Steam's Last Stand
technicshistory.com
technicshistory.com
That said, here's a lovely video from YouTuber "Aging Wheels" about a (working!) scale model of a British steam truck: https://youtu.be/PFKa8K9qZBQ
(Just a joke about the LORA complaints that always come up)
See: "TVCABO" vs "NOS" ["We"]. "TMN" vs "Meo" ["mine", mispelled].
Maybe if we can get nuclear cars, we can go back to steam turbines! :-)
so 'The steam car was an inflection point where steam power, for so long an engine driving technological progress forward, instead yielded the right-of-way to a brash newcomer. Steam began to look like relic of the past, reduced to watching from the shoulder as the future rushed by' is utterly clueless
(so is contrasting steam engines with 'combustion engines'. steam engines are combustion engines, except for the ones in nuclear power stations; they're external combustion engines, while the onboard engines that commonly run cars are internal combustion engines. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion_engine)
so the overall framing of the article is wrong, but that isn't its main thesis. its main thesis is that steamers were slow to start up and complicated to run, and then the matthew effect took over. i don't know enough about early automotive history to evaluate this thesis, but an obvious alternative hypothesis is that only henry ford knew what the fuck he was doing, so everybody else (including gm, which he had sort of founded before he founded ford) copied him once he outsold them ten to one in the 01910s
> every coal and nuclear electric power station, and a good fraction of the oil ones and part of each combined-cycle gas power station, runs on steam.
I'm aware of this. This is written in the context of the cultural decline of steam power as something people think and dream and write science fiction about, not its physical elimination from the world. See this post [0], particularly the last section, "The Twilight of Steam."
> so is contrasting steam engines with 'combustion engines'. steam engines are combustion engines
I'm aware of this also. But internal combustion engine is a mouthful, so I elected to shorten it, as described this post [1]
> but an obvious alternative hypothesis is that only henry ford knew what the fuck he was doing, so everybody else (including gm, which he had sort of founded before he founded ford) copied him once he outsold them ten to one in the 01910s
This can't be correct, because internal combustion cars left steam cars in the dust well before the 1910s; it was obvious to most people that internal combustion was winning by 1903.
[0]: https://technicshistory.com/2024/04/25/twilight-of-the-age-o... [1]: https://technicshistory.com/2024/03/21/twilight-of-the-steam...
i think there were a lot of things that were obviously true to people about motorcars in 01903 that turned out to be false; to mention a few, the ridiculous level of danger involved in traveling over fifteen miles an hour, the impossibility of them ever becoming as widespread as horses (due to their overwhelming mechanical complexity), and the utter impracticality of electric cars, though that one took quite a while to change. hindsight is 20:20
maybe if henry ford had still been building steam cars in 01899 when he founded the company that eventually became cadillac (acquired by gm in 01909), the first decade of the twentieth century would have seen the kinds of advances in low-thermal-mass heat exchangers and flash boilers that ford instead had to make in areas such as transmissions and the engine block. but maybe that wouldn't have been enough, or maybe ford's mind was better suited to mechanical and industrial engineering than to thermodynamics. maybe the inherently larger thermal mass of a steam engine doomed it for this application in a non-path-dependent way, much as there are no diesel motorcycles
you probably know more than i do about the relevant history, so you're more likely to be right
I doubt anyone other than your good self is going to be confused by the differentiation between "steam engine" and "combustion engine" tbh.
as for the pedantry, though, guilty as charged
there is a shorter term for 'internal combustion engine' that doesn't have a conflicting standard definition; you could call them 'explosion engines', which is what we call them in spanish (because 'motor de combustión interna' is even longer). sometimes this term is limited to otto-cycle engines (as in https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_de_explosi%C3%B3n) but logically should include diesel engines as well
in addition to lacking a conflicting standard definition, 'explosion engines' has the advantage that, like 'dynamic programming', it makes the subject sound more exciting
"It’s an idiosyncrasy to which we are dedicated."
* Corrosive
* Heavy
* Does not lubricate
* Huge heat capacity, i.e. you get cooked if even a little bit of it gets on you)
It's all tradeoffs, but responsiveness matters. And in terms of responsiveness steam < diesel < gas < electric. There's a reason both diesel and gas have long coexisted: sometimes you need more responsiveness, and sometimes more constant power. Steam was just too far from acceptable for high speed responsive output.
"Little and Often", a training film for steam locomotive fireman, covers this.[2]
This is the source of the phrase "running out of steam".
This is the full startup procedure for a Stanley Steamer.[3] Shows what all the gauges, levers, valves, and pumps do. Cold startup takes 20 minutes, is very tricky, and if botched the vehicle will be seriously damaged. Nice looking car, though. Pinstriping on the leaf springs!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJlXB965SAQ
https://youtube.com/v/rUg_ukBwsyo?t=1012
Now admittedly the doble was a high end luxury item, But you can see how it could be possible to have a every mans steam car.
1. Response time is already great, You have a reservoir of instantly available energy in the form of steam pressure ready to go whenever you need it. look up steam engines slipping their wheels, in fact one big problem with steam is that it is much easier to apply too much energy. Same problem with electric. they need a good torque management system to deliver only the power that is needed.
2. The reservoir response time is too long, Probably not a problem, that is the whole point of having a reservoir, but if it is, make it faster, fire tube boilers, more surface area, etc, a solvable problem. Consider the response time of the reservoir of an electric car. it is far worse than any steam engine, yet you say it has a faster response time.
No the real reason we don't use steam cars is that the engines are more expensive than internal combustion engines without all that much benefit.
Also consider how complex a thing you are proposing vs a gas and electric simple solution of "more input gives more output now."
https://youtube.com/v/rUg_ukBwsyo?t=1012
That said, as neat as steam cars are, there is a reason internal combustion engines won. Probably because they are smaller, lighter and most importantly cheaper.
A modern steam-powered vehicle could be based on a steam turbine creating electric power, with a battery and electric traction motor (effectively, a series hybrid). This is how many modern power plants work (coal, gas, nuclear) and would be much more efficient than classic steam engines, by targeting an optimal, constant RPM and torque and providing regenerative braking. It would have plenty of peak power and responsiveness, exceeding gas vehicles and similar to a fully electric vehicle.
But even with the high level of efficiency and performance that this configuration would allow, it's likely a non-starter for environmental reasons, unless you can use a much cleaner fuel than coal?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=electric+car+fi...
In reality we as a species are actually pretty good at handling risk. Look at gasoline cars those infernal firebombs on wheels ended up being ubiquitous.
Engineering solutions have to exist; we can not just will them into being. See also "why our electric cars have not improved in battery density by a factor of magnitude in the past 10 years".
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles store highly explosive H2 in tanks at up to 700 bar / 10,000 psi. That’s at least 20X more pressure than any steam engine!
First electric cars existed already in 19th century by the way.
How? That would have required massive investment not backed by any rational reason.
Only way ICE cars wouldn’t have won is if governments had decided to ban them, which would have been absurd.
(this is a bad relativity joke)
Electric engines are a power consumer.
What you are saying here makes no sense.