I will be deleting this post in a short while, but I wanted to be sure that everyone was aware that if it weren’t for the hard work and determination of one:
/u/JohnnyCanuck
-this error in historical accuracy would have been forced upon millions of lemmy users.
So, as a result of their firm belief that all showerthoughts must be historically accurate and factually correct, as mentioned, it will be removed.
One can only shudder to think on the devastation caused by such a glaring oversight…
The consequences would be devastating.
The aeolipile wasn’t really a stream engine. I’ve played with modern versions, and you can stop the spin with your hand. Not a bare hand mind, because it’s rather hot. But a cloth or a glove is fine.
These toys have zero power to do any useful work.
This is why an actual steam engine uses a reciprocating piston. Because doing it that way builds pressure and thus power.
I’ve enjoyed both sides of the conversation you’ve been having with XeroxCool.
But here, here’s an “alternate tech tree”.
Take aeliopile.
Scale it up a bit, make it out of a bit stronger alloy.
… Fire it with a bellows, or a kiln.
Alexandria? ~40AD?
The Romans were making a crude form of steel for swords.
I think you can fairly easily get that rpm and torque up.
Oh, but the joints, the rotation points will heat up! It will deform!
So have some dudes dousing it with a mixture of olive oil and water fairly regularly.
Shit, set up a plumbing system, do it with the dudes turning Archimedes screws.
… this is the civilization that had construction cranes, invented a self healing form of cement that we literally only figured out the actual recipe for within the last few years.
I think its entirely plausible that if somebody had just managed to nudge this spinning screaming ball just a bit conceptually further, it could have snowballed.
I can stop any household fan with my hand. That doesn’t mean they’re not real machines. Scale of a device has nothing to do with whether it’s design is real or not. Is a mechanical watch not a real machine because Big Ben is so much bigger? Is a motorized bicycle not a real machine because trucks exist? That steam engine is absolutely a steam engine. It uses mechanical principles to induce motion. Being weak doesn’t disqualify it. Alter the jets, raise the temperature, link 10 of them together, whatever and you’ll have something more difficult to stop.
It was a machine, it was not an engine. At no scale could it be used to power anything. And it would actually be dangerous to scale things too much. We know because people tried.
The aeolipile was a toy. And yes, toys can showcase interesting physics. I owned several of them as a child, and own a few today as, arguably, an adult.
Still, the thing about invention is that it isn’t a flash of inspiration and a new thing appears, it’s more of a slog of learning new things and applying old things in new ways.
Most often in history the most striking inventions were new ways of getting the raw resources, or improving the quality of those resources.
You can’t have a steam engine without a way to consistently produce steel.
What’s the minimum torque and power that you use to delineate between toy and machine? What were the specs on the original? Not your desktop toy, but the original.