Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology, with tech stuff from stuff
Speaker 1: COMI everyone, and welcome to tech stuff from our brand
Speaker 1: new exciting audio studios. Yeah, we haven't put up the
Speaker 1: baffling yet, so we're baffled, but the room is not.
Speaker 1: Today we are going to tackle steam engines. But by
Speaker 1: the way, that's Jonathan Strictland speaking. I'm Lauren. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I haven't done this in so long. I forgot how
Speaker 1: to introduce the show. Guy goes on a vacation for
Speaker 1: like a week and he comes back and total news
Speaker 1: a week and a half actually, but yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I thank you Lauren for introducing everybody. We're talking about
Speaker 1: steam engines today and how they work and the principles
Speaker 1: behind them, and it really comes down to thermodynamics, you know,
Speaker 1: you're talking about heat really and what heat does and
Speaker 1: how it changes things, and that's you know, harnessing that
Speaker 1: has allowed us to have a little bit of a
Speaker 1: revolution industrially speaking. Do do pretty goodness, migracious. I'm slow today.
Speaker 1: It took me like four seconds together. You're slow. You
Speaker 1: didn't forget to introduce you everybody. We're both on okay,
Speaker 1: but so yeah, so the thing about gases um when
Speaker 1: when 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 the like with 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: all off and form steam. It's the gas form of
Speaker 1: that substance. And now the molecules can break free of
Speaker 1: each other. So now you've got these free flowing molecules
Speaker 1: that are zipping around at high speed depending upon how
Speaker 1: much heat you've put into the system. And as it
Speaker 1: turns out, they exert pressure. I mean, this has momentum.
Speaker 1: It if it hits against stuff, it can press against stuff,
Speaker 1: and if you're able to harness that in some way,
Speaker 1: you can make that do work. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's you know, when you've got a sealed container and
Speaker 1: you create steam inside of it, it's going to exert
Speaker 1: pressure on the sides of that container, which can then
Speaker 1: do work yeah, or explode, as it turns out, depending
Speaker 1: upon what you've made the container out of and how
Speaker 1: hot you've made that water. Uh yeah. Because that's the
Speaker 1: other thing, is that water when it goes into steam,
Speaker 1: it's expanding, right, You're talking about making it, uh take
Speaker 1: up more space than normally would, more volume than it
Speaker 1: normally would, and that, as it turns out, is a
Speaker 1: very important part of some releast steam engines the idea
Speaker 1: that you can make something uh take up more room
Speaker 1: and as it condenses, meaning that when the steam starts
Speaker 1: to cool down and turned back into water, it's taking
Speaker 1: up less room. Right, It's going to create a little
Speaker 1: bit of a vacuum. Right, you can also use to
Speaker 1: do work. Yeah. So both of those those things, the
Speaker 1: idea of steam being able to press against stuff and
Speaker 1: the idea of steam once it condenses, creating a vacuum,
Speaker 1: those are the basic principles behind your your various kinds
Speaker 1: of steam engines. Now, this idea is not brand new.
Speaker 1: First of all, you've got a lot of people who
Speaker 1: will cite that a certain person named James Watt was
Speaker 1: the inventor of the steam engine. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: that's being a little premature to say that he did.
Speaker 1: I mean he would. He certainly played an instrumental role
Speaker 1: in making steam engines Uh practical. But you have to
Speaker 1: go way back if you want to look at the
Speaker 1: people who were really the inventors as far as we
Speaker 1: know of steam engines. That keep in mind, we're talking
Speaker 1: right now about the first recorded instances of people talking
Speaker 1: about steam engines. That the idea itself might even be older, right, right,
Speaker 1: But the first recorded instances are from the first century, yeah,
Speaker 1: common era. We're talking a hero or heroon or heroes
Speaker 1: or heroes of Alexandria. Uh. He was. He was a
Speaker 1: Greek mathematician and UH inventor. Yep. He was born in Egypt,
Speaker 1: lived and worked and mostly in Alexandria, but was of
Speaker 1: Greek origin and uh did a lot of different works.
Speaker 1: You know, he invented a lot of different things, or
Speaker 1: at least wrote about a lot of things that we
Speaker 1: presume he invented in MAJORI will be that he was
Speaker 1: just writing about stuff that other people have done, but
Speaker 1: as far as we know, he's the one who originated
Speaker 1: these ideas. Yeah, he had a few inventions that he
Speaker 1: wrote about. A coin operated device, Yeah, yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: even know if it was like a you know, sandal
Speaker 1: vending machine or something, or you know, uh, put a
Speaker 1: coin in and watch the lion eat somebody. I don't
Speaker 1: hoping fortune teller. Um it's zartan you make up. I
Speaker 1: wish I were big. Uh, Yeah, I don't know. He
Speaker 1: 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 la 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 Echoi studio the rattle of my head
Speaker 1: shaking a job? I can certainly see it better. Uh, this,
Speaker 1: this room is better lit than our other studio was.
Speaker 1: It's 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 Heros designed, was an early form
Speaker 1: of what we would consider a steam engine, although from
Speaker 1: what we can tell, it was mostly meant a sort
Speaker 1: of a decoration or distraction, a right, more and more
Speaker 1: like a toy, And several of the things that we're
Speaker 1: going to be talking about from these early periods are
Speaker 1: more likely to be toys than anything else. Yeah, because concepts.
