Also 8 stoaker. [a. Du. stoker, agent-n. f. stoken to feed (a fire), to stoke.]
1. One who feeds and tends a furnace.
1660. J. Okie’s Lament., i. Of a Famous Brewer my purpose is to tell,… The Noble Stoker Okey that doth the rest Excel.
1706. Phillips (ed. Kersey), Stoaker, one that looks after the Fire and some other Concerns in a Brew-house.
1707. [E. Ward], Barbacue Feast, 9. The Stoaker … by the Help of Breath and Bellows, blew up as rare a Charcoal Fire as ever was kindl’d in Term-Time.
1798. M. Noble, Eng. Regicides, II. 104. He [John Okey] was first a dray-man, then a stoaker in a brewhouse at Islington.
1846. A. Young, Naut. Dict., 323. Stoker or Fireman. A person employed to feed and trim the fires for the boilers of marine steam-engines.
1853. Lytton, My Novel, IX. i. Ten to one but he is saying—‘Not sixteen miles an hour! What the deuce is the matter with the stoker?’
1879. Cassell’s Techn. Educ., I. 284/2. The stoker should open the furnace-doors and push back a portion of the fuel, so as to make a space in front for the fresh supply.
b. Mechanical stoker: an apparatus for automatically feeding fuel into a furnace.
1884. R. Marsden, Cotton Spinning, 349. Mechanical stokers.—The question of stoking by machinery is an open one.
1893. Lightning, 9 Feb., 86/2. Lancashire boilers are used, fitted with Vicar’s mechanical stokers.
c. fig.
1737. M. Green, Spleen, 320. A prince’s cause, a church’s claim, I’ve known to raise a mighty flame, And priest, as stoker, very free To throw in peace and charity.
1893. T. M. Healy, in Westm. Gaz., 2 Nov., 2/2. At its head was a moderate … leader, averse, except when driven to it by the ‘stokers’ of the movement, to lend his approval to extreme demands.
2. pl. Small particles of black gritty matter which escape through the funnel of a steam-engine.
1899. F. T. Bullen, Way in Navy, 67. These ships … provide us instead with a never-ceasing supply of ‘stokers,’ a sort of fine black hail of grit that covers everything. It is not soft like soot.
