11 ms·

Howard Hughes modified a 1925 Doble steam car to reach 133 MPH (2022)

77 points by palmfacehn 3y ago

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
anybody have diagrams of this engine? Picture https://roarington.com/media-house/directories/cars/doble_e_20_steam_car_1925 https://roarington.com/media-house/directories/cars/doble_e_... This video opens the hood, and shows cross sections of engine. And is technical focus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtqVvS8iP9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtqVvS8iP9w This Jay Leno video is actually good. Has cutaway of the engine to show the moving parts. https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo?t=701 https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo?t=701
- TylerE 3y ago
  There really isn't much to the engine of a steam engine. It's the firebox/burner and boiler where all the really hard and interesting stuff happens.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    >> There really isn't much to the engine of a steam engine. Beware the train spotters. I hear a hundred steam-powered keyboards ready to rave about the intricacies of reverser gears.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Oh, I’m intimately aware. Just pointing my out that what most people call a steam “engine”… maybe only 10% of that is the actual engine. In something like a car especially. The actual engine is just a double acting cylinder and a few slide valves.
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        I think the negative response to this type of post is because you can take any field and do a reductive statement "It's Just XYZ". There is a hundred years of steam engine design "It's Just some valves". It's just a way to either minimize someone's field, or way to show you only have a cursory understanding. Rarely does someone have a deep knowledge of a field and then also frame an overview of the field as "Just some bits". Nuclear Physics is Just smashing atoms. Biology is Just some Cells. Or Just looking through a microscope. Computer Science is Just the application of And/OR statements. Or Just Boolean logic. Internal Combustion Engines are just little explosion's in a cylinder. F1 Cars are just an engine + battery + some wings. Edit: Honestly. I'm guilty of doing this too. I've "Just Learned" how people take it so have learned to adapt phrasing things that don't insult people.
  - jcgrillo 3y ago
    There is some interesting engineering in a compound double acting engine[1], especially one like the Doble which runs on superheated steam. There's a large temperature gradient between the "hot side" and the "cold side" where the hot side is something like 1250°F+. IIRC they had to be careful about getting the correct cast iron alloys, and the bores had to be slightly tapered. Then there's the valve train, which is totally different from an IC engine but sizing and flow considerations are still really important for efficiency. Also, your crossheads and bottom end bearings are potentially an area of concern--while rotational speeds are really low by modern engine standards, there's a problem of figuring out how to remove water from the lube oil. So I'd wager there's still a whole bunch of "interesting" things happening in the Doble engine, and we'd probably have a pretty difficult time building one from scratch today given that reciprocating steam engines haven't been "a thing" in industrial living memory. [1] For one example of an interesting problem: for a given temperature of inlet steam and desired power output, in a double expansion double-acting compound engine, tell me what size the hot cylinder will be, what size the cold cylinder will be, and what the clearances, rings, etc will be to make it all work efficiently across the operating envelope.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      The Doble boiler is so much more interesting than that, though ;) Almost unique.
      - jcgrillo 3y ago
        It is very cool. I think we'd be mistaken thinking that any of this engineering is "trivial". This was the height of a technology that's largely forgotten, and unforgetting it would be hard work at every turn.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    If plethora of designs in search of perfection is an indicator of something of interest, then take a look at the many variations in valve gear design, particularly for locomotives, which needed to operate reasonably efficiently over a wide range of speeds, gradients and loads. Even more so, consider the many attempts at making non-turbine rotary steam engines, wonderfully documented here: http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/rotaryengines/rotaryeng.htm http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/rotaryengines/rotaryeng... My personal favorite is the Tower spherical engine: http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/tower/tower.htm http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/tower/tower.htm Unlike most of the designs here, this one was built and even put to a little practical use.
    - uticus 3y ago
      > My personal favorite is the Tower spherical engine... when i first saw the static diagram, i thought wow that looks like it is much more complicated than this 2-d diagram lets on. then later down the page i saw the animation showing the 3-d complexity... mind blowing.
  - xenadu02 3y ago
    Well the perfection of a steam-powered car was interesting even though technically far too late to matter. Early steam cars were more like steam trains: big boilers that need to be fired an hour before you want to go anywhere and need regular stops to take on water. In a Doble there technically isn't a boiler as most people think of it; the modern equivalent term might be "steam generator". The Doble system flashes water to steam almost instantly and on-demand, then uses a condenser to recycle the water. The flame is also not burning continuously, but only when steam is needed. With modern insulation materials the firebox is very efficient with little heat loss and lasts a long time. This gives the Doble steam car a responsiveness closer to a gas engine, without the need to pre-heat the boiler or continuously refill with water. The fuel system is more flexible too, it can operate on almost any liquid combustible with some adjustment. By the time the Doble was developed it was too late; gasoline and diesel won.
    - jcgrillo 3y ago
      Part of the problem I think was that each Doble car was basically a one-off. They were expensive, high performance prototypes, not production consumer products. In principle they could have been made more user friendly--in terms of performance specs they were really close to a win (15mpg, powerful, quiet, low water consumption, fast starting) but they were still finicky, high maintenance machines. Higher production numbers could have driven solutions, but the Otto cycle had the advantage there. I wonder if you ran the 1890-1930 experiment 10 times how differently it all might shake out each time.