Speaker 1: It 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. Uh. It
Speaker 1: does have two pipes that come up from the top
Speaker 1: of the seal that then meet up with a sphere
Speaker 1: that is mounted on these two pipes. All right, the
Speaker 1: sphere itself can can rotate, uh along this axis that
Speaker 1: the pipes make. There's some sort of steam tight ball
Speaker 1: bearings that were involved. I guess. Also, by the way,
Speaker 1: we don't know that this was ever built, but this
Speaker 1: was his design. So in the the idea was that
Speaker 1: you put the water inside this bowl, you would heat
Speaker 1: up the bowl, the water would convert into steam, which
Speaker 1: would go up into the pipes into the sphere. And
Speaker 1: the sphere itself had two nozzles or two jets on
Speaker 1: on on opposite sides I believe, right opposite sides facing
Speaker 1: so that they would allow the ball to rotate once
Speaker 1: steam escapes, the same way that if you attached to
Speaker 1: bottle rockets to two sides of a wheel, um, and
Speaker 1: then you know, let it let's let it push it along, right,
Speaker 1: So in this case the pushing is kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about what's going on inside that sphere,
Speaker 1: which as far as we know was never actually built.
Speaker 1: But inside that 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 on all surfaces sphere interior. 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 were able to observe
Speaker 1: individual molecules, you would see these molecules bouncing off the
Speaker 1: various interior surfaces of that sphere. But because they're going
Speaker 1: in all directions, they're canceling each other out, which means
Speaker 1: that the ball itself is staying still relative to its environment. Hypothetically,
Speaker 1: assuming it's a perfect sphere and that there aren't any
Speaker 1: you know, major design flaws right there, Like there's not
Speaker 1: some weird thing there that's blocking where molecules can usually hit.
Speaker 1: But if you put an opening in that sphere, that
Speaker 1: means some of the molecules are going to go through
Speaker 1: the opening and escape, So that means they are not
Speaker 1: exerting that force inside the sphere on the opposite side
Speaker 1: where molecules are banging against that that edge of the
Speaker 1: sphere that makes the sphere move. So in other words,
Speaker 1: it's not even that steam is escaping, it's that the
Speaker 1: steam 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, and then 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 further and further. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's forward motion keeps going, but it's left and
Speaker 1: right motions stay more or less the same because they
Speaker 1: get canceled out by the various kids. I thought, what
Speaker 1: an interesting way to do that, And now I want
Speaker 1: to Now I want to build this and I want
Speaker 1: to watch it happen, probably from you know, a fifty
Speaker 1: foot observation tower. I don't kids and me. That's not
Speaker 1: I picture that we could use podcasters instead of children.
Speaker 1: We 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 snoozies. 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 that would turn the water, the water would
Speaker 1: flow into the bucket. Yeah, which makes it heavy. And
Speaker 1: the bucket itself is suspended by a pulley, and so
Speaker 1: because the bucket gets heavier, it starts to exert force
Speaker 1: on the pulley and eventually would pull the pulley so
Speaker 1: that the ropes on the other side of the pulley
Speaker 1: would actually split into two ropes wrapping around these two columns.
Speaker 1: And as those ropes the tension grew, it would make
Speaker 1: those columns rotate. The rotation of the columns in turn
Speaker 1: would open the temple doors. So by lighting the fire,
Speaker 1: you would entice the gods to open the doors for
Speaker 1: you allowing people into your temple. Now, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: I think that this was probably a lot of work
Speaker 1: to open doors when you could just walk up and
Speaker 1: open them push it. But as it turns out, that's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why steam technology took so long
Speaker 1: to develop. Even though we're talking about just you know,
Speaker 1: just a few decades into the Common era, that's when
Speaker 1: we're talking about steam engines. The reason we weren't using
Speaker 1: them for work is because there were a lot of
Speaker 1: other sources for work back in those days. Like the
Speaker 1: Romans had lots and lots of slaves, and as it
Speaker 1: turns out, the the history of Europe had lots of
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Either it was either slavery or serfdom. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of source of cheap labor out there,
Speaker 1: so you didn't have to worry about building things to
Speaker 1: make labor easier. That's what those unfortunate people were for. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and also also you know, the metal working at
Speaker 1: the time was not such that you could safely build
Speaker 1: boiler chambers that would really withstand the pressures necessary. Right,
Speaker 1: you had a lot of these devices. We wouldn't get
Speaker 1: into that until like the exactly you could build low
Speaker 1: pressure steam steam boilers, but low pressure means that you
Speaker 1: can't do a lot of work with them. They do
Speaker 1: you know, you're releasing steam, You're generaing steam and releasing
Speaker 1: steam in a way where it's not exerting the kind
Speaker 1: of pressure you would need to do anything really significant
Speaker 1: unless you were to be incredibly clever with your design.
Speaker 1: But we'll get into that. We we have to go
Speaker 1: a little bit further before we get to that part.
