The Locomotive - Lighthouse Survival Blog

1893.] THE LOCOMOTIVE. 189
the barrel was laid Hut on the lloor Nvl)cre tlic l)oilfr stood. (Its generul form ia sliown
in Fig. 2.)
" luvestigation showed that the boiler was nearly tilled with water at the time of
the explosion. The shell, above the water line, had lu-en overheated and softened, and
the enormous pressure that accumulated caused the explosion. The shell was bulged
outward in several places along the top to a depth of nearly half an inch."
Photography.
The labors of human ingenuity cannot be restrained, and all the present clamor
against machinery is only a clamor against the exercise of the human understanding.
But we have never been able to discover any practical use in all the daguerreotype
inventions, except in their having got the inventor a handsome pension from Louis
Philippe. The process is certainly curious, pretty, and new. But we have never been
able to hear of its producing any actual result, beyond the making of extremely
indistinct copies of drawings, feeble imitations of the ciphers on buttons, and most
teniae facsimiles of the human visage. Not that I should desire to act truculently on
this occasion, and break up all the little zinc cups and saucers which cover so many
ladies' thimbles with deposits of the "genuine copper," nor prevent any individual
from having his lineaments exhibited in the most alarming deformity; but that the
invention, though now of some half-dozen years' growth, is still so "little of its age,"
that it threatens to be a dwarf the longest day it lives. And this we shall admit to be
the case with hundreds of inventions once much more promising. The balloon,
for instance, has been half a century before the world's eye, and what has the world
made of it after all, or who has been the better for it, but Mr. Green, who is really
a very clever climber of the clouds, but who lias disappeared from fame since his offer
of ballooning it from America ? We hope he is not drowned, gas and all.
The daguerreotype system, however, is now superseded, in its minor points
at least, by younger rivals, and nobody seems to remember it, except, perhaps,
the Chancellor of the French Exchequer. A new exhibition has appeared in London,
and with the advantage of a new title ; a Mr. Fox Talbot has applied himself to making
it effective for taking likenesses, and this is the statement of an exhibition of his art a
few days since by an operator employed for its display: " In effect, as far as the sitter
is concerned, there is no material difference between the plan employed by him
and that at Mr. Beard's rooms in the Polytechnic Institution. The person whose
likeness is to be transferred is required, but for a few seconds, to place his face
in front of the glass of a camera obscura, and the light, a powerful one, impresses upon
a piece of pa2:)er placed therein a fdcsimile of the features, with this peculiarity,
that the lights in the original are shadows in the cojiy, and, vice versa, the shadows in
the original are lights in the copy. The position of the face is also reversed. This
paper is afterwards turned down upon another piece of prepared paper, and by
a simple process a complete transfer is made, the lights, shadows, and position
being again reversed, so that the original appearance is reproduced. The portraits,
those at least we have seen, are very satisfactory. There is a rough air of truth
about them, which reminds one of the first, and sometimes the best, sketches of
the artist, a sort of free sepia, or, rather, lithotint drawing, full of broad etTects
and vigor. One of the advantages of the art is, that from the original portrait, any
number of facsimile copies may be taken, and an additional inducement is, that
the charge is small."