To be fair, everybody who takes a thermodynamics course owes 90% of it to the 'steam science' pioneers. Understanding what determines and limits the efficiency

To be fair, everybody who takes a thermodynamics course owes 90% of it to the 'steam science' pioneers. Understanding what determines and limits the efficiency of heat engines was as big a deal in its day as the WWW is in ours, but unlike our own era, a lot of brand-new science and math had to be discovered by those engineers. Steam tech is much, much more interesting than it appears at first.