TechStuff Classic: Running on Steam

listen back to this classic episode. We're talking about steam engines today and how they work and the principles behind them, and it really comes down to thermodynamics. You know, you're talking about heat really and what heat does and how it changes things, and that's you know, harnessing that has allowed us to have a little bit of a revolution industrially speaking. Do do pretty goodness my ration, I'm slow today. It took me like four seconds. You're slow. You didn't

forget to introduce you everybody, we're both on okay. But so yeah, So the thing about gases, um when when when you heat them up, they they do stuff. Yeah, they move the molecules and the gases move around a lot more than they usually do. So let's say let's say you've got a liquid, all right, You've got all those molecules together in a liquid, their chain together, right, they formed this this collection of molecules that are all

part of a larger hole. So example, you've got a bucket of water, those molecules are all bound together to make that water. Now you can you can separate some water from that, but the molecules within that separate section, they're still bound together. It's not like you've just freed them and they're now flying all over the place. But if you add energy, as in heat to that water and you boil the water, that water starts to boil off and form steam. It's the gas form of that substance.

And now the molecules can break free of each other. So now you've got these free flowing molecules that are zipping around at high speed depending upon how much heat you've put into the system. And as it turns out, they exert pressure. I mean, this has momentum. It if it hits against stuff, it can press against stuff. And if you're able to harness that in some way, you

can make that do work. Right. Yeah, yeah, it's it's you know, when you've got a sealed container and you create steam inside of it, it's going to exert pressure on the sides of that container, which can then do work yeah, or explode, as it turns out, depending upon what you've made the container out of and how hot

you've made that water. Uh, yeah, Because that's the other thing, is that water when it goes into steam, it's expanding, right, You're talking about making it take up more space than normally would, more volume than it normally would, And that, as it turns out, is a very important part of some early steam engines, the idea that you can make something take up more room and as it condenses, meaning that and the steam starts to cool down and turn

back into water, it's taken up less room. Right, it's going to create a little bit of a vacuum you can also use to do work. Yeah. So both of those those things, the idea of steam being able to press against stuff and the idea of steam once it condenses, creating a vacuum, those are the basic principles behind your your various kinds of steam engines. Now, this idea is not brand new. First of all, You've got a lot of people who will cite that A certain person named

James Watt was the inventor of the steam engine. As it turns out, that's being a little premature to say that he did. I mean he would. He certainly played an instrumental role in making steam engines uh practical, But you have to go way back if you want to look at the people who were really the inventors as far as we know of steam engines. That keep in mind, we're talking right now about the first recorded instances of

people talking about steam engines. That the idea itself might even be older, right, but the first recorded instances are from the first century, yeah, Common era. We're talking a hero or Huron or heroes or heroes of Alexandria. Uh. He he was a Greek mathematician and uh inventor. Ye he was born in Egypt, lived and worked and mostly in Alexandria, but was of Greek origin, and uh did a lot of different works. You know, he invented a lot of different things, or at least wrote about a

lot of things that we presume he invented. It may very will be that he was just writing about stuff that other people have done, but as far as we know, he's the one who originated these ideas. Yeah. He had a few inventions that he wrote about. A coin operated device. Yeah, yeah, I don't even know if it was like a you know, sandal vending machine or something, or you know, put a coin in and watch the lion eat somebody. I don't know. I'm hoping fortune teller. Um it's Zartan you make up.

I wish I were big. Uh, Yeah, I don't know. He also wrote a lot about the discoveries of the Babylonians, the Egyptians and also other Greeks and also the Romans, and a bunch of stuff about the properties of air, which is going to come very much in handy for one of these other things that he described. Yeah, the uh I think you're you're referring to the A L pile? Is that how you say that? How I say it? I'll tell you how it's spelled. It's a E O L I P I L E. And I do not

speak Greek. It's all Greek to me, So I and Lawrence just shaking her head disapprovingly. Can you can you hear in our echoe studio the rattle of my head shaking? And I can certainly see it better? Uh, this this room is better lit than our other studio was it's much larger. It's it's like a nice cave. It is.

