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Of all the pre-war cars I have been in or around... only steam had the power to throw you back in the seat. It would be interesting to see a modern multifuel interpretation of one. Might be well suited to long runtimes and alternate fuels.
Not exactly what you asked for, but have you seen BMW's turbosteamer concept? https://newatlas.com/go/4936/
You can visit Thomas Edison's house with his lab near Newark NJ. There are two electric cars on display. Interestingly here it says in 1914 38% of all the cars on the road were electric; 22% gasoline, 40% steam powered. http://www.edisonmuckers.org/edisons-cars/
Of all the pre-war cars I have been in or around... only steam had the power to throw you back in the seat. It would be interesting to see a modern multifuel interpretation of one. Might be well suited to long runtimes and alternate fuels.
* But no sudden technological breakthrough explains the automobile’s arrival in the 1890s either.* Er, steel? Steel was about as exotic as titanium is now until the 1860s when the Bessemer process went into volume production.
I think steam engines prototyped a lot of the needed technology like lubrication, manufacturing of precision shafts and heat resistance which then could be applied to the gas engine.
To build an effective steam engine, you need a precisely ground piston and a precisely bored cylinder, otherwise you can't get useful working pressures. Grinding the piston is laborious but straightforward - you just need two centers and a cutting tool to achieve a rotationally symmetrical part. Boring the cylinder is much more challenging, because you need to cut a very wide, very deep, very straight hole into a huge lump of iron. Cutting that hole requires a very rigid, very powerful machine.
John Wilkinson developed an effective boring machine in 1774 for making cannons, but it was limited in speed and capacity by the water wheel that powered it. The next year, the Boulton & Watt company was founded, building stationary steam engines with cylinders made by Wilkinson. Wilkinson received the second steam engine built by Boulton & Watt, which he used to power a bigger and faster cylinder boring machine, which he used to build more and bigger steam engine cylinders for Boulton & Watt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of all the pre-war cars I have been in or around... only steam had the power to throw you back in the seat. It would be interesting to see a modern multifuel interpretation of one. Might be well suited to long runtimes and alternate fuels.
Not exactly what you asked for, but have you seen BMW's turbosteamer concept? https://newatlas.com/go/4936/
I don't think manufacturing a working model of such a thing would have been within reach for a couple of undergrads, although the project we went with was almost as ambitious— we ended up building a mostly functional laundry washer from scratch.
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It's perhaps a more limiting factor now than then. As the article notes most EVs at the turn of the century had a range of 40-70 miles. The model T of around 1910, ten years later, had a range of about 90. Earlier ICE cars were down nearer EVs. A century ago battery and ICE technology were not that far apart. i.e. both fairly primitive. If electrics had been chosen and had 100 years of continual minor incremental imp…
> If electrics had been chosen and had 100 years of continual minor incremental improvements... Battery technology is still basically just ordinary chemistry and, thus, hasn't made much progress in 100 years. E.g., we use a lead acid battery in cars now, and they had lead acid batteries back then. Just look at the periodic table, pick some elements, and make a battery. They did that 100 years ago also. If we do somet…
Maybe a global electric car industry working on the problem 4x longer than we have would have come up with something better, maybe not. Alternate time lines are never certain. :)
Batteries aren't all of it though - how would personal transportation have evolved if every city and road network had electric distribution points for vehicles - as was planned in the 1910s - instead of filling out with petrol stations? The fast charger networks could easily have been something of the 1940s rather than the 2000's. We'd undoubtedly have standardised on a generic one that worked with every make of car by now. We'd probably have designed cities a little differently too.
We also could have had steam powered cars. Jay Leno once said that he got pulled over on the freeway for breaking the speed limit in his Stanley Steamer from 1906-ish. Darn thing has a top speed of 127mph. My 2018 motorcycle tops out at 110mph, to give you a comparison. Why don't we have steam cars? Because in the early 1900's steam cars they couldn't compete with the elegance of ICE vehicles. The engines were big an…
> My 2018 motorcycle tops out at 110mph This is a silly point of fact. Motorcycles have been capable of achieving far greater than 110 mph for a long time; a top speed of 110mph puts your 2018 vehicle on the low end of the speed range for "motorcycle" class vehicles (as opposed to scooters, mopeds, ebikes, etc). My random 1997 low-end 600cc sportbike could exceed 130 mph when it was 15 years old.
We also could have had steam powered cars. Jay Leno once said that he got pulled over on the freeway for breaking the speed limit in his Stanley Steamer from 1906-ish. Darn thing has a top speed of 127mph. My 2018 motorcycle tops out at 110mph, to give you a comparison. Why don't we have steam cars? Because in the early 1900's steam cars they couldn't compete with the elegance of ICE vehicles. The engines were big an…
Here's one from 1860: https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/motorcycles/a26052/186...
Ransomes, famous maker of traction engines and inventor of the powered lawnmower had a couple of patents for steam motorcycles, but I've never seen details of what they envisaged.
Maneuver warfare would have been impossible on electric. And then when the war was over, all that surplus machinery was around, and so were the factories that built it.
Isn't that the same reason we still don't all drive electric cars?
I was always disappointed that NEV's didn't take off, seems like a perfect solution for cities and even suburbs -- lanes could be striped much narrower and parking could be much more dense.
But few people want to drive a glorified golf cart to the office, even if they only drive 10 miles and are stuck in stop and go traffic anyway, so the 25mph NEV cap wouldn't really change their commute time.