September 18, 2020 • 49 mins
How old are steam engines? How do steam engines work? Are there steam engines in common use today?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff production from I Heart Radio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I
love all things tech and it is time for a
classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published on
October six, two thousand thirteen. It is called Running on Steam. Yep,
(00:30):
we're gonna talk about some steamy stuff today, so let's
listen back to this classic episode. We're talking about steam
engines today and how they work and the principles behind them,
and it really comes down to thermodynamics. You know, you're
talking about heat really and what heat does and how
it changes things, and that's you know, harnessing that has
(00:52):
allowed us to have a little bit of a revolution
industrially speaking. Do do pretty goodness my ration, I'm slow today.
It took me like four seconds. You're slow. You didn't
forget to introduce you everybody, we're both on okay. But
so yeah, So the thing about gases, um when when
when you heat them up, they they do stuff. Yeah,
(01:14):
they move the molecules and the gases move around a
lot more than they usually do. So let's say let's
say you've got a liquid, all right, You've got all
those molecules together in a liquid, their chain together, right,
they formed this this collection of molecules that are all
part of a larger hole. So example, you've got a
bucket of water, those molecules are all bound together to
(01:34):
make that water. Now you can you can separate some
water from that, but the molecules within that separate section,
they're still bound together. It's not like you've just freed
them and they're now flying all over the place. But
if you add energy, as in heat to that water
and you boil the water, that water starts to boil
off and form steam. It's the gas form of that substance.
(01:57):
And now the molecules can break free of each other.
So now you've got these free flowing molecules that are
zipping around at high speed depending upon how much heat
you've put into the system. And as it turns out,
they exert pressure. I mean, this has momentum. It if
it hits against stuff, it can press against stuff. And
if you're able to harness that in some way, you
(02:19):
can make that do work. Right. Yeah, yeah, it's it's
you know, when you've got a sealed container and you
create steam inside of it, it's going to exert pressure
on the sides of that container, which can then do
work yeah, or explode, as it turns out, depending upon
what you've made the container out of and how hot
you've made that water. Uh, yeah, Because that's the other thing,
is that water when it goes into steam, it's expanding, right,
(02:42):
You're talking about making it take up more space than
normally would, more volume than it normally would, And that,
as it turns out, is a very important part of
some early steam engines, the idea that you can make
something take up more room and as it condenses, meaning
that and the steam starts to cool down and turn
back into water, it's taken up less room. Right, it's
(03:05):
going to create a little bit of a vacuum you
can also use to do work. Yeah. So both of
those those things, the idea of steam being able to
press against stuff and the idea of steam once it condenses,
creating a vacuum, those are the basic principles behind your
your various kinds of steam engines. Now, this idea is
not brand new. First of all, You've got a lot
(03:26):
of people who will cite that A certain person named
James Watt was the inventor of the steam engine. As
it turns out, that's being a little premature to say
that he did. I mean he would. He certainly played
an instrumental role in making steam engines uh practical, But
you have to go way back if you want to
look at the people who were really the inventors as
(03:48):
far as we know of steam engines. That keep in mind,
we're talking right now about the first recorded instances of
people talking about steam engines. That the idea itself might
even be older, right, but the first recorded instances are
from the first century, yeah, Common era. We're talking a
hero or Huron or heroes or heroes of Alexandria. Uh.
(04:12):
He he was a Greek mathematician and uh inventor. Ye
he was born in Egypt, lived and worked and mostly
in Alexandria, but was of Greek origin, and uh did
a lot of different works. You know, he invented a
lot of different things, or at least wrote about a
lot of things that we presume he invented. It may
very will be that he was just writing about stuff
(04:33):
that other people have done, but as far as we know,
he's the one who originated these ideas. Yeah. He had
a few inventions that he wrote about. A coin operated device. Yeah, yeah,
I don't even know if it was like a you know,
sandal vending machine or something, or you know, put a
coin in and watch the lion eat somebody. I don't know.
I'm hoping fortune teller. Um it's Zartan you make up.
(04:56):
I wish I were big. Uh, Yeah, I don't know.
He also wrote a lot about the discoveries of the Babylonians,
the Egyptians and also other Greeks and also the Romans,
and a bunch of stuff about the properties of air,
which is going to come very much in handy for
one of these other things that he described. Yeah, the
uh I think you're you're referring to the A L pile?
(05:19):
Is that how you say that? How I say it?
I'll tell you how it's spelled. It's a E O
L I P I L E. And I do not
speak Greek. It's all Greek to me, So I and
Lawrence just shaking her head disapprovingly. Can you can you
hear in our echoe studio the rattle of my head shaking?
And I can certainly see it better? Uh, this this
(05:39):
room is better lit than our other studio was it's
much larger. It's it's like a nice cave. It is.
It is a nice cave. So this, this device that
Heron or hero or Heroes had designed, was an early
form of what we would consider a steam engine, although
from what we can tell, it was mostly meant a
(06:00):
sort of a decoration or distraction, all right, more and
more like a toy. And several of the things that
we're going to be talking about from these early periods
are more likely to be toys than anything else because concepts.
He was the idea of exploring this, this nature of
well steam can do these these wild wacky things. I
don't know how we would do this in anything, and
(06:20):
I don't know how we would use this in any
practical way, but look at this cool thing and what
it can do. So what his could do was it
was imagined like a big bowl made out of some
metal like brass. They got a big brass bowl. It's
actually sealed, so you put water in it, but then
you put a water tight seal on there. It does
have two pipes that come up from the top of
(06:42):
the seal that then meet up with a sphere that
is mounted on these two pipes. All right, the sphere
itself can can rotate along this axis that the pipes make.
There's some sort of steam tight ball bearings that were involved,
I guess. Also, by the way, we don't know that
this was ever built, but this was his design. So
(07:04):
in the the idea was that you put the water
inside this bowl. You would heat of the bowl, the
water would convert into steam, which would go up into
the pipes into the sphere. And the sphir itself had
two nozzles or two jets on on on opposite sides
I believe, right opposite sides facing so that they would
allow the ball to rotate once steam escapes, the same
way that if you attached to bottle rockets to two
(07:26):
sides of a wheel um and then you know, let
it let's let it push it along, right, So in
this case the pushing is kind of interesting. So let's
talk about what's going on inside that sphere, which, as
far as we know, was never actually built. But inside
that sphere sphere, Now, if the sphere had no nozzles,
if there were no there were no openings, there were,
but somehow there was just water in there that you
(07:48):
had converted into steam. That steam would be pressing, pressing
equally on all surfaces, exactly sphere interiors. So in other words,
if you're looking at it, if you were able to
slow things down to just look at things like a
nanosecond at a time, and you're able to observe individual molecules,
you would see these molecules bouncing off the various interior
(08:10):
surfaces of that sphere. But because they're going in all directions,
they're canceling each other out, which means that the ball
itself is staying still relative to its environment. Hypothetically as sathing.
It's a perfect sphere, and that there aren't any you know,
major design flaws right there, Like there's not some weird
thing there that's blocking where molecules can usually hit. But
if you put an opening in that sphere, that means
(08:32):
some of the molecules are going to go through the
opening and escape, So that means they are not exerting
that force inside the sphere on the opposite side where
molecules are banging against that that edge of the sphere
that makes the sphere move. So in other words, it's
not even that steam is escaping, it's that the steam
that steam that is escaping is not counteracting the force
(08:53):
that's that it's uh counterparts are doing inside that sphere,
which I think is kind of an interesting explanation when
you think about it. And Uh, there was a a
site I was reading where his example was, imagine you
have a cardboard box, but you've taken the bottom and
the top off of it, and you've taken one of
the walls off of it. I think you put a
whole bunch of kids in there, just running around, and
(09:14):
whenever they hit one of the sides of the walls,
they careen off in a different direction. But because there's
one section side that doesn't have a wall, sometimes kids
just keep on running and they're they're outside of the box. Meanwhile,
the kids who are hitting the opposite side where there
is a wall, are moving the box. And yeah, so
it's forward motion keeps going, but it's left and right
motions stay more or less the same because they get
(09:36):
canceled out by the various kids. I thought, what an
interesting way to do that, And now I want to
Now I want to build this and I want to
watch it happen, probably from you know, a fifty foot
observation tower. I don't kids and me. That's not I'm
picturing that we could use podcasters instead of children. We
probably could, although we've got some kind of lazy podcasters.
(09:58):
I don't know, they might, you know, just kind of
push the wall. Our podcasters zombies. Well, you know, I
mostly interact with them after lunch, so that's always when
we get this neozies. Alright. So anyway, that was the
basis behind his idea. But he also had another one
that would use steam to do work. That was my
favorite example, so I had to include it. Yeah, this
(10:20):
one I had not seen it, but so so there
was a steam powered temple doors. That was the idea.
He I've got this great illustration. I'll show you after
the podcast, Laura. I'll put it up on our social
too when we when we get this podcast out. But
the idea was really kind of interesting. So in the illustration,
there's this altar and these temple doors, and the altar
(10:41):
has a little area in it where you could set
a sacrificial fire. Now that fire, the idea was that
the fire would heat up water that would create steam.
It would push the steam into a second container. That container,
in turn had a tube leading out of it, and
the other end of the tube would lead into a bucket. Now,
from what I can tell, it looks like the idea
(11:02):
is that the steam would push into this container. The
container would push more steam in through this other tube
that was leading to the bucket, and there the steam
would start to cool down and condense it turned into water.
So when they would turn the water, the water would
flow into the bucket. Yeah, which makes it heavy down.
And the bucket itself is suspended by a pulley, and
(11:23):
so because the bucket gets heavier, it starts to exert
force on the pulley and eventually would pull the pulley
so that the ropes on the other side of the
pulley would actually split into two ropes wrapping around these
two columns. And as those ropes the tension grew, it
would make those columns rotate. The rotation of the columns
in turn would open the temple doors. So by lighting
(11:45):
the fire, you would entice the gods to open the
doors for you, allowing people into your temple. Now, as
it turns out, I think that this was probably a
lot of work to open doors when you could just
walk up and open them push it. But as it
turns out, That's one of the reasons why steam technology
took so long to develop, even though we're talking about
just you know, just a few decades into the Common era.
