The origins of the steam engine | Hacker News Reader

The origins of the steam engine

rootsofprogress.org

97 pointsfeross44 comments

The amazing thing is that steam engines were made out of iron for most of the 19th century. Steel wasn't available in bulk until about 1880.

The materials really matter. Early steam engines such as Newcomen's were insanely complicated and had terrible thermodynamic efficiency, because the parts couldn't stand any real pressure.

Consider a Diesel. A basic Diesel engine is a very simple machine. Here's a rural mechanic in China restoring one from junk status to running, using basic tools.[1] It's a brutally simple one-cylinder engine, widely used in Japan and India. No pollution controls. No water recycling; you have to add water as often as fuel. No electrical components. Started with a hand crank. Costs about US$200-$300 for a new one.[2]

Seems like someone would have been able to build one of those by 1700 or so. But no. You couldn't build that engine without reasonably good steel. Even if you had one to copy, you could not build that with the technology of 1870. You need a strong cylinder, a strong cylinder head, and good piston rings that precisely fit the cylinder, or you won't get the compression to ignite the fuel. The first Diesel engine that worked was built in 1897.

Steel is interesting, because it's thousands of years old, yet wasn't mass produced until the 1890s. A Bessemer converter is very simple. The Romans could have built one. But it took quite a bit of R&D to get the metallurgy right so that steel came out. Bessemer got his working, but others, with different ore sources, couldn't get theirs to work reliably. Robert Mushet did 10,000 trials over ten years of to get an understanding of exactly what ingredients do what. This debugged the Bessemer process, and the world changed.

The Romans had sword factories. They could make steel, but not in bulk. If that work had happened a centuries earlier...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s--QjXbdnME

[2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Changchai-Diesel-Engi...

would you not also require diesel fuel?

Kerosene, Diesel fuel, and jet fuel are all very close. It's also possible to use sunflower oil, olive oil, whale oil, or alcohol, all of which were known for many centuries. Simple Diesels will run on a very wide range of fuels if they have to, although pollution, wear, and ash in the engine may increase, and power may decrease.

>Steel is interesting, because it's thousands of years old, yet wasn't mass produced until the 1890s.

Thank you for your succinct summation of this complex point. I've been fascinated by the history of technology for as long as I can remember, but as a kid, even a teenager, steel drove me nuts. On the one hand, there were lots of sources talking about the late 19th Century as the time when steel emerged, but there were equally as many references mentioning Chinese steel, Indian steel or Damascus steel thousands or hundreds of years ago. It took me a long time (until, in the pre-internet era, I had access to a college library) to get a good picture of steel's place over time.

It's funny how these things work. There are many inventions that, looking back, could've happened centuries earlier purely from a resource/physical constraints point of view (of course, scientific knowledge doesn't work quite that way).

As a film photographer, if I ever find myself in possession of a time machine, the first thing I'll do is go back to ancient Minoa/Rome/Egypt/China/Tikal and show people how to make silver based emulsions to use with pinhole cameras.

In a similar vein, this article "Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?" is a nice read.

https://rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wait-so-long-for-the-...

Anton Howes, co-author of this piece, earlier wrote

"Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part I" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-...

"Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part II" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-...

"Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part III" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-...

Part II has 304 HN comments from July 2022 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 .

I had fun designing and machining a simple steam engine with a one inch piston. It actually worked, though it was poorly balanced and vibrated too much.

Unfortunately, it consumed many many hours in the machine shop, and was one reason why I decided to write software - I could realize my ideas much faster!

in the uk, in the 60s you could get toy steam engines with i guess about a 3/4 inch piston. i had one, heated by a small methylated spirit burner. it had just about enough power to keep itself going, but whenever i tried to hook it up to one of my meccano constructs, it didn't have the juice.

Yeah they're still around Mamod makes a bunch of static engines that run on spirits, and can power small things. They're pretty commonly available either new, or used, and most of them will last forever.

I used to collect steam-engines, and had fun repairing them and maintaining them until a cross-country move meant I lost most of my collection.

I still have the Mamod Roadster, which is a cute little car powered by steam (not my video):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYYuFe7bdW4

Interestingly, the steam engines of the Titanic made use of the vacuum generated by condensing steam to extract additional energy from steam that's below atmospheric pressure.

https://www.titanicology.com/Titanica/TitanicsPrimeMover.htm

As were most if not all the other steamships of that era; compound steam engines were already over a century old by then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_steam_engine

Comments like these are the reason that I still read hacker news.

I can come to a thread, and almost always there will be somebody replying with extra information on the topic at hand.

Thank you.

Related blog post that is one of my favorite authors: https://technicshistory.com/2023/11/30/the-pursuit-of-effici...

