Development
Water wheels have been used historically to power mills of all types, but they are inefficient. Nineteenth-century efficiency improvements of water turbines allowed them to compete with steam engines (wherever water was available).
In 1826 Benoit Fourneyron developed a high efficiency (80%) outward-flow water turbine. Water was directed tangentially through the turbine runner, causing it to spin. Jean-Victor Poncelet designed an inward-flow turbine in about 1820 that used the same principles. S. B. Howd obtained a U.S. patent in 1838 for a similar design.
In 1848 James B. Francis, while working as head engineer of the Locks and Canals company in the water-powered factory city of Lowell, Massachusetts, improved on these designs to create a turbine with 90% efficiency. He applied scientific principles and testing methods to produce a very efficient turbine design. More importantly, his mathematical and graphical calculation methods improved turbine design and engineering. His analytical methods allowed confident design of high efficiency turbines to exactly match a site's flow conditions.
Read more about this topic: Francis Turbine
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“As a final instance of the force of limitations in the development of concentration, I must mention that beautiful creature, Helen Keller, whom I have known for these many years. I am filled with wonder of her knowledge, acquired because shut out from all distraction. If I could have been deaf, dumb, and blind I also might have arrived at something.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I’ve always been impressed by the different paths babies take in their physical development on the way to walking. It’s rare to see a behavior that starts out with such wide natural variation, yet becomes so uniform after only a few months.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)