Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff production from I Heart Radio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I
Speaker 1: love all things tech and it is time for a
Speaker 1: classic episode of tech Stuff. This episode originally published on
Speaker 1: October six, two thousand thirteen. It is called Running on Steam. Yep,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about some steamy stuff today, so let's
Speaker 1: listen back to this classic episode. We're talking about steam
Speaker 1: engines today and how they work and the principles behind them,
Speaker 1: and it really comes down to thermodynamics. You know, you're
Speaker 1: talking about heat really and what heat does and how
Speaker 1: it changes things, and that's you know, harnessing that has
Speaker 1: allowed us to have a little bit of a revolution
Speaker 1: industrially speaking. Do do pretty goodness my ration, I'm slow today.
Speaker 1: It took me like four seconds. You're slow. You didn't
Speaker 1: forget to introduce you everybody, we're both on okay. But
Speaker 1: so yeah, So the thing about gases, um when when
Speaker 1: when you heat them up, they they do stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they move the molecules and the gases move around a
Speaker 1: lot more than they usually do. So let's say let's
Speaker 1: say you've got a liquid, all right, You've got all
Speaker 1: those molecules together in a liquid, their chain together, right,
Speaker 1: they formed this this collection of molecules that are all
Speaker 1: part of a larger hole. So example, you've got a
Speaker 1: bucket of water, those molecules are all bound together to
Speaker 1: make that water. Now you can you can separate some
Speaker 1: water from that, but the molecules within that separate section,
Speaker 1: they're still bound together. It's not like you've just freed
Speaker 1: them and they're now flying all over the place. But
Speaker 1: if you add energy, as in heat to that water
Speaker 1: and you boil the water, that water starts to boil
Speaker 1: off and form steam. It's the gas form of that substance.
Speaker 1: And now the molecules can break free of each other.
Speaker 1: So now you've got these free flowing molecules that are
Speaker 1: zipping around at high speed depending upon how much heat
Speaker 1: you've put into the system. And as it turns out,
Speaker 1: they exert pressure. I mean, this has momentum. It if
Speaker 1: it hits against stuff, it can press against stuff. And
Speaker 1: if you're able to harness that in some way, you
Speaker 1: can make that do work. Right. Yeah, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, when you've got a sealed container and you
Speaker 1: create steam inside of it, it's going to exert pressure
Speaker 1: on the sides of that container, which can then do
Speaker 1: work yeah, or explode, as it turns out, depending upon
Speaker 1: what you've made the container out of and how hot
Speaker 1: you've made that water. Uh, yeah, Because that's the other thing,
Speaker 1: is that water when it goes into steam, it's expanding, right,
Speaker 1: You're talking about making it take up more space than
Speaker 1: normally would, more volume than it normally would, And that,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, is a very important part of
Speaker 1: some early steam engines, the idea that you can make
Speaker 1: something take up more room and as it condenses, meaning
Speaker 1: that and the steam starts to cool down and turn
Speaker 1: back into water, it's taken up less room. Right, it's
Speaker 1: going to create a little bit of a vacuum you
Speaker 1: can also use to do work. Yeah. So both of
Speaker 1: those those things, the idea of steam being able to
Speaker 1: press against stuff and the idea of steam once it condenses,
Speaker 1: creating a vacuum, those are the basic principles behind your
Speaker 1: your various kinds of steam engines. Now, this idea is
Speaker 1: not brand new. First of all, You've got a lot
Speaker 1: of people who will cite that A certain person named
Speaker 1: James Watt was the inventor of the steam engine. As
Speaker 1: it turns out, that's being a little premature to say
Speaker 1: that he did. I mean he would. He certainly played
Speaker 1: an instrumental role in making steam engines uh practical, But
Speaker 1: you have to go way back if you want to
Speaker 1: look at the people who were really the inventors as
Speaker 1: far as we know of steam engines. That keep in mind,
Speaker 1: we're talking right now about the first recorded instances of
Speaker 1: people talking about steam engines. That the idea itself might
Speaker 1: even be older, right, but the first recorded instances are
Speaker 1: from the first century, yeah, Common era. We're talking a
Speaker 1: hero or Huron or heroes or heroes of Alexandria. Uh.
Speaker 1: He he was a Greek mathematician and uh inventor. Ye
Speaker 1: he was born in Egypt, lived and worked and mostly
Speaker 1: in Alexandria, but was of Greek origin, and uh did
Speaker 1: a lot of different works. You know, he invented a
Speaker 1: lot of different things, or at least wrote about a
Speaker 1: lot of things that we presume he invented. It may
Speaker 1: very will be that he was just writing about stuff
Speaker 1: that other people have done, but as far as we know,
Speaker 1: he's the one who originated these ideas. Yeah. He had
Speaker 1: a few inventions that he wrote about. A coin operated device. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't even know if it was like a you know,
Speaker 1: sandal vending machine or something, or you know, put a
Speaker 1: coin in and watch the lion eat somebody. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm hoping fortune teller. Um it's Zartan you make up.
Speaker 1: I wish I were big. Uh, Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: He also wrote a lot about the discoveries of the Babylonians,
Speaker 1: the Egyptians and also other Greeks and also the Romans,
Speaker 1: and a bunch of stuff about the properties of air,
Speaker 1: which is going to come very much in handy for
Speaker 1: one of these other things that he described. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: uh I think you're you're referring to the A L pile?
Speaker 1: Is that how you say that? How I say it?
Speaker 1: I'll tell you how it's spelled. It's a E O
Speaker 1: L I P I L E. And I do not
Speaker 1: speak Greek. It's all Greek to me, So I and
Speaker 1: Lawrence just shaking her head disapprovingly. Can you can you
Speaker 1: hear in our echoe studio the rattle of my head shaking?
Speaker 1: And I can certainly see it better? Uh, this this
Speaker 1: room is better lit than our other studio was it's
Speaker 1: much larger. It's it's like a nice cave. It is.
Speaker 1: It is a nice cave. So this, this device that
Speaker 1: Heron or hero or Heroes had designed, was an early
Speaker 1: form of what we would consider a steam engine, although
Speaker 1: from what we can tell, it was mostly meant a
Speaker 1: sort of a decoration or distraction, all right, more and
Speaker 1: more like a toy. And several of the things that
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about from these early periods
Speaker 1: are more likely to be toys than anything else because concepts.
Speaker 1: He was the idea of exploring this, this nature of
Speaker 1: well steam can do these these wild wacky things. I
Speaker 1: don't know how we would do this in anything, and
Speaker 1: I don't know how we would use this in any
Speaker 1: practical way, but look at this cool thing and what
Speaker 1: it can do. So what his could do was it
Speaker 1: was imagined like a big bowl made out of some
Speaker 1: metal like brass. They got a big brass bowl. It's
Speaker 1: actually sealed, so you put water in it, but then
Speaker 1: you put a water tight seal on there. It does
Speaker 1: have two pipes that come up from the top of
Speaker 1: the seal that then meet up with a sphere that
Speaker 1: is mounted on these two pipes. All right, the sphere
Speaker 1: itself can can rotate along this axis that the pipes make.
