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Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

antonhowes.substack.com

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Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#221

Post by zabzonk »

dredmorbius wrote: post #213
zabzonk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But once you are up there you are up there, and professinal glider pilots can stay up there for ever, using thermals etc.

My suspicion is that a lot of the basics of glider flight were a lot easlier to discover / develop with powered aircraft. Given the relatively low power-output, and reliability, of early engines, many early aircraft might be considered (intermittently) powered gliders. It could still have been possible to work things out based on JATO launch, though the hang-glider approach of low sand-dune testing / training would p…

Actually many gliders, such as thosed used by the nascent Luftwaffe when they were banned from real aircraft used things like rubber bands and human towing to launch, and I can remember ground-based winches being used to launch RAF cadet planes when I was a kid.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#222

Post by bluGill »

BurningFrog wrote: post #162
bluGill wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slaves did many skilled labor jobs back in the day. In Uncle Tom's Cabin (a book you really should read, but beware the purpose was to make you pick up your gun and march, so if you have those tendencies...) on of the important slaves held a good factory job. Of course most slaves were just hard labor, but they did hold other positions. I think you can find examples of slaves holding every position in society other t…

I think the point is more that you can't give a slave a truck with a tank of gas and expect to see either again.

Sure you can - so long as you have a police force that will check up on things once in a while. Or at least you have convinced the slaves that the police force will catch them and life will be worse after they are caught.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#224

Post by eesmith »

legitster wrote: post #196
bko wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is anything today that would need to come down (or up) in price to kick off a revolution. I've heard some argue that was decentralized payments online (cryptocurrency) but that hasn't led to much outside of speculation IMO. The other thing I heard was battery technology. Just recently a podcast with Matthew Ball, he makes the argument that AR/VR/metaverse technology needs a breakthrough (in part) in…

I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at it. Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money. LCD screens did not produce as good of a picture quali…

> Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money.

Am I missing something? It looks like hundreds of diesel-electric locomotives are more powerful than the most powerful steam engines ever made.

I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_locomotives then sorted by tractive effort/force and looked for the most powerful diesel and most powerful steam.

EMD SD70ACe-T4 - diesel-electric - 200,000 pounds-force (890 kN) starting, 175,000 pounds-force (778 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_SD90MAC (478 built)

GE AC6000CW - diesel-electric - 188,000 pounds-force (836 kN) starting; 166,000 pounds-force (738 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_AC6000CW (317 built)

by comparison:

Erie Class P-1 - steam - 176,256 pounds-force (784 kN) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplex_locomotive (10 built) ("high tractive effort, but low speed, about 10 mph, over short distances" .. "the Triplexes produced huge amounts of tractive effort (TE) that may have been the highest of any steam locomotives before or since").

XA Triplex - steam - 166,600 pounds-force (741 kN) compound - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-8-8-4 (1 built) ("unable to sustain a speed greater than five miles an hour, since the six cylinders could easily consume more steam than the boiler could produce")

Power isn't the only factor. Steam engines produce the most power when just starting, which helps explain why the most power steam engines were also so slow.

(Something like the Union Pacific Big Boy had less tractive force, at 135,375 lbf, much higher speeds, topping out at 80mph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Big_Boy)

Going back to your thesis, in researching this I came across the Kaufman Act, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufman_Act , which banned steam engines in New York city due to pollution problems. Originally it required electric propulsion, but was amended to allow diesel when that proved viable, and that in turn provided a stepping stone toward dieselization of US trains.

Diesel trains are not worse polluters than steam, so your thesis doesn't really seem applicable.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#225

Post by TaylorAlexander »

zehaeva wrote: post #209
OJFord wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be a pretty nice 'coffee table book': a walk through history of inventions, with the dependencies of each one listed (to one or maybe two degrees only of course). You could pick it up anywhere, read forwards; back from something specific (or forward, if you made it a doubly linked list?); or back from whatever 'the end' would be.

You might be interested in James Burke's TV Show Connections! Which does this sort of thing for like 8 episodes. Go and learn why you can't have cars without swamp gasses!

Connections is also a book too!

