5 ms·

The origins of the steam engine

97 points by feross 3y ago

freitzkriesler2 3y ago
The Greeks made a sort of "toy" that spins when a fire boiled water. It's almost a shame that no one took it a step further. Imagine ancient Greece and Rome entering a steam age in the 1st or 2nd century.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  It is a toy. It is not efficient in first place and how it works doesn't actually produce much torque. Or likely power either. Water power with something like Egyptian screws might have been better solution.
  - KineticLensman 3y ago
    > It is a toy Exactly. It was basically a kettle on an axle, with two spouts, causing it to spin as the water boiled off. It had no valves so couldn't build up enough pressure to do usable work. It couldn't be reloaded with water when operating. The overall concept was constrained by the limited metal working skills of the era, which weren't up to making reliable high-pressure vessels. The development of usable pistons for steam engines followed centuries of experience gained making cannons and associated ammunition, which slowly provided the skills to make metal tubes that fitted and could hold pressure without themselves exploding.
    - antonhowes 3y ago
      Though note, from the post, that there were some applications of stationary aeolipiles with their spouts directed at vanes to do some light mechanical work - things like turning roasting spits and grinding pigments. All known throughout the fourteenth through to the seventeenth centuries, if not earlier, though it's unclear how widely any of them were adopted.
- antonhowes 3y ago
  It is in the post!
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  Here on HN I read about the theory, that one of the main reasons that the time of the steam engines came, was the rise of the cannon. Over generations, every king wanted to have the best cannons as that translated into power - and once you can build a cannon, you can build something that can contain high pressures and give that pressure a direction. In other words, to take that toy further, they would have also had to greatly improve their metallurgy first. Otherwise a smart greek inventor would have just created spectacular (and dangerous) booms, but nothing that could reliable do more work, than a ordinary slave.
  - antonhowes 3y ago
    Hmm, I don't think Savery's engine would have required that - it's just a copper vessel, and the pipes were often even made of wood. I've often seen the cannon theory applied to piston-using engines, but that was the next stage with Papin and Newcomen and beyond (hopefully our chapter II)
    - hutzlibu 3y ago
      Not an expert, but apperently this design was hard even with the modern tech_ "Second, the next stage of the process required high-pressure steam to force the water up, and the pump's soldered joints were barely capable of withstanding high pressure steam and needed frequent repair." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery
  - freitzkriesler2 3y ago
    I see that but we know the Romans had lead pipes. I'm curious how much steam those pipes could withstand. Perhaps enough to get some sort of rotary tool. Regardless, it's a fun hypothetical to think of an ancient Roman and Greek steam age.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  That's Hero's aeolipile, mentioned near the end of the article. Most scholars tend to agree that Rome [1] was nowhere near an Industrial Revolution. One take on it is here: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus..., but the general tl;dr is that a) even if you backported a fully working Watt steam engine to Classical Antiquity and they could manufacture it, there's nothing that they could use it for [2], and b) the Roman economy isn't really in a shape that encourages the kind of industrial innovation feedback loop you see in the Industrial Revolution. [1] Side note: at the time the aeolipile is developed, there is no independent Greece; Rome thoroughly conquered all the polities in the Balkans in the 2nd century BC. Classical Greece is largely 5th century BC. The aeolipile dates to 1st century AD, rather late in Roman history. [2] The historical motivation for the steam engine was of course draining coal mines, and the Romans weren't really using coal in enough quantities to require it. The Industrial Revolution itself was initially jumpstarted with textile production, which Rome was even further behind in--the spinning wheel wasn't developed until after 1000!
  - BirAdam 3y ago
    You are correct as far as anyone alive today can know. I would just add that there was quite a bit of cultural aversion to non-agricultural enterprises among the senatorial class. Merchants and tradesmen were looked down upon. This was made worse as many skilled laborers in the city of Rome were actually slaves.
whoomp12341 3y ago
oh wow. That makes me wonder... could we make a steam engine using the power of the sun that heats up water to boil into a fan that generates electricity, that then catches the water and flows down running a hydro generator so you get energy on the way up and on the way down. I wonder what kind of efficiency that would have compared to modern day solar? probably laughable
- Retric 3y ago
  What you’re missing here is pressure. Steam turbines work not because of steam alone, you can fill a room with steam insert a turbine and nothing happens. To get them to spin you need higher pressure on the input side of the turbine than the output. If you want to have steam go up a shaft that’s going to increase the pressure on output side and thus reduce the amount of energy generated by the turbine.
  - antonhowes 3y ago
    Yes, it's the difference in pressure/heat that is exploited, as Sadi Carnot noted (by analogising the steam engine to a water-wheel exploiting a fall of water, treating it as a "fall of heat")
- gamblor956 3y ago
  It's not efficient at all. Without condensing the solar input, there simply isn't enough energy to heat the water fast enough to create enough steam to push a fan. However, what you have described is similar to the basic design of closed-loop industrial solar thermal systems: they concentrate solar power to heat a liquid or other medium and use the heat (or heat differential) conventionally (see, for example the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility near Las Vegas).
