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Show MADE USE OF STEAM POWER Centuries Ago, Men Were Familiar With Its Possibilities, but Did Not Develop Them. A real curiosity in the United Slates patent office is a working model of the first steam engine, built by a clever inventor named Hero a century and a half before Christ was born. A modern engineer would call it a steam reaction turbine. It consists of a spherical vessel pivoted on an axis and supplied with steam through one of the pivots. The steam escapes through bent pipes in opposite directions, direc-tions, thus causing the globe to re-volve. re-volve. Hero was the first steam engineer. Having hit upon the idea that the expansive ex-pansive energy of steam could be used for power, he developed a number of devices for its mechanical employment. employ-ment. One of them was a hollow altar, beneath be-neath which a fire was built. Under the altar was a vessel containing waver. wa-ver. The latter, converted into steam, opined the temple doors by pressure upon a pair of vertical posts on which the doors swung. When the tire cooled, cool-ed, the doors closed automatically. The ancients 2,000 years and more ago used steam power for turning spits and various other unimportant purposes. pur-poses. But it does not seem to have occurred to them that this source of energy- might be made available for mechanical utilization on a large scale. |