If you enjoy videos, Proper People did a fantastic video about a 115 year old steam engine that still works that used to pump water for a city in Massachusetts.

Great watch full of info and some beautiful shots.

https://youtu.be/nBImv1mlcMg?si=XUyME3AmDB30sKaj

Often times people ask (even here on HN) whether the Romans could have built steam engines.

Here's my theory: yes, absolutely.

Technologies evolve for either military use or non-military use. Military technologies are subject to evolutionary pressures that are easily 100 to 1000 times higher than non-military technologies. An iron plow will do a better job than a wooden plow, but in the end it's just a matter of slightly increased productivity. But an iron sword vs a wooden alternative, that's life and death.

Military technologies, throughout ages, evolved many times faster than civilian ones. Do you think the technology to make an iron sword is harder, or simpler than the technology to distill spirits? Obviously harder, maybe 100 times so. Yet, swords appeared 5000 years ago, spirits about 1000 years ago. The Romans developed a huge industrial base capable of churning hundreds of thousands of "lorica segmentata" armors, yet, their technology when it came to textile dyes was absolutely pathetic. Etc, etc.

My point is the steam engine emerged as a civilian technology, not a military one. Once it matured, it powered battleships, so it obviously acquired a military relevance, but in the times of Watt, it was definitely civilian.

But could we have lived in an alternate history where the steam engine appeared as a military technology? If so, then it could have evolved many times faster, and I contend that I can see a scenario where the Romans (well, the Eastern Roman empire) could have initiated an industrial revolution. Centered around oil (petroleum), not coal. Hint: they possessed the Greek fire, a fundamental military technology. For some reason the Greek fire disappeared, and history evolved fire weapons starting with cannons. But it's entirely reasonable to think the fire weapons evolved out of Greek fire (i.e. flamethrowers), and this would have stimulated a healthy trade in petroleum, 1000 years before the real history.

OK: I don't get that second diagram showing how the "dripper" fountain works. How does the cooling/contracting air pull water up from the reservoir into the bottle? Why doesn't it just allow the water pushed up through the top pipe back into the bottle (which it somehow also does)?

There's a one-way valve at the top of the pipe from the lower reservoir to the bottle, and perhaps if there was another at the base of the top pipe to keep the water from flowing back it would work, but clearly there's no such valve.

And the same mechanism powers a number of the other systems; how do they all work?

The top pipe is submerged, and the other pipe is a simple valve. As the volume inside the container cools, the air pressure reduces, since the pressure of air outside the container is connected to the volume of water underneath, the pressure of air pushes the volume below and that squeezes the water past the valve at the top.

The pressure from the column of air at the top pipe is not sufficient to overcome the volume of water in the closed container, and so remains neutral.

That's the best I can describe this effect for you. ChatGPT would probably do a better job.

related is the notion of "steam engine time". here's a nice blog post explaining the concept: https://kk.org/thetechnium/steam-engine-ti/

Everything I've read about the development of the steam engine says that concept of "steam engine time" is fundamentally wrong.

how so? it seems to make intuitive sense that you needed a whole raft of supporting technologies to make the slowly rising curve of proto-steam-engine development suddenly hit an inflection point and spread the invention everywhere in a relatively short span. "steam engine time" is simply when all those things were in place and you could make a practical, cost-effective steam engine.

You need to be careful about what you mean by "steam engine time."

The link you gave has different interpretations. Gibson said "there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines" while the commenter says "The Romans had the idea of steam engines, but not of strong iron to contain the pressure, nor valves to regulate it, nor the cheap fuel to power it."

You apparently disagree with Gibson's characterization.

The original 1931 claim gives a third; "A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time"

However, As Anton Howes (co-author of the linked-to page) argues at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... , steam engines came decades after the pieces were available, and well after initial uses (like pumping water from a mine) were conceived of, and where there would have been social growth had they been available:

> So why did it then take almost another half a century, even with the increasingly widespread understanding of atmospheric pressure and vacuums, for a widely-adopted and practical atmospheric engine like Thomas Savery’s to appear?

> The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked on thermometers, weather-glasses, egg incubators, solar-activated fountains, and perpetual motion machines. But because people so rarely try to improve or invent things, the low-hanging fruit can be left on the tree for decades or even centuries.

> The development of the steam engine, rather than being a story of the Torricellian vacuum science unlocking a new technology, is instead just like that of textile machinery, signalling systems, and any number of other “ideas behind their time.” The rate at which such inventions appear is really down to the number of people applying themselves to improvement, and the strange-seeming delays are down to there so often being so few. When only a handful of people are inventors, is it really any wonder that the circumstantial setbacks and distractions that prevented a Petty or a Kalthoff can end up delaying things for decades?