      - TylerE 3y ago
        The part almost no one talks about is how there are tons of cars being sold as early as 1880. They were just called horseless carriages, and were essentially a small carriage with… an electric motor and batteries. Yup, the original dominant form of car was an EV.
deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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hinkley 3y ago
Howard Hughes was also fucking nuts. I knew a Microsoft millionaire who retired at 30. By 35 he was involuntarily committed, and nearly broke. I knew him because he threw great parties, and we got invited to one and my gf and he became friends. These were not rich people parties, they were upper middle class parties with zany themes, like alcoholic waffles. He was always doing something that surprised you. It made a certain kind of sense but it was things you would never think of. Over time, the surprises got less humorous and more troubling. Toward the end he had a manipulative girlfriend turned unrequited love who was sponging off of him, and his grip on reality was slipping. At one point he said he was trying to make himself insane, and I guess he succeeded. His mother got power of attorney when he was down to his condo and $85k in today’s dollars. Thinking about that after, and my own family’s experience with decline after retirement, I thought that the regulating effect of going to work every day was probably doing him a lot of good. I feel like the same thing happened with Hughes as well. He just holed up in his mansion and unraveled.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sandworm101 3y ago
  >> Howard Hughes was also fucking nuts. And also basically a criminal by today's standards. If a 19yo was caught in a Ferrari trying to break a record on a beach, or anywhere other than a closed race track on private land, that 19yo would be lucky to ever drive again. And if that 19yo hurt anyone, possibly a decade or more in prison.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Saw a video on YouTube the other day that mentioned an early Hollywood movie that killed three extras filming a flood scene. If I have my timelines right that would have been approximately contemporary with Hughes. The value of a human life seemed to drop pretty low during the Depression, but it wasn’t that great before then either. Unfortunately an expectation of safety is a rather recent development, one that Alec Baldwin is learning about right now.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
https://archive.is/NaCGK https://archive.is/NaCGK
Animats 3y ago
I'm amazed that the car stayed on the ground. Both Stanley and Doble made steam cars that had more power than the suspension could handle. A speed record attempt: "As the Steamer started its run, it was silent except for a low, soft whistle. This rose to a faint whine, and a jetlike white stream flowed from the tail of the car. Soon the head of the driver could hardly be seen in the blur of speed. The car passed the 100 m.p.h. mark and surged up to 197 m.p.h. As it was about to touch 200 m.p.h., however, the racer hit a slight bump on the beach. The light car took off like a wingless glider, soared for about 100 feet at a height of 10 feet, then crashed to the cement-hard sand in an explosion of steam and flames. The driver was flung clear, badly injured but not dead."[1] [1] https://www.americanheritage.com/stanleys-and-their-steamer https://www.americanheritage.com/stanleys-and-their-steamer
- jcgrillo 3y ago
  The Doble weighs about 4 times as much ;)
- RajT88 3y ago
  Apparently an urban legend, although the article is not suuuuper clear about it: > These stories persist to this day, although all are false. The truth is that the Stanley Steamer was constructed in such a way that it was impossible for it to blow up.
  - jfoutz 3y ago
    I'm no expert, but I think it's fair to call a boiler failure an explosion. you're going to have a ton of steam pressure in a confined space. Not like a gasoline or dinamite explosion, but still a hell of a boom. although maybe it did have a special emergency release valve that was sealed with a weaker metal or something so it couldn't get enough pressure to catastrophically fail. I'm skeptical of this claim at face value "impossible for it to blow up" but people are smart. it's probably true in a bunch of contexts.
    - clausecker 3y ago
      Except Doble cars don't have a traditional boiler. They have a monotube boiler, which only holds a minuscule amount of water at any given time and thus has much less stored energy that could go boom.
uticus 3y ago
> The 1925 Doble Steam Car could out-accelerate the mighty Model J Duesenberg of 1930, doing 0 to 75 mph in just 5 seconds, with its engine turning over at less than 1,000 rpm... wha? certainly better than my hatchback
- userbinator 3y ago
  Lots of torque. 1000lb-ft of it according to the article, which is far more than most passenger cars and roughly what a large semitrailer truck or bus would have.
  - uticus 3y ago
    1000 lb-ft available from a standing start. Even better than semis, which although get peak torque at low RPMs, still have to get to some rev range (combined with gearing down for those standing starts). I don't fully understand EVs, but afaik that's the only road-going tech today that provides instantly-available torque at any RPM (including near zero, the 'standing start').
metadat 3y ago
Was the steam produced by coal? Kinda hard to imagine stoking the boiler at 130MPH.
- jhallenworld 3y ago
  Fuel-oil (Kerosene).
jhallenworld 3y ago
That Doble engine (or its technology anyway) was used in the Besler steam powered plane. Here is a video of its flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8 On Douglas Self's museum of retro-tech, of course: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/steamplane/steamplane.htm http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/steamplane/stea...
wrycoder 3y ago
Pshaw. Glenn Curtis went 136 mph in 1907 on what looks a lot like a big Schwinn bicycle with a V-8 of his own design. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss_V-8_motorcycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss_V-8_motorcycle Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20100906140855/http://www.nasm.si.edu/imagedetail.cfm?imageID=1553 https://web.archive.org/web/20100906140855/http://www.nasm.s...
- palmfacehn 3y ago
  Yeah but he needed a motor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Minthorn_Murphy#Mile-a-Minute_ride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Minthorn_Murphy#Mile-a...