Speaker 1: But but these were the fundamentals, right of steam power,
Speaker 1: This idea of being able to to change water into
Speaker 1: another form and make it do work. It would just
Speaker 1: take a you know, a millennia and change before anyone
Speaker 1: started to think about it in another more practical way. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Our next own factor is from three Blasco Degara. He
Speaker 1: was an officer in the Smash Navy. And we don't
Speaker 1: know for sure that he actually tried to do this
Speaker 1: or that what he proposed was in fact a steam engine,
Speaker 1: because it's pretty vague, but he was talking about creating
Speaker 1: some sort of paddle boat that may have been steam powered. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The phrase used in the literature vessel of boiling water. Right,
Speaker 1: so as far as we know, the vessel of boiling water, well,
Speaker 1: you could guess that, well, that must mean that he
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: de la Porta wrote in a book called Spiritali of
Speaker 1: an invent and that would use steam pressure to raise
Speaker 1: a column of water through a vacuum created by steam
Speaker 1: when it condenses. Now, this is what you were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, Lauren. Along the same lines, or I guess,
Speaker 1: along opposite lines of all of these people who are
Speaker 1: theorizing that you know, you can you can convert steam,
Speaker 1: convert water to steam within a closed container, and that
Speaker 1: will result in increased pressure. That the opposite, if you
Speaker 1: can condense 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 you mean
Speaker 1: it as a nice thing, is that you could use
Speaker 1: a low pressure steam engine to create this effect. You
Speaker 1: didn't have to create high pressure to push something. You
Speaker 1: could just create steam in a low pressure environment, allow
Speaker 1: it to condense, and then it would create this this
Speaker 1: force all on its own. So uh, it ended up
Speaker 1: being a much more safe way of using steam power,
Speaker 1: especially early on, before we had really reached the level
Speaker 1: of machining parts that could withstand those intense pressures that
Speaker 1: happen when you create lots of steam in a confined space.
Speaker 1: I don't know if any of our listeners are are
Speaker 1: familiar 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 splosion 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 that intense pressure, and if you've cut
Speaker 1: off all the safety valves, which you should never ever
Speaker 1: ever do, then yeah, safety valves on on boilers, in fact,
Speaker 1: are one of the terrific inventions without which we probably
Speaker 1: would well, we certainly wouldn't be here, because we'd have
Speaker 1: a totally different world, our world. We never would have
Speaker 1: had so, um yeah, because he showed that, you know,
Speaker 1: you could essentially it would turn a water heater into
Speaker 1: part bomb, part rocket. And it was just you're talking
Speaker 1: about superheated water that's well past the boiling point due
Speaker 1: to the pressure hitting the air, boiling instantaneously turning into
Speaker 1: super hot steam. So just being close to this, even
Speaker 1: if you weren't hit by shrapnel, you could be burned
Speaker 1: severely just from the steam. This is serious stuff. So
Speaker 1: that's why these low pressure engines were the first four
Speaker 1: ray 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 sixteen seventy two. Uh, this
Speaker 1: was Ferdinand um Verbs I'm going to go with that pronunciation.
Speaker 1: Um He He might have he was living in the
Speaker 1: Imperial Chinese Court at the time, and he may have
Speaker 1: created a working steam car or toy. Um. Interesting, he
Speaker 1: at least drew 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: then 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 is I think the official name translated is the
Speaker 1: digester or engine for softening bones, which isn't creepy at all. No,
Speaker 1: that doesn't make me think of serial killer in the
Speaker 1: slightest But by but by attaching to this pressurized chamber
Speaker 1: slighting piston, h 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 down. Um. And this is going
Speaker 1: to become extremely important very soon. Yeah. Uh. And there
Speaker 1: were a lot of other people who were thinking about
Speaker 1: steam engines at this time. So while you know, you
Speaker 1: would argue that steam engines really didn't come into play
Speaker 1: until the mid seventeen hundreds. It was the sixteen hundreds
Speaker 1: where we had lots of people theorizing about it. They
Speaker 1: were kind of laying the groundwork that would allow the
Speaker 1: the following scientists, engineers, mechanics, you know, just interesting people
Speaker 1: who who thought about steam power and and began to
Speaker 1: put it to our to a practical application. They would
Speaker 1: follow and bill upon the discoveries that the their forefathers
Speaker 1: had come up with, and those included people like Jacob Besson.
Speaker 1: There's a little guy named Leonardo da vinci Um. He
Speaker 1: had three turtle friends, as I recall, and was trained
Speaker 1: by rat Uh, Florence Rivolt, 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 was really interested in this idea of
Speaker 1: 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 Miner's 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 yeah, like where
Speaker 1: there are people underground or where you're Yeah exactly, that's
Speaker 1: where where you're trying to work, and it's much harder
Speaker 1: when in there, you know, would completely submerged exactly. We'll
Speaker 1: talk more about that in the podcast that we're going
Speaker 1: to record immatily after this one up. But so, but
Speaker 1: so he uh, so he patented this thing that I
Speaker 1: don't again like, I don't think he ever built it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a design for a device that could pump
Speaker 1: water out of minds, using a steam powered apparatus to
Speaker 1: to operate the pump. But again, you're not using steam
Speaker 1: to push something. It was a design where the condensing
Speaker 1: steam would create a pulling force that would move some
Speaker 1: sort of piston or which in turn would move some
Speaker 1: sort of lever that in turn would operate a pump
Speaker 1: and pull water out. One of the problems was that
Speaker 1: it was even based just on the design, they could
Speaker 1: tell that it was going to be fairly limited in
Speaker 1: how far it could draw water, something like, you know,
Speaker 1: between twenty and thirty feet maybe um and that would
Speaker 1: be something that future engineers would improve upon. And that
Speaker 1: leads us up to the first big name. But before
Speaker 1: we get into that, let's take a quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsor. All right, let's get back into talking
Speaker 1: about steam engines. So we have worked our way up
Speaker 1: to seventeen twelve when a fellow named Thomas Newcoming invents
Speaker 1: a steam engine that is following along the same lines
Speaker 1: as Thomas Savory's idea, the idea to pump water from mines.