It is a nice cave. So this, this device that Heron or hero or Heroes had designed, was an early form of what we would consider a steam engine, although from what we can tell, it was mostly meant a sort of a decoration or distraction, all right, more and more like a toy. And several of the things that we're going to be talking about from these early periods are more likely to be toys than anything else because concepts. He was the idea of exploring this, this nature of

well steam can do these these wild wacky things. I don't know how we would do this in anything, and I don't know how we would use this in any practical way, but look at this cool thing and what it can do. So what his could do was it was imagined like a big bowl made out of some metal like brass. They got a big brass bowl. It's actually sealed, so you put water in it, but then

you put a water tight seal on there. It does have two pipes that come up from the top of the seal that then meet up with a sphere that is mounted on these two pipes. All right, the sphere itself can can rotate along this axis that the pipes make. There's some sort of steam tight ball bearings that were involved, I guess. Also, by the way, we don't know that this was ever built, but this was his design. So in the the idea was that you put the water

inside this bowl. You would heat of the bowl, the water would convert into steam, which would go up into the pipes into the sphere. And the sphir itself had two nozzles or two jets on on on opposite sides I believe, right opposite sides facing so that they would allow the ball to rotate once steam escapes, the same way that if you attached to bottle rockets to two sides of a wheel um and then you know, let it let's let it push it along, right, So in

this case the pushing is kind of interesting. So let's talk about what's going on inside that sphere, which, as far as we know, was never actually built. But inside that sphere sphere, Now, if the sphere had no nozzles, if there were no there were no openings, there were, but somehow there was just water in there that you had converted into steam. That steam would be pressing, pressing

equally on all surfaces, exactly sphere interiors. So in other words, if you're looking at it, if you were able to slow things down to just look at things like a nanosecond at a time, and you're able to observe individual molecules, you would see these molecules bouncing off the various interior surfaces of that sphere. But because they're going in all directions, they're canceling each other out, which means that the ball

itself is staying still relative to its environment. Hypothetically as sathing. It's a perfect sphere, and that there aren't any you know, major design flaws right there, Like there's not some weird

thing there that's blocking where molecules can usually hit. But if you put an opening in that sphere, that means some of the molecules are going to go through the opening and escape, So that means they are not exerting that force inside the sphere on the opposite side where molecules are banging against that that edge of the sphere

that makes the sphere move. So in other words, it's not even that steam is escaping, it's that the steam that steam that is escaping is not counteracting the force that's that it's uh counterparts are doing inside that sphere, which I think is kind of an interesting explanation when you think about it. And Uh, there was a a site I was reading where his example was, imagine you have a cardboard box, but you've taken the bottom and the top off of it, and you've taken one of

the walls off of it. I think you put a whole bunch of kids in there, just running around, and whenever they hit one of the sides of the walls, they careen off in a different direction. But because there's one section side that doesn't have a wall, sometimes kids just keep on running and they're they're outside of the box. Meanwhile, the kids who are hitting the opposite side where there

is a wall, are moving the box. And yeah, so it's forward motion keeps going, but it's left and right motions stay more or less the same because they get canceled out by the various kids. I thought, what an interesting way to do that, And now I want to Now I want to build this and I want to watch it happen, probably from you know, a fifty foot observation tower. I don't kids and me. That's not I'm

picturing that we could use podcasters instead of children. We probably could, although we've got some kind of lazy podcasters. I don't know, they might, you know, just kind of push the wall. Our podcasters zombies. Well, you know, I mostly interact with them after lunch, so that's always when we get this neozies. Alright. So anyway, that was the basis behind his idea. But he also had another one that would use steam to do work. That was my

favorite example, so I had to include it. Yeah, this one I had not seen it, but so so there was a steam powered temple doors. That was the idea. He I've got this great illustration. I'll show you after the podcast, Laura. I'll put it up on our social too when we when we get this podcast out. But the idea was really kind of interesting. So in the illustration, there's this altar and these temple doors, and the altar has a little area in it where you could set

a sacrificial fire. Now that fire, the idea was that the fire would heat up water that would create steam. It would push the steam into a second container. That container, in turn had a tube leading out of it, and the other end of the tube would lead into a bucket. Now, from what I can tell, it looks like the idea

is that the steam would push into this container. The container would push more steam in through this other tube that was leading to the bucket, and there the steam would start to cool down and condense it turned into water. So when they would turn the water, the water would flow into the bucket. Yeah, which makes it heavy down.

And the bucket itself is suspended by a pulley, and so because the bucket gets heavier, it starts to exert force on the pulley and eventually would pull the pulley so that the ropes on the other side of the pulley would actually split into two ropes wrapping around these two columns. And as those ropes the tension grew, it would make those columns rotate. The rotation of the columns in turn would open the temple doors. So by lighting the fire, you would entice the gods to open the

doors for you, allowing people into your temple. Now, as it turns out, I think that this was probably a lot of work to open doors when you could just walk up and open them push it. But as it turns out, That's one of the reasons why steam technology took so long to develop, even though we're talking about just you know, just a few decades into the Common era.