77 points by palmfacehn 3y ago

anybody have diagrams of this engine? Picture https://roarington.com/media-house/directories/cars/doble_e_20_steam_car_1925 https://roarington.com/media-house/directories/cars/doble_e_... This video opens the hood, and shows cross sections of engine. And is technical focus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtqVvS8iP9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtqVvS8iP9w This Jay Leno video is actually good. Has cutaway of the engine to show the moving parts. https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo?t=701 https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo?t=701

TylerE 3y ago
There really isn't much to the engine of a steam engine. It's the firebox/burner and boiler where all the really hard and interesting stuff happens.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  >> There really isn't much to the engine of a steam engine. Beware the train spotters. I hear a hundred steam-powered keyboards ready to rave about the intricacies of reverser gears.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Oh, I’m intimately aware. Just pointing my out that what most people call a steam “engine”… maybe only 10% of that is the actual engine. In something like a car especially. The actual engine is just a double acting cylinder and a few slide valves.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      I think the negative response to this type of post is because you can take any field and do a reductive statement "It's Just XYZ". There is a hundred years of steam engine design "It's Just some valves". It's just a way to either minimize someone's field, or way to show you only have a cursory understanding. Rarely does someone have a deep knowledge of a field and then also frame an overview of the field as "Just some bits". Nuclear Physics is Just smashing atoms. Biology is Just some Cells. Or Just looking through a microscope. Computer Science is Just the application of And/OR statements. Or Just Boolean logic. Internal Combustion Engines are just little explosion's in a cylinder. F1 Cars are just an engine + battery + some wings. Edit: Honestly. I'm guilty of doing this too. I've "Just Learned" how people take it so have learned to adapt phrasing things that don't insult people.
- jcgrillo 3y ago
  There is some interesting engineering in a compound double acting engine[1], especially one like the Doble which runs on superheated steam. There's a large temperature gradient between the "hot side" and the "cold side" where the hot side is something like 1250°F+. IIRC they had to be careful about getting the correct cast iron alloys, and the bores had to be slightly tapered. Then there's the valve train, which is totally different from an IC engine but sizing and flow considerations are still really important for efficiency. Also, your crossheads and bottom end bearings are potentially an area of concern--while rotational speeds are really low by modern engine standards, there's a problem of figuring out how to remove water from the lube oil. So I'd wager there's still a whole bunch of "interesting" things happening in the Doble engine, and we'd probably have a pretty difficult time building one from scratch today given that reciprocating steam engines haven't been "a thing" in industrial living memory. [1] For one example of an interesting problem: for a given temperature of inlet steam and desired power output, in a double expansion double-acting compound engine, tell me what size the hot cylinder will be, what size the cold cylinder will be, and what the clearances, rings, etc will be to make it all work efficiently across the operating envelope.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    The Doble boiler is so much more interesting than that, though ;) Almost unique.
    - jcgrillo 3y ago
      It is very cool. I think we'd be mistaken thinking that any of this engineering is "trivial". This was the height of a technology that's largely forgotten, and unforgetting it would be hard work at every turn.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  If plethora of designs in search of perfection is an indicator of something of interest, then take a look at the many variations in valve gear design, particularly for locomotives, which needed to operate reasonably efficiently over a wide range of speeds, gradients and loads. Even more so, consider the many attempts at making non-turbine rotary steam engines, wonderfully documented here: http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/rotaryengines/rotaryeng.htm http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/rotaryengines/rotaryeng... My personal favorite is the Tower spherical engine: http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/tower/tower.htm http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/tower/tower.htm Unlike most of the designs here, this one was built and even put to a little practical use.
