Chapter XXVI: My Downward Progress (3)

At the close of the exhibition I went home utterly discouraged. When I went into the shop the first person I met was the foreman of the lower floor, where the engine had been built. I told him of the plight in which I found myself placed and to which I attributed my failure. The fellow gave me the lie direct, saying with a conceited smirk: “It is impossible, Mr. Porter, that any such work as you have described can have gone out of this establishment.” I turned on my heel and left him, and in less than half a minute I saw at a distance of fifty feet a 22-inch piston being finished for an engine we were building for the Tremont and Suffolk Mill. The workman had finished turning the piston and was then cutting the grooves for the rings. The reflection from the surface showed me the same two cones meeting in the middle. I went up to the lathe, the back side of which was toward me, and told the workman to stop his lathe and bring me a straight-edge. This rocked on the edge in the middle of the piston, opening nearly one eighth of an inch on each face alternately. I sent a boy to find the foreman and asked him what he thought of that and left him. I had influence enough to have both the foreman and the workman discharged that night. Think of it; superintendent, general foreman, the foreman of the floor, and workman, altogether, never saw what I detected at a glance from the opposite side of the shop.

I want to stop here to express my disgust with the American system of making the tailstock of a lathe adjustable, which enables either an ignorant, careless or malicious workman to ruin his work after this fashion. To their credit, English tools have no such feature.

The very next day we received a call from Mr. Bishop, the engineer of the works of Russell & Irwin at New Britain, Conn., to tell us that their engine just put in by us had a very bad thump which he was afraid could not be cured as it was evidently caused by the piston projecting over the admission ports when at the end of its stroke. “Impossible,” I exclaimed; “I never made such an engine in my life.” I should here state that in experimenting with the first little engine that I made before I went to England, I at first made the piston project over the port one quarter of an inch, and the engine thumped. I satisfied myself that this was caused by the impact of the entering steam against the projecting surface of the piston, driving it against the opposite side of the cylinder; this was aggravated in high-speed engines. In this case the engine made 160 revolutions per minute and the steam was admitted through four simultaneous openings, so it entered the cylinder with great velocity. I turned a quarter of an inch off from each face of the piston, and the thump disappeared. I then made it a law from which I never varied, that the piston should come to the admission port and not project over it at all, and this feature was shown in every drawing.

Mr. Bishop replied to me: “It does project, Mr. Porter; it projects seven eighths of an inch over the port at each end of its stroke, for I have measured it.” I rushed up to the drawing-office and called for the horizontal sectional drawing of that cylinder, and there I saw the piston not only drawn, but figured--projecting seven eighths of an inch over the port. I felt as though I were sinking through the floor. That was what had ruined my Boston exhibition and sent me home disgraced and broken-hearted and the badly fitting piston, shameful as that was, had nothing to do with it. The first question that occurred to me was: “How came this drawing to exist and I to know nothing about it?” The answer to this question was simple.

When the first pair of Willimantic engines was started I was disappointed in their economy, and made up my mind that the excessive waste room was accountable for it. The proportion of cross-section area to the stroke being fifty per cent. greater than in my table of sizes increased in the same degree the proportion of waste room to the piston displacement. I felt that there was need here for improvement. By far the greatest amount of waste room was in the exhaust ports. I accepted a modification of the exhaust valves by which this item of the waste room was reduced fully one half and made a new pair of cylinders for this engine. The improvement in the economy was so marked that I determined to change the exhaust valves of all the engines. Only the exhaust valves and ports needed to be changed. These were drawn anew in pencil and carefully studied and approved of by me. It was necessary that the entire combined cylinder drawing should be retraced, but this, except only the exhaust ports and valves, was to be copied over the existing tracings. This did not require my attention, and I gave no thought to it. Here was the superintendent’s opportunity. In copying these tracings he had only to move the straight line representing each face of the piston on the longitudinal section of the cylinder seven eighths of an inch, thus adding this amount to the piston at each end, and shorten the cylinder heads to correspond, and the job was done; and there did not exist among the large number of persons in the drawing-office and shop who must have been aware of this change, loyalty enough to let me know anything about it.

We had also recently finished two engines for the Cocheco Mill at Dover, N. H., and about this time we received a letter from the superintendent of that mill expressing his admiration of the engines in every other respect, but complaining of a bad thump in the cylinders. He said he would be glad to invite the superintendents of other mills to see them, but he could not show the engines to anybody until that thump was cured.

I went directly to the president and demanded authority to change the pistons and heads of these engines. To my astonishment he refused point-blank, saying he had spent money enough on these alterations, and he would not spend another cent. I replied to him that there was one other alternative and that was to abandon the business, to which he made no reply. But why did I need to go to the president; why not make these changes myself? The answer to this question is very humiliating to me. An account had been made up of the cost of the alterations here described and presented to the board of directors, showing this to amount to $20,000. I was aghast at this statement; I had never seen a figure pertaining to the business, except the single bill already mentioned. I told the directors that any good pattern-maker would have taken the contract to alter those exhaust valves and ports on our twenty sizes of cylinders for an average price of fifty dollars each, and made a profit of fifty per cent. in doing it. The cost of the new drawings and the price of cylinders for the Willimantic engine could not more than double this sum, and by some hocus-pocus this $2000 had been changed to $20,000; probably by transfer from other losing accounts. The president replied that was the cost of the alterations as it appeared on the books, and the directors, without making any investigation, adopted a resolution that no further alterations should be made unless expressly ordered by the president.

I did not believe that in making this addition to the length of the piston the superintendent had any intention to wreck the business. He could have had no idea of its fatal nature; his only thought was to make a considerable further reduction of waste room and gratify his itching to change my drawings. But of course doing this without my knowledge was criminal, and should have caused his instant discharge; but his whole conduct from the beginning had been the same and the president had sustained him. I had no opportunity to pursue this matter further.

On receiving the president’s refusal I determined to appeal to the directors, but first I thought I would lay the matter before Mr. Henry Lewis, whom I regarded as the most open-minded of all. What was my amazement when, after listening to my statement, he replied: “We shall sustain the president, Mr. Porter.” Then I knew the end had come. It was idle for me to butt against the Philadelphia phalanx. A day or two after a committee of the directors headed by Mr. Shortridge, called at the office and asked to see our order book. This showed that in more than a month preceding we had not received a single order. On this state of affairs it was evident to the directors that a change must be made in the management. I had long realized that the great gulf that I had dug between the stockholders and myself, as already described, had never been filled. Neither the directors as a body, except on the single occasion already mentioned, nor any director individually, had ever conferred with me on any subject whatever. They knew nothing, except what they might have learned from the president; he had no mechanical knowledge or ability to form a mechanical judgment, and the superintendent influenced him in a degree which to me was unaccountable. His want of comprehension of the business was shown in his answer to the life-or-death question which I had presented to him. The next day I received a communication from the directors requesting me to send in my resignation, which I promptly did. Mr. Merrick was also requested to resign. This was evidently a put up job, to let me down easy. Mr. Merrick had for some time expressed a wish to be relieved from his position which he found very uncomfortable.

The directors elected as president one of their own number, who had nothing else to do, to sit in the president’s chair and draw his salary, and committed the practical management of the business to an oily-tongued man who had never seen a high-speed engine, and whose qualifications for the position were that he was a friend of one of the directors and was a Philadelphian, and who I learned received a large bonus for leaving his own business and accepting the position vacated by me.