[HN Gopher] The origins of the steam engine
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The origins of the steam engine
Author : feross
Score : 32 points
Date : 2023-11-29 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rootsofprogress.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (rootsofprogress.org)
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| The Greeks made a sort of "toy" that spins when a fire boiled
| water. It's almost a shame that no one took it a step further.
| Imagine ancient Greece and Rome entering a steam age in the 1st
| or 2nd century.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It is a toy. It is not efficient in first place and how it
| works doesn't actually produce much torque. Or likely power
| either.
|
| Water power with something like Egyptian screws might have been
| better solution.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > It is a toy
|
| Exactly. It was basically a kettle on an axle, with two
| spouts, causing it to spin as the water boiled off. It had no
| valves so couldn't build up enough pressure to do usable
| work. It couldn't be reloaded with water when operating. The
| overall concept was constrained by the limited metal working
| skills of the era, which weren't up to making reliable high-
| pressure vessels.
|
| The development of usable pistons for steam engines followed
| centuries of experience gained making cannons and associated
| ammunition, which slowly provided the skills to make metal
| tubes that fitted and could hold pressure without themselves
| exploding.
| antonhowes wrote:
| Though note, from the post, that there were some
| applications of stationary aeolipiles with their spouts
| directed at vanes to do some light mechanical work - things
| like turning roasting spits and grinding pigments. All
| known throughout the fourteenth through to the seventeenth
| centuries, if not earlier, though it's unclear how widely
| any of them were adopted.
| antonhowes wrote:
| It is in the post!
| whoomp12341 wrote:
| oh wow. That makes me wonder... could we make a steam engine
| using the power of the sun that heats up water to boil into a fan
| that generates electricity, that then catches the water and flows
| down running a hydro generator so you get energy on the way up
| and on the way down. I wonder what kind of efficiency that would
| have compared to modern day solar? probably laughable
| Retric wrote:
| What you're missing here is pressure.
|
| Steam turbines work not because of steam alone, you can fill a
| room with steam insert a turbine and nothing happens. To get
| them to spin you need higher pressure on the input side of the
| turbine than the output. If you want to have steam go up a
| shaft that's going to increase the pressure on output side and
| thus reduce the amount of energy generated by the turbine.
| antonhowes wrote:
| Yes, it's the difference in pressure/heat that is exploited,
| as Sadi Carnot noted (by analogising the steam engine to a
| water-wheel exploiting a fall of water, treating it as a
| "fall of heat")
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(page generated 2023-11-29 23:00 UTC)