Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

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. these are still the majority of the electric power grid. so all those electric cars you see on the road, as well as the streetlights above them and the factories they were built in, are powered primarily by steam. it's just coupled to them through wires instead of driveshafts

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

Author here. Some of the apparent errors here are due to the fact that this is part of a larger series, more of a book in blog form.

> 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 see, thanks! i still think 'combustion engine' is incorrect terminology. maybe your blog will turn out to be so popular that everyone will adopt your terminology, and it'll just be a pet peeve for the olds like me, like using 'literally' as a figurative intensifier. until then, though, it will make people familiar with the field cringe when they read your posts

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 appreciate the back and forth your comment sparked, very educational, but unrelated to that I would like to know why you precede years with a 0?

https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...

"It’s an idiosyncrasy to which we are dedicated."

In this day and age where we have lots of extra bits to store values, why go with only five digits? We're just kicking the can down the road. I propose we move to at least 12 digit years starting today: May 31, 000000002024

00000000let's 0000000000do 000000000it

> i still think 'combustion engine' is incorrect terminology

I doubt anyone other than your good self is going to be confused by the differentiation between "steam engine" and "combustion engine" tbh.

confusion was not the emotion i was experiencing. it was more like vicarious embarrassment, usually called 'cringe'

This kind of pedantry build on nothing than personal definitions is the worst.

just to clarify, the standard definition of 'combustion engine' includes steam engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion_engine, while it's mcdonald's personal definition of it that doesn't

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

Side note: supercritical CO2 turbines could supplant steam turbines. They could be much more compact. Steam turbines are expensive! I don't know why supercritical CO2 is not more popular so far, the technology has been talked about for 20 years or so and products have existed for over a decade.

that's very interesting! i had only heard about the supercritical pentane turbines, which i don't think you can buy as an off-the-shelf product yet (or possibly ever)

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