I'm back to working on my book after the Holidays and a very busy time at work. I would like to submit for your consideration one paragraph from the novel in which the protagonist describes the engine spaces of a steamboat of 1848. Please let me know if I have made any technical errors in the description:
"It was my first time on a steamboat and I set out to explore the Monroe from bottom to top. The machinery spaces included dark caverns with gangs of men stoking the furnaces with bolt after bolt of firewood, the open doors affording glimpses of the infernos that heated the enormous boilers. The boilers themselves were enormous cylindrical teakettles entwined with water pipes, steam pipes, vent pipes, flue pipes and more pipes. The engine itself consisted of a massive thirty inch piston driving the pitman shaft which connected it to the thirty foot paddle wheels. Valves, levers, and myriad brass gauges with trembling needles pointing at mysterious markings were tended by the engineer and his assistants, with one man always standing by to respond to engine signals from the pilothouse far above. I watched awhile, marveling, before the overwhelming heat and noise drove me out to the fresh air on deck."
Does anyone see any glaring (or non-glaring) technical errors in the above?
One basic question that I have yet to answer to my satisfaction is whether the Monroe had one engine or two. Way's Packet Directory does not give engine data, so all I really have to go on is that earlier Western steamboats had one engine, while later they tended to have two (info per "The Western River Steamboat" by Kane). The novel is set in 1848, so I'm guessing that's during the transition period and, for lack of hard fact, I could describe one engine or two. So far, as written above, I've gone with one.
Thanks in advance.
"It was my first time on a steamboat and I set out to explore the Monroe from bottom to top. The machinery spaces included dark caverns with gangs of men stoking the furnaces with bolt after bolt of firewood, the open doors affording glimpses of the infernos that heated the enormous boilers. The boilers themselves were enormous cylindrical teakettles entwined with water pipes, steam pipes, vent pipes, flue pipes and more pipes. The engine itself consisted of a massive thirty inch piston driving the pitman shaft which connected it to the thirty foot paddle wheels. Valves, levers, and myriad brass gauges with trembling needles pointing at mysterious markings were tended by the engineer and his assistants, with one man always standing by to respond to engine signals from the pilothouse far above. I watched awhile, marveling, before the overwhelming heat and noise drove me out to the fresh air on deck."
Does anyone see any glaring (or non-glaring) technical errors in the above?
One basic question that I have yet to answer to my satisfaction is whether the Monroe had one engine or two. Way's Packet Directory does not give engine data, so all I really have to go on is that earlier Western steamboats had one engine, while later they tended to have two (info per "The Western River Steamboat" by Kane). The novel is set in 1848, so I'm guessing that's during the transition period and, for lack of hard fact, I could describe one engine or two. So far, as written above, I've gone with one.
Thanks in advance.
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