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Excerpt from A Practical Treatise on the Combustion of Coal
This book is intended to present, within a moderate compass, the theory of the combustion of coal, with a view to adapting it to the needs of that large body of men to whom this subject is one of great interest, but who, on account of the abstruse style in which such books are generally written, can not easily obtain the desired information in regard to the chemistry of coal, its combustion, its calorific power, and other matters in this connection, which are not only of interest, but of importance to themselves.
Perhaps no more lucid or accurate presentation of this subject has been written for engineers, than that embodied in Professor Rankine's "Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers," but that work, excellent as it is in itself, is to most persons a book by no means easy to read, or easy to use. It is not that this subject needs to be explained anew, or that there is anything to add to what has already been written, but it is rather to present to the non mathematical reader that which is accepted as high authority among engineers, in a language less difficult to understand.
The absence then, of any purely practical treatise of recent date on this subject, and the belief that such a treatise would supply a want has induced the preparation of this volume. The reader will judge for himself how far this want, if it ever existed, has been met.
This book contains nothing that can be said to be new, but its usefulness need not be impaired on that account if it has the merit of presenting this subject in an accurate and intelligible manner. Much care has been bestowed upon the work to insure its accuracy. The numerous instances in which the writer has converted French calories into British units of heat, in order to make quotations in the text of any practical value to the reader, has added not a little to the labor of preparation. Wherever quotations have been made from French, German or English writers using the metrical system, the measurements, quantities and temperature have been re-calculated and reduced to American equivalents and Fahrenheit degrees.
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