That's when we're talking about steam engines. The reason we weren't using them for work is because there were a lot of other sources for work back in those days. Like the Romans had lots and lots of slaves, and as it turns out, the the history of Europe had lots of that kind of thing. Either it was either slavery or serfdom. Anyway, there was a lot of source of cheap labor out there, so you didn't have to worry about building things to make labor easier. That's what

those unfortunate people were for. Um. Yeah, and and also also, you know, the metal working at the time was not such that you could safely build boiler chambers that would really withstand the pressures necessary. Right, you had a lot of these prices. We wouldn't get into that until like the eighteen exactly. You could build low pressure steam steam boilers, but low pressure means that you can't do a lot

of work with them. They do. You know, you're releasing steam, you're genering steam and releasing steam in a way where it not exerting the kind of pressure you would need to do anything really significant unless you were to be incredibly clever with your design. But we'll get into that. We we have to go a little bit further before we get to that part. But these were the fundamentals, right of steam power, This idea of being able to to change water into another form and make it do work.

It would just take a you know, a millennia and change before anyone started to think about it in another more practical way. Yeah. Our next own factor is from three Blastco Degara. He was an officer in the Smash Navy, and we don't know for sure that he actually tried to do this or that what he proposed was in fact a steam engine, because it's pretty vague, but he was talking about creating some sort of paddle boat that may have been steam powered. Yeah. The phrase used in

the literature is vessel of boiling water. Right, so as far as we know the vessel of boiling water, well you could guess that, well, that must mean that it was using steam in some way, but because there isn't enough context there, we can't be certain. But it sounds like the idea was that you would use some sort of vessel of boiling water to generate steam in order to turn the paddles on a boat, very much like

we would see uh centuries later. But that the history books don't record any great Spanish paddle boats sailing across various European waters. So I guess we can probably draw the conclusion that this was an interesting idea that was never actualized, or if it was, it sunk um. And the next one's a sixteen o one, which not that not that long afterward, when a fellow named Giovanni Batista della Porta wrote in a book called Spiritali of an invention that would use steam pressure to raise a column

of water through a vacuum created by steam when it condenses. Now, this is what you were talking of out earlier, Lauren, right along the same lines, or I guess, along opposite lines of all of these people who are theorizing that you know, you can you can convert steam, convert water to steam within a closed container and that will result in increased pressure. That the opposite, if you can condense

steam into water, that it will create a vacuum. Right, Yeah, And that's that was an interesting idea that would again be capitalized on later. But this is the very basis of the earliest steam engines that we're doing work. Not that you were using steam to push something, but rather that you had created a chamber where steam, once it cools down and condenses into water, creates the suction force through the through creating a vacuum and thus can pull something.

And uh. In fact, as we'll talk about in just a couple of minutes, that's really how steam engines got their start. Uh. And again it that one of the nice things about this, and I really do mean it as a nice thing, is that you could use a low pressure steam engine to create this effect. You didn't have to create high pressure to push something. You could just create steam in a low pressure environment, allow it to condense, and then it would create this this force

all on its own. So uh, it ended up being a much more safe way of using steam power, especially early on, before we had really reached the level of machining parts that could withstand those intense pressures that happen when you create lots of steam in a confined space. I don't know if any of our listeners are familiar with a little program called MythBusters. Uh, MythBusters, of course, a Discovery Channel show. I was a huge fan, well, well before I even worked for How Stuff Works, I

was a big fan of the show. But I got to see MythBusters live in Atlanta. They came down and did a behind the scenes kind of tour and they talked a little bit about the various explosions that they've

seen on the show. And the reason why I'm saying this is that the the explosion they said was the most impressive and most terrifying was the water heater explosion because when you have that water under you know, turning into steam under the intense pressure, and if you've cut off all the safety valves, which you should never ever ever do, right then yeah, safety valves on on boilers, in fact, are one of the terrific inventions without which

we probably would well we certainly wouldn't be here because we'd have a totally different world, our world we never would have had happened. So um, yeah, because he showed that, you know, you could essentially it would turn a water heater into part bomb, part rocket, and it was just you're talking about superheated water that's well past the boiling point due to the pressure hitting the air, boiling instantaneously

turning into super hot steam. So just being close to this, even if you weren't hit by shrapnel, you could be burned severely just from the steam. This is serious stuff. So that's why these low pressure engines were the first foray into steam engines. Although we're still not quite there yet.

