Twilight of the Steam Age, Part 1: Internal Combustion
technicshistory.com
technicshistory.com
Also, not much on steel. It's amazing that the steam-powered industrial revolution was built with iron, not steel. Early engines had very low operating pressures. Some even just condensed steam and ran below atmospheric pressure. Attempts to operate at higher pressures resulted in leaks at best and boiler explosions at worst. The materials were just not good enough. Otto's 1862 engine would run for only a few minutes before breaking itself. Some later engines used the power stroke to lift a heavy weight, and as the weight came back down, it powered the output through a ratchet. Using that big burst of power from the power stroke needed much better materials. Otto finally got a cylinder-crank-flywheel engine working in 1876. Here's a working Otto engine of that original design, cranking out 7 horsepower.[1] Note all the shiny machined steel parts. That design would not work in iron.
Today, crankshafts, main bearings, pistons, piston rods, and piston rings are solved problems. It took about half a century to get all those parts to work reliably, and a full century before engines outlasted the rest of the vehicle.
Internal combustion pressures are higher, and Diesels have far higher pressures than gasoline engines. The materials problems are tougher. Without strong steel, Diesels are hopeless.
The cylinder walls could be very thick.
This section confused me. I thought it was illiberal conservatives that were teamed up with big business and capital against the small time craftsmen. What does defeating the liberals have to do with pushing back against capital?
"In industry conservatism could afford to do more than merely outliberalize the liberals. It bid boldly for the support of the urban proletariat by reintroducing corporate regulation of production. Through the association of an economic with a political reaction it hoped to create a mass following for the policy of counterrevolution. Hence the royalist victory in Prussia was followed by the promulgation of the two emergency measures of February 9 revitalizing the atrophied guild system." (etc., it goes on to cite similar post-1848 regulations imposed by other German states.)