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.
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.