Inefficiency and Smoke

It has been a while.

The research is progressing slowly.  I have set aside the gentrification stuff for a bit, and gone back to the material on smoke and combustion.

It is slowly sinking in that the fuel economy and air pollution of Victorian Toronto was driven by major inefficiencies in fuel use.  A modern internal combustion engine operates around 25-50% efficiency.  You put in 40 litres of fuel, you only get 10-20 litres worth of driving duty out of it.  Diesel engines get about 40% efficiency.

But a well-maintained steam locomotive got only 7-8% efficiency in good hands.  Most of the fuel, 92-93% of it was wasted.

Stationary steam was only marginally better.  Railway locomotives typically could not manage anything beyond single expansion.  Double, triple or quad expansion technology was just impractical.

In stationary steam single expansion seems to have been quite normal before the 1880s, but we get compound engines in the Toronto Water Works in the mid 1870s, big Worthington compound engines, which guzzled coal.  During the 1880s the number of engine builders offering compound steam expands and most makers seem to have been able to do this for stationary and marine applications. 

Compound engines, and those with various automatic cutoff and patent valving systems seem to have been the technology of industrial choice for greater fuel economy in the 1880s and 1890s, although patents, patterns and engine performance varied.  Modern estimates place these engines somewhere in the 10-15% efficiency, which looks terrible against a diesel engine, but was a great improvement over single-expansion steam.

This raises a couple of issues I had not though about before.  If there is such an effort being made to boost efficiency, then the quality of the operator becomes rather important.  Likewise, the quality of manufacture starts to matter.  A well-built machine of an older but reliable type may work better than a poorly-operated example of newer technology.

I note that the 1880s-1890s is an era of the professionalization of the stationary engineer, and one in which we can trace forms of customer loyalty between engine building firms and industrial users, often mediated through their key stationary engineering figures.

Thomas Worswick of Guelph, for example, who held the licences to make Brown, Porter and Armington & Sims pattern engines, and who included the Bourne family among his mechanics, and A M Wickens.  Wickens moves to the Globe when the Toronto Globe adopts a brown steam engine from Worswicks, and then goes on to run Queen's Park.  When Worswick transfers his business to Polson's Ironworks in Toronto the Bournes show up in the city, some of them working for Polson's and others working for TELco.  TELco, the Toronto Electric Light Co, adopts Armington & Sims and Brown pattern compound engines built by Worswick/Polson to generate electrical power in their new Scott St power plant, which Edward Bourne sets up for them.

Goldie & McCulloch of Galt held licences for Wheelock and Ideal pattern engines, and were very successful in getting lots of industrial business in the city in the 1880s and 1890s, but not in the very largest installations.  John Inglis which inhertited the licences to build Corliss pattern engines was also active in another bunch of companies.  The first Toronto Railway Co powerhouse was built around Corliss pattern machines from Laurie and Bertram's, the second TRC powerhouse was built around Armington & Sims patterns from Polson's. 

The adoption of steam turbines (in water pumping, TELco power production) in the Edwardian era broke apart these engine-builder to firm relationships.  They also marked the emergence of a new generation of stationary engineers, whose loyalties did not quite lie with the old companies and the old technologies.

I have noticed too that in the 1880s and 1890s the British stationary engineer, or the Canadian-born stationary engineer had enormous significance.  American-born stationary engineers existed (Philip at Eaton's, Hattwood at Allen Mfg) but they were not numerous, and there was not much career mobility for sationary engineers between the US and Canada.  So we have British operating engineer prestige running steam engines built around American patents and technologies. 

There would appear to be some interesting stories hidden in the late-Victorian city's industrial smoke, and some interesting connections between areas of research which I previously could not quite connect.