August 18, 2016 • 52 mins
One of the coolest things humans have ever figured out is how to use steam as power. It made the Industrial Revolution possible and even today, 88% of America's electricty comes from steam turbines.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there this
stuff you should know? What was that? That was? I
(00:22):
don't know. I don't know a little extra something on top.
I guess little hot sauce. Yeah to Lula. Uh So,
we just got back from our wonderful tour of the
United Kingdom in Ireland and it could not have gone better.
And you may be hearing more about this in the future,
or we may never speak of it again. That's true too.
(00:43):
Oh before we go though, um, before we go, Yeah,
we're still we're just starting out. Before we get started. Um,
I started my own little personal Chuck Charles W. Chuck
Bryant Facebook page as a public figure. Yeah, I've got
one of those two you do. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah,
(01:04):
it's largely neglected. I should probably pay attention to it.
Huh So basically, you say, I have a haunted ghost
house that I feel free to walk by it right now,
and my house is populated by me, and uh go
like the page and I'm gonna be sharing a little
more personal stuff like my opinion on things and sharing music.
(01:25):
I like photos of your bare knees, photos of my knees,
photos of my animals, just a little more stuff like
that because I get yelled at now when I do
anything semi personal stuff. You should know page. Yeah, I
think I'll go and have in mind too. Yeah. So
if you want a piece of me as gross as
that sound, look for Charles W. Chuck Bryan on Facebook
(01:49):
and uh, it's gonna be a party, it is. That's
the logo. Um, I do I neglect my Facebook page,
but I am fairly active on Twitter. Twitter thing. Yeah,
it's a Josh underscore, um underscore Clark, of course it is. Yeah,
(02:11):
that's that. I do the same thing on that though.
It's like I'm a little more opinionated and share more
personal stuff. We're a lot of real human beings exactly.
We don't have to be brand ambassadors. We can take
our sashes off, all right. So that's all for announcements
for me. So, Chuck, have you ever encountered water? Yeah?
(02:39):
So you know that there's three states of matter, and
water is a great demo of these different states, right, Yeah,
I encounter every morning when I washed my horse. Yeah,
well you should share pictures of you washing your horse
on your Facebook page. Um, what's your horse's name? Uh
ganho ganev nice man. There's just a few hundred people
(03:02):
who know what you're talking about. Um. So when you're
washing gancho and that nice water is like coming down
all over his horsey body, it is in its liquid state, right,
And when it's in its liquid liquid state, it's density
is different than when it's in its solid state. It's
more dense in its solid state. E g. Ice r
(03:24):
I E ice. Sorry, But then if you really heated
it up and turn it into steam, it would turn
into water vapor, right, yes, Then then it's in its
gaseous state and it's less dense. Those molecules could not
get further apart. They probably could. So while it's density
is smaller and ice, it actually takes up less space, right,
(03:46):
It's correct. So if you put that water in a
space and you froze it, it would shrink inside the space.
If you expanded it into water vapor, it would take
up more space. And as it takes up more and
more space, it's pressure increases. That's right. And if you
could only be clever enough to figure out a way
to harness that pressure. My friend, you would have harnessed
(04:07):
what's called steam power. That's right, and that is the
show for today. And uh Robert Lamb of Stuff to
Blow your mind wrote this one how steam technology works
on our website How stuff Works. It's a good one.
Robert can write a fine article that guy. Uh So,
let's go back in time a little in the old
(04:28):
way back machine steam powered one. Uh yeah, today it is.
Uh so it might take a little longer to get
these coal fires burning and sound different. But Jerry, it's
hard at work over their shoveling coal throwing the levers.
So let's go back. Uh we're gonna need a lot
of cold Jerry, because we're going back all the way
to a D seventy five shovel faster Jerry, how out
(05:00):
a smile? Oh, it's just about to say, you'd be
a wonderful uh whip guy for for the coal shovelers.
But not if you're asking him to smile, because then
it turns into a Broadway show. How about a smile?
Then the next song is called how about a smile?
And the cold shoveler singing, Yeah, that's not bad. Actually
(05:23):
I'm picturing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom all
of a sudden, Yeah, were they shoveling coal? No, they
were mining. Okay, so I guess in a way, they're
shoveling coal, but they were getting out of the ground.
They were extracting it rather than depositing it into a fire.
That was all wrong. So let's go back to and
(05:46):
a true hero named Hero, the Great mathematician Hero. He
was writing books on mechanics. He was thinking a lot
about air and payback he us, and way back in
he actually conceived of steam as an engine in a
(06:07):
way that we'll see came back to roost a bit,
back to roosts at the right. It left for a
while like a chicken, and then it came back and roosted. Yeah, exactly. Uh.
He didn't have the technology to pull it off at
the time, but what he thought about was a hollow
sphere with these bent two tubes coming out the side,
and then fill that that thing with water. Let's say
(06:29):
it looks like a football with arms. Fill up that
football with water, put it over a fire, and eventually
that water is gonna boil. It's going to turn into water.
Vapor inside and it's gonna come out those arms and
it's gonna spin that little football and its perfectly thrown spiral,
or it's gonna go spin around in an axis like
(06:51):
Curly on his shoulder on the on the floor from
the Three Stooges. Yeah, but it's attached to something over
the fire. Yeah, exactly, so it's spinning, spinning. Um. He
called that thing in a Leo pile. And he actually
had a number of different ideas and inventions too, theoretical
ones using steam. One was a steam powered bird and
(07:12):
this would have been about the right time for the
Clash of the Titans. Remember that little robot steam bird
in there? Uh the first movie, Yeah, the original one
with Harry Hamlin. Yeah, I mean that's basically this guy
is the one who came up with that boy. That
Medusa really scared me when I was here, and I'd
completely avoided that remake because it looks so bad. Yeah,
(07:35):
I was thinking about that when I was like, oh wait,
that was a Clash of the Titans, and I thought
about the remake Clash of the Titans. Nobody's actually they're
not making these movies as like an homage to a
great movie. They're doing it because they're like, uh, we
don't have any ideas, so we're just gonna poke your
nostalgia and and hopefully get a few bucks out of
(07:56):
you and disappoint you and probably ruined the original one
for you. That's true. But while I do love nostalgia.