The Greeks made a sort of "toy" that spins when a fire boiled water. It's almost a shame that no one took it a step further. Imagine ancient Greece and Rome entering a steam age in the 1st or 2nd century.

It is a toy. It is not efficient in first place and how it works doesn't actually produce much torque. Or likely power either.

Water power with something like Egyptian screws might have been better solution.

> It is a toy

Exactly. It was basically a kettle on an axle, with two spouts, causing it to spin as the water boiled off. It had no valves so couldn't build up enough pressure to do usable work. It couldn't be reloaded with water when operating. The overall concept was constrained by the limited metal working skills of the era, which weren't up to making reliable high-pressure vessels.

The development of usable pistons for steam engines followed centuries of experience gained making cannons and associated ammunition, which slowly provided the skills to make metal tubes that fitted and could hold pressure without themselves exploding.

Though note, from the post, that there were some applications of stationary aeolipiles with their spouts directed at vanes to do some light mechanical work - things like turning roasting spits and grinding pigments. All known throughout the fourteenth through to the seventeenth centuries, if not earlier, though it's unclear how widely any of them were adopted.

It is in the post!

Here on HN I read about the theory, that one of the main reasons that the time of the steam engines came, was the rise of the cannon. Over generations, every king wanted to have the best cannons as that translated into power - and once you can build a cannon, you can build something that can contain high pressures and give that pressure a direction. In other words, to take that toy further, they would have also had to greatly improve their metallurgy first. Otherwise a smart greek inventor would have just created spectacular (and dangerous) booms, but nothing that could reliable do more work, than a ordinary slave.

Hmm, I don't think Savery's engine would have required that - it's just a copper vessel, and the pipes were often even made of wood. I've often seen the cannon theory applied to piston-using engines, but that was the next stage with Papin and Newcomen and beyond (hopefully our chapter II)

Not an expert, but apperently this design was hard even with the modern tech_

"Second, the next stage of the process required high-pressure steam to force the water up, and the pump's soldered joints were barely capable of withstanding high pressure steam and needed frequent repair."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery

I see that but we know the Romans had lead pipes. I'm curious how much steam those pipes could withstand. Perhaps enough to get some sort of rotary tool.

Regardless, it's a fun hypothetical to think of an ancient Roman and Greek steam age.

That's Hero's aeolipile, mentioned near the end of the article.

Most scholars tend to agree that Rome [1] was nowhere near an Industrial Revolution. One take on it is here: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus..., but the general tl;dr is that a) even if you backported a fully working Watt steam engine to Classical Antiquity and they could manufacture it, there's nothing that they could use it for [2], and b) the Roman economy isn't really in a shape that encourages the kind of industrial innovation feedback loop you see in the Industrial Revolution.

[1] Side note: at the time the aeolipile is developed, there is no independent Greece; Rome thoroughly conquered all the polities in the Balkans in the 2nd century BC. Classical Greece is largely 5th century BC. The aeolipile dates to 1st century AD, rather late in Roman history.

[2] The historical motivation for the steam engine was of course draining coal mines, and the Romans weren't really using coal in enough quantities to require it. The Industrial Revolution itself was initially jumpstarted with textile production, which Rome was even further behind in--the spinning wheel wasn't developed until after 1000!

You are correct as far as anyone alive today can know. I would just add that there was quite a bit of cultural aversion to non-agricultural enterprises among the senatorial class. Merchants and tradesmen were looked down upon. This was made worse as many skilled laborers in the city of Rome were actually slaves.

My favorite of these has to be the temple door trick. A simple weight and counterweight setup with a literal twist.

Mine too! When Matt first showed us a draft I was amazed - never thought it would look so smooth.

oh wow. That makes me wonder... could we make a steam engine using the power of the sun that heats up water to boil into a fan that generates electricity, that then catches the water and flows down running a hydro generator so you get energy on the way up and on the way down. I wonder what kind of efficiency that would have compared to modern day solar? probably laughable

What you’re missing here is pressure.

Steam turbines work not because of steam alone, you can fill a room with steam insert a turbine and nothing happens. To get them to spin you need higher pressure on the input side of the turbine than the output. If you want to have steam go up a shaft that’s going to increase the pressure on output side and thus reduce the amount of energy generated by the turbine.

Yes, it's the difference in pressure/heat that is exploited, as Sadi Carnot noted (by analogising the steam engine to a water-wheel exploiting a fall of water, treating it as a "fall of heat")

It's not efficient at all. Without condensing the solar input, there simply isn't enough energy to heat the water fast enough to create enough steam to push a fan.