We're just talking about theory at the moment. All Right, I've I've got one from two Okay, this was Ferdinand um Verbs I'm going to go with that pronunciation um He He might have he was living in the Imperial Chinese court at the time, and he may have created a working steam car or toy um interesting. He at least drow up plans for one, and I'm not sure again, it's it's really yeah, it's it's hard to say a lot of these things from these earlier inventors, Uh, you know,

they haven't survived. So they may have one we don't know if they were ever built and then just were destroyed or lost, or we don't know if you know, they just was just in the plans but never actually built. One thing that I do believe was built In sixteen seventy nine, a French scientist and math professor named um Venice Papa from from Yes, France. I already said that excellent, Um, I've created the first pressure cooker, which is really a

direct application of what dela Portia was talking about. Um. This was I think the official name translated is the digester or engine for softening bones, which isn't creepy at all. That does. It made me think of Serial Killer in the slightest but by but by attaching to this pressurized chamber slighting piston, uh you know, and then heating the pot, the expanding steam would push the piston up, and then the vacuum created when the steam cooled liquid liquid would

pull the piston back downtcha um. And this is going to become extremely important very soon. Yeah. Uh. There were a lot of other people who were thinking about steam engines at this time. So while you know, you would argue that steam engines really didn't come into play until the mid seventeen hundreds, it was the sixteen hundreds where

we had lots of people theorizing about it. They were kind of laying the groundwork that would allow the The following scientists engineers, mechanics, you know, just interesting people who who thought about steam power and began to put it to our to a practical application. They would follow and build upon the discoveries that the their forefathers had come up with, and those included people like Jacob Besson. There's

a little guy named Leonardo da vinci Um. He had three turtle friends, as I recall, and was trained by a rat uh Florence Vault, Thomas Grant, Edward Ford. Lots of people were really talking about steam at this time, and then that leads us up to a fellow who patented an idea in six Thomas Savory, and he was the one who who was really interested in this idea of using the condensing steam to do work right. Well, okay, so it's a little bit of background on what he

what he patented. So coal mines were booming at this time because England was facing this timber crisis. There were increases in ship building and lots of firewood being used,

so so coal mining was becoming huge all right. So cole was starting to become the fuel of choice in England, and of course that would remain true for the next couple of centuries and so he patented this thing that he called the miners friend Um because a problem in coal mines as you wind up getting water in places where you really don't want water, and like where there are people underground or where you're yeah, exactly where you're trying to work, and it's much harder when in there,

you know, would completely submerged exactly. We'll talk more about that in the podcast that we're going to record immediately after this one. But so, but so he uh so he patented this thing that I don't again like, I don't think he ever built it. Yeah, it was a design for a device that could pump water out of minds, using a steam powered apparatus to to operate the pump.

But again, you're not using steam to push something. It was a design where the condensing steam would create a pulling force that would move some sort of piston or which in turn would move some sort of lever that in turn would operate a pump and pull water out. One of the problems was that it was even based just on the does ligne, they could tell that it was going to be fairly limited in how far it

could draw water. Something like you know, between twenty and thirty feet maybe um, and that would be something that future engineers would improve upon. Hate to interrupt this steamy conversation, but it's time for us to take a quick break. All right, Let's get back into talking about steam engines. So we have worked our way up to seventeen twelve when a fellow named Thomas Newcoming invents a steam engine that is following along the same lines as Thomas Savory's idea,

the idea to pump water from mines. The basic design was like this. You had a boiler, and the boiler's purpose, of course, is to hold the water and to allow that to heat up to steam. Right, So the steam would move into a cylinder which had a piston in it. But again, it wasn't meant to push the piston. The pistons natural resting place was at the top of the cylinder because the piston was attached to kind of a counter lever arm and the other end of the arm

was pulled down by gravity. It was meant to be heavier than the side that the piston was attached to, right, And so when the steam would cool, it would condense, and then the force of the vacuum that created would pull the piston down and the lift to the other side of the which would operate the pump. So here you've got this pulling suction that is moving the piston downward, lifting the other end of this this lever up, and that in turn was using it was actually activating the pump,

pulling the water out of the mine. And the the way this would work is that once you had that steam cool down, uh, the way they would cool it down is actually inject water into the cylinder. So you've got the cylinder, it's heated up, you've got the in fact that heat was the cylinder was quite warmed. They had to cool the cylinder down to condense the steam back into water. So the inject water into it helps cool the steam down, pulls the piston down, and then

they would allow the water to heat up again. The steam would slowly enter into this uh cylinder as gravity was pulling the other end of the lever, the heavier end back down again. That pulls the piston back to the up resting place and steam would fill the cylinder again. You'd have to cool it down again. You do this over and over again. Now, if you're listening and you're thinking, wow, that that sounds like that might not be terribly efficient.

