(6.)

Giovanni Branca of Loretto in Italy, an engineer and architect, proposed to work mills of different kinds by steam issuing from a large æolopile, and blowing against the vanes of a wheel. Branca was the author of many ingenious mechanical inventions, a collection of which he dedicated to M. Cenci, the governor of Loretto. These were published in a work printed at Rome in 1629. It is a thin quarto, entitled "Le Machine volume nuovo, et di molto artificio da fare effetti maravigliosi tanto Spiritali quanto di Animale Operatione, arichito di bellissime figure. Del Sig. Giovanni Branca, Cittadino Romano. In Roma, 1629." The work contains sixty-three engravings, accompanied by descriptions in Italian and Latin. Branca's steam engine, represented in the twenty-fifth plate, consists of a wheel furnished with flat vanes upon its rim, like the boards of a paddle wheel. The steam is produced in a close vessel, and made to issue with violence from the extremity [Pg023] of a pipe directed against the vanes, and causes the wheel to revolve. This motion being imparted by the usual mechanical contrivances, any machinery may be impelled by it. Different useful applications of this power are contained in the work, viz. pestles and mortars for pounding materials to make gunpowder, and rolling stones for grinding the same; machines for raising water by buckets, for sawing timbers, for driving piles, &c. &c.

This method of applying the force of steam has no analogy to any application of steam in modern engines.

Edward Somerset, Marquis of Worcester, 1663.