The origins of the steam engine (2023) | Hacker News Reader

The origins of the steam engine (2023)

blog.rootsofprogress.org

105 pointsbpierre19 comments

did that thing where I assumed it was a technical overview of how Valve developed the Steam store. This is the second time I've done it and it probably wont be the last

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-birth-of-windows-gaming

Ha! Same.. but I also just got done reading this..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41460276

I did the exact same thing.

So the classic Zelda & Co puzzle to open a door by starting a fire on an altar it is entirely possible with ancient technology.

Yep! The ancient Greeks had essentially a really basic steam engine. It is not really a device that you can get much useful work out of though. It isn’t 100% known why they made them, people have speculated that they just did it as a novelty or conversation piece.

Actually it seems like a totally plausible idea to put one in a temple and use it to impress people, which is pretty close to the Zelda application (of course in the game, temples are also puzzles).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

I always wonder, with articles like this, what really drove these innovations. Like, is it oversimplifying the socioeconomic pressures that drove or impeded these innovations? How did things like labor shortages or resource needs slow down and speed up the development of steam tech. How many parallel steam innovations stalled out or never took hold in other places in the world?

I guess what I'm really wondering is, is this an example of a narrative fallacy where we summarize a chaotic, messy process with a highly uncertain outcome as being linear and inevitable?

A good way to address this is to ask "why did the Roman Empire not have an industrial revolution?" Bret Devereaux already did a great job on this[0], but the short-ish answer goes like this:

Britain had basically been laid barren from trees (other areas of Europe had seen similar instances), but they still needed to heat houses. With firewood scares, and coal basically lying on the ground, particularly in Yorkshire, coal was an easy alternative.

And so Britain became dependent on coal for heating, but eventually the coal was not simply to be lifted off the ground, it now had to be dug up from mines. Mines weren't exactly a new thing, but these mines were huge comparatively, and the labour required was thus much larger than usual, and that informed the idea of using a steam engine to bring up the coal from the mine (after all, the coal was right there).

[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

Just to clarify, the initial use for steam engines at coal mines was to pump out water. (Same source as above)

An important point, because they then put that water into canals dug to the towns that needed the coal. This made coal even cheaper and let towns grow larger to house the workforces of new larger factories.

The origins of the steam engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38463195 - Nov 2023 (44 comments)

Hero's door-opener doesn't need pipes and a bottle and a bucket: the expanding air could have moved the rope by filling a rubber bladder. Except the Greeks didn't have rubber. (Therefore if they had had rubber, we'd have no steam engines?) The noise-maker could similarly have sent air through its organ directly, I'm not sure what's wrong with that, it doesn't seem to use hydraulics to increase the rate of flow, maybe some evening-out occurs that improves the sound?

they didn't have rubber bladders, but the reason rubber bladders are called rubber bladders is that, before the vulcanization of rubber was known to scientists, they used actual bladders, from slaughtered animals. but those are a bit more fragile and couldn't have pulled much of a rope without a bag or something

i suspect the organ model is wrong. there are a lot of ways to use hydraulics to get a precise flow rate, oscillating flow, etc., that heron talks about

Ancient Europeans had the sulphur, just no rubber trees.

Ancient Mesoamericans vulcanized rubber (e.g. to make the ōlli for Ollama) by extracting latex from the Panama rubber tree and mixing it with moonflower juice:

https://news.mit.edu/1999/rubber-0714

Those balls (which were solid rubber, very heavy, and deadly) are the only Aztec use of rubber we ever hear about. The other uses mentioned are more interesting:

> they identified a number of ancient hollow rubber figurines, a band made from rubber that secured a stone axe head to its wooden handle and numerous small rubber balls. The 16th-century documents also mentioned that Mesoamerican people made rubber-soled sandals and rubber-tipped hammers and drumsticks.

I mean, phrases like "ancient hollow rubber figurines" and "a stone axe head secured by a rubber band" are delightfully incongruous.

the balls predate the aztecs by many centuries too

I think you could also achieve this using a water-sealed steam gasometer instead of a bladder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder#Water-sealed_gas_ho...

I like to imagine ancient Romans using steam grenades or a siege using boilers pressurized to explode since they had no gunpowder.

“Sounds gimmicky. Let’s use the metal for armor and swords instead” — Romans, probably.

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