Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Thames and metropolis improvement plan / by John Martin. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
15/62 page 15
![will be the amount in recovered property and machinery; and in the annual expense of maintaining the steam power, as to be fully commensurate with any reasonable estimate for works that may be formed. In the first place, the sub- stitution of water power for steam engines, is alone a most important item, as we are informed that in the great water works at Philadelphia, wheels have superseded steam en- gines, yielding twice the quantity of water at a cost of exactly one tenth; and that here in London the Grand J unction Water Works Company had alone expended down to September 1833, no less a sum than £127,260 upon en- gines, engine houses, reservoirs, and the value of land for their formation. Other companies, it is known, have pro- portionate expenditure; and exclusive of the money so sunk, ]\Ir. James Simpson, the Engineer of the Chelsea Company, has stated in the before mentioned Report upon Water Supply, 1834, that the annual expense of maintain- ing an engine power equal to raising 100 cubic feet a second 60 feet high, or at an average altitude of 120 feet, would be at least £25,000 a year : but to raise such a body of water to higher levels, or to a uniform elevation of 120 feet, the expense would be enormously greater, as the following ex- tract from Mr. Mills evidence in the same Report will show. “ The actual expense of pumping 3.3 feet per second, or 288,048 feet per day, is stated in the Parliamentary Report of 1821, by the West Middlesex Company, to be £3,150 per year, about £1000 per cubic foot for water pumped 136 feet high. The actual expense of pumping 3^ cubic per second, or 310,000 feet per day, is stated in the same Report by the Grand Jnnction Company to be £3,500 per year, equal to £1000 per cubic foot per second for water pumped 115 feet high. The expense in the same Rejmrt by the New River Engineer, for pumjnng 181 cubic feet per second, 84 feet high, is stated to be £16,000 per year.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22362800_0017.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
