3 ms·
> Hero [Hero of Alexandria, 10-70 AD] even suggested a mechanical use for the effect. By setting a fire on a hollow, airtight altar, the heated air within would
by bambax 4y ago
> Hero [Hero of Alexandria, 10-70 AD] even suggested a mechanical use for the effect. By setting a fire on a hollow, airtight altar, the heated air within would flow down a tube into a sphere full of water, which in turn would be pushed up another tube into a hanging bucket. The bucket, when sufficiently heavy with water, would then pull on a rope to open some temple doors. Crucially, when the fire was extinguished, Hero noted that the cooling of the air in the altar would draw the water back into the sphere again, lighten the bucket, and so allow the doors to be closed by a counterweight.
Put the contraption on a chariot, use the ropes to turn the wheels instead of "temple doors" (!) and voilà: you have an auto-mobile.
Even if it's much less practical than using a horse, it's amazing that in almost 2000 years, nobody thought of making that for its sheer entertainment value -- or even to convince people that ghosts exist!
- masswerk 4y agoBut why would you want to use such a flimsy technology, if you have horses? There is no way an engine like this could outrun a lean and speedy chariot with two to four horses. Also, even a primitive mechanism like this may have encountered fatal problems with dirt, dust and sand. (Mind that steam locomotion was first tried for roads, which was a total failure because of the quality of roads, even in major city centers like London.)
- bambax 4y agoThat was answered in my comment? At first it would be much less useful than a horse, yes, but it would be so entertaining! And magical! Sell it to kings, make bets... Or accuse people of sorcery, have them burned...
- masswerk 4y agoWell, this is an application: sell it to the king, accuse him of sorcery, have him burned. Become king (and ride horses.) ;-)
- kragen 4y agoThere are lots of applications for heat engines that don't involve mobility: grinding wheat to flour, threshing and winnowing wheat, fulling cloth, sewing cloth together, hammering hot iron or annealed cold bronze, blowing the bellows on a forge or bloomery, sawing wood, turning wood or stone on a lathe, weaving cloth, spinning thread, playing music, crushing ore, grinding a new edge on a knife or axe with a grindstone, turning a potter's wheel, writing, kneading bread, calculating, and, as mentioned, raising water (from a well, from a river, into your fields, into a tower, into a salt pond, or out of a mine or swamp). All of these are things that people were already doing before Heron, in many cases devoting their lives to them, but steam power was not applied to some of them until less than a century ago. In medieval times we can add turning metal on a lathe and winding crossbows. Think of the most common German surnames, which are all occupational: Müller (grinding wheat), Schmidt (hammering iron), Schneider (sewing cloth), Fischer (catching fish), Weber (weaving cloth), Meyer (owning land), Wagner (making wagon wheels), Becker (baking bread), Schulz (herding peasants), Hoffmann (organizing the court), Schäfer (herding sheep), Koch (cooking food), Bauer (farming), and Richter (judging). This is a somewhat skewed sampling of occupations of men in Germany at the late-medieval or early-modern time surnames were imposed. If you were a Schmidt or a Weber you could expect to spend decades doing hard, physical labor every day, in a fixed physical location, labor that is now mostly done by steam.
- ttyprintk 4y agoI think Napoleon snickered at the first steam ships. Something about requiring precisely-controlled fire on a warship. But I bet the ancient Greeks would have killed to add a wheel to their quinqueremes.