A Description of the Differential Expansive Pumping Engine [pdf]

Definitely quite readable! This is a very "practical" book for the time. Most everything is provided in the form of a "rule-of-thumb" which is intended to get someone "close enough" as long as they were doing something fairly typical for that time period. It omits a lot of calculus/integrals/thermodynamics, having already distilled those down by constraining the physics to a single particular use-case (extracting mechanical energy from steam using one of 10 models of similar steam engines).

Nothing is "wrong" that I can find, and the rules of thumb all seem quite reasonable. It just surprises me not to see any references/naming of the root concepts which would help interested learners find additional in-depth reading material. But unless they start using steam that isn't around 50 psi, or creating their own steam engines from scratch, the numbers and equations in this book would serve someone well enough who was installing one of these 10 models of steam engines.

There's a lot more to dive into for a curious engineer, such as Carnot's heat engine efficiency limit being regurgitated on page 20 without ceremony. Or why is it that "A good working velocity of flow for water in the is pipes 200 feet per minute" (see Crane's Technical Paper 410 [0]). It could be useful to understand how to use thermodynamic equations along with the provided steam tables to derive variations on the Admiralty rule-of-thumb for non-standard steam pressures.

0: https://annas-archive.org/md5/cc494379619ba5eef13cf59c0237cc...