(12:07):
That's when we're talking about steam engines. The reason we
weren't using them for work is because there were a
lot of other sources for work back in those days.
Like the Romans had lots and lots of slaves, and
as it turns out, the the history of Europe had
lots of that kind of thing. Either it was either
slavery or serfdom. Anyway, there was a lot of source
of cheap labor out there, so you didn't have to
worry about building things to make labor easier. That's what
(12:31):
those unfortunate people were for. Um. Yeah, and and also also,
you know, the metal working at the time was not
such that you could safely build boiler chambers that would
really withstand the pressures necessary. Right, you had a lot
of these prices. We wouldn't get into that until like
the eighteen exactly. You could build low pressure steam steam boilers,
(12:51):
but low pressure means that you can't do a lot
of work with them. They do. You know, you're releasing steam,
you're genering steam and releasing steam in a way where
it not exerting the kind of pressure you would need
to do anything really significant unless you were to be
incredibly clever with your design. But we'll get into that.
We we have to go a little bit further before
we get to that part. But these were the fundamentals,
(13:13):
right of steam power, This idea of being able to
to change water into another form and make it do work.
It would just take a you know, a millennia and
change before anyone started to think about it in another
more practical way. Yeah. Our next own factor is from
three Blastco Degara. He was an officer in the Smash Navy,
(13:35):
and we don't know for sure that he actually tried
to do this or that what he proposed was in
fact a steam engine, because it's pretty vague, but he
was talking about creating some sort of paddle boat that
may have been steam powered. Yeah. The phrase used in
the literature is vessel of boiling water. Right, so as
far as we know the vessel of boiling water, well
(13:58):
you could guess that, well, that must mean that it
was using steam in some way, but because there isn't
enough context there, we can't be certain. But it sounds
like the idea was that you would use some sort
of vessel of boiling water to generate steam in order
to turn the paddles on a boat, very much like
we would see uh centuries later. But that the history
(14:20):
books don't record any great Spanish paddle boats sailing across
various European waters. So I guess we can probably draw
the conclusion that this was an interesting idea that was
never actualized, or if it was, it sunk um. And
the next one's a sixteen o one, which not that
(14:42):
not that long afterward, when a fellow named Giovanni Batista
della Porta wrote in a book called Spiritali of an
invention that would use steam pressure to raise a column
of water through a vacuum created by steam when it condenses. Now,
this is what you were talking of out earlier, Lauren,
right along the same lines, or I guess, along opposite
(15:03):
lines of all of these people who are theorizing that
you know, you can you can convert steam, convert water
to steam within a closed container and that will result
in increased pressure. That the opposite, if you can condense
steam into water, that it will create a vacuum. Right, Yeah,
And that's that was an interesting idea that would again
be capitalized on later. But this is the very basis
(15:25):
of the earliest steam engines that we're doing work. Not
that you were using steam to push something, but rather
that you had created a chamber where steam, once it
cools down and condenses into water, creates the suction force
through the through creating a vacuum and thus can pull something.
And uh. In fact, as we'll talk about in just
a couple of minutes, that's really how steam engines got
(15:47):
their start. Uh. And again it that one of the
nice things about this, and I really do mean it
as a nice thing, is that you could use a
low pressure steam engine to create this effect. You didn't
have to create high pressure to push something. You could
just create steam in a low pressure environment, allow it
to condense, and then it would create this this force
all on its own. So uh, it ended up being
(16:10):
a much more safe way of using steam power, especially
early on, before we had really reached the level of
machining parts that could withstand those intense pressures that happen
when you create lots of steam in a confined space.
I don't know if any of our listeners are familiar
with a little program called MythBusters. Uh, MythBusters, of course,
(16:31):
a Discovery Channel show. I was a huge fan, well,
well before I even worked for How Stuff Works, I
was a big fan of the show. But I got
to see MythBusters live in Atlanta. They came down and
did a behind the scenes kind of tour and they
talked a little bit about the various explosions that they've
seen on the show. And the reason why I'm saying
this is that the the explosion they said was the
(16:53):
most impressive and most terrifying was the water heater explosion
because when you have that water under you know, turning
into steam under the intense pressure, and if you've cut
off all the safety valves, which you should never ever
ever do, right then yeah, safety valves on on boilers,
in fact, are one of the terrific inventions without which
(17:14):
we probably would well we certainly wouldn't be here because
we'd have a totally different world, our world we never
would have had happened. So um, yeah, because he showed that,
you know, you could essentially it would turn a water
heater into part bomb, part rocket, and it was just
you're talking about superheated water that's well past the boiling
(17:35):
point due to the pressure hitting the air, boiling instantaneously
turning into super hot steam. So just being close to this,
even if you weren't hit by shrapnel, you could be
burned severely just from the steam. This is serious stuff.
So that's why these low pressure engines were the first
foray into steam engines. Although we're still not quite there yet.
We're just talking about theory at the moment. All Right,
(17:57):
I've I've got one from two Okay, this was Ferdinand
um Verbs I'm going to go with that pronunciation um
He He might have he was living in the Imperial
Chinese court at the time, and he may have created
a working steam car or toy um interesting. He at
least drow up plans for one, and I'm not sure again,
(18:17):
it's it's really yeah, it's it's hard to say a
lot of these things from these earlier inventors, Uh, you know,
they haven't survived. So they may have one we don't
know if they were ever built and then just were
destroyed or lost, or we don't know if you know,
they just was just in the plans but never actually built.
One thing that I do believe was built In sixteen
seventy nine, a French scientist and math professor named um
(18:40):
Venice Papa from from Yes, France. I already said that excellent, Um,
I've created the first pressure cooker, which is really a
direct application of what dela Portia was talking about. Um.
This was I think the official name translated is the
digester or engine for softening bones, which isn't creepy at all.
That does. It made me think of Serial Killer in
(19:01):
the slightest but by but by attaching to this pressurized
chamber slighting piston, uh you know, and then heating the pot,
the expanding steam would push the piston up, and then
the vacuum created when the steam cooled liquid liquid would
pull the piston back downtcha um. And this is going
to become extremely important very soon. Yeah. Uh. There were
(19:23):
a lot of other people who were thinking about steam
engines at this time. So while you know, you would
argue that steam engines really didn't come into play until
the mid seventeen hundreds, it was the sixteen hundreds where
we had lots of people theorizing about it. They were
kind of laying the groundwork that would allow the The
following scientists engineers, mechanics, you know, just interesting people who
(19:46):
who thought about steam power and began to put it
to our to a practical application. They would follow and
build upon the discoveries that the their forefathers had come
up with, and those included people like Jacob Besson. There's
a little guy named Leonardo da vinci Um. He had
three turtle friends, as I recall, and was trained by
(20:06):
a rat uh Florence Vault, Thomas Grant, Edward Ford. Lots
of people were really talking about steam at this time,
and then that leads us up to a fellow who
patented an idea in six Thomas Savory, and he was
the one who who was really interested in this idea
(20:27):
of using the condensing steam to do work right. Well, okay,
so it's a little bit of background on what he
what he patented. So coal mines were booming at this
time because England was facing this timber crisis. There were
increases in ship building and lots of firewood being used,
so so coal mining was becoming huge all right. So
(20:48):
cole was starting to become the fuel of choice in England,
and of course that would remain true for the next
couple of centuries and so he patented this thing that
he called the miners friend Um because a problem in
coal mines as you wind up getting water in places
where you really don't want water, and like where there
are people underground or where you're yeah, exactly where you're
(21:10):
trying to work, and it's much harder when in there,
you know, would completely submerged exactly. We'll talk more about
that in the podcast that we're going to record immediately
after this one. But so, but so he uh so
he patented this thing that I don't again like, I
don't think he ever built it. Yeah, it was a
design for a device that could pump water out of minds,
(21:33):
using a steam powered apparatus to to operate the pump.
But again, you're not using steam to push something. It
was a design where the condensing steam would create a
pulling force that would move some sort of piston or
which in turn would move some sort of lever that
in turn would operate a pump and pull water out.
(21:55):
One of the problems was that it was even based
just on the does ligne, they could tell that it
was going to be fairly limited in how far it
could draw water. Something like you know, between twenty and
thirty feet maybe um, and that would be something that
future engineers would improve upon. Hate to interrupt this steamy conversation,
(22:16):
but it's time for us to take a quick break.
All right, Let's get back into talking about steam engines.
So we have worked our way up to seventeen twelve
when a fellow named Thomas Newcoming invents a steam engine
(22:37):
that is following along the same lines as Thomas Savory's idea,
the idea to pump water from mines. The basic design
was like this. You had a boiler, and the boiler's purpose,
of course, is to hold the water and to allow
that to heat up to steam. Right, So the steam
would move into a cylinder which had a piston in it.
But again, it wasn't meant to push the piston. The
(22:59):
pistons natural resting place was at the top of the
cylinder because the piston was attached to kind of a
counter lever arm and the other end of the arm
was pulled down by gravity. It was meant to be
heavier than the side that the piston was attached to, right,
And so when the steam would cool, it would condense,
and then the force of the vacuum that created would
pull the piston down and the lift to the other
(23:23):
side of the which would operate the pump. So here
you've got this pulling suction that is moving the piston downward,
lifting the other end of this this lever up, and
that in turn was using it was actually activating the pump,
pulling the water out of the mine. And the the
way this would work is that once you had that
steam cool down, uh, the way they would cool it
(23:46):
down is actually inject water into the cylinder. So you've
got the cylinder, it's heated up, you've got the in
fact that heat was the cylinder was quite warmed. They
had to cool the cylinder down to condense the steam
back into water. So the inject water into it helps
cool the steam down, pulls the piston down, and then
they would allow the water to heat up again. The
steam would slowly enter into this uh cylinder as gravity
(24:09):
was pulling the other end of the lever, the heavier
end back down again. That pulls the piston back to
the up resting place and steam would fill the cylinder again.
You'd have to cool it down again. You do this
over and over again. Now, if you're listening and you're thinking, wow,
that that sounds like that might not be terribly efficient.
You're right, because it meant that you had to keep
cooling and heating that cylinder over and over, which meant
(24:31):
that you had to continuously burn fuel so that you
could continuously heat the water to create this this section.