Speaker 1: There's some sort of steam tight ball bearings that were involved,
Speaker 1: I guess. Also, by the way, we don't know that
Speaker 1: this was ever built, but this was his design. So
Speaker 1: in the the idea was that you put the water
Speaker 1: inside this bowl. You would heat of the bowl, the
Speaker 1: water would convert into steam, which would go up into
Speaker 1: the pipes into the sphere. And the sphir itself had
Speaker 1: two nozzles or two jets on on on opposite sides
Speaker 1: I believe, right opposite sides facing so that they would
Speaker 1: allow the ball to rotate once steam escapes, the same
Speaker 1: way that if you attached to bottle rockets to two
Speaker 1: sides of a wheel um and then you know, let
Speaker 1: it let's let it push it along, right, So in
Speaker 1: this case the pushing is kind of interesting. So let's
Speaker 1: talk about what's going on inside that sphere, which, as
Speaker 1: far as we know, was never actually built. But inside
Speaker 1: that sphere sphere, Now, if the sphere had no nozzles,
Speaker 1: if there were no there were no openings, there were,
Speaker 1: but somehow there was just water in there that you
Speaker 1: had converted into steam. That steam would be pressing, pressing
Speaker 1: equally on all surfaces, exactly sphere interiors. So in other words,
Speaker 1: if you're looking at it, if you were able to
Speaker 1: slow things down to just look at things like a
Speaker 1: nanosecond at a time, and you're able to observe individual molecules,
Speaker 1: you would see these molecules bouncing off the various interior
Speaker 1: surfaces of that sphere. But because they're going in all directions,
Speaker 1: they're canceling each other out, which means that the ball
Speaker 1: itself is staying still relative to its environment. Hypothetically as sathing.
Speaker 1: It's a perfect sphere, and that there aren't any you know,
Speaker 1: major design flaws right there, Like there's not some weird
Speaker 1: thing there that's blocking where molecules can usually hit. But
Speaker 1: if you put an opening in that sphere, that means
Speaker 1: some of the molecules are going to go through the
Speaker 1: opening and escape, So that means they are not exerting
Speaker 1: that force inside the sphere on the opposite side where
Speaker 1: molecules are banging against that that edge of the sphere
Speaker 1: that makes the sphere move. So in other words, it's
Speaker 1: not even that steam is escaping, it's that the steam
Speaker 1: that steam that is escaping is not counteracting the force
Speaker 1: that's that it's uh counterparts are doing inside that sphere,
Speaker 1: which I think is kind of an interesting explanation when
Speaker 1: you think about it. And Uh, there was a a
Speaker 1: site I was reading where his example was, imagine you
Speaker 1: have a cardboard box, but you've taken the bottom and
Speaker 1: the top off of it, and you've taken one of
Speaker 1: the walls off of it. I think you put a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of kids in there, just running around, and
Speaker 1: whenever they hit one of the sides of the walls,
Speaker 1: they careen off in a different direction. But because there's
Speaker 1: one section side that doesn't have a wall, sometimes kids
Speaker 1: just keep on running and they're they're outside of the box. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the kids who are hitting the opposite side where there
Speaker 1: is a wall, are moving the box. And yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's forward motion keeps going, but it's left and right
Speaker 1: motions stay more or less the same because they get
Speaker 1: canceled out by the various kids. I thought, what an
Speaker 1: interesting way to do that, And now I want to
Speaker 1: Now I want to build this and I want to
Speaker 1: watch it happen, probably from you know, a fifty foot
Speaker 1: observation tower. I don't kids and me. That's not I'm
Speaker 1: picturing that we could use podcasters instead of children. We
Speaker 1: probably could, although we've got some kind of lazy podcasters.
Speaker 1: I don't know, they might, you know, just kind of
Speaker 1: push the wall. Our podcasters zombies. Well, you know, I
Speaker 1: mostly interact with them after lunch, so that's always when
Speaker 1: we get this neozies. Alright. So anyway, that was the
Speaker 1: basis behind his idea. But he also had another one
Speaker 1: that would use steam to do work. That was my
Speaker 1: favorite example, so I had to include it. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: one I had not seen it, but so so there
Speaker 1: was a steam powered temple doors. That was the idea.
Speaker 1: He I've got this great illustration. I'll show you after
Speaker 1: the podcast, Laura. I'll put it up on our social
Speaker 1: too when we when we get this podcast out. But
Speaker 1: the idea was really kind of interesting. So in the illustration,
Speaker 1: there's this altar and these temple doors, and the altar
Speaker 1: has a little area in it where you could set
Speaker 1: a sacrificial fire. Now that fire, the idea was that
Speaker 1: the fire would heat up water that would create steam.
Speaker 1: It would push the steam into a second container. That container,
Speaker 1: in turn had a tube leading out of it, and
Speaker 1: the other end of the tube would lead into a bucket. Now,
Speaker 1: from what I can tell, it looks like the idea
Speaker 1: is that the steam would push into this container. The
Speaker 1: container would push more steam in through this other tube
Speaker 1: that was leading to the bucket, and there the steam
Speaker 1: would start to cool down and condense it turned into water.
Speaker 1: So when they would turn the water, the water would
Speaker 1: flow into the bucket. Yeah, which makes it heavy down.
Speaker 1: And the bucket itself is suspended by a pulley, and
Speaker 1: so because the bucket gets heavier, it starts to exert
Speaker 1: force on the pulley and eventually would pull the pulley
Speaker 1: so that the ropes on the other side of the
Speaker 1: pulley would actually split into two ropes wrapping around these
Speaker 1: two columns. And as those ropes the tension grew, it
Speaker 1: would make those columns rotate. The rotation of the columns
Speaker 1: in turn would open the temple doors. So by lighting
Speaker 1: the fire, you would entice the gods to open the
Speaker 1: doors for you, allowing people into your temple. Now, as
Speaker 1: it turns out, I think that this was probably a
Speaker 1: lot of work to open doors when you could just
Speaker 1: walk up and open them push it. But as it
Speaker 1: turns out, That's one of the reasons why steam technology
Speaker 1: took so long to develop, even though we're talking about
Speaker 1: just you know, just a few decades into the Common era.
Speaker 1: That's when we're talking about steam engines. The reason we
Speaker 1: weren't using them for work is because there were a
Speaker 1: lot of other sources for work back in those days.
