Page:Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat.djvu/67

Rh temperature is more or less elevated, to another in which it is lower. What happens in fact in a steam-engine actually in motion? The caloric developed in the furnace by the effect of the combustion traverses the walls of the boiler, produces steam, and in some way incorporates itself with it. The latter carrying it away, takes it first into the cylinder, where it performs some function, and from thence into the condenser, where it is liquefied by contact with the cold water which it encounters there. Then, as a final result, the cold water of the condenser takes possession of the caloric developed by the combustion. It is heated by the intervention of the steam as if it had been placed directly over the furnace. The steam is here only a means of transporting the caloric. It fills the same office as in the heating of baths by steam, except that in this case its motion is rendered useful.

We easily recognize in the operations that we have just described the re-establishment of equilibrium in the caloric, its passage from a more or less heated body to a cooler one. The first of these bodies, in this case, is the heated air of the furnace; the second is the condensing water. The re-establishment of equilibrium of the caloric takes place between them, if not completely, at