  - jandrese 3y ago
    It's possible, but solar thermal has proven to be less efficient than photovoltaic at capturing energy from the sun. The only advantage is that you can coast on stored heat after the sun sets to keep making energy. Other than some pilot plants solar thermal is going nowhere. Condensing the steam down and trying to extract energy from the condensation flowing downhill is orders of magnitude away from being worth it. The sun is boiling a few gallons of water per minute at best, while hydroelectric systems are measured millions of gallons per minute.
zem 3y ago
related is the notion of "steam engine time". here's a nice blog post explaining the concept: https://kk.org/thetechnium/steam-engine-ti/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/steam-engine-ti/
- eesmith 3y ago
  Everything I've read about the development of the steam engine says that concept of "steam engine time" is fundamentally wrong.
  - zem 3y ago
    how so? it seems to make intuitive sense that you needed a whole raft of supporting technologies to make the slowly rising curve of proto-steam-engine development suddenly hit an inflection point and spread the invention everywhere in a relatively short span. "steam engine time" is simply when all those things were in place and you could make a practical, cost-effective steam engine.
    - eesmith 3y ago
      You need to be careful about what you mean by "steam engine time." The link you gave has different interpretations. Gibson said "there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines" while the commenter says "The Romans had the idea of steam engines, but not of strong iron to contain the pressure, nor valves to regulate it, nor the cheap fuel to power it." You apparently disagree with Gibson's characterization. The original 1931 claim gives a third; "A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time" However, As Anton Howes (co-author of the linked-to page) argues at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-76c https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... , steam engines came decades after the pieces were available, and well after initial uses (like pumping water from a mine) were conceived of, and where there would have been social growth had they been available: > So why did it then take almost another half a century, even with the increasingly widespread understanding of atmospheric pressure and vacuums, for a widely-adopted and practical atmospheric engine like Thomas Savery’s to appear? > The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked on thermometers, weather-glasses, egg incubators, solar-activated fountains, and perpetual motion machines. But because people so rarely try to improve or invent things, the low-hanging fruit can be left on the tree for decades or even centuries. > The development of the steam engine, rather than being a story of the Torricellian vacuum science unlocking a new technology, is instead just like that of textile machinery, signalling systems, and any number of other “ideas behind their time.” The rate at which such inventions appear is really down to the number of people applying themselves to improvement, and the strange-seeming delays are down to there so often being so few. When only a handful of people are inventors, is it really any wonder that the circumstantial setbacks and distractions that prevented a Petty or a Kalthoff can end up delaying things for decades?
zyxin 3y ago
Interestingly, the steam engines of the Titanic made use of the vacuum generated by condensing steam to extract additional energy from steam that's below atmospheric pressure. https://www.titanicology.com/Titanica/TitanicsPrimeMover.htm https://www.titanicology.com/Titanica/TitanicsPrimeMover.htm
- userbinator 3y ago
  As were most if not all the other steamships of that era; compound steam engines were already over a century old by then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_steam_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_steam_engine
  - donw 3y ago
    Comments like these are the reason that I still read hacker news. I can come to a thread, and almost always there will be somebody replying with extra information on the topic at hand. Thank you.
    - ohthatsnotright 3y ago
      Related blog post that is one of my favorite authors: https://technicshistory.com/2023/11/30/the-pursuit-of-efficiency-and-the-science-of-steam/ https://technicshistory.com/2023/11/30/the-pursuit-of-effici...
dtgriscom 3y ago
OK: I don't get that second diagram showing how the "dripper" fountain works. How does the cooling/contracting air pull water up from the reservoir into the bottle? Why doesn't it just allow the water pushed up through the top pipe back into the bottle (which it somehow also does)? There's a one-way valve at the top of the pipe from the lower reservoir to the bottle, and perhaps if there was another at the base of the top pipe to keep the water from flowing back it would work, but clearly there's no such valve. And the same mechanism powers a number of the other systems; how do they all work?
- imchillyb 3y ago
  The top pipe is submerged, and the other pipe is a simple valve. As the volume inside the container cools, the air pressure reduces, since the pressure of air outside the container is connected to the volume of water underneath, the pressure of air pushes the volume below and that squeezes the water past the valve at the top. The pressure from the column of air at the top pipe is not sufficient to overcome the volume of water in the closed container, and so remains neutral. That's the best I can describe this effect for you. ChatGPT would probably do a better job.
imchillyb 3y ago
My favorite of these has to be the temple door trick. A simple weight and counterweight setup with a literal twist.
- antonhowes 3y ago
  Mine too! When Matt first showed us a draft I was amazed - never thought it would look so smooth.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
leetrout 3y ago
If you enjoy videos, Proper People did a fantastic video about a 115 year old steam engine that still works that used to pump water for a city in Massachusetts. Great watch full of info and some beautiful shots. https://youtu.be/nBImv1mlcMg?si=XUyME3AmDB30sKaj https://youtu.be/nBImv1mlcMg?si=XUyME3AmDB30sKaj
WalterBright 3y ago
