Solar heat Author:Charles Henry Pope Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. SOME TECHNICAL STUDY OF THE SUBJECT. Let me ask you to note carefully at the outset these two points first, that this treatise does not concern... more » itself at all with the nature of the sun, or its rays; the orb may be of flame,or of ice; the rays may be dependent on or affected by local conditions at the sun, or by the quality of our atmosphere, or both. None of these particulars, these questions, affect the practical matter we have in hand. We find sunshine coming upon us; we learn from experience that we can get heat from the rays as they fall, and can combine the force of a number of rays in a beam of increased intensity. Our problems are along these two lines: How can we best receive and accumulate the heatwhich the sun brings to us? The "technical study" here attempted is most practical in its quality; intended for the man of the farm and the shop quite as much as the man of the school or the laboratory. A future stage of the art will necessarily take up deep questions of theory for the higher development of the subject; but now and always the chiefly important side of the matter is the practical. How can we get and use the largest amount of solar heat? And, second, the manner of treatment here given to the problems in hand is one which aims to inform the man who has no technical library at hand, to aid the ranchman and the prospector in devising offhand appliances, as well as to help the educated and skilled artisan and manufacturer along their paths, by a few blunt, crude hints and by the suggestive force of the historical accounts herein presented. NOMENCLATURE. What are the proper terms to be used in describing the subject of this discussion? The writer selected as the title of his former work the phrase, "Solar Enginery," intending to include...« less