Woodruff and Beach Steam Engine
(Page 2 of 4)
March/April 1992
John Bowditch
One of the standard engine sizes made by Woodruff and Beach had
a 14' bore and 30' stroke, to which our engine conforms.
The maker rated this size of engine at 35 horsepower at 55
revolutions per minute. The steam pressure is not stated, but it is
a high pressure engine of its era, perhaps however this amounted to
not more than a boiler pressure of 85 pounds per square
inch.3 The valve or steam chest extends the full length
of the cylinder and is on the side rather than the top. This was a
relatively new design at the time with two important features: it
simplified the connection between the valve and the eccentric
actuating it, and second, and very importantly, it made it easier
for condensed water in a cold engine cylinder to escape to the
exhaust pipe with much less danger of straining or lifting a
cylinder head. The slide valve itself has a separate exhaust port
at each end, thus steam was admitted to each end of the cylinder
through a very short passage with a minimum loss of heat and
pressure. Economy of the exhaust steam was a secondary
consideration not much regarded at this time. Low pressure engines,
particularly marine engines, did at this time exhaust into a
condenser which increased efficiency, but it was chiefly done to
reuse the water in oceangoing vessels to keep salt out of the
boiler.
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By 1855 the Woodruff and Beach engines were made with entirely
different valve design, balanced poppet inlet valves and a gridiron
slide valve for the exhaust. It is said that at the time this
design was introduced the Woodruff and Beach engine was the only
one to have a governor controlled automatic cutoff, quick-closing,
valve gear, with the exception of the Corliss Engine patented in
1849, which had an entirely different valve gear that had shown
much greater fuel economy than plain slide valve
engines.4
The inventor of this valve gear, or at least enough of it to
contribute some degree of patent protection, was William Wright of
Rochester, New York, who was residing in Providence, Rhode Island
when he received a patent on a complex rotary engine. Two of the
six claims in his patent refer to balanced valves where the steam
pressure does not cause friction as in the D type valve used in all
but the Corliss engine of four years later. The inlet valves were
opened to admit steam at the beginning of each piston stroke, but
their closing was determined by the engine speed under governor
control in accord with the load on the engine. This responsiveness
to load resulted in important fuel economy giving it a competitive
advantage over nearly all other engines in the market. The Wright
patent does not refer to governor control. Wright held the position
of engineer in the Woodruff and Beach organization for some time,
but then moved to Newburg, New York where he established an engine
factory in his own name. There he made an engine closely similar to
that of the Woodruff and Beach engines, but with vertically instead
of horizontally oriented inlet valves.