  - uticus 3y ago
    > My personal favorite is the Tower spherical engine... when i first saw the static diagram, i thought wow that looks like it is much more complicated than this 2-d diagram lets on. then later down the page i saw the animation showing the 3-d complexity... mind blowing.
- xenadu02 3y ago
  Well the perfection of a steam-powered car was interesting even though technically far too late to matter. Early steam cars were more like steam trains: big boilers that need to be fired an hour before you want to go anywhere and need regular stops to take on water. In a Doble there technically isn't a boiler as most people think of it; the modern equivalent term might be "steam generator". The Doble system flashes water to steam almost instantly and on-demand, then uses a condenser to recycle the water. The flame is also not burning continuously, but only when steam is needed. With modern insulation materials the firebox is very efficient with little heat loss and lasts a long time. This gives the Doble steam car a responsiveness closer to a gas engine, without the need to pre-heat the boiler or continuously refill with water. The fuel system is more flexible too, it can operate on almost any liquid combustible with some adjustment. By the time the Doble was developed it was too late; gasoline and diesel won.
  - jcgrillo 3y ago
    Part of the problem I think was that each Doble car was basically a one-off. They were expensive, high performance prototypes, not production consumer products. In principle they could have been made more user friendly--in terms of performance specs they were really close to a win (15mpg, powerful, quiet, low water consumption, fast starting) but they were still finicky, high maintenance machines. Higher production numbers could have driven solutions, but the Otto cycle had the advantage there. I wonder if you ran the 1890-1930 experiment 10 times how differently it all might shake out each time.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      The part almost no one talks about is how there are tons of cars being sold as early as 1880. They were just called horseless carriages, and were essentially a small carriage with… an electric motor and batteries. Yup, the original dominant form of car was an EV.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hinkley 3y ago

Howard Hughes was also fucking nuts. I knew a Microsoft millionaire who retired at 30. By 35 he was involuntarily committed, and nearly broke. I knew him because he threw great parties, and we got invited to one and my gf and he became friends. These were not rich people parties, they were upper middle class parties with zany themes, like alcoholic waffles. He was always doing something that surprised you. It made a certain kind of sense but it was things you would never think of. Over time, the surprises got less humorous and more troubling. Toward the end he had a manipulative girlfriend turned unrequited love who was sponging off of him, and his grip on reality was slipping. At one point he said he was trying to make himself insane, and I guess he succeeded. His mother got power of attorney when he was down to his condo and $85k in today’s dollars. Thinking about that after, and my own family’s experience with decline after retirement, I thought that the regulating effect of going to work every day was probably doing him a lot of good. I feel like the same thing happened with Hughes as well. He just holed up in his mansion and unraveled.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sandworm101 3y ago
>> Howard Hughes was also fucking nuts. And also basically a criminal by today's standards. If a 19yo was caught in a Ferrari trying to break a record on a beach, or anywhere other than a closed race track on private land, that 19yo would be lucky to ever drive again. And if that 19yo hurt anyone, possibly a decade or more in prison.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Saw a video on YouTube the other day that mentioned an early Hollywood movie that killed three extras filming a flood scene. If I have my timelines right that would have been approximately contemporary with Hughes. The value of a human life seemed to drop pretty low during the Depression, but it wasn’t that great before then either. Unfortunately an expectation of safety is a rather recent development, one that Alec Baldwin is learning about right now.