Speaker 1: Like the Romans had lots and lots of slaves, and
Speaker 1: as it turns out, the the history of Europe had
Speaker 1: lots of that kind of thing. Either it was either
Speaker 1: slavery or serfdom. Anyway, there was a lot of source
Speaker 1: of cheap labor out there, so you didn't have to
Speaker 1: worry about building things to make labor easier. That's what
Speaker 1: those unfortunate people were for. Um. Yeah, and and also also,
Speaker 1: you know, the metal working at the time was not
Speaker 1: such that you could safely build boiler chambers that would
Speaker 1: really withstand the pressures necessary. Right, you had a lot
Speaker 1: of these prices. We wouldn't get into that until like
Speaker 1: the eighteen exactly. You could build low pressure steam steam boilers,
Speaker 1: but low pressure means that you can't do a lot
Speaker 1: of work with them. They do. You know, you're releasing steam,
Speaker 1: you're genering steam and releasing steam in a way where
Speaker 1: it not exerting the kind of pressure you would need
Speaker 1: to do anything really significant unless you were to be
Speaker 1: incredibly clever with your design. But we'll get into that.
Speaker 1: We we have to go a little bit further before
Speaker 1: we get to that part. But these were the fundamentals,
Speaker 1: right of steam power, This idea of being able to
Speaker 1: to change water into another form and make it do work.
Speaker 1: It would just take a you know, a millennia and
Speaker 1: change before anyone started to think about it in another
Speaker 1: more practical way. Yeah. Our next own factor is from
Speaker 1: three Blastco Degara. He was an officer in the Smash Navy,
Speaker 1: and we don't know for sure that he actually tried
Speaker 1: to do this or that what he proposed was in
Speaker 1: fact a steam engine, because it's pretty vague, but he
Speaker 1: was talking about creating some sort of paddle boat that
Speaker 1: may have been steam powered. Yeah. The phrase used in
Speaker 1: the literature is vessel of boiling water. Right, so as
Speaker 1: far as we know the vessel of boiling water, well
Speaker 1: you could guess that, well, that must mean that it
Speaker 1: was using steam in some way, but because there isn't
Speaker 1: enough context there, we can't be certain. But it sounds
Speaker 1: like the idea was that you would use some sort
Speaker 1: of vessel of boiling water to generate steam in order
Speaker 1: to turn the paddles on a boat, very much like
Speaker 1: we would see uh centuries later. But that the history
Speaker 1: books don't record any great Spanish paddle boats sailing across
Speaker 1: various European waters. So I guess we can probably draw
Speaker 1: the conclusion that this was an interesting idea that was
Speaker 1: never actualized, or if it was, it sunk um. And
Speaker 1: the next one's a sixteen o one, which not that
Speaker 1: not that long afterward, when a fellow named Giovanni Batista
Speaker 1: della Porta wrote in a book called Spiritali of an
Speaker 1: invention that would use steam pressure to raise a column
Speaker 1: of water through a vacuum created by steam when it condenses. Now,
Speaker 1: this is what you were talking of out earlier, Lauren,
Speaker 1: right along the same lines, or I guess, along opposite
Speaker 1: lines of all of these people who are theorizing that
Speaker 1: you know, you can you can convert steam, convert water
Speaker 1: to steam within a closed container and that will result
Speaker 1: in increased pressure. That the opposite, if you can condense
Speaker 1: steam into water, that it will create a vacuum. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's that was an interesting idea that would again
Speaker 1: be capitalized on later. But this is the very basis
Speaker 1: of the earliest steam engines that we're doing work. Not
Speaker 1: that you were using steam to push something, but rather
Speaker 1: that you had created a chamber where steam, once it
Speaker 1: cools down and condenses into water, creates the suction force
Speaker 1: through the through creating a vacuum and thus can pull something.
Speaker 1: And uh. In fact, as we'll talk about in just
Speaker 1: a couple of minutes, that's really how steam engines got
Speaker 1: their start. Uh. And again it that one of the
Speaker 1: nice things about this, and I really do mean it
Speaker 1: as a nice thing, is that you could use a
Speaker 1: low pressure steam engine to create this effect. You didn't
Speaker 1: have to create high pressure to push something. You could
Speaker 1: just create steam in a low pressure environment, allow it
Speaker 1: to condense, and then it would create this this force
Speaker 1: all on its own. So uh, it ended up being
Speaker 1: a much more safe way of using steam power, especially
Speaker 1: early on, before we had really reached the level of
Speaker 1: machining parts that could withstand those intense pressures that happen
Speaker 1: when you create lots of steam in a confined space.
Speaker 1: I don't know if any of our listeners are familiar
Speaker 1: with a little program called MythBusters. Uh, MythBusters, of course,
Speaker 1: a Discovery Channel show. I was a huge fan, well,
Speaker 1: well before I even worked for How Stuff Works, I
Speaker 1: was a big fan of the show. But I got
Speaker 1: to see MythBusters live in Atlanta. They came down and
Speaker 1: did a behind the scenes kind of tour and they
Speaker 1: talked a little bit about the various explosions that they've
Speaker 1: seen on the show. And the reason why I'm saying
Speaker 1: this is that the the explosion they said was the
Speaker 1: most impressive and most terrifying was the water heater explosion
Speaker 1: because when you have that water under you know, turning
Speaker 1: into steam under the intense pressure, and if you've cut
Speaker 1: off all the safety valves, which you should never ever
Speaker 1: ever do, right then yeah, safety valves on on boilers,
Speaker 1: in fact, are one of the terrific inventions without which
Speaker 1: we probably would well we certainly wouldn't be here because
Speaker 1: we'd have a totally different world, our world we never
Speaker 1: would have had happened. So um, yeah, because he showed that,
Speaker 1: you know, you could essentially it would turn a water
Speaker 1: heater into part bomb, part rocket, and it was just
Speaker 1: you're talking about superheated water that's well past the boiling
Speaker 1: point due to the pressure hitting the air, boiling instantaneously
Speaker 1: turning into super hot steam. So just being close to this,
Speaker 1: even if you weren't hit by shrapnel, you could be
Speaker 1: burned severely just from the steam. This is serious stuff.
Speaker 1: So that's why these low pressure engines were the first
Speaker 1: foray into steam engines. Although we're still not quite there yet.
Speaker 1: We're just talking about theory at the moment. All Right,
Speaker 1: I've I've got one from two Okay, this was Ferdinand
Speaker 1: um Verbs I'm going to go with that pronunciation um
Speaker 1: He He might have he was living in the Imperial
Speaker 1: Chinese court at the time, and he may have created
Speaker 1: a working steam car or toy um interesting. He at
Speaker 1: least drow up plans for one, and I'm not sure again,
Speaker 1: it's it's really yeah, it's it's hard to say a
Speaker 1: lot of these things from these earlier inventors, Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: they haven't survived. So they may have one we don't
Speaker 1: know if they were ever built and then just were
Speaker 1: destroyed or lost, or we don't know if you know,
Speaker 1: they just was just in the plans but never actually built.