You're right, because it meant that you had to keep cooling and heating that cylinder over and over, which meant that you had to continuously burn fuel so that you could continuously heat the water to create this this section. And furthermore, I have other people working to cool down

the cylinder. However, all of this was still more efficient than housing an entire team of horses to do the same war right, right, And so it ended up actually being such a useful device that they were used well after improved devices were made, so up until the nineteen yeah, yeah, you know, it wasn't until like it was in the late seventeen sixties when you would get a big improvement

over this design. But even then, even after that improvement was made, these were very reliable pumps and have been used for quite some time. You can actually see one if you go to Dearborn, Michigan. There's the Henry Ford Museum and they have on display one of Newcomen's actual engines. So this is one of the ones that dates back to the early eighteenth century, which I think is awesome. I totally want to do a text stuff series where we go to different museums and see and talk about

this kind of stuff. If anyone wants to invest. Yeah, so hey, if you guys all think that's a great idea, let us know and we'll pass those along to Discovery, because I don't know how I'm going to swing this on my own other than you know, really working on my hitchhiking skills. Lauren's nodding. Okay, so anyway, that's great radio, But no so so, like I said, this was not terribly efficient because of the cooling and the heating of

that cylinder. Right, So, if you could find a way of creating this vacuum to cool the steam down but to not have to worry about heating and cooling the cylinder itself, thus wasting fuel, you could make this a much more efficient system. And, as it turns out, and seventeen sixty nine, James Watt can put the plans for this one. Now. He's the guy who often we credit

as the inventor of the steam engine. Though all you guys have been listening, you know that's not exactly true, because he really just took this new Coomman engine and added a separate condenser to it. Right, So, what he did was he essentially added a separate chamber that connects to the cylinder, and so the cylinder would fill up with steam and then move into the separate chamber where it would condense, and still you would still get the vacuum.

But because you didn't have to worry about heating or cooling the cylinder itself, you didn't have to use as much fuel. And as a result, depending upon which source you read, they say he didn't have to worry about cooling the celinder, just let it continually exactly because we knew when the boiler exactly, you didn't have to Yeah, you didn't have to keep on burning fuel to take compensate for the fact that you had to use water

to cool it down. So according to some sources, that would mean that you say, between fifty and sev of the fuel you would usually use to operate the steam engine. Well, that's what made steam engines suddenly practical from a fuel standpoint. So they had are even proven to be able to do practical work, but they weren't very efficient. They used so much fuel that it became one of those questions of well is it even worth it to invest in this?

Uh and then with this invention, it made the steam engine something that was truly possible in lots of different applications. And that's when we really saw a figurative explosion and steam technology. There were some literal ones. In fact, that was one of the things what was really concerned about. He wanted to continue working in low pressure boilers, low pressure steam engines because he felt that any sort of high pressure application was far too dangerous to be practical.

And he spoke out, yea and uh. The thing was that in other areas of industry there were lots of improvements, like in machining and metalworking, so there were people who were working on building stronger, more secure boilers and engines that could handle high pressure. What was just very cautious about the whole thing. So it was one of those the development of high pressure engines would wait for another probably forty years or so. Um. But anyway, what stuff.

He became known as a genius in his own time. Everyone was crediting him with the creation of this magnificent technology. Um.

I'm sure that he was happy to receive that. But in the same or that when he created these improvements to the newcoman engine, there was another fellow, Nicholas Kugno, a French military officer, who developed a steam powered car, and it was designed to toe artillery pieces and it could only move it about two miles per hour, which is about three point two kilometers per hour, and so it was never really used. It wasn't really seen as

practical the idea here because it wasn't. Yeah. I read about it being um it being displayed in Paris where they were running it and it ran into a wall. But since it ran to a wall two miles per hour, no one noticed. That's a true story. Um. Yeah, So anyway, it was. But it was an early example of a steam powered car, if you can call it that. It really looked more like a like a long wooden dolly

with a huge boiler on the end of it. Um. It certainly didn't look like a car the way we would think of a car today, But it was designed to tow artillery. Yeah. We will get into some actual steampowered cars very soon. Uh so sight that's when James Picard and Matthew Wassboro build a steam engine with rotary motion. So this is using various levers and other devices like a crankshaft to transfer this reciprocal motion, which is that

up and down motion of a piston, into a rotational motion. Now, those of you who listen to our transmission episode will know all about this, and that's why I'm not going to go over it again because that episode nearly broke us. It was about cars, which I don't know if you guys have picked up on this. I'm not a big expert. Neither of us are really gearhead should have grabbed Scott probably, yeah, anyway, but yes, it trans translated this reciprocating motion into rotational force.

So that ended up being another important development, Um, although it wasn't really used in a practical sense for a while longer. Um There's one had another terrific addition to to his engine, and that was three. He created a double acting engine, right right, Well, this was an idea that ends up being really important in steam engines later on, although mostly used in high pressure engines not low pressure engines.

