81–90 of 107 posts
Ancient Greeks had a steam engine. They called it a Hero's engine. They used it as a toy. They couldn't use it as anything else than a toy. The reason they couldn't because they didn't have the metallurgy and the machining to create pistons, valves, etc. There's an important lesson that can be applied to every technology, I think: technological progress is always iterated, never revolutionized. If your novelty - a pr…
Ha. The title lead me to believe this was about Erlang. But this is great too.
Author here. The beam engine created power from steam, and was a key part of the early Industrial Revolution. The article is a deep dive into the engine: how it works, the history behind it, and the engineering tradeoffs the builders faced. There are quite a few interactive figures that I hope make the concepts easier to see.
No, don't do that. Because the pressure of the atmosphere isn't constant. It varies with weather and how high you are.
Instead use Pascal (Pa) or Hectopascal (hPA). I really pays back to use SI units for physical things. Suddenly you have formulas without weird constants, like 1 Pa = 1 N/m^2
It's a sad thing that new articles still propose units that are (since many, many years) outdated: the metric system is from 1793, the SI is from 1960.
BACK then people didn't knew better and used the varying atmosphere as base. But today ?!?!?
The first steam engines were vacuum engines, fill a cylinder full of steam and as it condenses it sucks the piston down, Watt's improvement and patent was on a separated condenser unit so you did not have to reheat the whole cylinder each time. This doubled the efficiency, that is, reduced the amount of coal you had to burn by half. But Watt would not sell manufacturing rights to his patent he sold operating licenses…
It wasn't a vacuum engine, as per post the water just cooled the cylinder. And it wasn't half of the coal, it was a third.
Author here. The beam engine created power from steam, and was a key part of the early Industrial Revolution. The article is a deep dive into the engine: how it works, the history behind it, and the engineering tradeoffs the builders faced. There are quite a few interactive figures that I hope make the concepts easier to see.
This reminds me a lot of the articles at: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ Not just in terms of presentation, but also quality. Amazing!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me a lot of the articles at: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ Not just in terms of presentation, but also quality. Amazing!
Thank you, a lot of research went into it :). And 100% inspired by Bartosz's articles - he is the first line in the credits section.
Author here. The beam engine created power from steam, and was a key part of the early Industrial Revolution. The article is a deep dive into the engine: how it works, the history behind it, and the engineering tradeoffs the builders faced. There are quite a few interactive figures that I hope make the concepts easier to see.
Quinn (Blondihacks) on youtube is a model engineer machinist and has, IMO, the most outsider-watchable content on building boilers and steam engines like this. Highly recommend this primer titled "The Model Engineering Learning Curve" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps_BQJEMnGA She's been building a model locomotive for years now, there are over 100 videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLY67-4BrEae-xhrvZX33gPk4…
Blondihacks is amazing. Beware though, you may be buying a lathe and a milling machine soon after you start watching :). It's a great hobby. Manual machining is totally different from writing code, but you get into a similar state of flow.
How did they make vacuum and be sure it was indeed a vacuum ?
How did they melted that metal alloy into the right shape ?
How did they built those precise mirrors ?
How many times did they fail before succeeding ?
How did they lubricate and seal properly all components ?
I know I could explain 80% of those inventions easily by studying them for a few days each. I know I would never be able to build 1% of those machines myself, I'd constantly run into technical issues and it'd take me years for each