Today, an iconoclast tests turbines. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
After I'd finished a recent talk, a man came up and gave me the
oddest book. On the spine it says Emerson's Hydrodynamics, etc. The
etc. is what sets this book apart. As we first open it, our
eyes are drawn to the glorious steel-plate engravings of all kinds of nineteenth-century
Then, we look more closely. There's no narrative -- only a parade of random cuttings.
This is not a book, it's a blog, published in 1892 -- a century before the Internet.
And James Emerson is a man of powerful opinions. This is the fourth edition of an item
that's already been popular for years.
Emerson was a water turbine pioneer. America had taken the idea of the turbine from the
French, and improved upon it. In 1870, Emerson had set up a remarkable new testing flume
in Holyoke, Massachusetts. At that time, turbines wasted about a third of the energy in
the water passing through them. When he'd finished, efficiencies were over ninety percent.
Emerson was a former sea captain and a prolific inventor -- justifiably proud of Yankee
mechanical ability. American has, he tells us, finally created the perfect water turbine.
But when we turn pages in this rag-bag summa theologica, what things we find! First item:
a one-page description of the Holyoke Flume. Then a screed on the disregard of truth in
the practice of law. And so on. Between his fine descriptions of machinery, Emerson pours
venom upon three institutions: the law, academia, and religion. Religion, he will have us
know, is antithetical to spiritual development and morality. Science is the enemy of
invention, and law the enemy of truth.
His constant interruptions make it very hard to trace this definitive pictorial snapshot of
late-19th-century hydropower. We read diatribes on the injustice of marriage and divorce for
women, and a defense of nudity. He condemns Catholicism and Mohamadism, prohibition, lawyers
and preachers -- even Newton's laws of motion.
He regards the metric system as academic folly, and he recom-mends dividing the foot into
tenths, rather than inches. Fifty-nine years later, when I was working in the airplane
industry, we followed a version of that advice. We did everything in inches and decimal
fractions of inches. We abandoned the foot.
I have to admire Emerson's emphasis on the equality of women and the value of a mechanic's
hands-on understanding. Yet the turbine had been the fruit of 18th-century mathematics,
and theory would drive further development. Emerson was less a real agent of social change
than someone preaching to people who already agreed with him.
But the engravings of machinery remain. Those glorious engines of America-emergent remind
us that, after all our talk, technological change occurs in the tactile world around us.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
J. Emerson, Treatise Relative to the Testing of Water-Wheels and Machinery, also of Inventions,
Studies, and Experiments, with Suggestions from a Life's Experience. 4th ed. (Willimansett,
MA: 1878/1892). I am most grateful to Marc B. Edwards for providing me with this very interesting
E. T. Layton, Jr. Scientific Technology, 1845-1900: The Hydraulic Trubine and the Origins of
American Industrial Research. Technology and Culture, January 1979, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 64-89.
For more on the Holyoke Flume and Emerson's role in it see:
Emerson's scale for measuring power.
The "Hercules" version of a Francis mixed-flow turbine blade.
Emerson's design of a ship's windlass.
on the thumbnail to the right for one sample of Emerson's many interspersed commentaries on religion.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2005 by John H.