Speaker 1: The basic design was like this. You had a boiler
Speaker 1: and the boiler's purpose, of course, is to hold the
Speaker 1: water and to allow that to heat up to steam. Right,
Speaker 1: so the steam would move into a cylinder which had
Speaker 1: a piston in it. But again, it wasn't meant to
Speaker 1: push the piston. The pistons natural resting place was at
Speaker 1: the top of the cylinder because the piston was attached
Speaker 1: to kind of a counter lever arm and the other
Speaker 1: end of the arm was pulled down by gravity. It
Speaker 1: was meant to be heavier than the side that the
Speaker 1: piston was attached to, right, And so when the steam
Speaker 1: would cool, it would condense, and then the force of
Speaker 1: the vacuum that created would pull the piston down and
Speaker 1: there by the lift to the other side of the
Speaker 1: hind which would operate the pump. So here you've got
Speaker 1: this pulling suction that is moving the piston downward, lifting
Speaker 1: the other end of this this lever up, and that
Speaker 1: 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 warm. 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 roved devices were made until the Yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: it wasn't until like it was in the late seventeen
Speaker 1: sixties when you would get a big improvement over this design.
Speaker 1: But even then, even after that improvement was made, these
Speaker 1: were very reliable pumps and had been used for quite
Speaker 1: some time. You can actually see one if you go
Speaker 1: to Dearborn, Michigan. There's the Henry Ford Museum and they
Speaker 1: have on display one of Newcomen's actual engines. So this
Speaker 1: is one of the ones that dates back to the
Speaker 1: early eighteenth century, which I think is awesome. I totally
Speaker 1: want to do a text stuff series where we go
Speaker 1: to different museums and see and talk about this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. If anyone wants to invest. Yeah, so hey,
Speaker 1: if you guys all think that's a great idea, let
Speaker 1: us know and we'll pass those along to Discovery, because
Speaker 1: I don't know how I'm going to swing this on
Speaker 1: my own other than you know, really working on my
Speaker 1: hitchhiking skills. Lauren's nodding, Okay, so that's great radio, but
Speaker 1: no so so, like I said, this was not terribly
Speaker 1: efficient because of the cooling and the heating of that cylinder. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you could find a way of creating this
Speaker 1: vacuum to cool the steam down but to not have
Speaker 1: to worry about heating and cooling the cylinder itself, thus
Speaker 1: wasting fuel, you could make this a much more efficient system.
Speaker 1: And as it turns out, and seventeen sixty nine, James
Speaker 1: Watt can't put the plans for this one. Now, he's
Speaker 1: the guy who often we credit as the inventor of
Speaker 1: the steam engine. Though all you guys have been listening,
Speaker 1: you know that's not exactly true, because he really just
Speaker 1: took this new Comman engine and added a separate condenser
Speaker 1: to it, right, So what he did was he essentially
Speaker 1: added a separate chamber that connects to the cylinder, and
Speaker 1: so the cylinder would fill up with steam and then
Speaker 1: move into the separate chamber where it would condense, and
Speaker 1: still you would still get the vacuum. But because you
Speaker 1: didn't have to worry about heating or cooling the cylinder itself,
Speaker 1: you didn't have to use as much fuel and as
Speaker 1: a result, depend upon which source you read there, you
Speaker 1: didn't have to worry about cooling the celinder. Just let
Speaker 1: it continually exactly because from the boiler exactly, you didn't
Speaker 1: have to Yeah, you didn't have to keep on burning
Speaker 1: fuel to take compensate for the fact that you had
Speaker 1: to use water to cool it down. So according to
Speaker 1: some sources, that would mean that you say, between fifty
Speaker 1: and sev of the fuel you would usually use to
Speaker 1: operate the steam engine. Well, that's what made steam engines
Speaker 1: suddenly practical from a fuel standpoint. So they had are
Speaker 1: even proven to be able to do practical work, but
Speaker 1: they weren't very efficient. They use so much fuel that
Speaker 1: it became one of those questions of well, is it
Speaker 1: even worth it to invest in this? Uh? And then
Speaker 1: with this invention, it made the steam engine something that
Speaker 1: was truly possible in lots of different applications. And that's
Speaker 1: when we really saw a figurative explosion in steam technology.
