[HN Gopher] The origins of the steam engine (2023)
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The origins of the steam engine (2023)
Author : bpierre
Score : 96 points
Date : 2024-09-03 11:03 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.rootsofprogress.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.rootsofprogress.org)
| tapeloop wrote:
| did that thing where I assumed it was a technical overview of how
| Valve developed the Steam store. This is the second time I've
| done it and it probably wont be the last
| BirAdam wrote:
| https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-birth-of-windows-gaming
| mkatx wrote:
| Ha! Same.. but I also just got done reading this..
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41460276
| _-_-__-_-_- wrote:
| I did the exact same thing.
| card_zero wrote:
| Hero's door-opener doesn't need pipes and a bottle and a bucket:
| the expanding air could have moved the rope by filling a rubber
| bladder. Except the Greeks didn't have rubber. (Therefore if they
| _had_ had rubber, we 'd have no steam engines?) The noise-maker
| could similarly have sent air through its organ directly, I'm not
| sure what's wrong with that, it doesn't seem to use hydraulics to
| increase the rate of flow, maybe some evening-out occurs that
| improves the sound?
| kragen wrote:
| they didn't have rubber bladders, but the reason rubber
| bladders are called rubber bladders is that, before the
| vulcanization of rubber was known to scientists, they used
| actual bladders, from slaughtered animals. but those are a bit
| more fragile and couldn't have pulled much of a rope without a
| bag or something
|
| i suspect the organ model is wrong. there are a lot of ways to
| use hydraulics to get a precise flow rate, oscillating flow,
| etc., that heron talks about
| maxwell wrote:
| Ancient Europeans had the sulphur, just no rubber trees.
|
| Ancient Mesoamericans vulcanized rubber (e.g. to make the
| _olli_ for Ollama) by extracting latex from the Panama rubber
| tree and mixing it with moonflower juice:
|
| https://news.mit.edu/1999/rubber-0714
| lupusreal wrote:
| I think you could also achieve this using a water-sealed steam
| gasometer instead of a bladder.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder#Water-sealed_gas_ho...
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The origins of the steam engine_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38463195 - Nov 2023 (44
| comments)
| dansmerino wrote:
| So the classic Zelda & Co puzzle to open a door by starting a
| fire on an altar it is entirely possible with ancient technology.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yep! The ancient Greeks had essentially a really basic steam
| engine. It is not really a device that you can get much useful
| work out of though. It isn't 100% known why they made them,
| people have speculated that they just did it as a novelty or
| conversation piece.
|
| Actually it seems like a totally plausible idea to put one in a
| temple and use it to impress people, which is pretty close to
| the Zelda application (of course in the game, temples are also
| puzzles).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
| dghughes wrote:
| I like to imagine ancient Romans using steam grenades or a siege
| using boilers pressurized to explode since they had no gunpowder.
| bee_rider wrote:
| "Sounds gimmicky. Let's use the metal for armor and swords
| instead" -- Romans, probably.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| I always wonder, with articles like this, what really drove these
| innovations. Like, is it oversimplifying the socioeconomic
| pressures that drove or impeded these innovations? How did things
| like labor shortages or resource needs slow down and speed up the
| development of steam tech. How many parallel steam innovations
| stalled out or never took hold in other places in the world?
|
| I guess what I'm really wondering is, is this an example of a
| narrative fallacy where we summarize a chaotic, messy process
| with a highly uncertain outcome as being linear and inevitable?
| Svip wrote:
| A good way to address this is to ask "why did the Roman Empire
| not have an industrial revolution?" Bret Devereaux already did
| a great job on this[0], but the short-ish answer goes like
| this:
|
| Britain had basically been laid barren from trees (other areas
| of Europe had seen similar instances), but they still needed to
| heat houses. With firewood scares, and coal basically lying on
| the ground, particularly in Yorkshire, coal was an easy
| alternative.
|
| And so Britain became dependent on coal for heating, but
| eventually the coal was not simply to be lifted off the ground,
| it now had to be dug up from mines. Mines weren't exactly a new
| thing, but these mines were huge comparatively, and the labour
| required was thus much larger than usual, and that informed the
| idea of using a steam engine to bring up the coal from the mine
| (after all, the coal was right there).
|
| [0] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-
| indus...
| enticeing wrote:
| Just to clarify, the initial use for steam engines at coal
| mines was to pump out water. (Same source as above)
| lupusreal wrote:
| An important point, because they then put that water into
| canals dug to the towns that needed the coal. This made
| coal even cheaper and let towns grow larger to house the
| workforces of new larger factories.
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