I had fun designing and machining a simple steam engine with a one inch piston. It actually worked, though it was poorly balanced and vibrated too much. Unfortunately, it consumed many many hours in the machine shop, and was one reason why I decided to write software - I could realize my ideas much faster!
- zabzonk 3y ago
  in the uk, in the 60s you could get toy steam engines with i guess about a 3/4 inch piston. i had one, heated by a small methylated spirit burner. it had just about enough power to keep itself going, but whenever i tried to hook it up to one of my meccano constructs, it didn't have the juice.
  - stevekemp 3y ago
    Yeah they're still around Mamod makes a bunch of static engines that run on spirits, and can power small things. They're pretty commonly available either new, or used, and most of them will last forever. I used to collect steam-engines, and had fun repairing them and maintaining them until a cross-country move meant I lost most of my collection. I still have the Mamod Roadster, which is a cute little car powered by steam (not my video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYYuFe7bdW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYYuFe7bdW4
eesmith 3y ago
Anton Howes, co-author of this piece, earlier wrote "Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part I" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... "Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part II" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-cc8 https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... "Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part III" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-76c https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... Part II has 304 HN comments from July 2022 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 .
Animats 3y ago
The amazing thing is that steam engines were made out of iron for most of the 19th century. Steel wasn't available in bulk until about 1880. The materials really matter. Early steam engines such as Newcomen's were insanely complicated and had terrible thermodynamic efficiency, because the parts couldn't stand any real pressure. Consider a Diesel. A basic Diesel engine is a very simple machine. Here's a rural mechanic in China restoring one from junk status to running, using basic tools.[1] It's a brutally simple one-cylinder engine, widely used in Japan and India. No pollution controls. No water recycling; you have to add water as often as fuel. No electrical components. Started with a hand crank. Costs about US$200-$300 for a new one.[2] Seems like someone would have been able to build one of those by 1700 or so. But no. You couldn't build that engine without reasonably good steel. Even if you had one to copy, you could not build that with the technology of 1870. You need a strong cylinder, a strong cylinder head, and good piston rings that precisely fit the cylinder, or you won't get the compression to ignite the fuel. The first Diesel engine that worked was built in 1897. Steel is interesting, because it's thousands of years old, yet wasn't mass produced until the 1890s. A Bessemer converter is very simple. The Romans could have built one. But it took quite a bit of R&D to get the metallurgy right so that steel came out. Bessemer got his working, but others, with different ore sources, couldn't get theirs to work reliably. Robert Mushet did 10,000 trials over ten years of to get an understanding of exactly what ingredients do what. This debugged the Bessemer process, and the world changed. The Romans had sword factories. They could make steel, but not in bulk. If that work had happened a centuries earlier... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s--QjXbdnME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s--QjXbdnME [2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Changchai-Diesel-Engine-On-Sale-Best_60592807970.htm https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Changchai-Diesel-Engi...
- zabzonk 3y ago
  would you not also require diesel fuel?
  - Animats 3y ago
    Kerosene, Diesel fuel, and jet fuel are all very close. It's also possible to use sunflower oil, olive oil, whale oil, or alcohol, all of which were known for many centuries. Simple Diesels will run on a very wide range of fuels if they have to, although pollution, wear, and ash in the engine may increase, and power may decrease.
credit_guy 3y ago
Often times people ask (even here on HN) whether the Romans could have built steam engines. Here's my theory: yes, absolutely. Technologies evolve for either military use or non-military use. Military technologies are subject to evolutionary pressures that are easily 100 to 1000 times higher than non-military technologies. An iron plow will do a better job than a wooden plow, but in the end it's just a matter of slightly increased productivity. But an iron sword vs a wooden alternative, that's life and death. Military technologies, throughout ages, evolved many times faster than civilian ones. Do you think the technology to make an iron sword is harder, or simpler than the technology to distill spirits? Obviously harder, maybe 100 times so. Yet, swords appeared 5000 years ago, spirits about 1000 years ago. The Romans developed a huge industrial base capable of churning hundreds of thousands of "lorica segmentata" armors, yet, their technology when it came to textile dyes was absolutely pathetic. Etc, etc. My point is the steam engine emerged as a civilian technology, not a military one. Once it matured, it powered battleships, so it obviously acquired a military relevance, but in the times of Watt, it was definitely civilian. But could we have lived in an alternate history where the steam engine appeared as a military technology? If so, then it could have evolved many times faster, and I contend that I can see a scenario where the Romans (well, the Eastern Roman empire) could have initiated an industrial revolution. Centered around oil (petroleum), not coal. Hint: they possessed the Greek fire, a fundamental military technology. For some reason the Greek fire disappeared, and history evolved fire weapons starting with cannons. But it's entirely reasonable to think the fire weapons evolved out of Greek fire (i.e. flamethrowers), and this would have stimulated a healthy trade in petroleum, 1000 years before the real history.

