ABSTRACT
In the early 1900s, the electric power generation industry was experiencing rapid growth and change. A major source of growing pains for the industry was the lack of accurate and standardized values for the properties of water and steam. For the design of power plants and the boilers and turbines within them, it is necessary to have accurate values of thermodynamic quantities such as the vapor pressure and the enthalpy of vaporization or latent heat. The region of most industrial importance was at much higher temperatures, well beyond what had been encountered in the ammonia work. Experiments at these conditions were also more difficult because water is very corrosive at high temperatures. The chapter describes the calorimeter that was built to overcome these difficulties and that was used to take the data reported in the Nathan S. Osborne, Harold F. Stimson, and Defoe C Ginnings' papers.
