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July TELESCOPE 148 IN THE TRIPLE'S WAKE The lakes' first triple-expansion engine belonged to the passenger and package freight steamer Lakeland, built at Cleveland in 1887 as the bulk freighter Cambria. ..Pesha photograph from one of the photo collections of old lake ships distributed in sets of 25 views by Marine Historical Society of Detroit. 1. Rise and Fall "It was on Lake Erie where the compound propeller engine for the merchant service in this country first took form," wrote John Morrison in his History of American Steam Navigation. Engines having two cylinders could be economical. Steam need not be discarded after it had pushed one cylinder's piston through its power stroke. It could be put to work again, pushing a second, larger cylinder, under lower pressures in keeping with its decreased temperature. This is the basic idea of a "compound" engine. Such engines had appeared in lake sidewheelers like Oregon of 1845 or Buckeye State of 1851, according to Morrison. In propeller ships of the 1860s, compound engines were arranged in "steeple" fashion. The smallest cylinder was atop the larger one, and the pistons of both rode on the same piston rod turning the propeller. The old wooden tug Glad- iator of 1871, dismantled only several years ago, had one of these engines. Morrison credits the lakes' first fore-and-aft compound engine to the propeller Egyptian, built 1873 at Black River, Ohio, where the Lorain yards of American Shipbuilding Company are found today. The fore-and-aft engine had a clear advantage over its predecessors: It could be " balanced. " Its cylinders were on separate piston rods, so the power strokes of the two pistons could occur alternately in a rhythm offsetting and minimizing the vibration. This was especially important in days of wooden ships when engine vibration caused practical limits to hull lengths. The fore-and-aft engine--and of course metal hulls--made longer lake ships possible. Only a simple refinement created the triple-expansion engine, but it was almost fifteen years in coming. As its name suggests, it had three cylinders strung fore-and-aft along