Is evidence in our show on Nostalgia, my nostalgia poke
button as a cover over it, so when people go
to poke it, they just get rebuffed. You should get
one of those ones that shock people when they should.
(08:16):
But I have to raise that cover to allow my
button to be pushed. So how do you I mean, like,
how did that cover get raised? I have to allow it,
you know, I have to want to dive into the
pool of nostalgia. You can't just come along and be like,
oh look another red dawn poke button. You know, did
that ever get made? Yeah? Okay, so Hero right, yeah, hero,
(08:40):
Hero comes up with this thing. He was very much limited,
and this would be the case for hundreds tens of centuries.
Um that steam power was the theoretically far more advanced
than practical material science. Yeah they were. He was way
ahead of his time. Yeah, I mean steam that the
(09:01):
power you can harness from steam is practically unlimited by
the depending on the materials that can hold the thing. Right,
if you have material that can hold the infinitely dense
amount of steam or infinitely pressurized pressurized amount of steam,
(09:22):
you could run the world, my friend. But we don't
have that, and Hero definitely didn't have it. He basically
could just draw it and say this will be great someday. Yeah,
which was great. I mean, that's that's how things get made.
He was just ahead of his time, like by about
six years. He was a futurist. Uh So flash forward
(09:44):
will rev up the machine again and we'll put her
along to sixteen o six. We're in Italy now, and
one that Giovanni Batista de la Porte, the of Naples, said,
you know what, I've got some theories about steam too,
(10:04):
and I think what we can do is actually create
a vacuum. So if we take that water that's steam
and it's in a closed container, it's going to increase
pressure in there, like we're talking about. So if we
condense it back down to water by cooling it in
that same chamber. Because they hadn't quite figured out that
you should do this separately, which we'll get to uh.
He said, that will decrease pressure in in theory, it'll
(10:28):
create a vacuum, it'll create a pull. Right, they went genius, Yeah,
that's great. In the French of course, said let's see
how we can apply this to cooking, and they did,
oh yeah, yeah. Within them, I think about seventy years
a guy named Denipe Papin who was not related to
Jacques Pepin. I wonder why I heard that name, but
(10:51):
may have been who was Jacque Pepin, very famous French chef. Okay, right,
great guy, I couldn't I thought you were talking about
Mario Tally. No, that's Italy. This is France. Right. They
basically took this idea and they said, surely there's a
way to use this for cooking, and Dinny Popan created
what is essentially the first pressure cooker. Yeah, the name
(11:13):
is so great, the digester or engine for softening bones.
It would extract like proteins and fats and all that
stuff from the bones and leave the bones brittle, so
you can turn the bones into bone powder and get
all the good stuff from it and cook with that. Right, yeah, well,
I'm not sure though. He ended up attaching a piston
essentially to it. Why did he do that as a
(11:37):
pressure release valve? Okay, yeah, alright, now that that makes sense, right,
So he added basically the world's first pressure relief valve
to the world's first pressure cooker. Yeah, the first steam
powered piston. Like he didn't know it yet, he was
laying the groundwork for an engine. Yeah. That's definitely one
thing that emerged from researching this, Chuck, is that, like
the history of steam power is definitely built on the
(12:02):
backs of earlier people. That's neat you can trace it
all back to one guy. Yeah, who's like, go forth
and make this. Do you know what struck me was
I was researching all these great men doing these things,
and I thought, how much further would we be along
in the world if women, all throughout antiquity just could
(12:23):
do whatever they wanted as well? Yeah, and contribute themselves. Yeah,
Like they literally cut off half of society and said
you just go do this and that that's valuable to
two raise families and to you know, cooking clean and
do all the things that women were forced to do
back then. But they could also do other things. I bet.
I mean they were doing other things. And I'm not
(12:44):
trying to say that they weren't making advances, but they
certainly taking it that way. They weren't allowed to go
into the science labs. No, but you make a good point,
like if if raising a family is an extremely important pursuit,
which I think we both agree it is, would society
be as far as it is now if men and
(13:06):
women had been equally involved in pursuing science and nobody
was raising the family. Yeah, Like, what two hundred years ago,
there's a lady who could have figured out a cure
for cancer, but in her family like no, no, no,
you you scrubbed that thing and turned that butter wonder
and she just muttered to herself, like I cure you anyway. Uh.
(13:31):
And necessity as a mother of invention is the other
thing that really came to mind, because all these advancements
usually came along because they wanted to do something like specifically, well,
almost every time there was an advancement, and definitely material science,
there was somebody who had invented a new steam thing
that was limited by the the poor materials available at
(13:52):
the time. When the new materials came along, they just
immediately used it for the steam invention that had been
drummed up a hundred years but four yeah, you know,
so it just constantly was advancing. Now I think I
have just bungled my message so poorly that people are
gonna say, chuck, there were plenty of women of science
in the early days. So to make up for that,
(14:14):
we're gonna have to do a podcast on the early
pioneers of science who are women? Alright, I pledged to
do that now. But my message was pure, you know
what I'm saying. Anybody who doesn't get that, sometimes I
don't talk so good, which is funny because it's your job, right.