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#227

Post by Symmetry »

pratik661 wrote: post #180
legitster wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if you were living in this period - England was constantly at war, the trees had all run out, and quality metal was nowhere to be found. You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress. Also, if we wanted to go back even further, the true roots are probably the Enlightenment. Before Wilkinson and Watt and Darby could think to develop technology…

Rights to privately acquire land, create corporations, and sell across markets were extant across different civilizations throughout history. The Chola merchant guilds had formalized corporate structures that dissipated the risk of long voyages 2000 years ago. Seeing that the Romans traded with the Cholas, the Romans probably had corporate structures too. Humans have been living in complex societies since the Bronze…

I'm not familiar with the Chola but one problem the Arab world had during this period was their equivalents of corporations dissolved upon the death of any of the principals. For a trade expedition that might last a year or two this is a perfectly sensible arrangement. But not for large mills or foundries requiring multiple principals to build and run and which might last decades and which can't be easily divided.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#228

Post by trinovantes »

legitster wrote: post #145

Environmental collapse and the price of steel! I think people forget just how expensive metal was. Carpenters would lock up their saws because the blades were so precious. People knew how to make cheaper steel from coal for a long time, but it was regarded as an inferior product and avoided. However, charcoal is labor intensive stuff to collect. By the 1700s, some cities in Europe had so depleted their available fore…

> And they never would have had to switch to cheap metal if they hadn't completely depleted their environment.

I've always wondered why some fantasy stories seem to be perpetually locked in pre-industrial technology. This does seem like a plausible canonical explanation if they had fast replenishing resources due to magic.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#229

Post by kragen »

masswerk wrote: post #117
bambax wrote: post #107

> Hero [Hero of Alexandria, 10-70 AD] even suggested a mechanical use for the effect. By setting a fire on a hollow, airtight altar, the heated air within would flow down a tube into a sphere full of water, which in turn would be pushed up another tube into a hanging bucket. The bucket, when sufficiently heavy with water, would then pull on a rope to open some temple doors. Crucially, when the fire was extinguished,…

But why would you want to use such a flimsy technology, if you have horses? There is no way an engine like this could outrun a lean and speedy chariot with two to four horses. Also, even a primitive mechanism like this may have encountered fatal problems with dirt, dust and sand. (Mind that steam locomotion was first tried for roads, which was a total failure because of the quality of roads, even in major city center…

There are lots of applications for heat engines that don't involve mobility: grinding wheat to flour, threshing and winnowing wheat, fulling cloth, sewing cloth together, hammering hot iron or annealed cold bronze, blowing the bellows on a forge or bloomery, sawing wood, turning wood or stone on a lathe, weaving cloth, spinning thread, playing music, crushing ore, grinding a new edge on a knife or axe with a grindstone, turning a potter's wheel, writing, kneading bread, calculating, and, as mentioned, raising water (from a well, from a river, into your fields, into a tower, into a salt pond, or out of a mine or swamp). All of these are things that people were already doing before Heron, in many cases devoting their lives to them, but steam power was not applied to some of them until less than a century ago.

In medieval times we can add turning metal on a lathe and winding crossbows.

Think of the most common German surnames, which are all occupational: Müller (grinding wheat), Schmidt (hammering iron), Schneider (sewing cloth), Fischer (catching fish), Weber (weaving cloth), Meyer (owning land), Wagner (making wagon wheels), Becker (baking bread), Schulz (herding peasants), Hoffmann (organizing the court), Schäfer (herding sheep), Koch (cooking food), Bauer (farming), and Richter (judging). This is a somewhat skewed sampling of occupations of men in Germany at the late-medieval or early-modern time surnames were imposed. If you were a Schmidt or a Weber you could expect to spend decades doing hard, physical labor every day, in a fixed physical location, labor that is now mostly done by steam.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#230

Post by dr_dshiv »

antonhowes wrote: post #192
dr_dshiv wrote: post #73

It’s not discussed in the article, but the magic of steam in the 16th century was expressly investigated by Robert Fludd. As a mystical philosopher, he was attacked by the more scientific types of his time. This probably set back the steam engine. But clearly, he was really on to something!! Don’t discount the weird, I guess, is the takeaway.

Well-noticed! I used one of Fludd’s illustrations, but I ran out of space writing about Drebbel, which took us up to c.1607. Fludd will feature VERY heavily in Part III. Fludd eventually became totally obsessed with the inverted flask experiment - and recent historiography suggests he wasn’t seen as a crank, but actually highly respected at the time.

Nice! Thanks to the Ritman library in Amsterdam, I have access to a lot of Fludd’s published books (with fun marginalia etc…) but a fair amount of his work doesn’t seem to have been translated. (Maybe you’ve found otherwise?)

Descartes and Mersenne present a early conflicted aversion to the occult/esoteric/natural magic (eg, topics like resonance). I presume that certain ideas became somewhat taboo. This is one reason why it may have taken so long for the concept of resonance to be adopted widely in the sciences (see Buchanan 2019 in Nature “Going into resonance”)

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