97 points by feross 3y ago

The Greeks made a sort of "toy" that spins when a fire boiled water. It's almost a shame that no one took it a step further. Imagine ancient Greece and Rome entering a steam age in the 1st or 2nd century.

Ekaros 3y ago
It is a toy. It is not efficient in first place and how it works doesn't actually produce much torque. Or likely power either. Water power with something like Egyptian screws might have been better solution.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  > It is a toy Exactly. It was basically a kettle on an axle, with two spouts, causing it to spin as the water boiled off. It had no valves so couldn't build up enough pressure to do usable work. It couldn't be reloaded with water when operating. The overall concept was constrained by the limited metal working skills of the era, which weren't up to making reliable high-pressure vessels. The development of usable pistons for steam engines followed centuries of experience gained making cannons and associated ammunition, which slowly provided the skills to make metal tubes that fitted and could hold pressure without themselves exploding.
  - antonhowes 3y ago
    Though note, from the post, that there were some applications of stationary aeolipiles with their spouts directed at vanes to do some light mechanical work - things like turning roasting spits and grinding pigments. All known throughout the fourteenth through to the seventeenth centuries, if not earlier, though it's unclear how widely any of them were adopted.
antonhowes 3y ago
It is in the post!
hutzlibu 3y ago
Here on HN I read about the theory, that one of the main reasons that the time of the steam engines came, was the rise of the cannon. Over generations, every king wanted to have the best cannons as that translated into power - and once you can build a cannon, you can build something that can contain high pressures and give that pressure a direction. In other words, to take that toy further, they would have also had to greatly improve their metallurgy first. Otherwise a smart greek inventor would have just created spectacular (and dangerous) booms, but nothing that could reliable do more work, than a ordinary slave.
- antonhowes 3y ago
  Hmm, I don't think Savery's engine would have required that - it's just a copper vessel, and the pipes were often even made of wood. I've often seen the cannon theory applied to piston-using engines, but that was the next stage with Papin and Newcomen and beyond (hopefully our chapter II)
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    Not an expert, but apperently this design was hard even with the modern tech_ "Second, the next stage of the process required high-pressure steam to force the water up, and the pump's soldered joints were barely capable of withstanding high pressure steam and needed frequent repair." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery
- freitzkriesler2 3y ago
  I see that but we know the Romans had lead pipes. I'm curious how much steam those pipes could withstand. Perhaps enough to get some sort of rotary tool. Regardless, it's a fun hypothetical to think of an ancient Roman and Greek steam age.
jcranmer 3y ago
That's Hero's aeolipile, mentioned near the end of the article. Most scholars tend to agree that Rome [1] was nowhere near an Industrial Revolution. One take on it is here: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus..., but the general tl;dr is that a) even if you backported a fully working Watt steam engine to Classical Antiquity and they could manufacture it, there's nothing that they could use it for [2], and b) the Roman economy isn't really in a shape that encourages the kind of industrial innovation feedback loop you see in the Industrial Revolution. [1] Side note: at the time the aeolipile is developed, there is no independent Greece; Rome thoroughly conquered all the polities in the Balkans in the 2nd century BC. Classical Greece is largely 5th century BC. The aeolipile dates to 1st century AD, rather late in Roman history. [2] The historical motivation for the steam engine was of course draining coal mines, and the Romans weren't really using coal in enough quantities to require it. The Industrial Revolution itself was initially jumpstarted with textile production, which Rome was even further behind in--the spinning wheel wasn't developed until after 1000!
- BirAdam 3y ago
  You are correct as far as anyone alive today can know. I would just add that there was quite a bit of cultural aversion to non-agricultural enterprises among the senatorial class. Merchants and tradesmen were looked down upon. This was made worse as many skilled laborers in the city of Rome were actually slaves.