All right, So seventeenth century, we're going forward in time
(14:36):
a little bit more, and over in England where we
just got back from, they had a timber crisis because
they were they were advancing. They were building so many
things made out of wood, uh, namely ships and of
course homes and things. Uh. And they were in those
homes they need a lot of firewood. So you still
needed the wood to build ships and things. But they
(14:58):
found out, hey, we can use coal for fires at least. Yeah,
we're running low on timber, so we need to allocate
it smartly. Yeah, so let's use coal, which was great,
but to get more coal, you have to dig deeper,
and to dig deeper means it's gonna be wetter. You're
gonna hit the water table eventually. And so eventually this
all led to a problem, which was, Hey, we're down
in this coal mine now and it's full of water.
(15:22):
How can we rectify this? Right? So necessity once again
pops up. Everybody just stood around thinking for about fifty years.
Everything came to halt, and then finally was a woman
in the background going, I'll tell you how to do
this the student name. Finally a man spoke up and
everyone listen, that's right. The guy in named Thomas Savory.
(15:43):
He was a military engineer. He had come up with
something that he called a miner's friend, right, which I
don't know if that's the best name for it, but
maybe it was. So his miner's Friend was basically, it's
it's really neat. So it's very tough to describe this
stuff from here on out. Every time we describe something,
(16:05):
you're gonna get lost. So just go look up a
diagram of what we're talking about helps and it definitely helps.
For sure, it helped me big time. Basically, what it
was was there was a pot of boiling water. And
in this pot of boiling water there the steam would
be created. And a pot I mean an enclosed pot
with like pipes coming out but valves keeping it shut, right,
(16:26):
and they you would create steam and this the steam
would be transferred into another chamber with a pipe that
was going down into the to the water that you
wanted to get out of the ground. Okay, okay, you
would introduce steam into this right, and then you would
introduce cold water into that steam filled chamber and it
would suddenly condense the water, create a vacuum, and that
(16:50):
vacuum would pump the water out of the ground. Then
you had another pipe that would siphon off the water
from that chamber because there was a non return valve.
Once the water came up, it couldn't go back down.
That was the key. And then they would pump the
water out of that tube that pipe and then do
the whole process over again. Yeah, and it worked pretty well.
(17:13):
He didn't sell a ton of them to the mining
It didn't become the miner's friend like he thought. What
it really became was the rich person who wanted to
garden friend this. Let's pump our swampy es stayed out
friend pretty much. And the reason why is because to
to run it effectively and safely, you could only get
about of water out. If you're pumping water of a
(17:36):
five foot mine, then then you had to have one
of these huge setups everyt and be pumping up to
a reservoir that eventually pumped it up out of the mine.
So there's no way you could do that. Plus, every
one of these setups had to have people running the valves,
like all the valves and things were operated manually, and
they had a pretty bad reputation for blowing up. Well
(17:58):
that too, right, but it was a really it was
almost this guy wanted to sell it and change the
mining industry. He didn't, but he did end up creating
a scientific and historical proof of concept. Yeah, and well,
you know what, let's take a break and we will
come back and pick back up with a couple of
other brilliant dudes who advanced on those inventions. Alright, so
(18:43):
was the miner's friend. I don't know why it's so
funny to me. Uh. And just about fourteen years later,
in seventeen twelve, there was a blacksmith named Thomas Newcoming
and his little buddy John Kelly, who was his assistant,
a plumber and glassblower. I get the feeling like everybody
back then, blue glass, I just knew what you're doing. Yeah,
(19:04):
make your own window. Like today how everyone? Uh what
do is something everyone can do today? Um? Drive a car? Yeah,
or complain on social media. That's stop posting personal stuff. Yeah,
that's the glass blowing of today, posting on social media,
complaining on it. I think you might be right. So
(19:25):
he was a glass blower and plumber. His assistant was
and um, they said, you know what, let's create a
better system. It's more efficient. He took it was called
the Newcoming Engine. I guess Callie as an assistant, getting
didn't get his name in there. I would have lobbied
for the new Callie or something, maybe combined the names.
It's clever, but newcoming. No, it's my name, assistant. So
(19:47):
they took Savori's uh separation of the boiler and then
added Poppins steam driven piston, and all of a sudden
they had the Newcoming Engine. Well they no, they took
the boiler and put it combined it together, right, so
like you had you had this piston and it was
heated and then cooled, and then heated and cooled, so
(20:12):
it's like combined into one. Yes, but it was a
piston that was moving up and down right. Well yeah,
but it was a piston that was moving up and
down via this thing that looks kind of like a seesaw. Yeah.
I was connected to that, right, And on the other
end of that seesaw was the pump. So one end
is a piston moving this thing up and down like
the seesaw. On the other ends the pump. Yeah, And
(20:34):
what it's really doing is it's pulling it down on
either side. Yeah, it's not pushing ever, like one side
pulls making it one side go up. On the other
side poles making the other side go up. Right, So
you've got a um, you've got that that steam being
generated and it's pushing the piston up and then you
hit it with some cold water and the vacuum is created. Right,
(20:54):
And this thing could go through twelve cycles a minute. Hey,
not bad, It's true, and um, it was. It was
beyond improved concept, Like this thing actually really worked. You
could use it to do all sorts of work with Yeah,
And it was in hundreds of minds all over Britain, uh,
and in Europe. So people were like digging into this
(21:17):
thing called the engine for the first time. Yeah, it
was pretty amazing. But what happened was with everything, these
engineers start to say, you know what, let's improve on this,
let's improve the efficiency with the pump, let's improve these cylinders. Uh.
You get better iron along the way, stronger iron. And
this newcoming engine is just kind of refined over a
(21:37):
period of years, right, just from people tinkering with it. Right,
it's working better and better. And there was one guy
whose name you'll probably recognized. His name is James Watt.