And furthermore, I have other people working to cool down
the cylinder. However, all of this was still more efficient
than housing an entire team of horses to do the
same war right, right, And so it ended up actually
being such a useful device that they were used well
(24:55):
after improved devices were made, so up until the nineteen yeah, yeah,
you know, it wasn't until like it was in the
late seventeen sixties when you would get a big improvement
over this design. But even then, even after that improvement
was made, these were very reliable pumps and have been
used for quite some time. You can actually see one
(25:17):
if you go to Dearborn, Michigan. There's the Henry Ford
Museum and they have on display one of Newcomen's actual engines.
So this is one of the ones that dates back
to the early eighteenth century, which I think is awesome.
I totally want to do a text stuff series where
we go to different museums and see and talk about
this kind of stuff. If anyone wants to invest. Yeah,
(25:40):
so hey, if you guys all think that's a great idea,
let us know and we'll pass those along to Discovery,
because I don't know how I'm going to swing this
on my own other than you know, really working on
my hitchhiking skills. Lauren's nodding. Okay, so anyway, that's great radio,
But no so so, like I said, this was not
(26:00):
terribly efficient because of the cooling and the heating of
that cylinder. Right, So, if you could find a way
of creating this vacuum to cool the steam down but
to not have to worry about heating and cooling the
cylinder itself, thus wasting fuel, you could make this a
much more efficient system. And, as it turns out, and
seventeen sixty nine, James Watt can put the plans for
(26:23):
this one. Now. He's the guy who often we credit
as the inventor of the steam engine. Though all you
guys have been listening, you know that's not exactly true,
because he really just took this new Coomman engine and
added a separate condenser to it. Right, So, what he
did was he essentially added a separate chamber that connects
to the cylinder, and so the cylinder would fill up
with steam and then move into the separate chamber where
(26:46):
it would condense, and still you would still get the vacuum.
But because you didn't have to worry about heating or
cooling the cylinder itself, you didn't have to use as
much fuel. And as a result, depending upon which source
you read, they say he didn't have to worry about
cooling the celinder, just let it continually exactly because we
knew when the boiler exactly, you didn't have to Yeah,
(27:07):
you didn't have to keep on burning fuel to take
compensate for the fact that you had to use water
to cool it down. So according to some sources, that
would mean that you say, between fifty and sev of
the fuel you would usually use to operate the steam engine. Well,
that's what made steam engines suddenly practical from a fuel standpoint.
(27:29):
So they had are even proven to be able to
do practical work, but they weren't very efficient. They used
so much fuel that it became one of those questions
of well is it even worth it to invest in this?
Uh and then with this invention, it made the steam
engine something that was truly possible in lots of different applications.
And that's when we really saw a figurative explosion and
(27:53):
steam technology. There were some literal ones. In fact, that
was one of the things what was really concerned about.
He wanted to continue working in low pressure boilers, low
pressure steam engines because he felt that any sort of
high pressure application was far too dangerous to be practical.
And he spoke out, yea and uh. The thing was
(28:16):
that in other areas of industry there were lots of improvements,
like in machining and metalworking, so there were people who
were working on building stronger, more secure boilers and engines
that could handle high pressure. What was just very cautious
about the whole thing. So it was one of those
(28:37):
the development of high pressure engines would wait for another
probably forty years or so. Um. But anyway, what stuff.
He became known as a genius in his own time.
Everyone was crediting him with the creation of this magnificent technology. Um.
I'm sure that he was happy to receive that. But
(28:59):
in the same or that when he created these improvements
to the newcoman engine, there was another fellow, Nicholas Kugno,
a French military officer, who developed a steam powered car,
and it was designed to toe artillery pieces and it
could only move it about two miles per hour, which
is about three point two kilometers per hour, and so
(29:19):
it was never really used. It wasn't really seen as
practical the idea here because it wasn't. Yeah. I read
about it being um it being displayed in Paris where
they were running it and it ran into a wall.
But since it ran to a wall two miles per hour,
no one noticed. That's a true story. Um. Yeah, So anyway,
(29:40):
it was. But it was an early example of a
steam powered car, if you can call it that. It
really looked more like a like a long wooden dolly
with a huge boiler on the end of it. Um.
It certainly didn't look like a car the way we
would think of a car today, But it was designed
to tow artillery. Yeah. We will get into some actual
steampowered cars very soon. Uh so sight that's when James
(30:04):
Picard and Matthew Wassboro build a steam engine with rotary motion.
So this is using various levers and other devices like
a crankshaft to transfer this reciprocal motion, which is that
up and down motion of a piston, into a rotational motion. Now,
those of you who listen to our transmission episode will
(30:24):
know all about this, and that's why I'm not going
to go over it again because that episode nearly broke us.
It was about cars, which I don't know if you
guys have picked up on this. I'm not a big expert.
Neither of us are really gearhead should have grabbed Scott probably, yeah, anyway,
but yes, it trans translated this reciprocating motion into rotational force.
(30:46):
So that ended up being another important development, Um, although
it wasn't really used in a practical sense for a
while longer. Um There's one had another terrific addition to
to his engine, and that was three. He created a
double acting engine, right right, Well, this was an idea
that ends up being really important in steam engines later on,
(31:09):
although mostly used in high pressure engines not low pressure engines.
The idea of being that you can you have a
cylinder that has valves on either end of the cylinder,
and so as the piston is moving toward one side,
steam is escaping out of that side and it's you know,
it's increasing on the other side, right, and then once
it gets to the end, the valve switch and so
(31:30):
the piston moves to the other side and steam is
coming into one end and escaping out the other. Now,
with Watt's designs, of course, we're talking about using that
suction force, so it's the condensing that's pulling the piston
from one side to the other. But later double action
steam engines would actually use steam force to push the
piston one side and then on the other side. In fact,
(31:50):
that's how most of the locomotive steam engines used steam.
Um and man, I love those locomotives too, But then,
you know, I think every kid who got to play
with them was fascinated. Certainly people like Walt Disney became
obsessed with them. I think that's a safe term. But
(32:10):
then we started seeing steam engines used in lots of
different ways. We're getting up to the eighteen hundreds now,
and that's really where the steam era takes off and
you start seeing steamboats, paddle steamers, locomotives. In eighteen o one,
a man named Richard trevithi it was an English miner
and engineer, built a steam powered locomotive called the puffing devil.
(32:32):
It could go on short trips, but only on short
trips because he had trouble keeping the water hot enough
to generate steam consistently. That actually was a real issue
with a lot of steam engines, the idea of how
do you how do you heat the boiler properly? And
I believe his engines were the first that we're using
steam to actually push pistons rather than the condensation in
(32:52):
the vacuum to pulse exactly. Trevith was of the school
of thought that high pressure steam engines their time had come.
It was safe enough, you could do it. What again
was not sold on this idea, but Trevor think certainly
thought that this was something that you could do. And
the early ones were still pretty inefficient. They weren't terribly fast. Um.
(33:14):
He would eventually build a little locomotive for for amusement.
Really it wasn't meant as a form of transportation. It
was called the catch me who can at a top
speed of twelve miles per hour, which is about nineteen
kilometers per hour. I think I think this was in
display in London. Some track was already laid around the
UK and the rest of Europe because horses would use
(33:37):
the track to pull pully tim pole cards along, right, exactly, yeah, exactiently.
In fact, you have the birth of the locomotive is
really an English thing. We think of it as a
very American thing here in the United States because it
was so defining of that era, as we really like
to just take ownership of everything we do. I mean,
you know, it's that wall is not so great China. Well,
(34:00):
think we need to take another quick break because I've
got the vapors. Not not really, it's just that's that's
steam related, Okay bye. In eighteen o four, London brewery
engineer named Arthur Wolfe improved this high pressure boiler design
(34:22):
through something called compounding, which uses excess steam from one
piston to fire a second piston and then a third.
This creates less heat loss in the system and winds
up with you know, you have to burn less fuel,
which is great more efficiency again, making it more of
a practical power solution. And uh, moving up to seven.
That's when another big name and steam engines this someone
(34:45):
Anyone who has followed the story of steamboats, anyone who's
familiar with Mark Twain is going to know this name.
Robert Fulton. He introduced the first steamship to provide regular
passenger service in America. Average speed of the steamship was
five miles per hour or eight kilometers per hour. Yeah. Well,
you know, if you don't have to paddle, it's fast enough.
(35:06):
It's you know, it's it's uh. And again it's one
of those things that another one those defining images in
American history. You think back to things like, you know,
like the Mark Twain stories, and they all have this
sort of evocative image of the great steamship. Of course,
Mark Twain was a steamship. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um. And
(35:28):
in fact, Mark Twain, that's a steamship term. It's actually
a term for how deep the water is, which you
would know if you ever have sailed on the rivers
of America. In Disney World, just pay attention on on
that boat, because they'll tell you all this. That's where
I got it. So I'm citing my source, uh, Disney World.
I was just there. I don't know if you know that.
That's that's where he was. George Stevenson, he was another
(35:54):
English engineer, and he built a steam locomotive to run
on rails, yep, and it carried thirty tons of coal
four d fifty feet uphill at four miles per hour
or six kilometers per hour, which doesn't doesn't sound like much,
but that's a huge amount of weight to have to transfer,
and it was a huge improvement over traffics version, which
(36:15):
could haul about ten tons of iron about ten miles.
So although it didn't go very far, it certainly had
to carry a lot of stuff and up an incline,
so you know, it was a big improvement over taking
like a super long route in order to avoid having
to go up an incline like that. UM Now at
this stage the steam engines worked with this. Like I said,
(36:38):
the steam press is on either side where you've got
the piston with the valves there. The valve will control
where the steam can enter and where it can exit.
So the steam comes in one side. Now this case
we do have the steam pressing right, so the steam
comes in on one side of the cylinder, pushes the
piston across. The steam exits out as uh of one
part of the valve while steam comes into the other
(37:00):
into the cylinder, the piston keeps that that seal steam
tight and then the piston moves back across the way
it came the first time. Uh, and you've got this
this process of a stroke exhaust and then the second
stroke and it's exhaust and it goes over and over
and over again. Meanwhile, you would have the piston attached
to some other form of device that would help, uh,
(37:24):
move the whole project, whatever it happens to be. So
with a locomotive, it might be a lever that is
then connected to a wheel. So one move of the
piston would be a half turn of the wheel, and
the move of the piston going back the other way
it would be the other half turn. And that's where
you get that locomotive force where you can have the
train moving down the track and having that steam escape
(37:47):
is what gives the trains there choo choo sound. That's true.