Speaker 1: There were some literal ones. In fact, that was one
Speaker 1: of the things what was really concerned about. He wanted
Speaker 1: to continue working in low pressure boilers, low pressure steam engines,
Speaker 1: because he felt that any sort of high pressure application
Speaker 1: was far too dangerous to be practical. And he spoke
Speaker 1: out yea and uh. The thing was that in other
Speaker 1: areas of industry there were lots of improvements, like in
Speaker 1: machining and metalworking, so there were people who were working
Speaker 1: on building stronger, more secure boilers and engines that could
Speaker 1: handle high pressure. What was just very cautious about the
Speaker 1: whole thing. So it was one of those the development
Speaker 1: of high pressure engines would wait for another probably forty
Speaker 1: years or so. Um. But anyway, what stuff. He became
Speaker 1: known as a genius in his own time everyone was
Speaker 1: 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 year 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 hole, and so
Speaker 1: it was never really used. It wasn't really seen as practical.
Speaker 1: The idea here wasn't. Yeah. I read about it being
Speaker 1: um it being displayed in Paris where they were running
Speaker 1: it and it ran into a wall. But since it
Speaker 1: ran to a wall two miles per hour, no one noticed.
Speaker 1: That's a true story. Um. Yeah, So anyway, it was.
Speaker 1: But it was an early example of a steam powered car,
Speaker 1: if you can call it that. It really looked more
Speaker 1: like a like a long wooden dolly with a huge
Speaker 1: boiler on the end of it. Um. It certainly didn't
Speaker 1: look like a car the way we would think of
Speaker 1: a car today. But it was designed to tow artillery. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We will get into some actual steam powered cars very soon. Uh.
Speaker 1: So that's when James Picard and Matthew Wassboro build a
Speaker 1: steam engine with rotary motion. So this is using various
Speaker 1: levers and other devices like a crankshaft to transfer this
Speaker 1: reciprocal motion, which is that up and down motion of
Speaker 1: a piston, into rotational motion. Now, those of you who
Speaker 1: listen to our transmission episode will know all about this,
Speaker 1: and that's why I'm not going to go over it
Speaker 1: again because that episode nearly broke us. It was about cars,
Speaker 1: which I don't know if you guys have picked up
Speaker 1: on this. I'm not a big expert and neither of
Speaker 1: us are really gearhead. Should have grabbed Scott probably, yeah anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: but yes, it it trans translated this reciprocating motion into
Speaker 1: rotational force. So that ended up being another important development, um,
Speaker 1: although it wasn't really used in a practical sense for
Speaker 1: a while longer. Um, there's a what had another terrific
Speaker 1: addition to to his engine, and that was he created
Speaker 1: a double acting engine, right right, Well, this was an
Speaker 1: idea that ends up being really important in steam engines
Speaker 1: later on, although mostly used in high pressure engines not
Speaker 1: low pressure engines. The idea being that you can you
Speaker 1: have a cylinder that has valves on either end of
Speaker 1: the cylinder, and so as the piston is moving toward
Speaker 1: one side, steam is escaping out of that side, and
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's increasing on the other side, right.
Speaker 1: And then once it gets to the end, the valve
Speaker 1: switch and so the piston moves to the other side
Speaker 1: and steam is coming into one end and escaping out
Speaker 1: the other. Now, with Watt's designs, of course, we're talking
Speaker 1: about using that suction force, so it's the condensing that's
Speaker 1: pulling the piston from one side to the other. But
Speaker 1: later double action steam engines would actually use steam force
Speaker 1: to push the piston one side and then on the
Speaker 1: other side. In fact, that's how most of the locomotive
Speaker 1: steam engines used steam. Um man, I love those locomotives too,
Speaker 1: But then, you know, I think every kid who got
Speaker 1: to play with them was fascinated. Certainly, people like Walt
Speaker 1: Disney became obsessed with them. I think that's a safe term.
Speaker 1: But then we started seeing steam engines used in lots
Speaker 1: of 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 Trevithick, 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. Trevithick was of the school
Speaker 1: of thought that higher ussure 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 Trevior certainly thought
Speaker 1: that this was something that you could do. And the
Speaker 1: early ones were still pretty inefficient. They weren't terribly fast. Um.
Speaker 1: He would eventually build a little locomotive for for amusement. Really,
Speaker 1: it wasn't meant as a form of transportation. It was
Speaker 1: called the catch me who can at a top speed
Speaker 1: of twelve miles per hour, which is about nineteen kilometers
Speaker 1: per hour. I think I think this was in display
Speaker 1: in London. Some track was already laid around the UK
Speaker 1: and the rest of Europe because horses would use the
Speaker 1: track to pull pully tempole cards along, right exactly, yeah, effectiently.
Speaker 1: In fact, you have a 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. Also, we really like
Speaker 1: to just take ownership of everything we do. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, it's that walls. It's so great China. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then in eighteen o four, London brewery engineer named Arthur
Speaker 1: Wolfe improved this high pressure boiler design through something called compounding,
Speaker 1: which uses excess steam from one piston to fire a
Speaker 1: second piston and then a third. This creates less heat
Speaker 1: loss in the system and winds up with you know,
Speaker 1: you you have to burn less fuel, which is great
Speaker 1: more efficiency again, making it more of a practical power solution.
Speaker 1: And uh. Moving up to eighteen o seven, that's when
Speaker 1: another big name and steam engines this someone anyone who
Speaker 1: has followed the story of steamboats Anyone who's familiar with
Speaker 1: Mark Twain is going to know this name, Robert Fulton.
