This pump was designed in the 1800's by John
Ericsson, designer of the Civil War battleship Monitor. The Ericsson Hot Air
Pump had many advantages for rural customers: It was reliable, ran on virtually
any fuel, had easily replaced parts, and could not explode. (No steam is used,
only a few cubic feet of hot air.)
A fascinating series of linkages sequences
all the events. The pump works by continuously heating and cooling the same air.
The heated air expands and pushes up the TRANSFER PISTON (shaded gray here).
The air is transferred around the edges of Transfer Piston to the space between
the top of the transfer piston and the AIR PISTON. Water circulating around the
cylinder cools the air, causing it to contract.
The water that cools the air
was just brought up from the well. It exits via the outlet pipe (behind, not shown.)
The Air Piston pushes the cooled, contracted air down past the Transfer Piston
and the cycle repeats.
(This is an 18-frame
animation, converted to animated GIF format and then super-compressed for Internet
transmission. (Note: On some Internet browsers it may be displayed much less smoothly
than the CD-ROM version, where the frames are timed to a thousandth of a second,
are larger, and there are twice as many frames (36).)) 
Download an animation of this pump! The
Ericsson Hot Air Pump animation requires 1 meg of SVGA video (VESA 1.2 or higher)
and at least 4 megabytes of free EMM or XMS RAM. It consists of 36 frames. Timing
accuracy better than 1/1000th of a second! You can slow it down and speed it up
in fine increments to run it at the perfect speed for you to enjoy!
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