I think he was born in England, but he made
his name in Glasgow, Scotland. Yeah, my new favorite country. Yeah,
it's a great country. I think his his I think
his name was James the game change or what. Yeah,
(22:01):
if he was a boxer, that's what he would have
been called. Although he took he took the Newcomban engine
and changed it back closer to the miner's friend though,
because the new coming combined the um the the boiler
with the condenser and he separated him out again. What
he figured out was if you just keep the piston hot, right,
(22:24):
the piston chamber hot and you have a separate condenser,
you're gonna use less energy keeping the condenser cool and
the piston hot. Because one of the dumb things about
the Newcomban engine and the reason why it took so
long to go through these cycles so where you could
only do twelve a minute, was because when when it
was hot and the steam rose, when you hit hit
(22:44):
it with that cold water, it cooled off and a
vacuum was created. You had to wait for the thing
to heat up again to get the steam. If you
had the cool water over here and the steam over here,
you would keep the hot side hot and the cool
side cool. Dlt it us and you could hit him.
You could use them to hit the the piston as
(23:05):
often as you wanted, and it really really improved. Um
it's efficiency. Yeah, like the engine is really starting to
take hold now and hum like an engine should. So
he partners up with a guy named Matthew Bolton. Um,
I'm not sure now spelled differently than Michael. There's a
U in there. Michael's just b O L t O
(23:26):
N right. Well, the this guy's is the British spelling. Oh,
so he could be a distant relative. You never know.
I like to think, so, uh, whatever happened to Michael Bolton?
You guarantee he's still touring and making records and stuff.
Guys like that. They don't go away. They might not
be in the international limelight and more, but they're still
(23:48):
doing what they do. There's always a home in Branson,
Missouri or Vegas, all right. So what has partnered up
with Bolton? Um they are making it more fuel efficient
engine now with that separate condenser. And this led to
to other inventions, one called the flyball Governor and one
called the double acting Engine. The flyball Governor is so difficult,
(24:13):
got to look it up. There's videos on YouTube. You
can't just look up a picture of it. You have
to see like an animated version of it. Yeah, and
once you see it, it all makes sense. And I
want to say I want to give a huge shout
out to a site that I found extremely helpful. UM
it's called Animated Engines dot com and they have all
these like just just graphics of engines and you can
(24:34):
speed up the friends persecutor slow it down and it
shows you like all the moving parts. You get it,
You just get it. But the flyball governors. So we'll
confuse you now with words. Well, no, the fireball governor,
We're just gonna say just go look it up. But
basically it is a way to automate the opening and
closing of valves using steve the steam that's being produced itself.
(24:56):
So what figured out this thing is making a lot
of steam, and a lot of steam is going to waste.
What if I took this waste steam and redirected it
to do other stuff like open and closed valves. That
was a huge innovation. They also came up with the
double acting engine, where they figured out, like, you don't
need to create a vacuum anymore, guys, we can just
use steam to make the pists and go up and
(25:19):
steam to make the piston go down. Double acting engine.
Pretty neat. Yeah, that was Those were enormous, enormous changes.
Again that laid a bunch of groundwork, Like they kicked
the thing forward and said, hey, twenty years from now,
get your inventors together, because we just came up with
some new ideas that you guys need to go build
better metal to contain it with. And don't forget about us. Yeah,
(25:43):
James Watt and I'm the other guy exactly. So what
this is what would set the table for the beginnings
of the industrial revolution which began in the textile industry.
Uh and and wolves specifically, for many many years had
been process by hand. Then they eventually took it down
(26:03):
by the river and had a water mill that would
that would you had a van by the river and
this water mill would would you know? You've all seen
how those work if you've been to any think still
Mountain Park here still has one pretty neat basically just
using hydro well les but say hydro electric, but hydro
(26:23):
power to spin a wheel. And they figured out, hey,
why don't we steam instead? And Bolton and Watts engine
works really well and people are using it like crazy.
But they were so early in the game. They had
all these patents that sort of made it hard, Like
(26:43):
these mines were going broke paying money on these patents
to to use this technology. What are they called royalties.
And so this other dude comes along, a guy named
Richard Trevorth Thick from Cornwall in England, I think it's
southwest south what yeah, known for their game hens and
(27:06):
they're supposed to have a great witchcraft museum there. I've
always wanted to go to but still have not been
able to make it. So they're known for game hens,
the Cornish engine which we're talking about, and a witchcraft museum.
Yeah not bad. No, that's not bad at all. Uh
and corn Yeah corn. So he was living in Cornwall
and he saw what was going on with all these miners.
(27:26):
He said, you know what I'm gonna do. Screw those
guys in their patents. I'm gonna just think of brand
new technology. That's better that you don't have to pay
royalties on their patents on patent. He had a real
bad attitude. Yeah, but he was smart. He was he
actually was super smart. This guy may have pushed them
further ahead than even Watt. And I've never heard of
(27:49):
the guy before you. No, I have the impressiment. He's
a national hero in England probably so um. But he uh,
he had some he he had the great fortune of
having some much more improved materials available to him. So
for a long time people had said, like, man, if
we could just get these containing vessels to hold really
(28:11):
high pressure, we could do amazing stuff with this. Yeah,
the new pressure is what drove the pistons. So the
more pressure the better, right, yeah, I mean if you could,
if you can, like you also, not only the more
pressure the better, the less um initial input you would
have to put in with energy would be more energy efficient, right,
you could just get right, So try to think. Um
(28:34):
had the advantage of having really good, better materials available
to him to make this stuff. So he um created
this Cornish engine, and the Cornish engine used higher pressure.
