Howard Hughes modified a 1925 Doble steam car to reach 133 MPH (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Howard Hughes modified a 1925 Doble steam car to reach 133 MPH (2022)

hemmings.com

77 pointspalmfacehn51 comments

I'm amazed that the car stayed on the ground. Both Stanley and Doble made steam cars that had more power than the suspension could handle. A speed record attempt:

"As the Steamer started its run, it was silent except for a low, soft whistle. This rose to a faint whine, and a jetlike white stream flowed from the tail of the car. Soon the head of the driver could hardly be seen in the blur of speed. The car passed the 100 m.p.h. mark and surged up to 197 m.p.h. As it was about to touch 200 m.p.h., however, the racer hit a slight bump on the beach. The light car took off like a wingless glider, soared for about 100 feet at a height of 10 feet, then crashed to the cement-hard sand in an explosion of steam and flames. The driver was flung clear, badly injured but not dead."[1]

[1] https://www.americanheritage.com/stanleys-and-their-steamer

Apparently an urban legend, although the article is not suuuuper clear about it:

> These stories persist to this day, although all are false. The truth is that the Stanley Steamer was constructed in such a way that it was impossible for it to blow up.

I'm no expert, but I think it's fair to call a boiler failure an explosion. you're going to have a ton of steam pressure in a confined space. Not like a gasoline or dinamite explosion, but still a hell of a boom.

although maybe it did have a special emergency release valve that was sealed with a weaker metal or something so it couldn't get enough pressure to catastrophically fail.

I'm skeptical of this claim at face value "impossible for it to blow up" but people are smart. it's probably true in a bunch of contexts.

Except Doble cars don't have a traditional boiler. They have a monotube boiler, which only holds a minuscule amount of water at any given time and thus has much less stored energy that could go boom.

oh! that's amazing!

I don't know much about steam engines, but more today, Thank you.

This is going to sound more snarky than I mean it but... You're not skeptical of the part where they're going close to 200mph on a beach?

Not the beach part, they range from soft sand to hard pack tidal flats:

    MADMAX Race Team set fastest ever speed at Pendine sands in a 1200hp Porsche Turbo @ 210.33mph

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNgkXqedYr4

https://www.pendinesands.org/history/land-speed-records/

... but I'm highly skeptical of 200 mph in a steamer in 1907.

The Doble weighs about 4 times as much ;)

anybody have diagrams of this engine?

Picture https://roarington.com/media-house/directories/cars/doble_e_...

This video opens the hood, and shows cross sections of engine. And is technical focus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtqVvS8iP9w

This Jay Leno video is actually good. Has cutaway of the engine to show the moving parts.

https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo?t=701

There really isn't much to the engine of a steam engine. It's the firebox/burner and boiler where all the really hard and interesting stuff happens.

There is some interesting engineering in a compound double acting engine[1], especially one like the Doble which runs on superheated steam. There's a large temperature gradient between the "hot side" and the "cold side" where the hot side is something like 1250°F+. IIRC they had to be careful about getting the correct cast iron alloys, and the bores had to be slightly tapered. Then there's the valve train, which is totally different from an IC engine but sizing and flow considerations are still really important for efficiency.

Also, your crossheads and bottom end bearings are potentially an area of concern--while rotational speeds are really low by modern engine standards, there's a problem of figuring out how to remove water from the lube oil.

So I'd wager there's still a whole bunch of "interesting" things happening in the Doble engine, and we'd probably have a pretty difficult time building one from scratch today given that reciprocating steam engines haven't been "a thing" in industrial living memory.

[1] For one example of an interesting problem: for a given temperature of inlet steam and desired power output, in a double expansion double-acting compound engine, tell me what size the hot cylinder will be, what size the cold cylinder will be, and what the clearances, rings, etc will be to make it all work efficiently across the operating envelope.

The Doble boiler is so much more interesting than that, though ;)

Almost unique.

It is very cool. I think we'd be mistaken thinking that any of this engineering is "trivial". This was the height of a technology that's largely forgotten, and unforgetting it would be hard work at every turn.

Well the perfection of a steam-powered car was interesting even though technically far too late to matter. Early steam cars were more like steam trains: big boilers that need to be fired an hour before you want to go anywhere and need regular stops to take on water.

In a Doble there technically isn't a boiler as most people think of it; the modern equivalent term might be "steam generator".

The Doble system flashes water to steam almost instantly and on-demand, then uses a condenser to recycle the water. The flame is also not burning continuously, but only when steam is needed. With modern insulation materials the firebox is very efficient with little heat loss and lasts a long time.