So you know when you hear the sound of the
steam escaping and it goes over and over. What's why
kids called trains choo choose the thing? They do it anymore,
or if they do, it's kind of that skew morphism thing.
Because of course, you don't have many steam powered trains
(38:07):
these days unless you go to Walt Disney World, where
you can write a train around Main Street, USA, and
this podcast, strangely enough, is not brought to you by
Disney World. No, no, I was brought to you by
Disney World, apparently, I believe. Usually on steam locomotives, it's
called it it's called a crosshead. The the portion that
links out from this piston, and that's going to be
(38:29):
connected to something called a drive rod, and then coupling
rods are going to what going to be what drives
the wheels. Yeah. I usually do have to have a
couple of different elements in here to translate the motion properly,
because otherwise, again you've got that reciprocating motion, which is
just going in two directions. Right, it's either going up
and down or left and right. However, you know, it
depends on your orientation and the orientation of the device.
(38:52):
But that limits what you can do unless you use
other gadgets to kind of translate that motion into something
that can do useful work. I mean, unless you just
need to open and close the door repeatedly, then then
you could just have a pole attached to it. But
otherwise you would need something more more versatile. So by
eighteen twenty five, steam locomotives were starting to be used
(39:14):
to haul passengers on a regular basis at that point.
Before then, it was pretty much used in cargo, right.
I think the very I think five was the very
first ride of a passenger steam locomotive. That was George
Stevenson's Locomotion number one. It carried some cargo and maybe
about six hundred passengers or so, and that was that
was its maiden voyage. I hear that everybody was doing
(39:36):
a brand new dance now to do the locomotion. Okay,
Laurence shaking her head again. So I guess I need
to move on alright, So eight hundreds from all the
way through eighteen eighty, we're gonna make a big skip
unless you have something you want to add in that.
Uh not really, no, I guess I guess I could
put in at this point that the popular kind of
boiler that was being used at this time, and and
(39:58):
this is going to become in for safety reasons. The
popular kind of boiler was a fire tube boiler, which
basically consists of a tank of water perforated with furnace
pipes and the you know, the hot gases from generated
from the fire from the fire in these pipes that
are going through this cylinder of water are what is
heating the water. It's a pretty efficient way to do it,
(40:19):
but it also means that the whole tank is under
a lot of pressure. So therefore if at burst, it's
going to lead to that big scary explosion that we
were talking about earlier. Right. So the heating element here
are these these pipes that run through the boiler. The
water surrounds the pipes, the pipes get hot because of
the fires creating these hot gases. You also, by the way,
have to have something to vent the hot gases out of,
(40:40):
so so you didn't just have steam venting out, you
actually had hot air hot gases venting out to based
from whatever the heat source was. See, that was one
of the problems that earlier inventors had run into, was
that they were trying to figure out a way of
creating this hot water, and some of them were doing
things like using a red hot iron uh inserted uneath
the boiler. But that heat starts to dissipate, and once
(41:03):
it does, you don't have power anymore. So it was
only through creating something that would be allow you to
generate a fire and continuate generate. So even though we
talk about steam powered trains. Have you ever seen those
movies where they're shoveling coal into a furnace, Well, you
have to generate the steam, right, It's not the trains
not running on coal. The coal is what's generating the
heat in the fire. It's it's the fuel that creates
(41:26):
the creates the heat that allows the water to boil,
that makes the train go, and the green grass grows
all around and around. So yeah, so moving up to
eight Between eighteen eighty, steam engines are used in practically
every major industrial application, and in fact really both figuratively
(41:47):
and literally drive the industrial revolution. Uh. In eighteen eighty
Charles A. Parsons invinced the first steam turbine. So now
we're getting into a way of using steam to not
just push something mechanically, but also generate electricity, which would
become really important as well. Uh. In eight are actually
(42:09):
really eighteen six is when we first start seeing steam
powered cars in the United States, the Stanley Steamer being
the popular model, also affectionately called flying teapots. Have you
ever seen a picture of these? They really do look
like horseless carriages. When you hear that term, it looks
like it's a carriage that's missing a horse in front
of it, and it's got one usually one lever that
(42:30):
you use for steering, and that's it, and uh, you
just uh, you know, god speed. They were really popular.
They went in this early kind of period, more than
sixty of them in the United States, and sixty that's
obviously a tiny number these days, but you're talking back
then where only a small sliver of the population would
(42:53):
have had access to it, both monetarily and just opportunity
from opportunity's sake, you know, not everyone lived in in
an area where they could get access to this. Also,
keep in mind that these machines were usually used for
intercity travel. It's not something that the idea of traveling
across country really wasn't wasn't part of the automotive industry
(43:15):
at that point, whether it was steam powered or gas
powered or even electrically powered. We talked about electrical cars,
and they predate the gas engine vehicles as well. Um,
if you wanted to go across the country, you've got
a train. You didn't you didn't drive your car at
this time. But we get up to a sad time though,
we're getting up to for those of us who happened
(43:36):
to like that. Cho choose. Yeah, as of about nineteen sixty,
we're going to see the end of the locomotive era. Yeah.
You don't see many places producing steam powered trains these days.
If they are, it's for some sort of amusement park
or something along those lines. It's not meant as a
means of travel. There are some steam powered engines that
are still in operation in various places around the world,
(43:57):
but they aren't really being produced because we have alternative now,
all right. Certainly by the nineteen thirties, people had started
to realize that internal combustion engines using gasoline as a
fuel were much more efficient and cheap to use than
these than these external combustion engines, which is what a
steam engine is. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Um, So
(44:18):
we start seeing this end of this era in around
nineteen sixty, But it doesn't mean that we're no longer
using steam engines. We still are, right right, partially because
we have improved the kind of boiler that's used. Water
tube boilers are kind of the inverse of that fire
tube boiler that I was talking about earlier. It's it's
basically a furnace that's perforated with water pipes instead of
(44:38):
being a water tank that's perforated with furnace pipes, and
there's water inside of furnace. You've got tubes of water
inside of furnace and uh and yeah, so so only
those tubes are under pressure and therefore it's safer overall. Right,
there's less of a less of a chance for our
catastrophic breakdown. Although again with valves proper valving you you're
pretty safe most of the time. And yeah, back in
(45:01):
two thousand nine, you know, way back then, a team
of engineers built a car called the Inspiration, which is
steam powered high speed car uses a turbine engine, not
a piston engine, steam powered, and it broke the land
speed record for steam powered vehicles. UM. The average speed
was a breezy one forty eight miles power or two
(45:25):
kilometers prower. That's fast. Yeah, you're being powered by steam.
And I think I think that that is that's still
the standing UH land speed record. I know that there's
another team working on it. There's a US steam team
that's working on building its own UH steam powered vehicle
that they hope will break that record. But as far
as I know, that has not happened yet as of
(45:46):
the recording of this podcast. Yeah, and there is there.
There are a few companies that are working on test
versions of steam powered cars. There's one called Cyclone Cyclone
Power Technologies, which is working with Raytheon on the defense
contractor at the moment, and in fact, the the U
S team is working on a high speed vehicle called
the Cyclone. That's what the name of the one that
(46:09):
they're hoping will break the records, the cycling. Yeah. Yeah,
they're you know, they're producing these engines that would fit
in the you know, standard vehicle engine space. That's a
big deal too. We didn't even mention that. But the
steam engines of traditionally were very large because you had
to have a boiler, You had to have something that
could contain a lot of water to generate the steam
you needed, and you know, you were venting that steam.
(46:31):
So it wasn't like your recap capturing and reusing, and
even if you did recapture it, especially with the old
condenser models, even if you did recapture it, you were
still losing some So it's it wasn't something that you
could run indefinitely. You might be able to run it
for a long time, but you know that's one of
those challenges is trying to miniaturize something like steam power,
which uh, you know it doesn't work so well. Also
(46:53):
turns out to be a big part of the steampunk movement,
this kind of idea of avoiding the miniaturization. You know,
you want these kind of bulky things that have lots
of character to them. You know, they're shiny and brassy, unuseful,
but really full of characters. Yeah, no, it's got lots
of character. It's just looks like, Wow, you know, that's
a great, uh steampunk version of a mobile device, and
(47:16):
it only weighs seventy pounds and burns every time you
use it, right, Well, you know that would obviously you
would be much more frugal with your use. You wouldn't
be picking up your smartphone every five seconds at dinner.
I'm speaking about my own personal behavior at this point.
So yeah, there's still other companies that are developing steam
engines for power generation, usually for places in the world
(47:38):
that are not on a power grid and therefore do
not have access to electricity. There's one called a uniflow Power,
which is unveiled a generator back in steam generator, steam
powered generator, I should say, didn't generate steam. You generated
power through steam. Um. But it was meant to help
communities that are not direct connected to power grids to
(48:01):
to deliver electricity to parts of the world that otherwise
would not have it. So we're seeing steam still being
used in applications today. Absolutely, And I mean, you know,
I want to point out that most of the electricity
generated is technically steam general. Sure, I mean that's what
nuclear power is, that's what a coal power plant is, right, Yeah, Yeah,
we're talking you're burning a fuel that is generating steam
(48:22):
that is turning usually yeah, exactly. Even things like the
plasma waste converters. I've talked about those in the past
where they've talked about using the excess heat in order
to generate steam that would turn turbines and be kind
of a co located with a power generator. So you'd
have a trash disposal and power generation unit all put together.
But it's using steam to do that. It means plasma
(48:45):
to to break down the trash power a level of
efficiency of of how hot you can get water, how
quickly with how the work? Yeah, and then how can
you how can you take something that normally would just
be considered a waste eye product and turn it into
useful stuff. You know, heat. We often think of all,
we lost a lot of our energy through heat. But
(49:07):
if you can recapture that heat and make it do
work like you can with steam power, then you're in
good shape. So yeah, that kind of wraps up our
discussion about steam engines. Uh, this was a fun one
to do. It's totally another one of those look backs
on on the technology of days of your that are
still relevant today. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic episode.