But not only that, it was a compounding engine, meaning
that UM it had it used the steam in more
(28:56):
than one way. Right, So rather than like one piston,
He's like, why not have four pistons and one piston
is fired and then some steam from that piston escapes
and fires another pistons, another and another, and all of
a sudden you're doing four times the work. I'm from Cornwall.
It was amazing, and he was. There was an American
(29:17):
and men her name Oliver Evans, who was kind of
doing similar things in the United States, and then a
guy named Arthur wolf I'm sorry, Arthur Wolfe was the
when it came up with a compounding Oh right, yeah, yeah, Travis.
His main contribution was basically just making a more rock solid, cheaper, lighter,
more efficient engine that used high pressure Yeah, it's a wolf.
(29:41):
Have you O O l F Virginia Woolf not wolf?
Well wolf, It just seems funny looking. Uh. He was
a brewery engineer. He made beer, and he's the one
that said, yeah, why don't we get all these pistons going,
pistons firing more pistons, pistons everywhere? It just made total sense.
Should we take a break? Yes? All right? They got
(30:23):
steam coming out of everywhere, steam engines, they're working there,
they're turning pistons and so all of this eventually would
lead to used to move things and people around. People like,
I'm so tired of walking my legs for so bad?
Can you take the steam technology and like make a
(30:46):
steam powered car? And apparently people have been working on
it for a while. There's some debate over who created
the first steam powered vehicle, And supposedly there's a guy
named Ferdinand Verbist who's the verby Ist fir to end
he supposedly created a steam car in sixteen seventy two,
but I guess that's up for debate. Um, there's a
(31:07):
lot of like you could draw a schematic of something,
but it doesn't necessarily mean you actually created it. I
think is the issue, Like we we have no idea
what was actually on the other side of a newcomb
in um steam engine. We just because none of the
diagrams ever mentioned it. It's all about the steam engine itself.
They don't talk about like the pumps, so we don't
(31:29):
really know what kind of pumps they were using. That
kind of thing. So if we go back, we can't
say for certain that this guy did it. It's possible,
but I think widely the guy named Nicolau Joseph Kuno,
who is a friend inventor, obviously created a steam powered
vehicle in seventeen sixty nine. But steam powered cars they
went virtually nowhere. That's like when I've been at the snowboard,
(31:51):
I thought, because evidence by my crayon drawing the skiboard,
and then we heard from people who said, sorry, the
snowboarders actually before that even so whatever, But like you said,
I created that in a vacuum, a vacuum created by
condensing water vapors. So as far as I'm concerned, I
(32:13):
did in the snowboard. Sure, yeah, you're tapped into the zeitgeist.
People wanted to go really fast on a skateboard down
a mountain while it was snow covered, and you just
wanted to deliver on that. In six year old Chuck
and Stone Mountain, Georgia, it was I was so keyte
to see a water wheel, right, I'd seen my first
ski movie, which one Now I was just kidding, but
(32:36):
those were big back then. Sure remember Better Off Dead? Yeah,
sure that was a ski movie of sorts. Yeah, part
that was. Someone said something funny on Twitter today about
I can't remember who it was, some politician, he said,
reminds him of an eighties ski movie villain. It was
really good because every ski movie the eighties had a
(32:58):
bad guy. Oh yeah, it was always the developer looking
to build condos at the ski resort. Exactly. All right,
So you're right, the car is one thing, but what
if we could make something larger? Uh? Treviorthik actually was
kind of key in this, and he said, you know what,
we've got these things they whether, they don't call them
railroad tracks yet, they just called them rails on the ground.
(33:22):
But yeah, and you hook a donkey up to a cart. Yeah,
and it's to help. It's really to help the donkey, sure,
because they're so stupid they can't walk in a straight line. Really.
But but if they're pulling a cart on rails that
have already been laid out on the path they're supposed
to follow, they're fine. Just give him a couple of
carrots and maybe a nice scratch behind the ear and
(33:45):
they're okay. Yeah, they were called tramways officially. I was
just kidding. So Trevior think is like, hey, let's let's
put something steam powered on these tracks. Brilliant, and he
tried it. He actually came up with something UM called
Trevor Thicks portable steam engine, which he called the Puffing Devil.
That was his name for it, and uh, it worked.
(34:07):
He did a demonstration where it hauled ten tons of
iron for ten miles. You know how huge that is
at the time. Sure, yeah, amazing because everything, everything up
to that point had been hauled by donkeys horse power, Yeah,
literal horse power. Right, um yeah, obviously not just donkeys.
There were horses too, but everything was very much localized.
(34:28):
And I don't think we've said it yet, but steam
power was the um the literal engine for the industrial revolution.
This is where it all started, you know. And the
way that it started was you could suddenly take timber
in this area and move it over to this area
hundreds of miles away. The coal in this area to
(34:48):
power these steam engines over here changed the course of history.
It did water turning into water vapor and containing that.
It's amazing and it's it's started it in England. Yeah,
it's just pretty neat. You're pandering. No, it's true, the
like over here in America. We're like, yeah, the Industrial
Revolution really picked up in the nineteenth century with America.
(35:10):
But I mean it's it's roots are definitely further back. Yeah,
this is in uh what eighteen o four? I think
I learned that England cannot be flattered, right, flattery, don't
pander to us? All right, so it's eighteen o eight,
(35:30):
you've got what do you call it? The the Industrial Revolution? No,
the Devil's puffer, the puffer devil, the puffing devil, puffing devil,
like the Devil's puffer. Sure that is, uh miner's friend.