However, what you have described is similar to the basic design of closed-loop industrial solar thermal systems: they concentrate solar power to heat a liquid or other medium and use the heat (or heat differential) conventionally (see, for example the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility near Las Vegas).

It's possible, but solar thermal has proven to be less efficient than photovoltaic at capturing energy from the sun. The only advantage is that you can coast on stored heat after the sun sets to keep making energy. Other than some pilot plants solar thermal is going nowhere.

Condensing the steam down and trying to extract energy from the condensation flowing downhill is orders of magnitude away from being worth it. The sun is boiling a few gallons of water per minute at best, while hydroelectric systems are measured millions of gallons per minute.

Thermal solar energy is a thing. The important part is concentrating the energy with mirrors to reach high temperatures and pressures. They use solar turbines because those are more efficient than steam engines. My understanding is that the efficiency is close to solar panels.

Solar thermal isn't used because solar panels are much cheaper and simpler. In world without cheap solar panels, solar thermal would be preferred form of solar energy, and could be done with advanced technology.

This is an awesome point related to the post I just made as a sibling comment. Solar energy is cheap! The sun blasts us with whatever crazy number real energy folks know by heart. The issue is after we collect it, how do we move it?

If you’ve read Project Hail Mary, the sci-fi part isn’t collecting energy, its the lossless transport.

Hopefully that’s not a spoiler.

A major issue with solar thermal is clouds and dust. PV works fine with indirect light from a dusty panel, but to concentrate sunlight you need a clear sky and clean surfaces. Next you need 2 axis solar tracking to get high grade heat or a complex trough system with a separate working fluid and complex plumbing/heat loss. Next you lose energy trying to concentrate sunlight and from the heat engine itself.

In the end it seems like it should be cheap but nobody got it anywhere lose to PV pricing.

What is concentrated solar thermal?

    Concentrated solar thermal (CST) is a solar energy technology that uses sunlight to generate heat.

    Spain is the world leader in the use of CST to produce electricity, with around 2.3 GW in operation, followed by the United States with around 1.7 GW in operation.

https://arena.gov.au/renewable-energy/concentrated-solar-the...

    The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has announced it has approved $65 million in funding to Vast Solar to construct VS1, a first-of-a-kind 30 MW / 288 MWh concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in Port Augusta, South Australia.

    ARENA’s funding for VS1 is conditional upon the project reaching financial close, which is targeted to occur in late 2023. VS1 is expected to take two years to build with commercial operations commencing late 2025.

    CSP uses mirrors to concentrate and capture heat from the sun in solar receivers, with high temperature heat transferred via sodium and stored in molten salt. The stored heat can then be used to heat water to create steam to power a turbine and produce electricity, or the heat can also be used directly to decarbonise some industrial processes.

    One of the benefits of CSP is that the captured heat can be stored cost-effectively for long periods with little loss of energy. This means that CSP can be used to generate electricity or provide heat on demand, including overnight.

https://arena.gov.au/news/one-step-closer-towards-australias...

    Vast's modular CSP v3.0 technology has been proven at its 1.1 MW, grid-synchronised demonstration project in Australia and will be used in a growing pipeline of zero-carbon power projects globally.

https://www.vast.energy/about-technology

We could, but it would certainly be less efficient than other approaches. I haven’t seen it brought up recently but there’s a simple quote that makes it easy to evaluate any sort of energy related discussion based on the laws of thermodynamics:

“You can’t win, you can’t break even, and you can’t quit the game.” - C.P. Snow [1] (No idea if that’s the correct attribution, I heard it from a professor 20 years ago)

My personal shorthand for this is to focus on the efficiencies of energy transformation and transport. Converting or moving energy means we lose some fraction of the total energy. All we can do is minimize that fraction.

The main point being that with that mental framework, I can easily assume that your posited approach won’t be more efficient than a solar panel or some other process with fewer transformation steps because each step magnifies energy loss inefficiencies.

Basically, the entirety of the energy debate is two things: How can we harvest energy cheaply and move it with minimal waste.

This is the basis for the whole room temp superconductor story that captured a bunch of our nerd imaginations, what happens if you get super close to zero energy loss while moving electrons?

Also, one more thing to keep in mind is constraints. Your proposed solution may be way more efficient by some metric if we change the constraints. For instance, my brain mostly goes to transportation which is transport and storage with immediate demand requirements. However, if our requirements were different along the lines of “lets store as much energy as possible over months, to slowly release it over months”, inefficiencies of scale change things. Then maybe slowly moving water uphill during summer while releasing slowly during winter is a valid thing to consider [2].

[1] https://gohighbrow.com/laws-of-thermodynamics/

[2] https://medium.com/drax/how-to-turn-a-mountain-into-a-giant-...

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