Not just in terms of presentation, but also quality.
Amazing!
And 100% inspired by Bartosz's articles - he is the first line in the credits section.
And each of those could be expanded to much more than the page you already made.
Things are almost always a lot more complicated than they seem. It seems so simple -- "water + heat makes steam, steam pushes piston, back and forth motion makes rotary motion" -- but it is really anything but.
RE: safety valve, pressure gauge, etc. - yes, there is definitely another article to be built here :). Another fun aspect is safely starting the machine, warming it up appropriately, flushing water from the system, and the bigger engines even had a small engine to get the wheel turning.
> I wasn't sure how it was possible for a leather belt to transmit so much power.
Friction is also one of the main reasons why rivets work. And why ropes work and why knots don't unwind and lashings work and, and, and ... and of course also nails and screws and worm drives. Friction is awesome.
> Another fun aspect is safely starting the machine
I saw them start this little beaty more than a decade ago:
https://dieselhouse.dk/en/videnom/#BW2000
It was not exactly a quick and simple job.
Building things up from first principles, and ideally also tactile / visceral examples, is my absolute favourite genre of explanations. Alas, a rarefied genre, because it is so much harder to do well (without doing disservice to the learner's intellect and ability) than expert talking to (presumed) expert. So thanks for contributing to it.
People like George Polya [0], Richard Feynman [1], Grace Hopper [2] are exemplars of this tradition.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0gbw-Ur_do
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ
(And I too try in my own meagre way through my blog and source code, albeit it's all plain text because visual explainers, animated ones that too are ridiculously difficult. So I have some idea of how much of a labour of love your piece is. <Claps hands, Whistles, Doffs hat>.)
The key thing to understand about early steam engine technology is that they didn't have steel. Good steel in quantity wasn't available until the Bessemer converter around 1880. The converter itself is simple. It took about 10,000 melts to get the metallurgy right, and analytical chemistry to get consistent ingredient mixes.
Without steel, the early engines were cast or wrought iron. So everything was very low pressure, or blew up. That's why "atmospheric" engines such as Newcomen's were built. That doesn't use steam pressure at all. It just uses condensing steam to create a partial vacuum so atmospheric pressure can push the piston. The technology got stuck there for 75 years.
Higher pressure engines made of iron were tried. They blew up frequently at first. This led to a useful institution, The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, founded in 1866.[1] They still exist, owned by Munich Re. Hartford Steam Boiler had a tough approach to insurance. They'd insure risky things such as steamboats, but only after their inspectors had inspected them. Their insurance policies gave them the right to inspect at any time, which they used. The usual arrangement was that they inspected something, produced a list of things which had to be fixed, and came back for a second inspection after the fixes. Only then did they provide coverage. Steamboats mostly stopped blowing up.
(Today, Hartford Steam Boiler also sells business interruption insurance against cyberattacks, and even AI liability insurance. They probably still inspect first. That may be the good path to AI safety - liability lawyers suing for damages on one side, and an insurance company into tough inspections on the other.)
Great point on steel not being an option, I should have mentioned that.
RE: Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection - cool, thanks for the details!
This is impressive work!
For other animations I put together a style guide and worked together with Fable to build them.
No, don't do that. Because the pressure of the atmosphere isn't constant. It varies with weather and how high you are.
Instead use Pascal (Pa) or Hectopascal (hPA). I really pays back to use SI units for physical things. Suddenly you have formulas without weird constants, like 1 Pa = 1 N/m^2
It's a sad thing that new articles still propose units that are (since many, many years) outdated: the metric system is from 1793, the SI is from 1960.
BACK then people didn't knew better and used the varying atmosphere as base. But today ?!?!?
1 atm = 101,325 PA
It is not an SI unit but it is widely used and very useful in situations, such as this, where pressure relative to atmospheric pressure is relevant.