Speaker 1: You introduced the first steamship to provide regular passenger service
Speaker 1: in America. Average speed of the steamship was five miles
Speaker 1: per hour or eight kilometers per hour. Yeah. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: if you don't have to paddle, it's fast enough. It's
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's uh. And again it's one of
Speaker 1: those things that another Onether's defining images in a American history.
Speaker 1: You think back to things like, you know, like the
Speaker 1: Mark Twain stories, and they all have this sort of
Speaker 1: evocative image of the great steamship. Of course, Mark Twain
Speaker 1: was a steamship. Yeah yeah, yeah, um. And in fact,
Speaker 1: Mark Twain, that's a steamship term. It's actually a term
Speaker 1: for how deep the water is, which you would know
Speaker 1: if you ever have sailed on the rivers of America.
Speaker 1: In Disney World, just pay attention on on that boat
Speaker 1: because they'll tell you all this. That's where I got it.
Speaker 1: So I'm citing my source, Um, Disney World. I was
Speaker 1: just there. I don't know if you know that, that's
Speaker 1: that's where he was. George Stevenson, he was another English
Speaker 1: engineer and he built a steam locomotive to run on
Speaker 1: rails yep. And it carried thirty tons of coal four
Speaker 1: fifty feet uphill at four miles per hour or six
Speaker 1: kilometers per hour, which doesn't doesn't sound like much, but
Speaker 1: that's a huge amount of weight to transfer. And it
Speaker 1: was a huge improvement over trafficics version, which could haul
Speaker 1: about ten tons of iron about ten miles. So although
Speaker 1: it didn't go very far, it certainly had to carry
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff and up an incline, so you know,
Speaker 1: it was a big improvement over taking like a super
Speaker 1: long route in order to avoid having to go up
Speaker 1: an incline like that. UM. Now at this stage the
Speaker 1: steam engines worked with this. Like I said, the steam
Speaker 1: press is on either side where you've got the piston
Speaker 1: with the valves there. The valve will control where the
Speaker 1: steam can enter and where it can exit, so the
Speaker 1: steam comes in one side. Now this case, we do
Speaker 1: have the steam pressing right, so the steam comes in
Speaker 1: on one side of the cylinder, pushes the piston across.
Speaker 1: The steam exits out as uh of one part of
Speaker 1: the valve while steam comes into the other end of
Speaker 1: the cylinder. The piston keeps that that seal steam tight,
Speaker 1: and then the piston moves back across the way it
Speaker 1: came the first time. Uh, and you've got this this
Speaker 1: process of a stroke exhaust and then the second stroke
Speaker 1: and it's exhaust, and it goes over and over and
Speaker 1: over again. Meanwhile, you would have the piston attached to
Speaker 1: some other form of device that would help, uh, move
Speaker 1: the whole project, whatever it happens to be. So with
Speaker 1: a locomotive, it might be a lever that is then
Speaker 1: connected to a wheel. So one move of the piston
Speaker 1: would be a half turn of the wheel, and the
Speaker 1: move of the piston going back the other way it
Speaker 1: would be the other half turn. And that's where you
Speaker 1: get that locomotive force where you can have the train
Speaker 1: moving down the track and having that steam escape is
Speaker 1: what gives the trains there choo choose 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. That's why
Speaker 1: kids called trains choo choose. I don't think they do
Speaker 1: it anymore, or if they do, it's kind of that
Speaker 1: skew morphism thing, because of course, you don't have many
Speaker 1: steam powered trains these days. Unless you go to Walt
Speaker 1: Disney World where you can write a train around Main Street, USA.
Speaker 1: And this podcast, strangely enough, is not brought to you
Speaker 1: by Disney World. No, I was brought to you by
Speaker 1: Disney World, apparently, I believe. Usually in 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. Yeah, I usually do have to have
Speaker 1: a couple of different elements in here to translate the
Speaker 1: motion properly, because otherwise, again you've got that reciprocating motion
Speaker 1: which is just going in two directions. Right, it's either
Speaker 1: going up and down or left and right. However, you know,
Speaker 1: it 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 can just have a poll attached to it. But
Speaker 1: otherwise you would need something more more versatile. So by
Speaker 1: eighty five, steam locomotive were starting to be used to
Speaker 1: haul passengers on a regular basis at that point. Before
Speaker 1: then it was pretty much used in cargo, right. I
Speaker 1: think the very I think was the very first ride
Speaker 1: of a passenger steam locomotive. That was George Stevenson's Locomotion
Speaker 1: number one. It carried some cargo and maybe about six
Speaker 1: d passengers or so, and that was that was its
Speaker 1: maiden voyage. I hear that everybody was doing a brand
Speaker 1: new dance now to do the locomotion. Okay, Laurence shaking
Speaker 1: her head against I guess I need to move on alright,
Speaker 1: So eight hundreds from all the way through eighteen eighty,
Speaker 1: we're gonna make a big skip. Unless you have something
Speaker 1: you want to add in that. Uh, not really, no,
Speaker 1: I guess. I guess I could put in at this
Speaker 1: point that the popular kind of boiler that was being
Speaker 1: used at this time, and and it's going to become
Speaker 1: important for for safety reasons. The popular kind of boiler
Speaker 1: was a fire tube boiler, which basically consists of a
Speaker 1: tank of water perforated with furnace pipes and the you know,
Speaker 1: the hot gases from generated from the fire from the
Speaker 1: fire in these pipes that are going through this cylinder
Speaker 1: of water are what is heating the water. It's a
Speaker 1: pretty efficient way to do it, but it also means
Speaker 1: that the whole tank is under a lot of pressure.