Speaker 1: One thing that I do believe was built In sixteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, a French scientist and math professor named um
Speaker 1: Venice Papa from from Yes, France. I already said that excellent, Um,
Speaker 1: I've created the first pressure cooker, which is really a
Speaker 1: direct application of what dela Portia was talking about. Um.
Speaker 1: This was I think the official name translated is the
Speaker 1: digester or engine for softening bones, which isn't creepy at all.
Speaker 1: That does. It made me think of Serial Killer in
Speaker 1: the slightest but by but by attaching to this pressurized
Speaker 1: chamber slighting piston, uh you know, and then heating the pot,
Speaker 1: the expanding steam would push the piston up, and then
Speaker 1: the vacuum created when the steam cooled liquid liquid would
Speaker 1: pull the piston back downtcha um. And this is going
Speaker 1: to become extremely important very soon. Yeah. Uh. There were
Speaker 1: a lot of other people who were thinking about steam
Speaker 1: engines at this time. So while you know, you would
Speaker 1: argue that steam engines really didn't come into play until
Speaker 1: the mid seventeen hundreds, it was the sixteen hundreds where
Speaker 1: we had lots of people theorizing about it. They were
Speaker 1: kind of laying the groundwork that would allow the The
Speaker 1: following scientists engineers, mechanics, you know, just interesting people who
Speaker 1: who thought about steam power and began to put it
Speaker 1: to our to a practical application. They would follow and
Speaker 1: build upon the discoveries that the their forefathers had come
Speaker 1: up with, and those included people like Jacob Besson. There's
Speaker 1: a little guy named Leonardo da vinci Um. He had
Speaker 1: three turtle friends, as I recall, and was trained by
Speaker 1: a rat uh Florence Vault, Thomas Grant, Edward Ford. Lots
Speaker 1: of people were really talking about steam at this time,
Speaker 1: and then that leads us up to a fellow who
Speaker 1: patented an idea in six Thomas Savory, and he was
Speaker 1: the one who who was really interested in this idea
Speaker 1: of using the condensing steam to do work right. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: so it's a little bit of background on what he
Speaker 1: what he patented. So coal mines were booming at this
Speaker 1: time because England was facing this timber crisis. There were
Speaker 1: increases in ship building and lots of firewood being used,
Speaker 1: so so coal mining was becoming huge all right. So
Speaker 1: cole was starting to become the fuel of choice in England,
Speaker 1: and of course that would remain true for the next
Speaker 1: couple of centuries and so he patented this thing that
Speaker 1: he called the miners friend Um because a problem in
Speaker 1: coal mines as you wind up getting water in places
Speaker 1: where you really don't want water, and like where there
Speaker 1: are people underground or where you're yeah, exactly where you're
Speaker 1: trying to work, and it's much harder when in there,
Speaker 1: you know, would completely submerged exactly. We'll talk more about
Speaker 1: that in the podcast that we're going to record immediately
Speaker 1: after this one. But so, but so he uh so
Speaker 1: he patented this thing that I don't again like, I
Speaker 1: don't think he ever built it. Yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: design for a device that could pump water out of minds,
Speaker 1: using a steam powered apparatus to to operate the pump.
Speaker 1: But again, you're not using steam to push something. It
Speaker 1: was a design where the condensing steam would create a
Speaker 1: pulling force that would move some sort of piston or
Speaker 1: which in turn would move some sort of lever that
Speaker 1: in turn would operate a pump and pull water out.
Speaker 1: One of the problems was that it was even based
Speaker 1: just on the does ligne, they could tell that it
Speaker 1: was going to be fairly limited in how far it
Speaker 1: could draw water. Something like you know, between twenty and
Speaker 1: thirty feet maybe um, and that would be something that
Speaker 1: future engineers would improve upon. Hate to interrupt this steamy conversation,
Speaker 1: but it's time for us to take a quick break.
Speaker 1: All right, Let's get back into talking about steam engines.
Speaker 1: So we have worked our way up to seventeen twelve
Speaker 1: when a fellow named Thomas Newcoming invents a steam engine
Speaker 1: that is following along the same lines as Thomas Savory's idea,
Speaker 1: the idea to pump water from mines. The basic design
Speaker 1: was like this. You had a boiler, and the boiler's purpose,
Speaker 1: of course, is to hold the water and to allow
Speaker 1: that to heat up to steam. Right, So the steam
Speaker 1: would move into a cylinder which had a piston in it.
Speaker 1: But again, it wasn't meant to push the piston. The
Speaker 1: pistons natural resting place was at the top of the
Speaker 1: cylinder because the piston was attached to kind of a
Speaker 1: counter lever arm and the other end of the arm
Speaker 1: was pulled down by gravity. It was meant to be
Speaker 1: heavier than the side that the piston was attached to, right,
Speaker 1: And so when the steam would cool, it would condense,
Speaker 1: and then the force of the vacuum that created would
Speaker 1: pull the piston down and the lift to the other
Speaker 1: side of the which would operate the pump. So here
Speaker 1: you've got this pulling suction that is moving the piston downward,
Speaker 1: lifting the other end of this this lever up, and
Speaker 1: that in turn was using it was actually activating the pump,
Speaker 1: pulling the water out of the mine. And the the
Speaker 1: way this would work is that once you had that
Speaker 1: steam cool down, uh, the way they would cool it
Speaker 1: down is actually inject water into the cylinder. So you've
Speaker 1: got the cylinder, it's heated up, you've got the in
Speaker 1: fact that heat was the cylinder was quite warmed. They
Speaker 1: had to cool the cylinder down to condense the steam
Speaker 1: back into water. So the inject water into it helps
Speaker 1: cool the steam down, pulls the piston down, and then
Speaker 1: they would allow the water to heat up again. The
Speaker 1: steam would slowly enter into this uh cylinder as gravity
Speaker 1: was pulling the other end of the lever, the heavier
Speaker 1: end back down again. That pulls the piston back to
Speaker 1: the up resting place and steam would fill the cylinder again.
Speaker 1: You'd have to cool it down again. You do this
Speaker 1: over and over again. Now, if you're listening and you're thinking, wow,
Speaker 1: that that sounds like that might not be terribly efficient.
Speaker 1: You're right, because it meant that you had to keep
Speaker 1: cooling and heating that cylinder over and over, which meant
Speaker 1: that you had to continuously burn fuel so that you
Speaker 1: could continuously heat the water to create this this section.