whoomp12341 3y ago

oh wow. That makes me wonder... could we make a steam engine using the power of the sun that heats up water to boil into a fan that generates electricity, that then catches the water and flows down running a hydro generator so you get energy on the way up and on the way down. I wonder what kind of efficiency that would have compared to modern day solar? probably laughable

Retric 3y ago
What you’re missing here is pressure. Steam turbines work not because of steam alone, you can fill a room with steam insert a turbine and nothing happens. To get them to spin you need higher pressure on the input side of the turbine than the output. If you want to have steam go up a shaft that’s going to increase the pressure on output side and thus reduce the amount of energy generated by the turbine.
- antonhowes 3y ago
  Yes, it's the difference in pressure/heat that is exploited, as Sadi Carnot noted (by analogising the steam engine to a water-wheel exploiting a fall of water, treating it as a "fall of heat")
gamblor956 3y ago
It's not efficient at all. Without condensing the solar input, there simply isn't enough energy to heat the water fast enough to create enough steam to push a fan. However, what you have described is similar to the basic design of closed-loop industrial solar thermal systems: they concentrate solar power to heat a liquid or other medium and use the heat (or heat differential) conventionally (see, for example the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility near Las Vegas).
- jandrese 3y ago
  It's possible, but solar thermal has proven to be less efficient than photovoltaic at capturing energy from the sun. The only advantage is that you can coast on stored heat after the sun sets to keep making energy. Other than some pilot plants solar thermal is going nowhere. Condensing the steam down and trying to extract energy from the condensation flowing downhill is orders of magnitude away from being worth it. The sun is boiling a few gallons of water per minute at best, while hydroelectric systems are measured millions of gallons per minute.

zem 3y ago

related is the notion of "steam engine time". here's a nice blog post explaining the concept: https://kk.org/thetechnium/steam-engine-ti/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/steam-engine-ti/