Speaker 1: So therefore if at first it's going to lead to
Speaker 1: that big scary explosion that we were talking about earlier. Right,
Speaker 1: So the heating element here are these these pipes that
Speaker 1: run through the boiler. The water surrounds the pipes, the
Speaker 1: pipes get hot because of the fires creating these hot gases.
Speaker 1: You also, by the way, you have to have something
Speaker 1: to vent the hot gases out of, so so you
Speaker 1: didn't just have steam venting out, you actually had hot
Speaker 1: air hot gases venting out to based from whatever the
Speaker 1: heat source was. See, that was one of the problems
Speaker 1: that earlier inventors had run into, was that they were
Speaker 1: trying to figure out a way of creating this hot water,
Speaker 1: and some of them were doing things like using a
Speaker 1: red hot iron uh inserted underneath the boiler. But that
Speaker 1: heat starts to dissipate, and once it does, you don't
Speaker 1: have power anymore. So it was only through creating something
Speaker 1: that would be allow you to generate a fire and
Speaker 1: continuate generate. So even though we talk about steam powered trains,
Speaker 1: have you ever seen those movies where they're shoveling coal
Speaker 1: into a furnace, Well, you have to generate the steam, right,
Speaker 1: It's not the trains not running on coal. The coal
Speaker 1: is what's generating the heat in the fire. It's it's
Speaker 1: the fuel that creates the creates the heat that allows
Speaker 1: the water to boil, that makes the train go, and
Speaker 1: the green grass grows all around and around. So yeah,
Speaker 1: so moving up to eighteen eight. Between eighteen eighty, steam
Speaker 1: engines are used in practically every major industrial application and
Speaker 1: in fact really both figuratively and literally drive the industrial revolution. Uh.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty Charles A. Parsons invinced the first steam turbine.
Speaker 1: So now we're getting into a way of using steam
Speaker 1: to not just push something mechanically, but also generate electricity,
Speaker 1: which would become really important as well. Uh. In eighteen
Speaker 1: seven are actually really eighteen ninety six is when we
Speaker 1: first start seeing steam powered cars in the United States,
Speaker 1: the Stanley Steamer being the popular model, also affectionately called
Speaker 1: flying teapots. Have you ever seen a picture of these?
Speaker 1: They really do look like horseless carriages. When you hear
Speaker 1: that term, it looks like it's a carriage that's missing
Speaker 1: a horse in front of it, and it's got one
Speaker 1: usually one lever that you use for steering, and that's it,
Speaker 1: and uh, you just uh, you know, god speed. They
Speaker 1: were really popular. They were in this early kind of period,
Speaker 1: more than sixty of them in the United States, and
Speaker 1: sixty that's obviously a tiny number these days, but you're
Speaker 1: talking back then where only a small sliver of the
Speaker 1: population would have had access to it, both monetarily and
Speaker 1: just opportunity from opportunity's sake, you know, not everyone lived
Speaker 1: in a in an area where they could get access
Speaker 1: to this. Also, keep in mind that these machines were
Speaker 1: usually used for intercity travel. It's not something that the
Speaker 1: idea of traveling across country really wasn't wasn't part of
Speaker 1: the automo out of industry at that point, whether it
Speaker 1: was steam powered or gas powered or even electrically powered.
Speaker 1: We talked about electrical cars, and they predate the gas
Speaker 1: engine vehicles as well. Um, if you wanted to go
Speaker 1: across the country, you've got a train, you didn't you
Speaker 1: didn't drive your car at this time. But we get
Speaker 1: up to a sad time though. We're getting up to
Speaker 1: for those of us who happened to like the choo choose. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as of about nineteen sixty, we're going to see the
Speaker 1: end of the locomotive era. Yeah. You don't see many
Speaker 1: places producing steam powered trains these days. If they are,
Speaker 1: it's for some sort of amusement park or something along
Speaker 1: those lines. It's not meant as a means of travel.
Speaker 1: There are some steam powered engines that are still in
Speaker 1: operation in various places around the world, but they aren't
Speaker 1: really being produced because we have alternatives now, all right.
Speaker 1: Certainly by the nineteen thirties, people had started to realize
Speaker 1: that internal combustion engines using gasoline as a fuel were
Speaker 1: much more efficient and cheap to use than these than
Speaker 1: these external combustion engine which is what a steam engine is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really is. Yeah. Um. So we start seeing this
Speaker 1: end of this era in around nineteen But it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that we're no longer using steam engines. We still are,
Speaker 1: right right, partially because we have improved the kind of
Speaker 1: boiler that's used. Water Tube boilers are kind of the
Speaker 1: inverse of that fire tub boiler that I was talking
Speaker 1: about earlier. It's it's basically a furnace that's perforated with
Speaker 1: water pipes instead of being a water tank that's perforated
Speaker 1: with furnace pipes. And there are forts of water inside
Speaker 1: of furnace. You've got tubes of water inside of furnace
Speaker 1: and uh and yeah, so so only those tubes are
Speaker 1: under pressure and therefore it's safer overall. Right, there's less
Speaker 1: of a less of a chance for a catastrophic breakdown.