If you have suggestions for future topics of current episodes
(49:30):
of tech Stuff, send it to me via Twitter. The
handle is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(49:50):
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff production from I Heart Radio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I
love all things tech and it is time for a
classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published on
October six, two thousand thirteen. It is called Running on Steam. Yep,
(00:30):
we're gonna talk about some steamy stuff today, so let's
listen back to this classic episode. We're talking about steam
engines today and how they work and the principles behind them,
and it really comes down to thermodynamics. You know, you're
talking about heat really and what heat does and how
it changes things, and that's you know, harnessing that has
(00:52):
allowed us to have a little bit of a revolution
industrially speaking. Do do pretty goodness my ration, I'm slow today.
It took me like four seconds. You're slow. You didn't
forget to introduce you everybody, we're both on okay. But
so yeah, So the thing about gases, um when when
when you heat them up, they they do stuff. Yeah,
(01:14):
they move the molecules and the gases move around a
lot more than they usually do. So let's say let's
say you've got a liquid, all right, You've got all
those molecules together in a liquid, their chain together, right,
they formed this this collection of molecules that are all
part of a larger hole. So example, you've got a
bucket of water, those molecules are all bound together to
(01:34):
make that water. Now you can you can separate some
water from that, but the molecules within that separate section,
they're still bound together. It's not like you've just freed
them and they're now flying all over the place. But
if you add energy, as in heat to that water
and you boil the water, that water starts to boil
off and form steam. It's the gas form of that substance.
(01:57):
And now the molecules can break free of each other.
So now you've got these free flowing molecules that are
zipping around at high speed depending upon how much heat
you've put into the system. And as it turns out,
they exert pressure. I mean, this has momentum. It if
it hits against stuff, it can press against stuff. And
if you're able to harness that in some way, you
(02:19):
can make that do work. Right. Yeah, yeah, it's it's
you know, when you've got a sealed container and you
create steam inside of it, it's going to exert pressure
on the sides of that container, which can then do
work yeah, or explode, as it turns out, depending upon
what you've made the container out of and how hot
you've made that water. Uh, yeah, Because that's the other thing,
is that water when it goes into steam, it's expanding, right,
(02:42):
You're talking about making it take up more space than
normally would, more volume than it normally would, And that,
as it turns out, is a very important part of
some early steam engines, the idea that you can make
something take up more room and as it condenses, meaning
that and the steam starts to cool down and turn
back into water, it's taken up less room. Right, it's
(03:05):
going to create a little bit of a vacuum you
can also use to do work. Yeah. So both of
those those things, the idea of steam being able to
press against stuff and the idea of steam once it condenses,
creating a vacuum, those are the basic principles behind your
your various kinds of steam engines. Now, this idea is
not brand new. First of all, You've got a lot
(03:26):
of people who will cite that A certain person named
James Watt was the inventor of the steam engine. As
it turns out, that's being a little premature to say
that he did. I mean he would. He certainly played
an instrumental role in making steam engines uh practical, But
you have to go way back if you want to
look at the people who were really the inventors as
(03:48):
far as we know of steam engines. That keep in mind,
we're talking right now about the first recorded instances of
people talking about steam engines. That the idea itself might
even be older, right, but the first recorded instances are
from the first century, yeah, Common era. We're talking a
hero or Huron or heroes or heroes of Alexandria. Uh.
(04:12):
He he was a Greek mathematician and uh inventor. Ye
he was born in Egypt, lived and worked and mostly
in Alexandria, but was of Greek origin, and uh did
a lot of different works. You know, he invented a
lot of different things, or at least wrote about a
lot of things that we presume he invented. It may
very will be that he was just writing about stuff
(04:33):
that other people have done, but as far as we know,
he's the one who originated these ideas. Yeah. He had
a few inventions that he wrote about. A coin operated device. Yeah, yeah,
I don't even know if it was like a you know,
sandal vending machine or something, or you know, put a
coin in and watch the lion eat somebody. I don't know.
I'm hoping fortune teller. Um it's Zartan you make up.
(04:56):
I wish I were big. Uh, Yeah, I don't know.
He also wrote a lot about the discoveries of the Babylonians,
the Egyptians and also other Greeks and also the Romans,
and a bunch of stuff about the properties of air,
which is going to come very much in handy for
one of these other things that he described. Yeah, the
uh I think you're you're referring to the A L pile?
(05:19):
Is that how you say that? How I say it?
I'll tell you how it's spelled. It's a E O
L I P I L E. And I do not
speak Greek. It's all Greek to me, So I and
Lawrence just shaking her head disapprovingly. Can you can you
hear in our echoe studio the rattle of my head shaking?
And I can certainly see it better? Uh, this this
(05:39):
room is better lit than our other studio was it's
much larger. It's it's like a nice cave. It is.
It is a nice cave. So this, this device that
Heron or hero or Heroes had designed, was an early
form of what we would consider a steam engine, although
from what we can tell, it was mostly meant a
(06:00):
sort of a decoration or distraction, all right, more and
more like a toy. And several of the things that
we're going to be talking about from these early periods
are more likely to be toys than anything else because concepts.
He was the idea of exploring this, this nature of
well steam can do these these wild wacky things. I
don't know how we would do this in anything, and
(06:20):
I don't know how we would use this in any
practical way, but look at this cool thing and what
it can do. So what his could do was it
was imagined like a big bowl made out of some
metal like brass. They got a big brass bowl. It's
actually sealed, so you put water in it, but then
you put a water tight seal on there. It does
have two pipes that come up from the top of
(06:42):
the seal that then meet up with a sphere that
is mounted on these two pipes. All right, the sphere
itself can can rotate along this axis that the pipes make.
There's some sort of steam tight ball bearings that were involved,
I guess. Also, by the way, we don't know that
this was ever built, but this was his design. So
(07:04):
in the the idea was that you put the water
inside this bowl. You would heat of the bowl, the
water would convert into steam, which would go up into
the pipes into the sphere. And the sphir itself had
two nozzles or two jets on on on opposite sides
I believe, right opposite sides facing so that they would
allow the ball to rotate once steam escapes, the same
way that if you attached to bottle rockets to two
(07:26):
sides of a wheel um and then you know, let
it let's let it push it along, right, So in
this case the pushing is kind of interesting. So let's
talk about what's going on inside that sphere, which, as
far as we know, was never actually built. But inside
that sphere sphere, Now, if the sphere had no nozzles,
if there were no there were no openings, there were,
but somehow there was just water in there that you
(07:48):
had converted into steam. That steam would be pressing, pressing
equally on all surfaces, exactly sphere interiors. So in other words,
if you're looking at it, if you were able to
slow things down to just look at things like a
nanosecond at a time, and you're able to observe individual molecules,
you would see these molecules bouncing off the various interior
(08:10):
surfaces of that sphere. But because they're going in all directions,
they're canceling each other out, which means that the ball
itself is staying still relative to its environment. Hypothetically as sathing.
It's a perfect sphere, and that there aren't any you know,
major design flaws right there, Like there's not some weird
thing there that's blocking where molecules can usually hit. But
if you put an opening in that sphere, that means
(08:32):
some of the molecules are going to go through the
opening and escape, So that means they are not exerting
that force inside the sphere on the opposite side where
molecules are banging against that that edge of the sphere
that makes the sphere move. So in other words, it's
not even that steam is escaping, it's that the steam
that steam that is escaping is not counteracting the force
(08:53):
that's that it's uh counterparts are doing inside that sphere,
which I think is kind of an interesting explanation when
you think about it. And Uh, there was a a
site I was reading where his example was, imagine you
have a cardboard box, but you've taken the bottom and
the top off of it, and you've taken one of
the walls off of it. I think you put a
whole bunch of kids in there, just running around, and
(09:14):
whenever they hit one of the sides of the walls,
they careen off in a different direction. But because there's
one section side that doesn't have a wall, sometimes kids
just keep on running and they're they're outside of the box. Meanwhile,
the kids who are hitting the opposite side where there
is a wall, are moving the box. And yeah, so
it's forward motion keeps going, but it's left and right
motions stay more or less the same because they get
(09:36):
canceled out by the various kids. I thought, what an
interesting way to do that, And now I want to
Now I want to build this and I want to
watch it happen, probably from you know, a fifty foot
observation tower. I don't kids and me. That's not I'm
picturing that we could use podcasters instead of children. We
probably could, although we've got some kind of lazy podcasters.
(09:58):
I don't know, they might, you know, just kind of
push the wall. Our podcasters zombies. Well, you know, I
mostly interact with them after lunch, so that's always when
we get this neozies. Alright. So anyway, that was the
basis behind his idea. But he also had another one
that would use steam to do work. That was my
favorite example, so I had to include it. Yeah, this
(10:20):
one I had not seen it, but so so there
was a steam powered temple doors. That was the idea.
He I've got this great illustration. I'll show you after
the podcast, Laura. I'll put it up on our social
too when we when we get this podcast out. But
the idea was really kind of interesting. So in the illustration,
there's this altar and these temple doors, and the altar
(10:41):
has a little area in it where you could set
a sacrificial fire. Now that fire, the idea was that
the fire would heat up water that would create steam.
It would push the steam into a second container. That container,
in turn had a tube leading out of it, and
the other end of the tube would lead into a bucket. Now,
from what I can tell, it looks like the idea
(11:02):
is that the steam would push into this container. The
container would push more steam in through this other tube
that was leading to the bucket, and there the steam
would start to cool down and condense it turned into water.
So when they would turn the water, the water would
flow into the bucket. Yeah, which makes it heavy down.
And the bucket itself is suspended by a pulley, and
(11:23):
so because the bucket gets heavier, it starts to exert
force on the pulley and eventually would pull the pulley
so that the ropes on the other side of the
pulley would actually split into two ropes wrapping around these
two columns. And as those ropes the tension grew, it
would make those columns rotate. The rotation of the columns
in turn would open the temple doors. So by lighting
(11:45):
the fire, you would entice the gods to open the
doors for you, allowing people into your temple. Now, as
it turns out, I think that this was probably a
lot of work to open doors when you could just
walk up and open them push it. But as it
turns out, That's one of the reasons why steam technology
took so long to develop, even though we're talking about
just you know, just a few decades into the Common era.
(12:07):
That's when we're talking about steam engines. The reason we
weren't using them for work is because there were a
lot of other sources for work back in those days.