eesmith 3y ago
Everything I've read about the development of the steam engine says that concept of "steam engine time" is fundamentally wrong.
- zem 3y ago
  how so? it seems to make intuitive sense that you needed a whole raft of supporting technologies to make the slowly rising curve of proto-steam-engine development suddenly hit an inflection point and spread the invention everywhere in a relatively short span. "steam engine time" is simply when all those things were in place and you could make a practical, cost-effective steam engine.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    You need to be careful about what you mean by "steam engine time." The link you gave has different interpretations. Gibson said "there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines" while the commenter says "The Romans had the idea of steam engines, but not of strong iron to contain the pressure, nor valves to regulate it, nor the cheap fuel to power it." You apparently disagree with Gibson's characterization. The original 1931 claim gives a third; "A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time" However, As Anton Howes (co-author of the linked-to page) argues at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-76c https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... , steam engines came decades after the pieces were available, and well after initial uses (like pumping water from a mine) were conceived of, and where there would have been social growth had they been available: > So why did it then take almost another half a century, even with the increasingly widespread understanding of atmospheric pressure and vacuums, for a widely-adopted and practical atmospheric engine like Thomas Savery’s to appear? > The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked on thermometers, weather-glasses, egg incubators, solar-activated fountains, and perpetual motion machines. But because people so rarely try to improve or invent things, the low-hanging fruit can be left on the tree for decades or even centuries. > The development of the steam engine, rather than being a story of the Torricellian vacuum science unlocking a new technology, is instead just like that of textile machinery, signalling systems, and any number of other “ideas behind their time.” The rate at which such inventions appear is really down to the number of people applying themselves to improvement, and the strange-seeming delays are down to there so often being so few. When only a handful of people are inventors, is it really any wonder that the circumstantial setbacks and distractions that prevented a Petty or a Kalthoff can end up delaying things for decades?

zyxin 3y ago

Interestingly, the steam engines of the Titanic made use of the vacuum generated by condensing steam to extract additional energy from steam that's below atmospheric pressure. https://www.titanicology.com/Titanica/TitanicsPrimeMover.htm https://www.titanicology.com/Titanica/TitanicsPrimeMover.htm

userbinator 3y ago
As were most if not all the other steamships of that era; compound steam engines were already over a century old by then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_steam_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_steam_engine
- donw 3y ago
  Comments like these are the reason that I still read hacker news. I can come to a thread, and almost always there will be somebody replying with extra information on the topic at hand. Thank you.
  - ohthatsnotright 3y ago
    Related blog post that is one of my favorite authors: https://technicshistory.com/2023/11/30/the-pursuit-of-efficiency-and-the-science-of-steam/ https://technicshistory.com/2023/11/30/the-pursuit-of-effici...

dtgriscom 3y ago

OK: I don't get that second diagram showing how the "dripper" fountain works. How does the cooling/contracting air pull water up from the reservoir into the bottle? Why doesn't it just allow the water pushed up through the top pipe back into the bottle (which it somehow also does)? There's a one-way valve at the top of the pipe from the lower reservoir to the bottle, and perhaps if there was another at the base of the top pipe to keep the water from flowing back it would work, but clearly there's no such valve. And the same mechanism powers a number of the other systems; how do they all work?

imchillyb 3y ago
The top pipe is submerged, and the other pipe is a simple valve. As the volume inside the container cools, the air pressure reduces, since the pressure of air outside the container is connected to the volume of water underneath, the pressure of air pushes the volume below and that squeezes the water past the valve at the top. The pressure from the column of air at the top pipe is not sufficient to overcome the volume of water in the closed container, and so remains neutral. That's the best I can describe this effect for you. ChatGPT would probably do a better job.

imchillyb 3y ago

My favorite of these has to be the temple door trick. A simple weight and counterweight setup with a literal twist.

antonhowes 3y ago
Mine too! When Matt first showed us a draft I was amazed - never thought it would look so smooth.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

leetrout 3y ago

If you enjoy videos, Proper People did a fantastic video about a 115 year old steam engine that still works that used to pump water for a city in Massachusetts. Great watch full of info and some beautiful shots. https://youtu.be/nBImv1mlcMg?si=XUyME3AmDB30sKaj https://youtu.be/nBImv1mlcMg?si=XUyME3AmDB30sKaj

WalterBright 3y ago

I had fun designing and machining a simple steam engine with a one inch piston. It actually worked, though it was poorly balanced and vibrated too much. Unfortunately, it consumed many many hours in the machine shop, and was one reason why I decided to write software - I could realize my ideas much faster!

zabzonk 3y ago
in the uk, in the 60s you could get toy steam engines with i guess about a 3/4 inch piston. i had one, heated by a small methylated spirit burner. it had just about enough power to keep itself going, but whenever i tried to hook it up to one of my meccano constructs, it didn't have the juice.
- stevekemp 3y ago
  Yeah they're still around Mamod makes a bunch of static engines that run on spirits, and can power small things. They're pretty commonly available either new, or used, and most of them will last forever. I used to collect steam-engines, and had fun repairing them and maintaining them until a cross-country move meant I lost most of my collection. I still have the Mamod Roadster, which is a cute little car powered by steam (not my video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYYuFe7bdW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYYuFe7bdW4

eesmith 3y ago

Anton Howes, co-author of this piece, earlier wrote "Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part I" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... "Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part II" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-cc8 https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... "Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part III" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-76c https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... Part II has 304 HN comments from July 2022 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 .

