Look! No moving parts!

Looks exactly like the Taylor Air Compressor that was installed at the old Victoria Copper Mine near Rockland, MI in 1906. I couldn't find info on the web but if you have a Mark's Mechanical Engineers Handbook a good explanatioon of the device is shown under "Air Compressors, Taylor Hydraulics.

Here is the only info I could find on the web at

The most interesting of the technological developments was the Taylor Hydraulic Air Compressor. Designed by C. H. Taylor of Montreal, Canada, this amazing system had no moving parts and was one of only four ever constructed. It was basically a thirty foot high chamber drilled out of solid rock under the Ontonagon River. Water from the river filled the chamber compressing air vented from above ground. A venturi effect pressurized this air to 117 P.S.I which was adequate to drive the rock drills, pumps, stamp mill, and even a small locomotive used to move ore. The Taylor Hydraulic Air Compressor was non-polluting, extremely low maintenance, and 82% efficient!

The person who wrote this didn't understand the system or have any idea of its size. The 30' is 345' in the Mark's Handbook and the output from one unit was over 10,000 CFM at 114 PSI.

BudT

How did they get the water out of the chamber?

Bret Cahill

Great! Thanks for the information.

The laws of nature are the same for everybody - so when a natural principle is employed in a laboratory instrument, it may well already have been employed in mining or elsewhere.

rediscovery. When one has made very many discoveries, one finds that some of them were attributed to great scientists of the past. My fractional factorials, for example, trod the same path as Euler trod with his Gamma function. I then took the matter further, with an extension to the calculus.

However, I am not aware of my pump existing already as a small instrument suitable for a laboratory.

Such things are always possible, of course.

The sheer scale of the Taylor design - as you described above - is "heroic" engineering at its best. Driving a railway system with compressed air at 117 pounds per square inch? Fascinating.

Thanks again.

Charles Douglas Wehner

My diagram at

shows the Bunsen suction pump as parts A B and C. They will have used parts A and C - the venturi (employing the Bernouilli effect to suck air into the downpipe), but will not have needed an enclosure C. Air can just be drawn from the environment.

Then the water falls into the chamber E. Here the air separates out on top of the water.

They will have used either a pipe (likely) or a second chamber (less likely) for the header tank H.

The water then flows away at a level J below the air outlet F.

The topology of the area has to allow a water outlet J somewhere below the level of the river A. It is the difference in elevation that provides the energy.

This was a copper mine. It seems to me that they had dug out a seam of ore, and already had a chamber. Then the demand for ore increased, and they decided to use the existing chamber as an air compressor, and mechanise the mine.

That is highly original. If this is true - that they did not specially excavate the chamber - they will have created a compressor for virtually nothing.

Charles Douglas Wehner

Try 400 years ago. It's interesting how good ideas keep reemerging. Yours is a modern application of the hydraulic trompe invented in Italy in the 1600s and widely used as a compressed air source in smelting.

It relies on the Bernouilli Effect. The Bernouilli brothers were Swiss-Italian, and lived 400 years ago.

This is a good link. The mechanisms shown are related to mine.

Cheers.

Charles Douglas Wehner

There were >

The first shows the mine in Canada. It did not, as I suspected, get the water out by means of a pipe. It gets the water out by means of a sloping shaft (Fig. 37).

The shaft is narrow, so when the chamber fills with air, a frothy mixture enters the shaft, and a "negative resistance" effect occurs, by which the more the air that escapes the more encouragement for air to escape.

So when air is not drawn off - it seems the mine is out of use - the pump keeps oscillating. The page says this forms a (synthetic, cold) geyser that blows up to 700 feet into the air.

Natural (hot) geysers (icelandic, geysir) have water and water-vapour. The water boils until the water-vapour level reaches the outlet. Then a frothy mixture triggers the oscillation.

Charles