The idea of being that you can you have a cylinder that has valves on either end of the cylinder, and so as the piston is moving toward one side, steam is escaping out of that side and it's you know, it's increasing on the other side, right, and then once it gets to the end, the valve switch and so the piston moves to the other side and steam is

coming into one end and escaping out the other. Now, with Watt's designs, of course, we're talking about using that suction force, so it's the condensing that's pulling the piston from one side to the other. But later double action steam engines would actually use steam force to push the piston one side and then on the other side. In fact, that's how most of the locomotive steam engines used steam. Um and man, I love those locomotives too, But then, you know, I think every kid who got to play

with them was fascinated. Certainly people like Walt Disney became obsessed with them. I think that's a safe term. But then we started seeing steam engines used in lots of different ways. We're getting up to the eighteen hundreds now, and that's really where the steam era takes off and you start seeing steamboats, paddle steamers, locomotives. In eighteen o one, a man named Richard trevithi it was an English miner and engineer, built a steam powered locomotive called the puffing devil.

It could go on short trips, but only on short trips because he had trouble keeping the water hot enough to generate steam consistently. That actually was a real issue with a lot of steam engines, the idea of how do you how do you heat the boiler properly? And I believe his engines were the first that we're using steam to actually push pistons rather than the condensation in the vacuum to pulse exactly. Trevith was of the school of thought that high pressure steam engines their time had come.

It was safe enough, you could do it. What again was not sold on this idea, but Trevor think certainly thought that this was something that you could do. And the early ones were still pretty inefficient. They weren't terribly fast. Um. He would eventually build a little locomotive for for amusement. Really it wasn't meant as a form of transportation. It was called the catch me who can at a top speed of twelve miles per hour, which is about nineteen kilometers per hour. I think I think this was in

display in London. Some track was already laid around the UK and the rest of Europe because horses would use the track to pull pully tim pole cards along, right, exactly, yeah, exactiently. In fact, you have the birth of the locomotive is really an English thing. We think of it as a very American thing here in the United States because it was so defining of that era, as we really like to just take ownership of everything we do. I mean,

you know, it's that wall is not so great China. Well, think we need to take another quick break because I've got the vapors. Not not really, it's just that's that's steam related, Okay bye. In eighteen o four, London brewery engineer named Arthur Wolfe improved this high pressure boiler design through something called compounding, which uses excess steam from one piston to fire a second piston and then a third.

This creates less heat loss in the system and winds up with you know, you have to burn less fuel, which is great more efficiency again, making it more of a practical power solution. And uh, moving up to seven. That's when another big name and steam engines this someone Anyone who has followed the story of steamboats, anyone who's familiar with Mark Twain is going to know this name. Robert Fulton. He introduced the first steamship to provide regular

passenger service in America. Average speed of the steamship was five miles per hour or eight kilometers per hour. Yeah. Well, you know, if you don't have to paddle, it's fast enough. It's you know, it's it's uh. And again it's one of those things that another one those defining images in American history. You think back to things like, you know, like the Mark Twain stories, and they all have this sort of evocative image of the great steamship. Of course,

Mark Twain was a steamship. Yeah, yeah, yeah, um. And in fact, Mark Twain, that's a steamship term. It's actually a term for how deep the water is, which you would know if you ever have sailed on the rivers of America. In Disney World, just pay attention on on that boat, because they'll tell you all this. That's where I got it. So I'm citing my source, uh, Disney World. I was just there. I don't know if you know that.

That's that's where he was. George Stevenson, he was another English engineer, and he built a steam locomotive to run on rails, yep, and it carried thirty tons of coal four d fifty feet uphill at four miles per hour or six kilometers per hour, which doesn't doesn't sound like much, but that's a huge amount of weight to have to transfer, and it was a huge improvement over traffics version, which could haul about ten tons of iron about ten miles.

So although it didn't go very far, it certainly had to carry a lot of stuff and up an incline, so you know, it was a big improvement over taking like a super long route in order to avoid having to go up an incline like that. UM Now at this stage the steam engines worked with this. Like I said, the steam press is on either side where you've got the piston with the valves there. The valve will control where the steam can enter and where it can exit.

So the steam comes in one side. Now this case we do have the steam pressing right, so the steam comes in on one side of the cylinder, pushes the piston across. The steam exits out as uh of one part of the valve while steam comes into the other into the cylinder, the piston keeps that that seal steam tight and then the piston moves back across the way

it came the first time. Uh, and you've got this this process of a stroke exhaust and then the second stroke and it's exhaust and it goes over and over and over again. Meanwhile, you would have the piston attached to some other form of device that would help, uh, move the whole project, whatever it happens to be. So with a locomotive, it might be a lever that is

then connected to a wheel. So one move of the piston would be a half turn of the wheel, and the move of the piston going back the other way it would be the other half turn. And that's where you get that locomotive force where you can have the train moving down the track and having that steam escape is what gives the trains there choo choo sound. That's true. So you know when you hear the sound of the steam escaping and it goes over and over. What's why