lll-o-lll 3y ago

https://archive.is/NaCGK https://archive.is/NaCGK

Animats 3y ago

I'm amazed that the car stayed on the ground. Both Stanley and Doble made steam cars that had more power than the suspension could handle. A speed record attempt: "As the Steamer started its run, it was silent except for a low, soft whistle. This rose to a faint whine, and a jetlike white stream flowed from the tail of the car. Soon the head of the driver could hardly be seen in the blur of speed. The car passed the 100 m.p.h. mark and surged up to 197 m.p.h. As it was about to touch 200 m.p.h., however, the racer hit a slight bump on the beach. The light car took off like a wingless glider, soared for about 100 feet at a height of 10 feet, then crashed to the cement-hard sand in an explosion of steam and flames. The driver was flung clear, badly injured but not dead."[1] [1] https://www.americanheritage.com/stanleys-and-their-steamer https://www.americanheritage.com/stanleys-and-their-steamer

jcgrillo 3y ago
The Doble weighs about 4 times as much ;)
RajT88 3y ago
Apparently an urban legend, although the article is not suuuuper clear about it: > These stories persist to this day, although all are false. The truth is that the Stanley Steamer was constructed in such a way that it was impossible for it to blow up.
- jfoutz 3y ago
  I'm no expert, but I think it's fair to call a boiler failure an explosion. you're going to have a ton of steam pressure in a confined space. Not like a gasoline or dinamite explosion, but still a hell of a boom. although maybe it did have a special emergency release valve that was sealed with a weaker metal or something so it couldn't get enough pressure to catastrophically fail. I'm skeptical of this claim at face value "impossible for it to blow up" but people are smart. it's probably true in a bunch of contexts.
  - clausecker 3y ago
    Except Doble cars don't have a traditional boiler. They have a monotube boiler, which only holds a minuscule amount of water at any given time and thus has much less stored energy that could go boom.

uticus 3y ago

> The 1925 Doble Steam Car could out-accelerate the mighty Model J Duesenberg of 1930, doing 0 to 75 mph in just 5 seconds, with its engine turning over at less than 1,000 rpm... wha? certainly better than my hatchback

userbinator 3y ago
Lots of torque. 1000lb-ft of it according to the article, which is far more than most passenger cars and roughly what a large semitrailer truck or bus would have.
- uticus 3y ago
  1000 lb-ft available from a standing start. Even better than semis, which although get peak torque at low RPMs, still have to get to some rev range (combined with gearing down for those standing starts). I don't fully understand EVs, but afaik that's the only road-going tech today that provides instantly-available torque at any RPM (including near zero, the 'standing start').

metadat 3y ago

Was the steam produced by coal? Kinda hard to imagine stoking the boiler at 130MPH.

jhallenworld 3y ago
Fuel-oil (Kerosene).

jhallenworld 3y ago

That Doble engine (or its technology anyway) was used in the Besler steam powered plane. Here is a video of its flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8 On Douglas Self's museum of retro-tech, of course: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/steamplane/steamplane.htm http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/steamplane/stea...

wrycoder 3y ago

Pshaw. Glenn Curtis went 136 mph in 1907 on what looks a lot like a big Schwinn bicycle with a V-8 of his own design. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss_V-8_motorcycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss_V-8_motorcycle Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20100906140855/http://www.nasm.si.edu/imagedetail.cfm?imageID=1553 https://web.archive.org/web/20100906140855/http://www.nasm.s...

palmfacehn 3y ago
Yeah but he needed a motor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Minthorn_Murphy#Mile-a-Minute_ride https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Minthorn_Murphy#Mile-a...