then took part in the Anglo-French expedition of 1845 to Madagascar, and received the cross of the Legion of Honour for distinguished conduct. He afterwards took part in another Anglo-French expedition, that of Parana, which opened the river La Plata to commerce. In 1851 he joined the Arctic expedition under the command of Captain Kennedy in search of Sir John Franklin, and discovered the strait between Boothia Felix and Somerset Land which bears his name. Early in 1852 he was promoted lieutenant, and in the same year accompanied the Franklin search expedition under Captain Inglefield. As on the previous occasion, his intelligence, devotion to duty and courage won him the esteem and admiration of all with whom he was associated. While making a perilous journey with two comrades for the purpose of communicating with Sir Edward Belcher, he suddenly disappeared in an opening between the broken masses of ice (August 1853). A pension was granted to his family by the emperor Napoleon III., and an obelisk was erected to his memory in front of Greenwich hospital.
BELLOWS, ALBERT F. (1829–1883), American landscape-painter, was born at Milford, Massachusetts, on the 20th of November 1829. He first studied architecture, then turned to painting, and worked in Paris and in the Royal Academy at Antwerp. He painted much in England; was a member of the National Academy of Design, and of the American Water Color Society, New York; and an honorary member of the Royal Belgian Society of Water-Colourists. His earlier work was genre, in oils; after 1865 he used water-colours more and more exclusively and painted landscapes. Among his water-colours are “Afternoon in Surrey” (1868); “Sunday in Devonshire” (1876), exhibited at the Philadelphia Exposition; “New England Village School” (1878); and “The Parsonage” (1879). He died in Auburndale, Massachusetts, on the 24th of November 1883.
BELLOWS, HENRY WHITNEY (1814–1882), American clergyman, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 11th of June 1814. He graduated at Harvard College in 1832, and at the Harvard Divinity School in 1837, held a brief pastorate (1837–1838) at Mobile, Alabama, and in 1839 became pastor of the First Congregational (Unitarian) church in New York City (afterwards All Souls church), in charge of which he remained until his death. Here Bellows acquired a high reputation as a pulpit orator and lyceum lecturer, and was a recognized leader in the Unitarian Church in America. For many years after 1846 he edited The Christian Inquirer, a Unitarian weekly paper, and he was also for some time an editor of The Christian Examiner. In 1857 he delivered a series of lectures in the Lowell Institute course, on “The Treatment of Social Diseases.” At the outbreak of the Civil War he planned the United States Sanitary Commission, of which he was the first and only president (1861 to 1878). He was the first president of the first Civil Service Reform Association organized in the United States (1877), was an organizer of the Union League Club and of the Century Association in New York City, and planned with his parishioner and friend, Peter Cooper, the establishment of Cooper Union. In 1865 he proposed and organized the national conference of Unitarian and other Christian churches, and from 1865 to 1880 was chairman of its council. He died in New York City on the 30th of January 1882. A bronze memorial tablet by Augustus Saint Gaudens was unveiled in All Souls church in 1886. His published writings include Restatements of Christian Doctrine in Twenty-Five Sermons (1860); Unconditioned Loyalty (1863), a strong pro-Union sermon, which was widely circulated during the Civil War; The Old World in its New Face: Impressions of Europe in 1867–1868 (2 vols., 1868–1869); Historical Sketch of the Union League Club (1879); and Twenty-Four Sermons in All Souls Church, New York, 1865–1881 (1886).
See Russell N. Bellows, Henry Whitney Bellows (Keene, N.H., 1897), a biographical sketch reprinted from T. B. Peck’s Bellows Family Genealogy; John White Chadwick, Henry W. Bellows: His Life and Character (New York, 1882), a memorial address; and Charles J. Stillé, History of the United States Sanitary Commission (Philadelphia, 1866).
BELLOWS and BLOWING MACHINES, appliances used for producing currents of air, or for moving volumes of air from one place to another. Formerly all such artificially-produced currents of air were used to assist the combustion of fires and furnaces, but now this purpose only forms a part of the uses to which they are put. Blowing appliances, among which are included bellows, rotary fans, blowing engines, rotary blowers and steam-jet blowers, are now also employed for forcing pure air into buildings and mines for purposes of ventilation, for withdrawing vitiated air for the same reason, and for supplying the air or other gas which is required in some chemical processes. Appliances of this kind differ from air compressors in that they are primarily intended for the transfer of quantities of air at low pressures, very little above that of the atmosphere, whereas the latter are used for supplying air which has previously been raised to a pressure which may be many times that of the atmosphere (see Power Transmission: Pneumatic).
Among the earliest contrivances employed for producing the movement of air under a small pressure were those used in Egypt during the Greek occupation. These depended upon the heating of the air, which, being raised in pressure and bulk, was made to force water out of closed vessels, the water being afterwards employed for moving some kind of mechanism. In the process of iron smelting there is still used in some parts of India an artificial blast, produced by a simple form of bellows made from the skins of goats; bellows of this kind probably represent one of the earliest contrivances used for producing currents of air.
The bellows[1] now in use consists, in its simplest form, of two flat boards, of rectangular, circular or pear shape, connected round their edges by a wide band of leather so as to include an air chamber, which can be increased or diminished in volume by separating the boards or bringing them nearer together. The leather is kept from collapsing, on the separation of the boards, by several rings of wire which act like the ribs of animals. The lower board has a hole in the centre, covered inside by a leather flap or valve which can only open inwards; there is also an open outlet, generally in the form of a pipe or nozzle, whose aperture is much smaller than that of the valve. When the upper board is raised air rushes into the cavity through the valve to fill up the partial vacuum produced; on again depressing the upper board the valve is closed by the air attempting to rush out again, and this air is discharged through the open nozzle with a velocity depending on the pressure exerted.
The current of air produced is evidently not continuous but intermittent or in puffs, because an interval is needed to refill the cavity after each discharge. In order to remedy this drawback the double bellows are used. To understand their action it is only necessary to conceive an additional board with valve, like the lower board of the single bellows, attached in the same way by leather below this lower board. Thus there are three boards, forming two cavities, the two lower boards being fitted with air-valves. The lowest board is held down by a weight and another weight rests on the top board. In working these double bellows the lowest board is raised, and drives the air from the lower cavity into the upper. On lowering the bottom board again a fresh supply of air is drawn in through the bottom valve, to be again discharged when the board is raised. As the air passes from the lower to the upper cavity it is prevented from returning by the valve in the middle board, and in this way a quantity of air is sent into the upper cavity each time the lowest board is raised. The weight on the top board provides the necessary pressure for the blast, and at the same time causes the current of air delivered to be fairly continuous. When the air is being forced into the upper cavity the weight is being
- ↑ The Old English word for this appliance was blástbaelig, i.e. “blow-bag,” cf. German Blasebalg. By the 11th century the first part of the word apparently dropped out of use, and baelig, bylig, bag, is found in early glossaries as the equivalent of the Latin follis. Baelig became in Middle English bely, i.e. “belly,” a sack or bag, and so the general word for the lower part of the trunk in man and animals, the stomach, and another form, probably northern in origin, belu, belw, became the regular word for the appliance, the plural “bellies” being still used till the 16th century, when “bellows” appears, and the word in the singular ceases to be used. The verb “to bellow” of the roar of a bull, or the low of a cow, is from Old English bellan, to bell, roar.