kids called trains choo choose the thing? They do it anymore, or if they do, it's kind of that skew morphism thing. Because of course, you don't have many steam powered trains these days unless you go to Walt Disney World, where you can write a train around Main Street, USA, and this podcast, strangely enough, is not brought to you by Disney World. No, no, I was brought to you by Disney World, apparently, I believe. Usually on steam locomotives, it's

called it it's called a crosshead. The the portion that links out from this piston, and that's going to be connected to something called a drive rod, and then coupling rods are going to what going to be what drives the wheels. Yeah. I usually do have to have a couple of different elements in here to translate the motion properly, because otherwise, again you've got that reciprocating motion, which is just going in two directions. Right, it's either going up

and down or left and right. However, you know, it depends on your orientation and the orientation of the device. But that limits what you can do unless you use other gadgets to kind of translate that motion into something that can do useful work. I mean, unless you just need to open and close the door repeatedly, then then you could just have a pole attached to it. But

otherwise you would need something more more versatile. So by eighteen twenty five, steam locomotives were starting to be used to haul passengers on a regular basis at that point. Before then, it was pretty much used in cargo, right. I think the very I think five was the very first ride of a passenger steam locomotive. That was George Stevenson's Locomotion number one. It carried some cargo and maybe about six hundred passengers or so, and that was that

was its maiden voyage. I hear that everybody was doing a brand new dance now to do the locomotion. Okay, Laurence shaking her head again. So I guess I need to move on alright, So eight hundreds from all the way through eighteen eighty, we're gonna make a big skip unless you have something you want to add in that. Uh not really, no, I guess I guess I could put in at this point that the popular kind of boiler that was being used at this time, and and

this is going to become in for safety reasons. The popular kind of boiler was a fire tube boiler, which basically consists of a tank of water perforated with furnace pipes and the you know, the hot gases from generated from the fire from the fire in these pipes that are going through this cylinder of water are what is heating the water. It's a pretty efficient way to do it, but it also means that the whole tank is under

a lot of pressure. So therefore if at burst, it's going to lead to that big scary explosion that we were talking about earlier. Right. So the heating element here are these these pipes that run through the boiler. The water surrounds the pipes, the pipes get hot because of the fires creating these hot gases. You also, by the way, have to have something to vent the hot gases out of, so so you didn't just have steam venting out, you actually had hot air hot gases venting out to based

from whatever the heat source was. See, that was one of the problems that earlier inventors had run into, was that they were trying to figure out a way of creating this hot water, and some of them were doing things like using a red hot iron uh inserted uneath the boiler. But that heat starts to dissipate, and once it does, you don't have power anymore. So it was only through creating something that would be allow you to generate a fire and continuate generate. So even though we

talk about steam powered trains. Have you ever seen those movies where they're shoveling coal into a furnace, Well, you have to generate the steam, right, It's not the trains not running on coal. The coal is what's generating the heat in the fire. It's it's the fuel that creates the creates the heat that allows the water to boil, that makes the train go, and the green grass grows

all around and around. So yeah, so moving up to eight Between eighteen eighty, steam engines are used in practically every major industrial application, and in fact really both figuratively and literally drive the industrial revolution. Uh. In eighteen eighty Charles A. Parsons invinced the first steam turbine. So now we're getting into a way of using steam to not just push something mechanically, but also generate electricity, which would

become really important as well. Uh. In eight are actually really eighteen six is when we first start seeing steam powered cars in the United States, the Stanley Steamer being the popular model, also affectionately called flying teapots. Have you ever seen a picture of these? They really do look

like horseless carriages. When you hear that term, it looks like it's a carriage that's missing a horse in front of it, and it's got one usually one lever that you use for steering, and that's it, and uh, you just uh, you know, god speed. They were really popular.

They went in this early kind of period, more than sixty of them in the United States, and sixty that's obviously a tiny number these days, but you're talking back then where only a small sliver of the population would have had access to it, both monetarily and just opportunity from opportunity's sake, you know, not everyone lived in in an area where they could get access to this. Also, keep in mind that these machines were usually used for

intercity travel. It's not something that the idea of traveling across country really wasn't wasn't part of the automotive industry at that point, whether it was steam powered or gas powered or even electrically powered. We talked about electrical cars, and they predate the gas engine vehicles as well. Um, if you wanted to go across the country, you've got a train. You didn't you didn't drive your car at

this time. But we get up to a sad time though, we're getting up to for those of us who happened to like that. Cho choose. Yeah, as of about nineteen sixty, we're going to see the end of the locomotive era. Yeah. You don't see many places producing steam powered trains these days. If they are, it's for some sort of amusement park or something along those lines. It's not meant as a