You got those got a party? Uh so this is
a portable steam engine. He takes it to London, Central London,
(35:52):
puts it on a circular track and everyone goes blind, me,
what is that it is of the devil? It's a
puffing devil. Yeah, and it's amazing. Uh And that was
an engineer there named George Stevenson and a couple of
decades after Treviorthick, he said, you know what, I'm gonna
take that and I'm gonna like everyone else before, saying
I'm gonna make it better, more efficient, And all of
(36:15):
a sudden things got so good. They actually opened up
what I think is the first town to town railroad
line between because they're trying to move coal from Durham
to Stockton at a shipping port and it works so well,
they said, all right, let's do this. Let's let's put
(36:36):
in the infrastructure, build what this guy is calling a
locomotive track, and that was I think the very first
operating locomotive track rail line and it didn't just carry cargo,
it carried six hundred passengers. Yeah. Yeah, so why don't
we put people on that thing? And they're like, is
this safe? And he's like, no, not at all, But
(36:58):
I really have a lot to prove. So just pick
six criminals who cares, Yeah, don't sit near the boiler
and you'll be fine. Yeah. Uh So in the meantime,
there's people are still tinkering around with the steam car
that didn't go away, but it never took off. No,
and um, the steam locomotive was just this beautiful design
(37:20):
to think about it. So let's go back to all
the steam engines we talked about. It's um, steam moving
a piston back and forth, back and forth, right or
up and down, of course, sure, but in this case
it's going um, it's moving horizontally. The piston is and
the piston is attached to a bar that's attached to
a wheel, and if you want to get kind of fancy,
(37:42):
you can attach several wheels to this bar. And as
the pistons moving back and forth, this bar is actually
making an a lipse and as far as the wheels
are concerned, they're making circles. And you're moving forward as
this is happening. And again, go to animated Engines dot
com and look up a steam locomotive and it's just
(38:06):
amazing and it's design like these people really just got
in there and roll up their shirt sleeves and they
had like cold dust down their faces and really they
were doing like some real engineering. Oh yeah, I'm just
so impressed with the guys who who made this stuff.
It was amazing. You know there, of course, there's no surprise.
But there are I don't know what they call themselves,
(38:27):
but there are big time train officionados that go and
just watch trains, trainoids. They might be called train watchers,
even train spotters. No, are you sure? I don't think so, probably,
but they trainees. I can't remember where I came across it,
but it was in another podcast I was researching and
(38:49):
found this whole subculture of people that that find these
old you know us. I mean they watch all kinds
of trains, but mainly they what really like get them going,
We really get some out of in the morning. It
really gets there's their miner's friend up. Yeah, it's the
promise stuff, the promise of an old fashioned steam locomotive
(39:09):
that's going through town because they still have them. You know,
it's amazing. It's pretty cool. I mean, I get white
people do it. It's sort of like birding, you know.
It's a very solitary kind of quiet thing. Yeah, and
then that train rumbles by, and I mean, like I
I understand, I've never been into trains or whatever. I'm
more just I think the steam engine on a steam
locomotive is amazing. Yeah, and you like to take trains. Sure,
(39:32):
we took a train from Manchester to Edinburgh. Lovely. It
was a really nice ride to the English countryside. In
Scottish I couldn't tell the difference. I could. I was like, yeah,
we're in Scotland now I know, all right. So the
(39:52):
steam engine is chugging along. Um Stephen, they called it
so so cool. He was a conductor on locomotion number one.
That one was six center passengers. Yeah, it's just so
cool that they named it like locomotion number one. This
is the very first time they've been done. They were
very prescient. Just so cool. It's like the first plane
(40:16):
flight or something. We need to do one on the right, brothers, Okay,
I'm happy to do that there from Ohio. No. Sorry, ever,
would't even say their name, So Chuck the steam locomotive is.
It was pretty much an out of the gate hit.
Some poor people were still working on the steam powered car.
(40:36):
But in the meantime other people are like, what about
steam boats, let's come up with something like that, and um,
some people have been kicking around the idea for that
as well. And apparently it followed pretty closely the evolution
of the steam locomotive too. Um, just people building on
ideas and people coming with proof of concepts. And it
(40:58):
was an American guy named Rob Fulton who created the
first steam powered paddle wheeled boat that showed that it
was actually capable of moving up and down rivers. Yeah,
and that there was There was a guy in England
and about forty years earlier named Jonathan Hall who had
the first steam powered tugboat, but it didn't work too
well because again the technology with these newcomen and savory
(41:21):
engines just weren't good enough. But it was really Fulton
who said, you know, come aboard, how quaint is this? Yeah?
Do you like my captain's hat? Yeah? Traveling up and
down the river with a paddle boat? How quaint. They're like, well,
we don't have any future things to compare it to,
so it's just contemporary to us. Well in dudes that
were professional oarsmen were like, no, I really like the
(41:45):
looks of this exactly. It's wonderful. So Fulton created, um,
the first one. But it was a guy named WILLIAMS.
Symington who gets credit for the full first fully steampowered passenger. Yeah,
the Charlotte dun Duss and uh, Fulton's was the Claremont
(42:05):
yea and uh in eighteen nineteen, what what they would
do with these these sailing ships, because they would now
outfit them with steam power for when the wind was
down and just to augment the wind. And it worked
out great in in eighteen nineteen, the Savannah became the
very first steam powered ship to make a transatlantic crossing. Yeah,
(42:26):
and apparently this theme power was such a threat to
sail makers that this is a consortium of salemakers lobby
the British government saying hey, can you can you do something?
Can you stifle the steam technology? Can you shut down
this amazing evancement because we make sales? Yeah, it didn't work.
(42:48):
That's you know, every time something is automated, like the
A t M or something and people say, oh, people
are gonna lose jobs, you're looking at history, buddy. That's
all his tree has been is one advancement that puts
people out of work, creating a new industry where people
can work. And it's sad in a way, but it's
(43:09):
just part of it, you know. Yeah, it's called moving forward. Yeah,
too bad, So sad for the sale industry, sale making industry,
but you know, there's people still sale recreationally. Sure. Yeah,
so now he gets the best part in my opinion, Chuck, Yeah,
I like the locomotive. So the steam turbine, the electricity
(43:33):
producing steam powered turbine. Yeah, there's a good argument for that.
