn of the year 1796, I commenced the study of law at Rutland, in Vermont. After completing my studies I began business in partnership with Nathaniel Chipman, Esq. formerly a senator in congress, and a gentleman who is placed by his legal, literary, and scientifick attainments in the highest rank of American worthies.

While member of the university and student at law, I often amused myself and perhaps sometimes my friends, by poetical effusions, many of which were published in the Lay preacher's Gazette, edited by Joseph Dennie, Esq. and The Eagle, a newspaper printed at Dartmouth. Some of these poems I have since published in England, and they have, likewise, been republished in a work just issued from the Lorenzo Press of E. Bronson, Esq.

In the spring of the year 1801, I was employed as an agent for a respectable company, formed in Vermont for the purpose of securing a patent in London of a new invented hydraulick machine. This machine was the invention of a Mr. Langdon (not mine as has been stated by some of my good friends in this country.) I was likewise a member of this company, and thus became deeply interested in its success as one of the principals as well as agent. I was urged to hurry my departure in consequence of a report in circulation that certain persons by stealth had made them

selves master of the invention, and were determined to anticipate us in our object of securing a patent in London.

In consequence of this report, the experiments which were made with this machine were performed in a hasty manner. The machine itself was complicated with parts which were of no use, and are not worth a description. The only principle which gave it any apparent superiority to the common pump was not stated in the patent specification. By the aid of this principle, however, which we shall presently describe, water was raised in a hasty experiment through leaky tin pipes, apparently by suction or the pressure of the atmosphere alone, forty-two feet from the surface of the fountain to the bottom of the cylinders in which the pistons were worked.

From these experiments, it should seem that some new principle in the laws of hydraulicks was developed; as the simple pressure of the atmosphere can never elevate water to a greater height than thirty-four feet.

But my principal hopes of deriving benefit from this machine, consisted in its property of drawing water from a distance through pipes, ascending from the fountain to the place of delivery on a principle not dissimilar to what is now in practice in England, and for the application of which a lucrative patent was obtained by a Mr. Dalby. I embarked from New York the fifth of May, and arrived in London, after a tedious passage, the fourth of July. I waited on Mr. King, then ambassadour from the United States, to whom I had letters, and was by him favoured with a letter to Mr. Nicholson, an eminent philosopher and chymist, at Soho square. With this gentleman I had several interviews on the subject of my hydraulick machine, and from him received an opinion in writing, stating his unfavourable view of its merits. I likewise made a number of experiments in London, with a different result from what I had seen in Vermont.

In this desperate situation of the adventure, I received a letter from one of the Vermont company, informing that there was a deception in the patent. That by some experiments made subsequent to my departure for London it appeared that no water could be raised by Langdon's invention higher than by the common pump, unless by a perforation in the pipe, which made what the inventor called an air hole; and which by him had been kept a secret, and not mentioned in the patent specification. This perforation, by admitting air into the pipe, lessened the gravity of the column of water and caused it to rise some feet higher than it could be forced by the simple pressure of the atmosphere. I troubled Mr. Nicholson again with this last principle: he informed me that a similar deception had been practised on the academicans at Paris, but that the trick was discovered by the hissing noise made by the air rushing into the aperture in the pipe.

My next essay was an attempt to improve on the principle last developed, by which a column of water might be raised higher than it could be carried by the simple pressure of the atmosphere, by admitting air into the pipe to assist in its ascent. This I shall briefly sketch, and I hope to make my meaning intelligible without a diagram.

Suppose the simple apparatus of what is commonly called a suction pump, moved by steam or any other power, were placed at the top of a pipe leading sixty feet perpendicular height from the fountain and the air exhausted from the pipe by the operation of its piston. The water would rise in this pipe thirty-three feet and two-thirds nearly, leaving a vacuum from the surface of the water thus elevated in the pipe, to the bottom of the piston. At the height

* This was such a fraud in the inventor, that by every principle. of law and reason the patent was void, and no contract founded on it could be valid.