We now come to the beginning of the steam engine as we understand the
term; the machine that involves the use of the cylinder and piston.
These two features had been used in pumps long before, the atmospheric
pump being one of the oldest of modern machines. The vacuum was known
and utilized long before the cause of it was known. [Footnote: The
discoverer was an Italian, Torricelli, about 1643. Gallileo, his tutor
and friend, did not know why water would not rise in a tube more than
thirty-three feet. No one knew of the _weight of the atmosphere_,
so late as the early days of this republic. Many did not believe the
theory long after that time. Torricelli, by his experiments, demonstrated
the fact and invented the mercurial barometer, long known as the
"Torricellian Tube." This last instrument led to another discovery; that
the weight of the atmosphere varied from time to time in the same
locality, and that storms and weather changes were indicated by a rising
and falling of the column of mercury in the tube of the
siphon-barometer. That which we call the "weather-bureau," organized by
General Albert J. Myer, United States Army, in 1870, and growing out of
the army signal service, of which he was chief, makes its "forecasts" by
the use of the telegraph and the barometer. The "low pressure area"
follows a path, which means a change of weather on that path. Notices by
telegraph define the route, and the coming storm is not foretold, but
_foreknown;_ not prophesied, but _ascertained._ If we have
been led from the crude pump of Gallileo's time directly to the weather
bureau of the present with its invaluable signals to sailors and
convenience to everybody, it is no more than is continually to be traced
even to the beginning of the wonderful school of modern science.]

But in the beginning it was not proposed to use steam in connection with
the cylinder and piston which now really constitutes the steam-engine.