This gives the Doble steam car a responsiveness closer to a gas engine, without the need to pre-heat the boiler or continuously refill with water. The fuel system is more flexible too, it can operate on almost any liquid combustible with some adjustment.

By the time the Doble was developed it was too late; gasoline and diesel won.

Part of the problem I think was that each Doble car was basically a one-off. They were expensive, high performance prototypes, not production consumer products. In principle they could have been made more user friendly--in terms of performance specs they were really close to a win (15mpg, powerful, quiet, low water consumption, fast starting) but they were still finicky, high maintenance machines. Higher production numbers could have driven solutions, but the Otto cycle had the advantage there. I wonder if you ran the 1890-1930 experiment 10 times how differently it all might shake out each time.

The part almost no one talks about is how there are tons of cars being sold as early as 1880.

They were just called horseless carriages, and were essentially a small carriage with… an electric motor and batteries. Yup, the original dominant form of car was an EV.

If plethora of designs in search of perfection is an indicator of something of interest, then take a look at the many variations in valve gear design, particularly for locomotives, which needed to operate reasonably efficiently over a wide range of speeds, gradients and loads.

Even more so, consider the many attempts at making non-turbine rotary steam engines, wonderfully documented here: http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/rotaryengines/rotaryeng...

My personal favorite is the Tower spherical engine: http://douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/tower/tower.htm

Unlike most of the designs here, this one was built and even put to a little practical use.

> My personal favorite is the Tower spherical engine...

when i first saw the static diagram, i thought wow that looks like it is much more complicated than this 2-d diagram lets on. then later down the page i saw the animation showing the 3-d complexity... mind blowing.

>> There really isn't much to the engine of a steam engine.

Beware the train spotters. I hear a hundred steam-powered keyboards ready to rave about the intricacies of reverser gears.

Oh, I’m intimately aware. Just pointing my out that what most people call a steam “engine”… maybe only 10% of that is the actual engine. In something like a car especially. The actual engine is just a double acting cylinder and a few slide valves.

I think the negative response to this type of post is because you can take any field and do a reductive statement "It's Just XYZ". There is a hundred years of steam engine design "It's Just some valves".

It's just a way to either minimize someone's field, or way to show you only have a cursory understanding. Rarely does someone have a deep knowledge of a field and then also frame an overview of the field as "Just some bits".

Nuclear Physics is Just smashing atoms.

Biology is Just some Cells. Or Just looking through a microscope.

Computer Science is Just the application of And/OR statements. Or Just Boolean logic.

Internal Combustion Engines are just little explosion's in a cylinder.

F1 Cars are just an engine + battery + some wings.

Edit:

Honestly. I'm guilty of doing this too. I've "Just Learned" how people take it so have learned to adapt phrasing things that don't insult people.

That Doble engine (or its technology anyway) was used in the Besler steam powered plane. Here is a video of its flight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8

On Douglas Self's museum of retro-tech, of course:

http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/steamplane/stea...

Pshaw. Glenn Curtis went 136 mph in 1907 on what looks a lot like a big Schwinn bicycle with a V-8 of his own design.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtiss_V-8_motorcycle

Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20100906140855/http://www.nasm.s...

Yeah but he needed a motor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Minthorn_Murphy#Mile-a...

> The 1925 Doble Steam Car could out-accelerate the mighty Model J Duesenberg of 1930, doing 0 to 75 mph in just 5 seconds, with its engine turning over at less than 1,000 rpm...

wha? certainly better than my hatchback

Lots of torque. 1000lb-ft of it according to the article, which is far more than most passenger cars and roughly what a large semitrailer truck or bus would have.

1000 lb-ft available from a standing start. Even better than semis, which although get peak torque at low RPMs, still have to get to some rev range (combined with gearing down for those standing starts). I don't fully understand EVs, but afaik that's the only road-going tech today that provides instantly-available torque at any RPM (including near zero, the 'standing start').

https://archive.is/NaCGK

Was the steam produced by coal? Kinda hard to imagine stoking the boiler at 130MPH.

Fuel-oil (Kerosene).

Howard Hughes was also fucking nuts.

I knew a Microsoft millionaire who retired at 30. By 35 he was involuntarily committed, and nearly broke.

I knew him because he threw great parties, and we got invited to one and my gf and he became friends. These were not rich people parties, they were upper middle class parties with zany themes, like alcoholic waffles. He was always doing something that surprised you. It made a certain kind of sense but it was things you would never think of.

Over time, the surprises got less humorous and more troubling. Toward the end he had a manipulative girlfriend turned unrequited love who was sponging off of him, and his grip on reality was slipping. At one point he said he was trying to make himself insane, and I guess he succeeded. His mother got power of attorney when he was down to his condo and $85k in today’s dollars.

