Browsing named entities in Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing). You can also browse the collection for James Watt or search for James Watt in all documents.

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Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing), Dwight, Timothy 1752-1817 (search)
when he resigned the office. President Dwight was one of the American committee on Revision of the Bible from 1878 till 1885. Educator; born in Northampton, Mass., May 14, 1752; graduated at Yale College in 1769, and was a tutor there from 1771 to 1777, when he became an army chaplain, and served until October, 1778. During that time he wrote many popular patriotic songs. He labored on a farm for a few years, preaching occasionally, and in 1781 and 1786 was a member of the Connecticut legislature. In 1783 he was a settled minister at Greenfield and principal of an academy there; and from 1795 until his death was president of Yale College. In 1796 he began travelling in the New England States and in New York during his college vacations, and in 1821 he published his Travels in New England and New York, in 4 volumes. Dr. Dwight wrote some excellent poetry, revised Watt's version of the Psalms, and published many occasional sermons. He died in New Haven, Conn., Jan. 11, 1817.
Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing), Engineering. (search)
end of the eighteenth century a great intellectual revival took place. In literature appeared Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Goethe. In pure science there came Laplace, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Berzelius, Priestley, Count Rumford, James Watt, and Dr. Franklin. The last three were among the earliest to bring about a union of pure and applied science. Franklin immediately applied his discovery that frictional electricity and lightning were the same to the protection of buildings by lightning-rods. Count Rumford (whose experiments on the conversion of power into heat led to the discovery of the conservatism of energy) spent a long life in contriving useful inventions. James Watt, one of the few men who have united in themselves knowledge of abstract science, great inventive faculties, and rare mechanical skill, changed the steam-engine from a worthless rattletrap into the most useful machine ever invented by man. To do this he first discovered the science of thermodyna
Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing), Fulton, Robert 1765-1815 (search)
ntor; born in Robert Fulton. Little Britain, Lancaster co., Pa., in 1765; received a common-school education; became a miniature painter; and, at the age of twenty, was practising that profession in Philadelphia, by which he made Fulton's Clermont enough money to buy a small farm in Washington county, on which he placed his mother. Then he went to England; studied painting under Benjamin West; became a civil engineer; and made himself familiar with the steam engine, then just improved by Watt. He devised various machines, among them an excavator for scooping out the channels of aqueducts. He wrote and published essays on canals and canal navigation in 1795-96. He went to Paris in 1797, and remained there seven years with Joel Barlow, studying languages and sciences, and invented a torpedo. This he offered to the French and English governments, but both rejected the invention, and in December, 1806, he arrived in New York. He went to Washington, where the models and drawings o
Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing), Steamboats, Hudson River (search)
nce the first boat was built by Mr. Livingston and Mr. Fulton, ten vessels are now in operation on their construction, and several more contracted for. When Messrs. Watt and Bolton had given a great degree of perfection to the steam-engine, it was conceived that this great and manageable power might be usefully applied to the st obtained from most of the States in the Union a law vesting in him for a long term the exclusive use of steamboats) built one upon the Delaware. He made use of Watt and Bolton's engine, and his propelling power was paddles. This vessel navigated the river from Philadelphia to Bordentown for a few weeks, but was found so imper in Talman & Ward's manufactory in the Bowery, who state that the links claimed by Mr. Dodd as his invention and an important improvement have been to all Bolton & Watt's engines for fourteen years. When I put these links in my patent, I did not patent them exclusively for all kinds of machinery; nor did I patent the steam-engine
Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing), Sumner, Charles 1811- (search)
f descents, remainders, and executory devises, also the ancient hair-splitting technicalities of special pleading—both creatures of an illiterate age, gloomy with black-letter and verbal subtilties. He returns again and again to the contrast between the lawyer or the judge, both practising law, and the jurist. All ages have abounded in lawyers and judges. There is no church-yard that does not contain their forgotten dust. But the jurist is rare.... The jurist is higher than the lawyer, as Watt, who invented the steam-engine, is higher than the journeyman who feeds its fires and pours oil on its irritated machinery—as Washington is more exalted than the Swiss, who, indifferent to cause, barters for money the vigor of his arm and the sharpness of his spear. Mr. Sumner reaffirms this contrast with even greater zeal and force in his opinion in the great case of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. If there were to be stricken out from the history of constitutional liberty what has be