means of travel. There are some steam powered engines that are still in operation in various places around the world, but they aren't really being produced because we have alternative now, all right. Certainly by the nineteen thirties, people had started to realize that internal combustion engines using gasoline as a fuel were much more efficient and cheap to use than these than these external combustion engines, which is what a

steam engine is. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. Um, So we start seeing this end of this era in around nineteen sixty, But it doesn't mean that we're no longer using steam engines. We still are, right right, partially because we have improved the kind of boiler that's used. Water tube boilers are kind of the inverse of that fire

tube boiler that I was talking about earlier. It's it's basically a furnace that's perforated with water pipes instead of being a water tank that's perforated with furnace pipes, and there's water inside of furnace. You've got tubes of water inside of furnace and uh and yeah, so so only those tubes are under pressure and therefore it's safer overall. Right, there's less of a less of a chance for our catastrophic breakdown. Although again with valves proper valving you you're

pretty safe most of the time. And yeah, back in two thousand nine, you know, way back then, a team of engineers built a car called the Inspiration, which is steam powered high speed car uses a turbine engine, not a piston engine, steam powered, and it broke the land speed record for steam powered vehicles. UM. The average speed was a breezy one forty eight miles power or two kilometers prower. That's fast. Yeah, you're being powered by steam. And I think I think that that is that's still

the standing UH land speed record. I know that there's another team working on it. There's a US steam team that's working on building its own UH steam powered vehicle that they hope will break that record. But as far as I know, that has not happened yet as of the recording of this podcast. Yeah, and there is there. There are a few companies that are working on test

versions of steam powered cars. There's one called Cyclone Cyclone Power Technologies, which is working with Raytheon on the defense contractor at the moment, and in fact, the the U S team is working on a high speed vehicle called the Cyclone. That's what the name of the one that they're hoping will break the records, the cycling. Yeah. Yeah, they're you know, they're producing these engines that would fit in the you know, standard vehicle engine space. That's a

big deal too. We didn't even mention that. But the steam engines of traditionally were very large because you had to have a boiler, You had to have something that could contain a lot of water to generate the steam you needed, and you know, you were venting that steam. So it wasn't like your recap capturing and reusing, and even if you did recapture it, especially with the old condenser models, even if you did recapture it, you were still losing some So it's it wasn't something that you

could run indefinitely. You might be able to run it for a long time, but you know that's one of those challenges is trying to miniaturize something like steam power, which uh, you know it doesn't work so well. Also turns out to be a big part of the steampunk movement, this kind of idea of avoiding the miniaturization. You know, you want these kind of bulky things that have lots of character to them. You know, they're shiny and brassy, unuseful,

but really full of characters. Yeah, no, it's got lots of character. It's just looks like, Wow, you know, that's a great, uh steampunk version of a mobile device, and it only weighs seventy pounds and burns every time you use it, right, Well, you know that would obviously you would be much more frugal with your use. You wouldn't be picking up your smartphone every five seconds at dinner. I'm speaking about my own personal behavior at this point.

So yeah, there's still other companies that are developing steam engines for power generation, usually for places in the world that are not on a power grid and therefore do not have access to electricity. There's one called a uniflow Power, which is unveiled a generator back in steam generator, steam powered generator, I should say, didn't generate steam. You generated

power through steam. Um. But it was meant to help communities that are not direct connected to power grids to to deliver electricity to parts of the world that otherwise would not have it. So we're seeing steam still being used in applications today. Absolutely, And I mean, you know, I want to point out that most of the electricity

generated is technically steam general. Sure, I mean that's what nuclear power is, that's what a coal power plant is, right, Yeah, Yeah, we're talking you're burning a fuel that is generating steam that is turning usually yeah, exactly. Even things like the plasma waste converters. I've talked about those in the past where they've talked about using the excess heat in order to generate steam that would turn turbines and be kind

of a co located with a power generator. So you'd have a trash disposal and power generation unit all put together. But it's using steam to do that. It means plasma to to break down the trash power a level of efficiency of of how hot you can get water, how quickly with how the work? Yeah, and then how can you how can you take something that normally would just be considered a waste eye product and turn it into useful stuff. You know, heat. We often think of all,

we lost a lot of our energy through heat. But if you can recapture that heat and make it do work like you can with steam power, then you're in good shape. So yeah, that kind of wraps up our discussion about steam engines. Uh, this was a fun one to do. It's totally another one of those look backs on on the technology of days of your that are still relevant today. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic episode. If you have suggestions for future topics of current episodes

of tech Stuff, send it to me via Twitter. The handle is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.