Like the Romans had lots and lots of slaves, and
as it turns out, the the history of Europe had
lots of that kind of thing. Either it was either
slavery or serfdom. Anyway, there was a lot of source
of cheap labor out there, so you didn't have to
worry about building things to make labor easier. That's what
(12:31):
those unfortunate people were for. Um. Yeah, and and also also,
you know, the metal working at the time was not
such that you could safely build boiler chambers that would
really withstand the pressures necessary. Right, you had a lot
of these prices. We wouldn't get into that until like
the eighteen exactly. You could build low pressure steam steam boilers,
(12:51):
but low pressure means that you can't do a lot
of work with them. They do. You know, you're releasing steam,
you're genering steam and releasing steam in a way where
it not exerting the kind of pressure you would need
to do anything really significant unless you were to be
incredibly clever with your design. But we'll get into that.
We we have to go a little bit further before
we get to that part. But these were the fundamentals,
(13:13):
right of steam power, This idea of being able to
to change water into another form and make it do work.
It would just take a you know, a millennia and
change before anyone started to think about it in another
more practical way. Yeah. Our next own factor is from
three Blastco Degara. He was an officer in the Smash Navy,
(13:35):
and we don't know for sure that he actually tried
to do this or that what he proposed was in
fact a steam engine, because it's pretty vague, but he
was talking about creating some sort of paddle boat that
may have been steam powered. Yeah. The phrase used in
the literature is vessel of boiling water. Right, so as
far as we know the vessel of boiling water, well
(13:58):
you could guess that, well, that must mean that it
was using steam in some way, but because there isn't
enough context there, we can't be certain. But it sounds
like the idea was that you would use some sort
of vessel of boiling water to generate steam in order
to turn the paddles on a boat, very much like
we would see uh centuries later. But that the history
(14:20):
books don't record any great Spanish paddle boats sailing across
various European waters. So I guess we can probably draw
the conclusion that this was an interesting idea that was
never actualized, or if it was, it sunk um. And
the next one's a sixteen o one, which not that
(14:42):
not that long afterward, when a fellow named Giovanni Batista
della Porta wrote in a book called Spiritali of an
invention that would use steam pressure to raise a column
of water through a vacuum created by steam when it condenses. Now,
this is what you were talking of out earlier, Lauren,
right along the same lines, or I guess, along opposite
(15:03):
lines of all of these people who are theorizing that
you know, you can you can convert steam, convert water
to steam within a closed container and that will result
in increased pressure. That the opposite, if you can condense
steam into water, that it will create a vacuum. Right, Yeah,
And that's that was an interesting idea that would again
be capitalized on later. But this is the very basis
(15:25):
of the earliest steam engines that we're doing work. Not
that you were using steam to push something, but rather
that you had created a chamber where steam, once it
cools down and condenses into water, creates the suction force
through the through creating a vacuum and thus can pull something.
And uh. In fact, as we'll talk about in just
a couple of minutes, that's really how steam engines got
(15:47):
their start. Uh. And again it that one of the
nice things about this, and I really do mean it
as a nice thing, is that you could use a
low pressure steam engine to create this effect. You didn't
have to create high pressure to push something. You could
just create steam in a low pressure environment, allow it
to condense, and then it would create this this force
all on its own. So uh, it ended up being
(16:10):
a much more safe way of using steam power, especially
early on, before we had really reached the level of
machining parts that could withstand those intense pressures that happen
when you create lots of steam in a confined space.
I don't know if any of our listeners are familiar
with a little program called MythBusters. Uh, MythBusters, of course,
(16:31):
a Discovery Channel show. I was a huge fan, well,
well before I even worked for How Stuff Works, I
was a big fan of the show. But I got
to see MythBusters live in Atlanta. They came down and
did a behind the scenes kind of tour and they
talked a little bit about the various explosions that they've
seen on the show. And the reason why I'm saying
this is that the the explosion they said was the
(16:53):
most impressive and most terrifying was the water heater explosion
because when you have that water under you know, turning
into steam under the intense pressure, and if you've cut
off all the safety valves, which you should never ever
ever do, right then yeah, safety valves on on boilers,
in fact, are one of the terrific inventions without which
(17:14):
we probably would well we certainly wouldn't be here because
we'd have a totally different world, our world we never
would have had happened. So um, yeah, because he showed that,
you know, you could essentially it would turn a water
heater into part bomb, part rocket, and it was just
you're talking about superheated water that's well past the boiling
(17:35):
point due to the pressure hitting the air, boiling instantaneously
turning into super hot steam. So just being close to this,
even if you weren't hit by shrapnel, you could be
burned severely just from the steam. This is serious stuff.
So that's why these low pressure engines were the first
foray into steam engines. Although we're still not quite there yet.
We're just talking about theory at the moment. All Right,
(17:57):
I've I've got one from two Okay, this was Ferdinand
um Verbs I'm going to go with that pronunciation um
He He might have he was living in the Imperial
Chinese court at the time, and he may have created
a working steam car or toy um interesting. He at
least drow up plans for one, and I'm not sure again,
(18:17):
it's it's really yeah, it's it's hard to say a
lot of these things from these earlier inventors, Uh, you know,
they haven't survived. So they may have one we don't
know if they were ever built and then just were
destroyed or lost, or we don't know if you know,
they just was just in the plans but never actually built.
One thing that I do believe was built In sixteen
seventy nine, a French scientist and math professor named um
(18:40):
Venice Papa from from Yes, France. I already said that excellent, Um,
I've created the first pressure cooker, which is really a
direct application of what dela Portia was talking about. Um.
This was I think the official name translated is the
digester or engine for softening bones, which isn't creepy at all.
That does. It made me think of Serial Killer in
(19:01):
the slightest but by but by attaching to this pressurized
chamber slighting piston, uh you know, and then heating the pot,
the expanding steam would push the piston up, and then
the vacuum created when the steam cooled liquid liquid would
pull the piston back downtcha um. And this is going
to become extremely important very soon. Yeah. Uh. There were
(19:23):
a lot of other people who were thinking about steam
engines at this time. So while you know, you would
argue that steam engines really didn't come into play until
the mid seventeen hundreds, it was the sixteen hundreds where
we had lots of people theorizing about it. They were
kind of laying the groundwork that would allow the The
following scientists engineers, mechanics, you know, just interesting people who
(19:46):
who thought about steam power and began to put it
to our to a practical application. They would follow and
build upon the discoveries that the their forefathers had come
up with, and those included people like Jacob Besson. There's
a little guy named Leonardo da vinci Um. He had
three turtle friends, as I recall, and was trained by
(20:06):
a rat uh Florence Vault, Thomas Grant, Edward Ford. Lots
of people were really talking about steam at this time,
and then that leads us up to a fellow who
patented an idea in six Thomas Savory, and he was
the one who who was really interested in this idea
(20:27):
of using the condensing steam to do work right. Well, okay,
so it's a little bit of background on what he
what he patented. So coal mines were booming at this
time because England was facing this timber crisis. There were
increases in ship building and lots of firewood being used,
so so coal mining was becoming huge all right. So
(20:48):
cole was starting to become the fuel of choice in England,
and of course that would remain true for the next
couple of centuries and so he patented this thing that
he called the miners friend Um because a problem in
coal mines as you wind up getting water in places
where you really don't want water, and like where there
are people underground or where you're yeah, exactly where you're
(21:10):
trying to work, and it's much harder when in there,
you know, would completely submerged exactly. We'll talk more about
that in the podcast that we're going to record immediately
after this one. But so, but so he uh so
he patented this thing that I don't again like, I
don't think he ever built it. Yeah, it was a
design for a device that could pump water out of minds,
(21:33):
using a steam powered apparatus to to operate the pump.
But again, you're not using steam to push something. It
was a design where the condensing steam would create a
pulling force that would move some sort of piston or
which in turn would move some sort of lever that
in turn would operate a pump and pull water out.
(21:55):
One of the problems was that it was even based
just on the does ligne, they could tell that it
was going to be fairly limited in how far it
could draw water. Something like you know, between twenty and
thirty feet maybe um, and that would be something that
future engineers would improve upon. Hate to interrupt this steamy conversation,
(22:16):
but it's time for us to take a quick break.
All right, Let's get back into talking about steam engines.
So we have worked our way up to seventeen twelve
when a fellow named Thomas Newcoming invents a steam engine
(22:37):
that is following along the same lines as Thomas Savory's idea,
the idea to pump water from mines. The basic design
was like this. You had a boiler, and the boiler's purpose,
of course, is to hold the water and to allow
that to heat up to steam. Right, So the steam
would move into a cylinder which had a piston in it.
But again, it wasn't meant to push the piston. The
(22:59):
pistons natural resting place was at the top of the
cylinder because the piston was attached to kind of a
counter lever arm and the other end of the arm
was pulled down by gravity. It was meant to be
heavier than the side that the piston was attached to, right,
And so when the steam would cool, it would condense,
and then the force of the vacuum that created would
pull the piston down and the lift to the other
(23:23):
side of the which would operate the pump. So here
you've got this pulling suction that is moving the piston downward,
lifting the other end of this this lever up, and
that in turn was using it was actually activating the pump,
pulling the water out of the mine. And the the
way this would work is that once you had that
steam cool down, uh, the way they would cool it
(23:46):
down is actually inject water into the cylinder. So you've
got the cylinder, it's heated up, you've got the in
fact that heat was the cylinder was quite warmed. They
had to cool the cylinder down to condense the steam
back into water. So the inject water into it helps
cool the steam down, pulls the piston down, and then
they would allow the water to heat up again. The
steam would slowly enter into this uh cylinder as gravity
(24:09):
was pulling the other end of the lever, the heavier
end back down again. That pulls the piston back to
the up resting place and steam would fill the cylinder again.
You'd have to cool it down again. You do this
over and over again. Now, if you're listening and you're thinking, wow,
that that sounds like that might not be terribly efficient.
You're right, because it meant that you had to keep
cooling and heating that cylinder over and over, which meant
(24:31):
that you had to continuously burn fuel so that you
could continuously heat the water to create this this section.
