"
"Oh, no," said he. "I have planned the thing better than
that. You see, the greater the weight the greater the power and
the velocity. Now, if you take a solid cylinder of lead about
four inches in diameter, so that it would slip easily down your
pipe,--you might grease it, for that matter,--and twenty feet in
length, it would be an enormous weight, and in slowly descending
for about an hour a day--for that would be long enough for your
pumping--and going down a thousand feet, it would run your
engine for a year. Now, then, at the end of the year you could
not expect to haul that weight up again. You would have a
trigger arrangement which would detach it from the rope when it
got to the bottom. Then you would wind up your rope,--a man
could do that in a short time,--and you would attach another
cylinder of lead, and that would run your engine for another
year, minus a few days, because it would only go down nine
hundred and eighty feet. The next year you would put on another
cylinder, and so on. I have not worked out the figures exactly,
but I think that in this way your engine would run for thirty
years before the pipe became entirely filled with cylinders.
That would be probably as long as you would care to have water
forced into the house."
"Yes"' said I, "I think that is likely."
He saw that his scheme did not strike me favorably. Suddenly
a light flashed across his face.
"I tell you what you can do with your pipe," he said, "just
as it is.
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