I love it. Remember how electricity works episode So electricity
is created when you spin a copper coil inside a magnet, right,
And Michael Faraday created what he called a dynamo, which
is basically that, And he said, hey, steam guys of
(43:55):
the future, I got an idea for you. Go ahead
and come up with a steam power our dynamo. Can
you do it? And they set about trying to make
that happen. Um. Part of the problem though, is they
figured out that with a steam powered piston, which is
what all steam power or steam engines powered were pistons
up to that point, you could only do so many
(44:16):
um cycles. Yeah yeah, and that's you need the dynamo
going pretty fast to create some electricity or enough to
use on an industrial scale. So this dude named um
Charles Algernon Parsons who's British. In four he figured out
that there was a new type of steel available and
(44:37):
you could create a pretty nice turbine from it. And
if you took that turbine and went all the way
back to basically Hero's original idea, which was spinning, but
rather than having the steam spin the actual vessel, you
had vessel vessel creating steam that you're shooting out at
the turbine. You can spin a dynamo pretty fast. Eighteen
(44:58):
thousand revolutions a minute was his dynamo, and in Jack
that was enough to generate electricity, and they installed it
forthwith at the Fourth Bank's power station, and the rest
of Europe said, holy cow, we have electricity. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah.
(45:19):
And as a matter of fact that something like eight
percent of the electricity in the United States still today
is made through steam steam turbines. Amazing worldwide is made
through steam turbines. So like this, this guy changed the world, um,
along with Faraday. Yeah, of course and everyone else before, right,
(45:43):
because everybody's building on the work of everybody else, and
all the women who supported those men who probably had
better ideas, who were like, we could have come up
with this years ago. So we mentioned a few times
that this was dangerous, uh, exploding boilers or a problem man.
Even when they figured out safety valves. Um, early safety
(46:05):
valves wouldn't work. Actually, later safety valves have proved to
not work on occasion in the case of Three Mile Island.
But um they it got a bad rap in the press,
of course, and that probably um slowed progress a bit,
but progress continued nevertheless. Well even today there's boiler explosions,
(46:25):
like there's a big one at a plant, a Danta
Corporation plant in Tennessee, just blew up like a significant
portion of the plant. And it's it's not just um
that it's like throwing hot water out everywhere. The the
pressure that can build up in these high pressure systems, uh,
(46:45):
in these vessels, if the vessel gives when that when
that steam hits the regular atmosphere, it expands right, and
you have basically I think I read something like a
ten m vessel of water, which is what you would
find on like a steam locomotive. If it blew up,
it would blow up to with a force equivalent of
(47:08):
one ton of TNT. Crazy. Yeah, so it's a it's
a big deal if you're blower blows up. And it
all comes down to the safety valves and whether or
not they're allowing too much pressure to build up, and
then your vessel's ability to withstand that added pressure pretty scary.
It is kind of scary, but it's yeah, no, that's
(47:29):
my scense there. Scary. I don't want to be evolving
a boiler accident. Uh No, I don't think anyone wants to. UM.
All right, we're gonna finish, I think with this, right
unless you have other stuff beyond super critical fluid. Oh,
I do kind of all right, we'll finish with that then,
but right now, super critical fluid we'll talk about it.
(47:51):
Is earlier when you talked about solid, liquid and gas
each having their molecule distribution at different densities. Um, something
really strange happens, as Robert points out, when you heat uh,
when you when you go through the from solid to
liquid to gas, and if you heat up that gas enough,
(48:13):
those molecules actually eventually are forced back together and it
becomes like a liquid again, but it still has the
properties of a gas. Yeah, it's kind of like a
plasma state or something almost. It's super critical fluid. Yeah,
you know, that has its own name. So when when
water in particular hits its um, its critical point is
(48:35):
that seven and five degrees fahrenh height and two seventeen atmospheres.
So it's very high temperature, very high pressure. When it
goes beyond that point and it starts behaving quite weirdly. Um,
you actually can get more steam power out of less
(48:57):
initial fossil fuel input. So it's a sleep, it's more um,
it's more efficient when you can heat something to these
higher pressures, these super critical pressures, way more. Yeah. So again,
the reason that you can do this is we could
have always done it. We could have heated it up
to this this amount, but we never had the materials
(49:18):
to hold it. Now we have the materials to hold it.
And they're they're um creating more and more electricity with
supercritical steam. Yeah. And here's a little mind blowing fact
for you. Uh. This water to create the supercritical liquid
fluid is heated at such a high pressure that it
doesn't even boil. No, it goes right from water to
water vapor. That's fast. And apparently they're figuring out now
(49:42):
that you could actually use c O two instead of
water because it has a much lower critical point. It's
like um five degrees fahrenheight and seventy three atmospheres, which
is like nothing, and they're figuring out, we'll wait a minute,
we could use a bunch of c O two in
lieu of water vapor and get even more um energy
(50:02):
out of this, Yeah, but from less input. So they're
trying to figure out how to how to use supercritical
c O two to create electricity now to power steam turbines.
It's a decent band name, super Critical CR two. Sure, sure,
it's not bad. You got one more tidbit? That was it? Oh?
That was a tidbit? Yeah? Oh great? Can I go home? Yeah,
(50:25):
in just a minute. Uh, since we don't have anything else.