And furthermore, I have other people working to cool down
the cylinder. However, all of this was still more efficient
than housing an entire team of horses to do the
same war right, right, And so it ended up actually
being such a useful device that they were used well
(24:55):
after improved devices were made, so up until the nineteen yeah, yeah,
you know, it wasn't until like it was in the
late seventeen sixties when you would get a big improvement
over this design. But even then, even after that improvement
was made, these were very reliable pumps and have been
used for quite some time. You can actually see one
(25:17):
if you go to Dearborn, Michigan. There's the Henry Ford
Museum and they have on display one of Newcomen's actual engines.
So this is one of the ones that dates back
to the early eighteenth century, which I think is awesome.
I totally want to do a text stuff series where
we go to different museums and see and talk about
this kind of stuff. If anyone wants to invest. Yeah,
(25:40):
so hey, if you guys all think that's a great idea,
let us know and we'll pass those along to Discovery,
because I don't know how I'm going to swing this
on my own other than you know, really working on
my hitchhiking skills. Lauren's nodding. Okay, so anyway, that's great radio,
But no so so, like I said, this was not
(26:00):
terribly efficient because of the cooling and the heating of
that cylinder. Right, So, if you could find a way
of creating this vacuum to cool the steam down but
to not have to worry about heating and cooling the
cylinder itself, thus wasting fuel, you could make this a
much more efficient system. And, as it turns out, and
seventeen sixty nine, James Watt can put the plans for
(26:23):
this one. Now. He's the guy who often we credit
as the inventor of the steam engine. Though all you
guys have been listening, you know that's not exactly true,
because he really just took this new Coomman engine and
added a separate condenser to it. Right, So, what he
did was he essentially added a separate chamber that connects
to the cylinder, and so the cylinder would fill up
with steam and then move into the separate chamber where
(26:46):
it would condense, and still you would still get the vacuum.
But because you didn't have to worry about heating or
cooling the cylinder itself, you didn't have to use as
much fuel. And as a result, depending upon which source
you read, they say he didn't have to worry about
cooling the celinder, just let it continually exactly because we
knew when the boiler exactly, you didn't have to Yeah,
(27:07):
you didn't have to keep on burning fuel to take
compensate for the fact that you had to use water
to cool it down. So according to some sources, that
would mean that you say, between fifty and sev of
the fuel you would usually use to operate the steam engine. Well,
that's what made steam engines suddenly practical from a fuel standpoint.
(27:29):
So they had are even proven to be able to
do practical work, but they weren't very efficient. They used
so much fuel that it became one of those questions
of well is it even worth it to invest in this?
Uh and then with this invention, it made the steam
engine something that was truly possible in lots of different applications.
And that's when we really saw a figurative explosion and
(27:53):
steam technology. There were some literal ones. In fact, that
was one of the things what was really concerned about.
He wanted to continue working in low pressure boilers, low
pressure steam engines because he felt that any sort of
high pressure application was far too dangerous to be practical.
And he spoke out, yea and uh. The thing was
(28:16):
that in other areas of industry there were lots of improvements,
like in machining and metalworking, so there were people who
were working on building stronger, more secure boilers and engines
that could handle high pressure. What was just very cautious
about the whole thing. So it was one of those
(28:37):
the development of high pressure engines would wait for another
probably forty years or so. Um. But anyway, what stuff.
He became known as a genius in his own time.
Everyone was crediting him with the creation of this magnificent technology. Um.
I'm sure that he was happy to receive that. But
(28:59):
in the same or that when he created these improvements
to the newcoman engine, there was another fellow, Nicholas Kugno,
a French military officer, who developed a steam powered car,
and it was designed to toe artillery pieces and it
could only move it about two miles per hour, which
is about three point two kilometers per hour, and so
(29:19):
it was never really used. It wasn't really seen as
practical the idea here because it wasn't. Yeah. I read
about it being um it being displayed in Paris where
they were running it and it ran into a wall.
But since it ran to a wall two miles per hour,
no one noticed. That's a true story. Um. Yeah, So anyway,
(29:40):
it was. But it was an early example of a
steam powered car, if you can call it that. It
really looked more like a like a long wooden dolly
with a huge boiler on the end of it. Um.
It certainly didn't look like a car the way we
would think of a car today, But it was designed
to tow artillery. Yeah. We will get into some actual
steampowered cars very soon. Uh so sight that's when James
(30:04):
Picard and Matthew Wassboro build a steam engine with rotary motion.
So this is using various levers and other devices like
a crankshaft to transfer this reciprocal motion, which is that
up and down motion of a piston, into a rotational motion. Now,
those of you who listen to our transmission episode will
(30:24):
know all about this, and that's why I'm not going
to go over it again because that episode nearly broke us.
It was about cars, which I don't know if you
guys have picked up on this. I'm not a big expert.
Neither of us are really gearhead should have grabbed Scott probably, yeah, anyway,
but yes, it trans translated this reciprocating motion into rotational force.
(30:46):
So that ended up being another important development, Um, although
it wasn't really used in a practical sense for a
while longer. Um There's one had another terrific addition to
to his engine, and that was three. He created a
double acting engine, right right, Well, this was an idea
that ends up being really important in steam engines later on,
(31:09):
although mostly used in high pressure engines not low pressure engines.
The idea of being that you can you have a
cylinder that has valves on either end of the cylinder,
and so as the piston is moving toward one side,
steam is escaping out of that side and it's you know,
it's increasing on the other side, right, and then once
it gets to the end, the valve switch and so
(31:30):
the piston moves to the other side and steam is
coming into one end and escaping out the other. Now,
with Watt's designs, of course, we're talking about using that
suction force, so it's the condensing that's pulling the piston
from one side to the other. But later double action
steam engines would actually use steam force to push the
piston one side and then on the other side. In fact,
(31:50):
that's how most of the locomotive steam engines used steam.
Um and man, I love those locomotives too, But then,
you know, I think every kid who got to play
with them was fascinated. Certainly people like Walt Disney became
obsessed with them. I think that's a safe term. But
(32:10):
then we started seeing steam engines used in lots of
different ways. We're getting up to the eighteen hundreds now,
and that's really where the steam era takes off and
you start seeing steamboats, paddle steamers, locomotives. In eighteen o one,
a man named Richard trevithi it was an English miner
and engineer, built a steam powered locomotive called the puffing devil.
(32:32):
It could go on short trips, but only on short
trips because he had trouble keeping the water hot enough
to generate steam consistently. That actually was a real issue
with a lot of steam engines, the idea of how
do you how do you heat the boiler properly? And
I believe his engines were the first that we're using
steam to actually push pistons rather than the condensation in
(32:52):
the vacuum to pulse exactly. Trevith was of the school
of thought that high pressure steam engines their time had come.
It was safe enough, you could do it. What again
was not sold on this idea, but Trevor think certainly
thought that this was something that you could do. And
the early ones were still pretty inefficient. They weren't terribly fast. Um.
(33:14):
He would eventually build a little locomotive for for amusement.
Really it wasn't meant as a form of transportation. It
was called the catch me who can at a top
speed of twelve miles per hour, which is about nineteen
kilometers per hour. I think I think this was in
display in London. Some track was already laid around the
UK and the rest of Europe because horses would use
(33:37):
the track to pull pully tim pole cards along, right, exactly, yeah, exactiently.
In fact, you have the birth of the locomotive is
really an English thing. We think of it as a
very American thing here in the United States because it
was so defining of that era, as we really like
to just take ownership of everything we do. I mean,
you know, it's that wall is not so great China. Well,
(34:00):
think we need to take another quick break because I've
got the vapors. Not not really, it's just that's that's
steam related, Okay bye. In eighteen o four, London brewery
engineer named Arthur Wolfe improved this high pressure boiler design
(34:22):
through something called compounding, which uses excess steam from one
piston to fire a second piston and then a third.
This creates less heat loss in the system and winds
up with you know, you have to burn less fuel,
which is great more efficiency again, making it more of
a practical power solution. And uh, moving up to seven.
That's when another big name and steam engines this someone
(34:45):
Anyone who has followed the story of steamboats, anyone who's
familiar with Mark Twain is going to know this name.
Robert Fulton. He introduced the first steamship to provide regular
passenger service in America. Average speed of the steamship was
five miles per hour or eight kilometers per hour. Yeah. Well,
you know, if you don't have to paddle, it's fast enough.
(35:06):
It's you know, it's it's uh. And again it's one
of those things that another one those defining images in
American history. You think back to things like, you know,
like the Mark Twain stories, and they all have this
sort of evocative image of the great steamship. Of course,
Mark Twain was a steamship. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um. And
(35:28):
in fact, Mark Twain, that's a steamship term. It's actually
a term for how deep the water is, which you
would know if you ever have sailed on the rivers
of America. In Disney World, just pay attention on on
that boat, because they'll tell you all this. That's where
I got it. So I'm citing my source, uh, Disney World.
I was just there. I don't know if you know that.
That's that's where he was. George Stevenson, he was another
(35:54):
English engineer, and he built a steam locomotive to run
on rails, yep, and it carried thirty tons of coal
four d fifty feet uphill at four miles per hour
or six kilometers per hour, which doesn't doesn't sound like much,
but that's a huge amount of weight to have to transfer,
and it was a huge improvement over traffics version, which
(36:15):
could haul about ten tons of iron about ten miles.
So although it didn't go very far, it certainly had
to carry a lot of stuff and up an incline,
so you know, it was a big improvement over taking
like a super long route in order to avoid having
to go up an incline like that. UM Now at
this stage the steam engines worked with this. Like I said,
(36:38):
the steam press is on either side where you've got
the piston with the valves there. The valve will control
where the steam can enter and where it can exit.
So the steam comes in one side. Now this case
we do have the steam pressing right, so the steam
comes in on one side of the cylinder, pushes the
piston across. The steam exits out as uh of one
part of the valve while steam comes into the other
(37:00):
into the cylinder, the piston keeps that that seal steam
tight and then the piston moves back across the way
it came the first time. Uh, and you've got this
this process of a stroke exhaust and then the second
stroke and it's exhaust and it goes over and over
and over again. Meanwhile, you would have the piston attached
to some other form of device that would help, uh,
(37:24):
move the whole project, whatever it happens to be. So
with a locomotive, it might be a lever that is
then connected to a wheel. So one move of the
piston would be a half turn of the wheel, and
the move of the piston going back the other way
it would be the other half turn. And that's where
you get that locomotive force where you can have the
train moving down the track and having that steam escape
(37:47):
is what gives the trains there choo choo sound. That's true.