Speaker 1: And furthermore, I have other people working to cool down
Speaker 1: the cylinder. However, all of this was still more efficient
Speaker 1: than housing an entire team of horses to do the
Speaker 1: same war right, right, And so it ended up actually
Speaker 1: being such a useful device that they were used well
Speaker 1: after improved devices were made, so up until the nineteen yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't until like it was in the
Speaker 1: late seventeen sixties when you would get a big improvement
Speaker 1: over this design. But even then, even after that improvement
Speaker 1: was made, these were very reliable pumps and have been
Speaker 1: used for quite some time. You can actually see one
Speaker 1: if you go to Dearborn, Michigan. There's the Henry Ford
Speaker 1: Museum and they have on display one of Newcomen's actual engines.
Speaker 1: So this is one of the ones that dates back
Speaker 1: to the early eighteenth century, which I think is awesome.
Speaker 1: I totally want to do a text stuff series where
Speaker 1: we go to different museums and see and talk about
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff. If anyone wants to invest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so hey, if you guys all think that's a great idea,
Speaker 1: let us know and we'll pass those along to Discovery,
Speaker 1: because I don't know how I'm going to swing this
Speaker 1: on my own other than you know, really working on
Speaker 1: my hitchhiking skills. Lauren's nodding. Okay, so anyway, that's great radio,
Speaker 1: But no so so, like I said, this was not
Speaker 1: terribly efficient because of the cooling and the heating of
Speaker 1: that cylinder. Right, So, if you could find a way
Speaker 1: of creating this vacuum to cool the steam down but
Speaker 1: to not have to worry about heating and cooling the
Speaker 1: cylinder itself, thus wasting fuel, you could make this a
Speaker 1: much more efficient system. And, as it turns out, and
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty nine, James Watt can put the plans for
Speaker 1: this one. Now. He's the guy who often we credit
Speaker 1: as the inventor of the steam engine. Though all you
Speaker 1: guys have been listening, you know that's not exactly true,
Speaker 1: because he really just took this new Coomman engine and
Speaker 1: added a separate condenser to it. Right, So, what he
Speaker 1: did was he essentially added a separate chamber that connects
Speaker 1: to the cylinder, and so the cylinder would fill up
Speaker 1: with steam and then move into the separate chamber where
Speaker 1: it would condense, and still you would still get the vacuum.
Speaker 1: But because you didn't have to worry about heating or
Speaker 1: cooling the cylinder itself, you didn't have to use as
Speaker 1: much fuel. And as a result, depending upon which source
Speaker 1: you read, they say he didn't have to worry about
Speaker 1: cooling the celinder, just let it continually exactly because we
Speaker 1: knew when the boiler exactly, you didn't have to Yeah,
Speaker 1: you didn't have to keep on burning fuel to take
Speaker 1: compensate for the fact that you had to use water
Speaker 1: to cool it down. So according to some sources, that
Speaker 1: would mean that you say, between fifty and sev of
Speaker 1: the fuel you would usually use to operate the steam engine. Well,
Speaker 1: that's what made steam engines suddenly practical from a fuel standpoint.
Speaker 1: So they had are even proven to be able to
Speaker 1: do practical work, but they weren't very efficient. They used
Speaker 1: so much fuel that it became one of those questions
Speaker 1: of well is it even worth it to invest in this?
Speaker 1: Uh and then with this invention, it made the steam
Speaker 1: engine something that was truly possible in lots of different applications.
Speaker 1: And that's when we really saw a figurative explosion and
Speaker 1: steam technology. There were some literal ones. In fact, that
Speaker 1: was one of the things what was really concerned about.
Speaker 1: He wanted to continue working in low pressure boilers, low
Speaker 1: pressure steam engines because he felt that any sort of
Speaker 1: high pressure application was far too dangerous to be practical.
Speaker 1: And he spoke out, yea and uh. The thing was
Speaker 1: that in other areas of industry there were lots of improvements,
Speaker 1: like in machining and metalworking, so there were people who
Speaker 1: were working on building stronger, more secure boilers and engines
Speaker 1: that could handle high pressure. What was just very cautious
Speaker 1: about the whole thing. So it was one of those
Speaker 1: the development of high pressure engines would wait for another
Speaker 1: probably forty years or so. Um. But anyway, what stuff.
Speaker 1: He became known as a genius in his own time.
Speaker 1: Everyone was crediting him with the creation of this magnificent technology. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that he was happy to receive that. But
Speaker 1: in the same or that when he created these improvements
Speaker 1: to the newcoman engine, there was another fellow, Nicholas Kugno,
Speaker 1: a French military officer, who developed a steam powered car,
Speaker 1: and it was designed to toe artillery pieces and it
Speaker 1: could only move it about two miles per hour, which
Speaker 1: is about three point two kilometers per hour, and so
Speaker 1: it was never really used. It wasn't really seen as
Speaker 1: practical the idea here because it wasn't. Yeah. I read
Speaker 1: about it being um it being displayed in Paris where
Speaker 1: they were running it and it ran into a wall.
Speaker 1: But since it ran to a wall two miles per hour,
Speaker 1: no one noticed. That's a true story. Um. Yeah, So anyway,
Speaker 1: it was. But it was an early example of a
Speaker 1: steam powered car, if you can call it that. It
Speaker 1: really looked more like a like a long wooden dolly
Speaker 1: with a huge boiler on the end of it. Um.
Speaker 1: It certainly didn't look like a car the way we
Speaker 1: would think of a car today, But it was designed
Speaker 1: to tow artillery. Yeah. We will get into some actual
Speaker 1: steampowered cars very soon. Uh so sight that's when James
Speaker 1: Picard and Matthew Wassboro build a steam engine with rotary motion.
Speaker 1: So this is using various levers and other devices like
Speaker 1: a crankshaft to transfer this reciprocal motion, which is that
Speaker 1: up and down motion of a piston, into a rotational motion. Now,
Speaker 1: those of you who listen to our transmission episode will
Speaker 1: know all about this, and that's why I'm not going
Speaker 1: to go over it again because that episode nearly broke us.
Speaker 1: It was about cars, which I don't know if you
Speaker 1: guys have picked up on this. I'm not a big expert.
Speaker 1: Neither of us are really gearhead should have grabbed Scott probably, yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: but yes, it trans translated this reciprocating motion into rotational force.
Speaker 1: So that ended up being another important development, Um, although
Speaker 1: it wasn't really used in a practical sense for a
Speaker 1: while longer. Um There's one had another terrific addition to
Speaker 1: to his engine, and that was three. He created a
Speaker 1: double acting engine, right right, Well, this was an idea
Speaker 1: that ends up being really important in steam engines later on,
Speaker 1: although mostly used in high pressure engines not low pressure engines.