Animats 3y ago

The amazing thing is that steam engines were made out of iron for most of the 19th century. Steel wasn't available in bulk until about 1880. The materials really matter. Early steam engines such as Newcomen's were insanely complicated and had terrible thermodynamic efficiency, because the parts couldn't stand any real pressure. Consider a Diesel. A basic Diesel engine is a very simple machine. Here's a rural mechanic in China restoring one from junk status to running, using basic tools.[1] It's a brutally simple one-cylinder engine, widely used in Japan and India. No pollution controls. No water recycling; you have to add water as often as fuel. No electrical components. Started with a hand crank. Costs about US$200-$300 for a new one.[2] Seems like someone would have been able to build one of those by 1700 or so. But no. You couldn't build that engine without reasonably good steel. Even if you had one to copy, you could not build that with the technology of 1870. You need a strong cylinder, a strong cylinder head, and good piston rings that precisely fit the cylinder, or you won't get the compression to ignite the fuel. The first Diesel engine that worked was built in 1897. Steel is interesting, because it's thousands of years old, yet wasn't mass produced until the 1890s. A Bessemer converter is very simple. The Romans could have built one. But it took quite a bit of R&D to get the metallurgy right so that steel came out. Bessemer got his working, but others, with different ore sources, couldn't get theirs to work reliably. Robert Mushet did 10,000 trials over ten years of to get an understanding of exactly what ingredients do what. This debugged the Bessemer process, and the world changed. The Romans had sword factories. They could make steel, but not in bulk. If that work had happened a centuries earlier... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s--QjXbdnME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s--QjXbdnME [2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Changchai-Diesel-Engine-On-Sale-Best_60592807970.htm https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Changchai-Diesel-Engi...

zabzonk 3y ago
would you not also require diesel fuel?
- Animats 3y ago
  Kerosene, Diesel fuel, and jet fuel are all very close. It's also possible to use sunflower oil, olive oil, whale oil, or alcohol, all of which were known for many centuries. Simple Diesels will run on a very wide range of fuels if they have to, although pollution, wear, and ash in the engine may increase, and power may decrease.

credit_guy 3y ago

Often times people ask (even here on HN) whether the Romans could have built steam engines. Here's my theory: yes, absolutely. Technologies evolve for either military use or non-military use. Military technologies are subject to evolutionary pressures that are easily 100 to 1000 times higher than non-military technologies. An iron plow will do a better job than a wooden plow, but in the end it's just a matter of slightly increased productivity. But an iron sword vs a wooden alternative, that's life and death. Military technologies, throughout ages, evolved many times faster than civilian ones. Do you think the technology to make an iron sword is harder, or simpler than the technology to distill spirits? Obviously harder, maybe 100 times so. Yet, swords appeared 5000 years ago, spirits about 1000 years ago. The Romans developed a huge industrial base capable of churning hundreds of thousands of "lorica segmentata" armors, yet, their technology when it came to textile dyes was absolutely pathetic. Etc, etc. My point is the steam engine emerged as a civilian technology, not a military one. Once it matured, it powered battleships, so it obviously acquired a military relevance, but in the times of Watt, it was definitely civilian. But could we have lived in an alternate history where the steam engine appeared as a military technology? If so, then it could have evolved many times faster, and I contend that I can see a scenario where the Romans (well, the Eastern Roman empire) could have initiated an industrial revolution. Centered around oil (petroleum), not coal. Hint: they possessed the Greek fire, a fundamental military technology. For some reason the Greek fire disappeared, and history evolved fire weapons starting with cannons. But it's entirely reasonable to think the fire weapons evolved out of Greek fire (i.e. flamethrowers), and this would have stimulated a healthy trade in petroleum, 1000 years before the real history.