Pumping

Smaller and cheaper than a triple-expansion vertical engine, the horizontal cross-compound pumping engine, Pump No. 2, ran at relatively slow revolutions and was considered the height of engineering from the 1890s to World War I. This pumping engine at the York Water Company was built by the Worthington Pump & Machinery Corporation, Snow-Holly Works, Buffalo, New York.

Installed alongside an Epping Carpenter pump that was later scrapped, this water pump was built by Allis-Chalmers, which for many years had Edwin Reynolds as its chief engineer. Driven by a Corliss steam engine, these large city water pumps were installed in Jacksonville's water supply improvement program in 1915, and each pumped 5 million gallons of water a day until 1930 when the first of the electric-driven peripheral pumping stations began operating. Steam engine operation was discontinued in 1956.

This machine is an unusual triple-expansion, three-crank rocker engine, which in its day was a high-capacity unit providing outstanding performance for the Boston Water Works Corporation. Designed by Erasmus Darwin Leavitt, Jr. (1836-1916), Engine No. 3 was installed in 1894 to a high-service pumping facility on the south side of the Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Brighton.

At a time when steam power was finding its first uses in America, Philadelphia opened two steam pumping stations, January 1801, to lift water from the Schuylkill River and distribute it through the city's wooden pipes and mains. By 1811 a new water power works was begun on the river near Morris Hill, and the Fairmount Water Works opened September 7, 1815. These water works represented the first large-scale application of steam pumping to water service in the country.

This is one of three nearly identical pumping stations that drained the Haarlemmermeer (Haarlem Lake), 1849- 52, then continued to maintain the polder's water table for more than 80 years. The Haarlemmermeer area covers 45,000 acres (about 70 square miles) in a triangular region between the cities of Amsterdam, Haarlem, and Leiden.

At the site of the first water pumping station providing water and sewage systems to the City of Erie in 1868, the Chestnut Street Pumping Station houses one of the largest steam engines, which pumped 20 million gallons a day. The triple-expansion steam reciprocating engine, which pumped water from the filter plant to the city reservoir, was typical of those used in municipal water pumping stations throughout the country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.