Speaker 1: The idea of being that you can you have a
Speaker 1: cylinder that has valves on either end of the cylinder,
Speaker 1: and so as the piston is moving toward one side,
Speaker 1: steam is escaping out of that side and it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's increasing on the other side, right, and then once
Speaker 1: it gets to the end, the valve switch and so
Speaker 1: the piston moves to the other side and steam is
Speaker 1: coming into one end and escaping out the other. Now,
Speaker 1: with Watt's designs, of course, we're talking about using that
Speaker 1: suction force, so it's the condensing that's pulling the piston
Speaker 1: from one side to the other. But later double action
Speaker 1: steam engines would actually use steam force to push the
Speaker 1: piston one side and then on the other side. In fact,
Speaker 1: that's how most of the locomotive steam engines used steam.
Speaker 1: Um and man, I love those locomotives too, But then,
Speaker 1: you know, I think every kid who got to play
Speaker 1: with them was fascinated. Certainly people like Walt Disney became
Speaker 1: obsessed with them. I think that's a safe term. But
Speaker 1: then we started seeing steam engines used in lots of
Speaker 1: different ways. We're getting up to the eighteen hundreds now,
Speaker 1: and that's really where the steam era takes off and
Speaker 1: you start seeing steamboats, paddle steamers, locomotives. In eighteen o one,
Speaker 1: a man named Richard trevithi it was an English miner
Speaker 1: and engineer, built a steam powered locomotive called the puffing devil.
Speaker 1: It could go on short trips, but only on short
Speaker 1: trips because he had trouble keeping the water hot enough
Speaker 1: to generate steam consistently. That actually was a real issue
Speaker 1: with a lot of steam engines, the idea of how
Speaker 1: do you how do you heat the boiler properly? And
Speaker 1: I believe his engines were the first that we're using
Speaker 1: steam to actually push pistons rather than the condensation in
Speaker 1: the vacuum to pulse exactly. Trevith was of the school
Speaker 1: of thought that high pressure steam engines their time had come.
Speaker 1: It was safe enough, you could do it. What again
Speaker 1: was not sold on this idea, but Trevor think certainly
Speaker 1: thought that this was something that you could do. And
Speaker 1: the early ones were still pretty inefficient. They weren't terribly fast. Um.
Speaker 1: He would eventually build a little locomotive for for amusement.
Speaker 1: Really it wasn't meant as a form of transportation. It
Speaker 1: was called the catch me who can at a top
Speaker 1: speed of twelve miles per hour, which is about nineteen
Speaker 1: kilometers per hour. I think I think this was in
Speaker 1: display in London. Some track was already laid around the
Speaker 1: UK and the rest of Europe because horses would use
Speaker 1: the track to pull pully tim pole cards along, right, exactly, yeah, exactiently.
Speaker 1: In fact, you have the birth of the locomotive is
Speaker 1: really an English thing. We think of it as a
Speaker 1: very American thing here in the United States because it
Speaker 1: was so defining of that era, as we really like
Speaker 1: to just take ownership of everything we do. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, it's that wall is not so great China. Well,
Speaker 1: think we need to take another quick break because I've
Speaker 1: got the vapors. Not not really, it's just that's that's
Speaker 1: steam related, Okay bye. In eighteen o four, London brewery
Speaker 1: engineer named Arthur Wolfe improved this high pressure boiler design
Speaker 1: through something called compounding, which uses excess steam from one
Speaker 1: piston to fire a second piston and then a third.
Speaker 1: This creates less heat loss in the system and winds
Speaker 1: up with you know, you have to burn less fuel,
Speaker 1: which is great more efficiency again, making it more of
Speaker 1: a practical power solution. And uh, moving up to seven.
Speaker 1: That's when another big name and steam engines this someone
Speaker 1: Anyone who has followed the story of steamboats, anyone who's
Speaker 1: familiar with Mark Twain is going to know this name.
Speaker 1: Robert Fulton. He introduced the first steamship to provide regular
Speaker 1: passenger service in America. Average speed of the steamship was
Speaker 1: five miles per hour or eight kilometers per hour. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, if you don't have to paddle, it's fast enough.
Speaker 1: It's you know, it's it's uh. And again it's one
Speaker 1: of those things that another one those defining images in
Speaker 1: American history. You think back to things like, you know,
Speaker 1: like the Mark Twain stories, and they all have this
Speaker 1: sort of evocative image of the great steamship. Of course,
Speaker 1: Mark Twain was a steamship. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um. And
Speaker 1: in fact, Mark Twain, that's a steamship term. It's actually
Speaker 1: a term for how deep the water is, which you
Speaker 1: would know if you ever have sailed on the rivers
Speaker 1: of America. In Disney World, just pay attention on on
Speaker 1: that boat, because they'll tell you all this. That's where
Speaker 1: I got it. So I'm citing my source, uh, Disney World.
Speaker 1: I was just there. I don't know if you know that.
Speaker 1: That's that's where he was. George Stevenson, he was another
Speaker 1: English engineer, and he built a steam locomotive to run
Speaker 1: on rails, yep, and it carried thirty tons of coal
Speaker 1: four d fifty feet uphill at four miles per hour
Speaker 1: or six kilometers per hour, which doesn't doesn't sound like much,
Speaker 1: but that's a huge amount of weight to have to transfer,
Speaker 1: and it was a huge improvement over traffics version, which
Speaker 1: could haul about ten tons of iron about ten miles.
Speaker 1: So although it didn't go very far, it certainly had
Speaker 1: to carry a lot of stuff and up an incline,
Speaker 1: so you know, it was a big improvement over taking
Speaker 1: like a super long route in order to avoid having
Speaker 1: to go up an incline like that. UM Now at
Speaker 1: this stage the steam engines worked with this. Like I said,
Speaker 1: the steam press is on either side where you've got
Speaker 1: the piston with the valves there. The valve will control
Speaker 1: where the steam can enter and where it can exit.
Speaker 1: So the steam comes in one side. Now this case
Speaker 1: we do have the steam pressing right, so the steam
Speaker 1: comes in on one side of the cylinder, pushes the
Speaker 1: piston across. The steam exits out as uh of one
Speaker 1: part of the valve while steam comes into the other
Speaker 1: into the cylinder, the piston keeps that that seal steam
Speaker 1: tight and then the piston moves back across the way
Speaker 1: it came the first time. Uh, and you've got this
Speaker 1: this process of a stroke exhaust and then the second
Speaker 1: stroke and it's exhaust and it goes over and over
Speaker 1: and over again. Meanwhile, you would have the piston attached
Speaker 1: to some other form of device that would help, uh,
Speaker 1: move the whole project, whatever it happens to be. So
Speaker 1: with a locomotive, it might be a lever that is
Speaker 1: then connected to a wheel. So one move of the
Speaker 1: piston would be a half turn of the wheel, and
Speaker 1: the move of the piston going back the other way
Speaker 1: it would be the other half turn. And that's where
Speaker 1: you get that locomotive force where you can have the
Speaker 1: train moving down the track and having that steam escape
Speaker 1: is what gives the trains there choo choo sound. That's true.
