Water and water-supplies : and unfermented beverages / by John Attfield.

  • John Attfield
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Water and water-supplies : and unfermented beverages / by John Attfield. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    water, and not only renders life possible on this earth by contributing to the maintenance of the warmth of the earth in the manner already described, but even adds to the pleasures of life, by enabling us to slide, skate, and otherwise amuse ourselves on its smooth and slippery surface. The expansion of water in freezing is almost irresistible, A bombshell filled with cold water, duly plugged, and exposed to the cold of a Canadian winter for a few hours, is inevitably cracked or burst in pieces. Our own less severe temperatures in Great Britain are ample for the bursting of lead, iron, or earthenware pipes, with the too common result of damaged walls, floors, or furniture, when the thaw comes. Brickwork run up during frost may have the water in its mortar frozen, the particles of the mortar being inevitably separated from each other and from the bricks, instead of interlacing with each other, and within the brick pores, as mortar normally should, with the not infrequent result of the carcases tumbling down when the temperature once more rises. But the harm occasionally done to the householder, or to the unwise builder, is unworthy of serious notice, in view of the good done by this operation of nature to the farmer and gardener, and through them to the community. For clods of earth and hard food-yielding minerals, previously permeated with the winter's rain, are split and disintegrated by the winter's frost in a manner that neither spade, plough, nor hammer could accomplish, and thus are made to yield their stores of riches for plants, animals, and man. Elasticity.—The elasticity of water is very slight. It is almost incompressible. A thousand gallons, subjected to a pressure equal to that of a second atmosphere, about fifteen pounds per square inch, would only be reduced in bulk to the extent of about one-third of a pint. This almost complete incompressibility of water renders it a valuable medium for the conveyance of pressure. In the powerful instrument, now so familiar to manufacturers and engineers under the name of Bramah's hydraulic press, the [H. 12.] C
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