So you know when you hear the sound of the
steam escaping and it goes over and over. What's why
kids called trains choo choose the thing? They do it anymore,
or if they do, it's kind of that skew morphism thing.
Because of course, you don't have many steam powered trains
(38:07):
these days unless you go to Walt Disney World, where
you can write a train around Main Street, USA, and
this podcast, strangely enough, is not brought to you by
Disney World. No, no, I was brought to you by
Disney World, apparently, I believe. Usually on steam locomotives, it's
called it it's called a crosshead. The the portion that
links out from this piston, and that's going to be
(38:29):
connected to something called a drive rod, and then coupling
rods are going to what going to be what drives
the wheels. Yeah. I usually do have to have a
couple of different elements in here to translate the motion properly,
because otherwise, again you've got that reciprocating motion, which is
just going in two directions. Right, it's either going up
and down or left and right. However, you know, it
depends on your orientation and the orientation of the device.
(38:52):
But that limits what you can do unless you use
other gadgets to kind of translate that motion into something
that can do useful work. I mean, unless you just
need to open and close the door repeatedly, then then
you could just have a pole attached to it. But
otherwise you would need something more more versatile. So by
eighteen twenty five, steam locomotives were starting to be used
(39:14):
to haul passengers on a regular basis at that point.
Before then, it was pretty much used in cargo, right.
I think the very I think five was the very
first ride of a passenger steam locomotive. That was George
Stevenson's Locomotion number one. It carried some cargo and maybe
about six hundred passengers or so, and that was that
was its maiden voyage. I hear that everybody was doing
(39:36):
a brand new dance now to do the locomotion. Okay,
Laurence shaking her head again. So I guess I need
to move on alright, So eight hundreds from all the
way through eighteen eighty, we're gonna make a big skip
unless you have something you want to add in that.
Uh not really, no, I guess I guess I could
put in at this point that the popular kind of
boiler that was being used at this time, and and
(39:58):
this is going to become in for safety reasons. The
popular kind of boiler was a fire tube boiler, which
basically consists of a tank of water perforated with furnace
pipes and the you know, the hot gases from generated
from the fire from the fire in these pipes that
are going through this cylinder of water are what is
heating the water. It's a pretty efficient way to do it,
(40:19):
but it also means that the whole tank is under
a lot of pressure. So therefore if at burst, it's
going to lead to that big scary explosion that we
were talking about earlier. Right. So the heating element here
are these these pipes that run through the boiler. The
water surrounds the pipes, the pipes get hot because of
the fires creating these hot gases. You also, by the way,
have to have something to vent the hot gases out of,
(40:40):
so so you didn't just have steam venting out, you
actually had hot air hot gases venting out to based
from whatever the heat source was. See, that was one
of the problems that earlier inventors had run into, was
that they were trying to figure out a way of
creating this hot water, and some of them were doing
things like using a red hot iron uh inserted uneath
the boiler. But that heat starts to dissipate, and once
(41:03):
it does, you don't have power anymore. So it was
only through creating something that would be allow you to
generate a fire and continuate generate. So even though we
talk about steam powered trains. Have you ever seen those
movies where they're shoveling coal into a furnace, Well, you
have to generate the steam, right, It's not the trains
not running on coal. The coal is what's generating the
heat in the fire. It's it's the fuel that creates
(41:26):
the creates the heat that allows the water to boil,
that makes the train go, and the green grass grows
all around and around. So yeah, so moving up to
eight Between eighteen eighty, steam engines are used in practically
every major industrial application, and in fact really both figuratively
(41:47):
and literally drive the industrial revolution. Uh. In eighteen eighty
Charles A. Parsons invinced the first steam turbine. So now
we're getting into a way of using steam to not
just push something mechanically, but also generate electricity, which would
become really important as well. Uh. In eight are actually
(42:09):
really eighteen six is when we first start seeing steam
powered cars in the United States, the Stanley Steamer being
the popular model, also affectionately called flying teapots. Have you
ever seen a picture of these? They really do look
like horseless carriages. When you hear that term, it looks
like it's a carriage that's missing a horse in front
of it, and it's got one usually one lever that
(42:30):
you use for steering, and that's it, and uh, you
just uh, you know, god speed. They were really popular.
They went in this early kind of period, more than
sixty of them in the United States, and sixty that's
obviously a tiny number these days, but you're talking back
then where only a small sliver of the population would
(42:53):
have had access to it, both monetarily and just opportunity
from opportunity's sake, you know, not everyone lived in in
an area where they could get access to this. Also,
keep in mind that these machines were usually used for
intercity travel. It's not something that the idea of traveling
across country really wasn't wasn't part of the automotive industry
(43:15):
at that point, whether it was steam powered or gas
powered or even electrically powered. We talked about electrical cars,
and they predate the gas engine vehicles as well. Um,
if you wanted to go across the country, you've got
a train. You didn't you didn't drive your car at
this time. But we get up to a sad time though,
we're getting up to for those of us who happened
(43:36):
to like that. Cho choose. Yeah, as of about nineteen sixty,
we're going to see the end of the locomotive era. Yeah.
You don't see many places producing steam powered trains these days.
If they are, it's for some sort of amusement park
or something along those lines. It's not meant as a
means of travel. There are some steam powered engines that
are still in operation in various places around the world,
(43:57):
but they aren't really being produced because we have alternative now,
all right. Certainly by the nineteen thirties, people had started
to realize that internal combustion engines using gasoline as a
fuel were much more efficient and cheap to use than
these than these external combustion engines, which is what a
steam engine is. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Um, So
(44:18):
we start seeing this end of this era in around
nineteen sixty, But it doesn't mean that we're no longer
using steam engines. We still are, right right, partially because
we have improved the kind of boiler that's used. Water
tube boilers are kind of the inverse of that fire
tube boiler that I was talking about earlier. It's it's
basically a furnace that's perforated with water pipes instead of
(44:38):
being a water tank that's perforated with furnace pipes, and
there's water inside of furnace. You've got tubes of water
inside of furnace and uh and yeah, so so only
those tubes are under pressure and therefore it's safer overall. Right,
there's less of a less of a chance for our
catastrophic breakdown. Although again with valves proper valving you you're
pretty safe most of the time. And yeah, back in
(45:01):
two thousand nine, you know, way back then, a team
of engineers built a car called the Inspiration, which is
steam powered high speed car uses a turbine engine, not
a piston engine, steam powered, and it broke the land
speed record for steam powered vehicles. UM. The average speed
was a breezy one forty eight miles power or two
(45:25):
kilometers prower. That's fast. Yeah, you're being powered by steam.
And I think I think that that is that's still
the standing UH land speed record. I know that there's
another team working on it. There's a US steam team
that's working on building its own UH steam powered vehicle
that they hope will break that record. But as far
as I know, that has not happened yet as of
(45:46):
the recording of this podcast. Yeah, and there is there.
There are a few companies that are working on test
versions of steam powered cars. There's one called Cyclone Cyclone
Power Technologies, which is working with Raytheon on the defense
contractor at the moment, and in fact, the the U
S team is working on a high speed vehicle called
the Cyclone. That's what the name of the one that
(46:09):
they're hoping will break the records, the cycling. Yeah. Yeah,
they're you know, they're producing these engines that would fit
in the you know, standard vehicle engine space. That's a
big deal too. We didn't even mention that. But the
steam engines of traditionally were very large because you had
to have a boiler, You had to have something that
could contain a lot of water to generate the steam
you needed, and you know, you were venting that steam.
(46:31):
So it wasn't like your recap capturing and reusing, and
even if you did recapture it, especially with the old
condenser models, even if you did recapture it, you were
still losing some So it's it wasn't something that you
could run indefinitely. You might be able to run it
for a long time, but you know that's one of
those challenges is trying to miniaturize something like steam power,
which uh, you know it doesn't work so well. Also
(46:53):
turns out to be a big part of the steampunk movement,
this kind of idea of avoiding the miniaturization. You know,
you want these kind of bulky things that have lots
of character to them. You know, they're shiny and brassy, unuseful,
but really full of characters. Yeah, no, it's got lots
of character. It's just looks like, Wow, you know, that's
a great, uh steampunk version of a mobile device, and
(47:16):
it only weighs seventy pounds and burns every time you
use it, right, Well, you know that would obviously you
would be much more frugal with your use. You wouldn't
be picking up your smartphone every five seconds at dinner.
I'm speaking about my own personal behavior at this point.
So yeah, there's still other companies that are developing steam
engines for power generation, usually for places in the world
(47:38):
that are not on a power grid and therefore do
not have access to electricity. There's one called a uniflow Power,
which is unveiled a generator back in steam generator, steam
powered generator, I should say, didn't generate steam. You generated
power through steam. Um. But it was meant to help
communities that are not direct connected to power grids to
(48:01):
to deliver electricity to parts of the world that otherwise
would not have it. So we're seeing steam still being
used in applications today. Absolutely, And I mean, you know,
I want to point out that most of the electricity
generated is technically steam general. Sure, I mean that's what
nuclear power is, that's what a coal power plant is, right, Yeah, Yeah,
we're talking you're burning a fuel that is generating steam
(48:22):
that is turning usually yeah, exactly. Even things like the
plasma waste converters. I've talked about those in the past
where they've talked about using the excess heat in order
to generate steam that would turn turbines and be kind
of a co located with a power generator. So you'd
have a trash disposal and power generation unit all put together.
But it's using steam to do that. It means plasma
(48:45):
to to break down the trash power a level of
efficiency of of how hot you can get water, how
quickly with how the work? Yeah, and then how can
you how can you take something that normally would just
be considered a waste eye product and turn it into
useful stuff. You know, heat. We often think of all,
we lost a lot of our energy through heat. But
(49:07):
if you can recapture that heat and make it do
work like you can with steam power, then you're in
good shape. So yeah, that kind of wraps up our
discussion about steam engines. Uh, this was a fun one
to do. It's totally another one of those look backs
on on the technology of days of your that are
still relevant today. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic episode.
If you have suggestions for future topics of current episodes
(49:30):
of tech Stuff, send it to me via Twitter. The
handle is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit
the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(49:50):
listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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