Speaker 1: Although again with valves proper VALVNG, you're you're pretty safe
Speaker 1: most of the time. Back in two thousand nine, you know,
Speaker 1: way back then, a team of engineers built a car
Speaker 1: called the Inspiration, which is steam powered high speed car
Speaker 1: uses a turbine engine, not a pist an engine, steam powered,
Speaker 1: and it broke the land speed record for steam powered vehicles. UM.
Speaker 1: The average speed was a breezy one hundred forty eight
Speaker 1: miles power or two kilometers prower. That's fast. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: being powered by steam, and I think I think that
Speaker 1: is still the standing UH land speed record. I know
Speaker 1: that there's another team working on it. There's a US
Speaker 1: steam team that's working on building its own UH steam
Speaker 1: powered vehicle that they hope will break that record, but
Speaker 1: as far as I know, that has not happened yet
Speaker 1: as of the recording of this podcast. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: is there. There are a few companies that are working
Speaker 1: on test versions of steam powered cars. There's one called
Speaker 1: Cyclone Cyclone Power Technologies, which is working with raytheon the
Speaker 1: defense contractor at the moment, and in fact, the the
Speaker 1: U S team is working on a high speed vehicle
Speaker 1: called the Cyclone. That's what the name of the one
Speaker 1: that 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, Yeah, because you
Speaker 1: had to have a boiler, You had to have something
Speaker 1: that could contain a lot of water to generate the
Speaker 1: steam you needed, and you know, you were venting that steam.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't like your recap capturing and using even
Speaker 1: if you did recapture it, especially with the old condenser models,
Speaker 1: even if you did recapture it, you were still losing
Speaker 1: some So it's it wasn't something that you could run indefinitely.
Speaker 1: You might be able to run it for a long time,
Speaker 1: but you know, that's one of those challenges is trying
Speaker 1: to miniaturize something like steam power, which uh, you know
Speaker 1: it doesn't work so well. Also turns out to be
Speaker 1: a big part of the steampunk movement, this kind of
Speaker 1: idea of avoiding the miniaturization. You know, you want these
Speaker 1: kind of bulky things that have lots of character to them.
Speaker 1: You know, they're shiny and brassy, unuseful, but really full
Speaker 1: of characters. Yeah, no, it's got lots of character. It's
Speaker 1: just looks like, wow, you know, that's a great steampunk
Speaker 1: version of a mobile device, and it only weighs seventy
Speaker 1: pounds and burns you terribly every time you use it. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: they know that would obviously you would be much more
Speaker 1: frugal with your use. You wouldn't be picking up your
Speaker 1: smartphone every five seconds at dinner. I'm speaking about my
Speaker 1: own personal behavior at this point. So yeah, there's still
Speaker 1: other companies that are developing steam engines for power generation,
Speaker 1: usually for places in the world that are not on
Speaker 1: a power grid and therefore do not have access to electricity.
Speaker 1: There's one called a uniflow power, which is unveiled a generator.
Speaker 1: Back in steam generator, a steam powered generator, I should say,
Speaker 1: didn't generate steam generated power through steam, um, but it
Speaker 1: was meant to help communities that are not directly connected
Speaker 1: to power grids to to deliver electricity to parts of
Speaker 1: the world that otherwise would not have it. So we're
Speaker 1: seeing steam still being used in applications today. Absolutely, And
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I want to point out that
Speaker 1: most of the electricity generated is technically steam general. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's what nuclear power is, That's what a
Speaker 1: coal power plant is, right yea, yeah, we're talking you're
Speaker 1: burning a fuel that is generating steam that is turning
Speaker 1: usually yeah, exactly. Even things like the plasma waste converters.
Speaker 1: I've talked about those in the past where they've talked
Speaker 1: about using the excess heat in order to generate steam
Speaker 1: that would turn turbines and be kind of a co
Speaker 1: located with a power generator. So you'd have a trash
Speaker 1: disposal and power generation unit all put together. But it's
Speaker 1: using steam to do that. I mean, it's plasma to
Speaker 1: to break down the trash. A level of efficiency of
Speaker 1: of how hot you can get water, how quickly with
Speaker 1: with how work? Yeah, and how can you how can
Speaker 1: you take something that normally would just be considered a
Speaker 1: waste byproduct and turn it into useful stuff? You know, heat?
Speaker 1: We often think of, all, we lost a lot of
Speaker 1: our energy through heat. But if you can recapture that
Speaker 1: heat and make it do work like you can with
Speaker 1: steam power, then you're in good shape. So yeah, that
Speaker 1: kind of wraps up our discussion about steam engines. Uh,
Speaker 1: this was a fun one to do. It's totally another
Speaker 1: one of those look backs on on the technology of
Speaker 1: days of YR that are still relevant today. If you
Speaker 1: guys have any suggestions for things that we should cover,
Speaker 1: maybe you're thinking, you know, it's high time Tech Stuff
Speaker 1: does a full episode on Trebusch's Let us know right
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