Speaker 1: So you know when you hear the sound of the
Speaker 1: steam escaping and it goes over and over. What's why
Speaker 1: kids called trains choo choose the thing? They do it anymore,
Speaker 1: or if they do, it's kind of that skew morphism thing.
Speaker 1: Because of course, you don't have many steam powered trains
Speaker 1: these days unless you go to Walt Disney World, where
Speaker 1: you can write a train around Main Street, USA, and
Speaker 1: this podcast, strangely enough, is not brought to you by
Speaker 1: Disney World. No, no, I was brought to you by
Speaker 1: Disney World, apparently, I believe. Usually on steam locomotives, it's
Speaker 1: called it it's called a crosshead. The the portion that
Speaker 1: links out from this piston, and that's going to be
Speaker 1: connected to something called a drive rod, and then coupling
Speaker 1: rods are going to what going to be what drives
Speaker 1: the wheels. Yeah. I usually do have to have a
Speaker 1: couple of different elements in here to translate the motion properly,
Speaker 1: because otherwise, again you've got that reciprocating motion, which is
Speaker 1: just going in two directions. Right, it's either going up
Speaker 1: and down or left and right. However, you know, it
Speaker 1: depends on your orientation and the orientation of the device.
Speaker 1: But that limits what you can do unless you use
Speaker 1: other gadgets to kind of translate that motion into something
Speaker 1: that can do useful work. I mean, unless you just
Speaker 1: need to open and close the door repeatedly, then then
Speaker 1: you could just have a pole attached to it. But
Speaker 1: otherwise you would need something more more versatile. So by
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty five, steam locomotives were starting to be used
Speaker 1: to haul passengers on a regular basis at that point.
Speaker 1: Before then, it was pretty much used in cargo, right.
Speaker 1: I think the very I think five was the very
Speaker 1: first ride of a passenger steam locomotive. That was George
Speaker 1: Stevenson's Locomotion number one. It carried some cargo and maybe
Speaker 1: about six hundred passengers or so, and that was that
Speaker 1: was its maiden voyage. I hear that everybody was doing
Speaker 1: a brand new dance now to do the locomotion. Okay,
Speaker 1: Laurence shaking her head again. So I guess I need
Speaker 1: to move on alright, So eight hundreds from all the
Speaker 1: way through eighteen eighty, we're gonna make a big skip
Speaker 1: unless you have something you want to add in that.
Speaker 1: Uh not really, no, I guess I guess I could
Speaker 1: put in at this point that the popular kind of
Speaker 1: boiler that was being used at this time, and and
Speaker 1: this is going to become in for safety reasons. The
Speaker 1: popular kind of boiler was a fire tube boiler, which
Speaker 1: basically consists of a tank of water perforated with furnace
Speaker 1: pipes and the you know, the hot gases from generated
Speaker 1: from the fire from the fire in these pipes that
Speaker 1: are going through this cylinder of water are what is
Speaker 1: heating the water. It's a pretty efficient way to do it,
Speaker 1: but it also means that the whole tank is under
Speaker 1: a lot of pressure. So therefore if at burst, it's
Speaker 1: going to lead to that big scary explosion that we
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier. Right. So the heating element here
Speaker 1: are these these pipes that run through the boiler. The
Speaker 1: water surrounds the pipes, the pipes get hot because of
Speaker 1: the fires creating these hot gases. You also, by the way,
Speaker 1: have to have something to vent the hot gases out of,
Speaker 1: so so you didn't just have steam venting out, you
Speaker 1: actually had hot air hot gases venting out to based
Speaker 1: from whatever the heat source was. See, that was one
Speaker 1: of the problems that earlier inventors had run into, was
Speaker 1: that they were trying to figure out a way of
Speaker 1: creating this hot water, and some of them were doing
Speaker 1: things like using a red hot iron uh inserted uneath
Speaker 1: the boiler. But that heat starts to dissipate, and once
Speaker 1: it does, you don't have power anymore. So it was
Speaker 1: only through creating something that would be allow you to
Speaker 1: generate a fire and continuate generate. So even though we
Speaker 1: talk about steam powered trains. Have you ever seen those
Speaker 1: movies where they're shoveling coal into a furnace, Well, you
Speaker 1: have to generate the steam, right, It's not the trains
Speaker 1: not running on coal. The coal is what's generating the
Speaker 1: heat in the fire. It's it's the fuel that creates
Speaker 1: the creates the heat that allows the water to boil,
Speaker 1: that makes the train go, and the green grass grows
Speaker 1: all around and around. So yeah, so moving up to
Speaker 1: eight Between eighteen eighty, steam engines are used in practically
Speaker 1: every major industrial application, and in fact really both figuratively
Speaker 1: and literally drive the industrial revolution. Uh. In eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: Charles A. Parsons invinced the first steam turbine. So now
Speaker 1: we're getting into a way of using steam to not
Speaker 1: just push something mechanically, but also generate electricity, which would
Speaker 1: become really important as well. Uh. In eight are actually
Speaker 1: really eighteen six is when we first start seeing steam
Speaker 1: powered cars in the United States, the Stanley Steamer being
Speaker 1: the popular model, also affectionately called flying teapots. Have you
Speaker 1: ever seen a picture of these? They really do look
Speaker 1: like horseless carriages. When you hear that term, it looks
Speaker 1: like it's a carriage that's missing a horse in front
Speaker 1: of it, and it's got one usually one lever that
Speaker 1: you use for steering, and that's it, and uh, you
Speaker 1: just uh, you know, god speed. They were really popular.
Speaker 1: They went in this early kind of period, more than
Speaker 1: sixty of them in the United States, and sixty that's
Speaker 1: obviously a tiny number these days, but you're talking back
Speaker 1: then where only a small sliver of the population would
Speaker 1: have had access to it, both monetarily and just opportunity
Speaker 1: from opportunity's sake, you know, not everyone lived in in
Speaker 1: an area where they could get access to this. Also,
Speaker 1: keep in mind that these machines were usually used for
Speaker 1: intercity travel. It's not something that the idea of traveling
Speaker 1: across country really wasn't wasn't part of the automotive industry
Speaker 1: at that point, whether it was steam powered or gas
Speaker 1: powered or even electrically powered. We talked about electrical cars,
Speaker 1: and they predate the gas engine vehicles as well. Um,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to go across the country, you've got
Speaker 1: a train. You didn't you didn't drive your car at
Speaker 1: this time. But we get up to a sad time though,
Speaker 1: we're getting up to for those of us who happened
Speaker 1: to like that. Cho choose. Yeah, as of about nineteen sixty,
Speaker 1: we're going to see the end of the locomotive era. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You don't see many places producing steam powered trains these days.