Thinking about that after, and my own family’s experience with decline after retirement, I thought that the regulating effect of going to work every day was probably doing him a lot of good. I feel like the same thing happened with Hughes as well. He just holed up in his mansion and unraveled.

"my own family’s experience with decline after retirement, "

For three generations, everyone who has retired early in my family has thrived. One even retired extraordinarily late at 80 and is still doing well.

My father has just retired at 90.

My father died a few years ago at age 89. Timber logger, driving a cat at a work site, took a tumble down a hill.

Sad to lose him, of course, but it was inevitable that he would have worked until he died. Probably worked as a logger for nearly 75 years.

I remember when I was a kid, he came home with a broken leg, splinted by some coworkers. He insisted on having dinner with us before going to the emergency room and getting a cast.

I have a strong work ethic, but I still feel like an irresponsible juvenile when I compare myself to my dad.

That generation has some serious scars from the Great Depression...

He is a scientist, he just liked working. He is also more of a child of WWII than the depression.

>> Howard Hughes was also fucking nuts.

And also basically a criminal by today's standards. If a 19yo was caught in a Ferrari trying to break a record on a beach, or anywhere other than a closed race track on private land, that 19yo would be lucky to ever drive again. And if that 19yo hurt anyone, possibly a decade or more in prison.

That feels a little unfair. Every driver in the 1920s would be be breaking today's laws. They were exploring a new technology when it wasn't clear yet what the rules should be. The laws at the time (inherited from horse-drawn vehicles) only set speed limits in specific places like cities and bridges. You could ride your horse as fast as you dared anywhere else, and the same with cars.

Saw a video on YouTube the other day that mentioned an early Hollywood movie that killed three extras filming a flood scene. If I have my timelines right that would have been approximately contemporary with Hughes.

The value of a human life seemed to drop pretty low during the Depression, but it wasn’t that great before then either. Unfortunately an expectation of safety is a rather recent development, one that Alec Baldwin is learning about right now.

The armorer in that case was extraordinarily negligent, having a loaded weapon on set at all. After what happened to Brandon Lee I can't imagine any movie production allowing live rounds any where near the set - and he was killed by a blank round!

I am still sore about that. Some parts of that movie are so good. Give me a less rapey cut and it would be top ten.

It has Ernie Hudson (you can't go wrong with Ernie Hudson), that dude from The Warriors ("come out and play-yay"), The Candyman, the photojournalist from Nope, a Coen Brothers regular, an actress from True Romance, Bad Boys, Unforgiven, Wall Street and Fatal Attraction. And Oh my god that's horrible, how didn't I know that Brandon's fiancée worked on the movie?? And apparently she agrees with you.

"Twenty eight years ago, I was shattered by the shock and grief of losing the love of my life, Brandon Lee, so senselessly. My heart aches again now for Halyna Hutchins' husband and son, and for all those left in the wake of this avoidable tragedy," Hutton tells PEOPLE.

> The value of a human life seemed to drop pretty low during the Depression, but it wasn’t that great before then either.

Very true. Every 10 stories of building height had an expected death rate attached to it. Same for every extra 100ft span of bridge.

When the Brooklyn Bridge was built and workers were being crippled or killed by the bends down in the caissons... the solution was already known from research over a decade before. But we're not gonna pay people to not work (decompression time) so they just let people get hurt.

None of those things were considered very newsworthy or a significant problem to be prevented.

I don't know why I am surprised to hear the BB foundations were deep enough to cause that issue. It's clearly a deep water channel.

Beware assuming that the bends requires great depth as a causal factor; it is possible to get them as shallow as 10 feet.

There are a lot of factors that come into play.

It was Noahs Ark (1928) Not HH

I think you’ll find if you read what I wrote again that I didn’t say he had anything to do with it.

(I had in fact forgotten he made movies, not just consumed them voraciously)

A criminal of the most terrible kind. They should have locked him up and threw away the key. They should have confiscated the car and locked that up too to keep some other potential daredevil from driving that murderous machine. I bet it didn't even have seat belts.

In other news, the Wright brothers didn't have a pilot's license and operated without FAA permits for an airfield!

A number of people attempted to achieve speed records on beaches, and not all survived. And this wasn't Ocean City, Maryland, in a modern July. The local authorities would have had something to say if anyone, even a millionaire (when a million was a lot) had tried this on an occupied stretch of beach.

The crime is fun. The sentence is death.

Sounds vaguely Great Gatsbyish; you should write it up into a story.

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