Speaker 1: If they are, it's for some sort of amusement park
Speaker 1: or something along those lines. It's not meant as a
Speaker 1: means of travel. There are some steam powered engines that
Speaker 1: are still in operation in various places around the world,
Speaker 1: but they aren't really being produced because we have alternative now,
Speaker 1: all right. Certainly by the nineteen thirties, people had started
Speaker 1: to realize that internal combustion engines using gasoline as a
Speaker 1: fuel were much more efficient and cheap to use than
Speaker 1: these than these external combustion engines, which is what a
Speaker 1: steam engine is. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Um, So
Speaker 1: we start seeing this end of this era in around
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty, But it doesn't mean that we're no longer
Speaker 1: using steam engines. We still are, right right, partially because
Speaker 1: we have improved the kind of boiler that's used. Water
Speaker 1: tube boilers are kind of the inverse of that fire
Speaker 1: tube boiler that I was talking about earlier. It's it's
Speaker 1: basically a furnace that's perforated with water pipes instead of
Speaker 1: being a water tank that's perforated with furnace pipes, and
Speaker 1: there's water inside of furnace. You've got tubes of water
Speaker 1: inside of furnace and uh and yeah, so so only
Speaker 1: those tubes are under pressure and therefore it's safer overall. Right,
Speaker 1: there's less of a less of a chance for our
Speaker 1: catastrophic breakdown. Although again with valves proper valving you you're
Speaker 1: pretty safe most of the time. And yeah, back in
Speaker 1: two thousand nine, you know, way back then, a team
Speaker 1: of engineers built a car called the Inspiration, which is
Speaker 1: steam powered high speed car uses a turbine engine, not
Speaker 1: a piston engine, steam powered, and it broke the land
Speaker 1: speed record for steam powered vehicles. UM. The average speed
Speaker 1: was a breezy one forty eight miles power or two
Speaker 1: kilometers prower. That's fast. Yeah, you're being powered by steam.
Speaker 1: And I think I think that that is that's still
Speaker 1: the standing UH land speed record. I know that there's
Speaker 1: another team working on it. There's a US steam team
Speaker 1: that's working on building its own UH steam powered vehicle
Speaker 1: that they hope will break that record. But as far
Speaker 1: as I know, that has not happened yet as of
Speaker 1: the recording of this podcast. Yeah, and there is there.
Speaker 1: There are a few companies that are working on test
Speaker 1: versions of steam powered cars. There's one called Cyclone Cyclone
Speaker 1: Power Technologies, which is working with Raytheon on the defense
Speaker 1: contractor at the moment, and in fact, the the U
Speaker 1: S team is working on a high speed vehicle called
Speaker 1: the Cyclone. That's what the name of the one that
Speaker 1: they're hoping will break the records, the cycling. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're you know, they're producing these engines that would fit
Speaker 1: in the you know, standard vehicle engine space. That's a
Speaker 1: big deal too. We didn't even mention that. But the
Speaker 1: steam engines of traditionally were very large because you had
Speaker 1: to have a boiler, You had to have something that
Speaker 1: could contain a lot of water to generate the steam
Speaker 1: you needed, and you know, you were venting that steam.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't like your recap capturing and reusing, and
Speaker 1: even if you did recapture it, especially with the old
Speaker 1: condenser models, even if you did recapture it, you were
Speaker 1: still losing some So it's it wasn't something that you
Speaker 1: could run indefinitely. You might be able to run it
Speaker 1: for a long time, but you know that's one of
Speaker 1: those challenges is trying to miniaturize something like steam power,
Speaker 1: which uh, you know it doesn't work so well. Also
Speaker 1: turns out to be a big part of the steampunk movement,
Speaker 1: this kind of idea of avoiding the miniaturization. You know,
Speaker 1: you want these kind of bulky things that have lots
Speaker 1: of character to them. You know, they're shiny and brassy, unuseful,
Speaker 1: but really full of characters. Yeah, no, it's got lots
Speaker 1: of character. It's just looks like, Wow, you know, that's
Speaker 1: a great, uh steampunk version of a mobile device, and
Speaker 1: it only weighs seventy pounds and burns every time you
Speaker 1: use it, right, Well, you know that would obviously you
Speaker 1: would be much more frugal with your use. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: be picking up your smartphone every five seconds at dinner.
Speaker 1: I'm speaking about my own personal behavior at this point.
Speaker 1: So yeah, there's still other companies that are developing steam
Speaker 1: engines for power generation, usually for places in the world
Speaker 1: that are not on a power grid and therefore do
Speaker 1: not have access to electricity. There's one called a uniflow Power,
Speaker 1: which is unveiled a generator back in steam generator, steam
Speaker 1: powered generator, I should say, didn't generate steam. You generated
Speaker 1: power through steam. Um. But it was meant to help
Speaker 1: communities that are not direct connected to power grids to
Speaker 1: to deliver electricity to parts of the world that otherwise
Speaker 1: would not have it. So we're seeing steam still being
Speaker 1: used in applications today. Absolutely, And I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: I want to point out that most of the electricity
Speaker 1: generated is technically steam general. Sure, I mean that's what
Speaker 1: nuclear power is, that's what a coal power plant is, right, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're talking you're burning a fuel that is generating steam
Speaker 1: that is turning usually yeah, exactly. Even things like the
Speaker 1: plasma waste converters. I've talked about those in the past
Speaker 1: where they've talked about using the excess heat in order
Speaker 1: to generate steam that would turn turbines and be kind
Speaker 1: of a co located with a power generator. So you'd
Speaker 1: have a trash disposal and power generation unit all put together.
Speaker 1: But it's using steam to do that. It means plasma
Speaker 1: to to break down the trash power a level of
Speaker 1: efficiency of of how hot you can get water, how
Speaker 1: quickly with how the work? Yeah, and then how can
Speaker 1: you how can you take something that normally would just
Speaker 1: be considered a waste eye product and turn it into
Speaker 1: useful stuff. You know, heat. We often think of all,
Speaker 1: we lost a lot of our energy through heat. But
Speaker 1: if you can recapture that heat and make it do
Speaker 1: work like you can with steam power, then you're in
Speaker 1: good shape. So yeah, that kind of wraps up our
Speaker 1: discussion about steam engines. Uh, this was a fun one
Speaker 1: to do. It's totally another one of those look backs
Speaker 1: on on the technology of days of your that are
Speaker 1: still relevant today. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic episode.
Speaker 1: If you have suggestions for future topics of current episodes
Speaker 1: of tech Stuff, send it to me via Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart
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