If you want to know more about steam power, you
can type those words into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com. Since I said steam power, it's
time for listener mail. This was written by one of
our jingle writers, you know, our little jingle bumpers. Sure yeah, Hey, guys,
(50:45):
just want to appreciate the fact that s Y s
K gives joke mos like me the opportunity to feel
famous for just a leading moment. Whenever I'm listening to
an episode and I'm cut to commercially here one of
my little songs, it really takes me by surprise, and
I think that sounds familiar. Oh yeah, I wrote that. Yeppee.
I'm gonna stay at home dad. I'm trying to make
my name for myself as at home dad, as a
(51:08):
versatile graphic artist and film composer. And it's nice to
know that at least something of mine is making it
out to the masses. And speaking of being a dad,
I just finished my first children's e book, which we're
gonna plug since he give us says, uh, oh yeah
for sure, Yeah, we plug it anyway. I'm very proud
of it. It's called Hector's Song. It's a tale about
being who you are no matter what. That's a great message.
(51:32):
You can get the regular read words on a page
version on Kindle or or an enhanced version with narration
and music on eyebooks that jacks into your brain. Yeah.
He recommends it for kids zero to six or so.
And you can go to his website which is Elaine
Osborne E A L A N elon probably O S
(51:53):
B O R N E dot com, or just go
to e books or Amazon. And thanks again, guys, J
Money and Chuck E. D. You guys are the real deal.
Thanks so long. We appreciate that. Man. You're the real
deal too, man writing books and music and yeah stay
at home dad, and yeah pretty neat, yea super neat.
If you want to get in touch with us because
(52:15):
you submitted a jingle and have now written a book,
well we want to hear from you. You can tweet
to us at s y esk podcast or josh um
Clark too. You can hang with us on Facebook dot com,
slash stuff you Should Know, check me and check out
on Facebook for the more personal stuff with Chuck's needs. Uh.
You can send us an email to stuff podcast the
(52:37):
how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us
at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you should know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there this
stuff you should know? What was that? That was? I
(00:22):
don't know. I don't know a little extra something on top.
I guess little hot sauce. Yeah to Lula. Uh So,
we just got back from our wonderful tour of the
United Kingdom in Ireland and it could not have gone better.
And you may be hearing more about this in the future,
or we may never speak of it again. That's true too.
(00:43):
Oh before we go though, um, before we go, Yeah,
we're still we're just starting out. Before we get started. Um,
I started my own little personal Chuck Charles W. Chuck
Bryant Facebook page as a public figure. Yeah, I've got
one of those two you do. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah,
(01:04):
it's largely neglected. I should probably pay attention to it.
Huh So basically, you say, I have a haunted ghost
house that I feel free to walk by it right now,
and my house is populated by me, and uh go
like the page and I'm gonna be sharing a little
more personal stuff like my opinion on things and sharing music.
(01:25):
I like photos of your bare knees, photos of my knees,
photos of my animals, just a little more stuff like
that because I get yelled at now when I do
anything semi personal stuff. You should know page. Yeah, I
think I'll go and have in mind too. Yeah. So
if you want a piece of me as gross as
that sound, look for Charles W. Chuck Bryan on Facebook
(01:49):
and uh, it's gonna be a party, it is. That's
the logo. Um, I do I neglect my Facebook page,
but I am fairly active on Twitter. Twitter thing. Yeah,
it's a Josh underscore, um underscore Clark, of course it is. Yeah,
(02:11):
that's that. I do the same thing on that though.
It's like I'm a little more opinionated and share more
personal stuff. We're a lot of real human beings exactly.
We don't have to be brand ambassadors. We can take
our sashes off, all right. So that's all for announcements
for me. So, Chuck, have you ever encountered water? Yeah?
(02:39):
So you know that there's three states of matter, and
water is a great demo of these different states, right, Yeah,
I encounter every morning when I washed my horse. Yeah,
well you should share pictures of you washing your horse
on your Facebook page. Um, what's your horse's name? Uh
ganho ganev nice man. There's just a few hundred people
(03:02):
who know what you're talking about. Um. So when you're
washing gancho and that nice water is like coming down
all over his horsey body, it is in its liquid state, right,
And when it's in its liquid liquid state, it's density
is different than when it's in its solid state. It's
more dense in its solid state. E g. Ice r
(03:24):
I E ice. Sorry, But then if you really heated
it up and turn it into steam, it would turn
into water vapor, right, yes, Then then it's in its
gaseous state and it's less dense. Those molecules could not
get further apart. They probably could. So while it's density
is smaller and ice, it actually takes up less space, right,
(03:46):
It's correct. So if you put that water in a
space and you froze it, it would shrink inside the space.
If you expanded it into water vapor, it would take
up more space. And as it takes up more and
more space, it's pressure increases. That's right. And if you
could only be clever enough to figure out a way
to harness that pressure. My friend, you would have harnessed
(04:07):
what's called steam power. That's right, and that is the
show for today. And uh Robert Lamb of Stuff to
Blow your mind wrote this one how steam technology works
on our website How stuff Works. It's a good one.
Robert can write a fine article that guy. Uh So,
let's go back in time a little in the old
(04:28):
way back machine steam powered one. Uh yeah, today it is.
Uh so it might take a little longer to get
these coal fires burning and sound different. But Jerry, it's
hard at work over their shoveling coal throwing the levers.
So let's go back. Uh we're gonna need a lot
of cold Jerry, because we're going back all the way
to a D seventy five shovel faster Jerry, how out
(05:00):
a smile? Oh, it's just about to say, you'd be
a wonderful uh whip guy for for the coal shovelers.
But not if you're asking him to smile, because then
it turns into a Broadway show. How about a smile?
Then the next song is called how about a smile?
And the cold shoveler singing, Yeah, that's not bad. Actually
(05:23):
I'm picturing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom all
of a sudden, Yeah, were they shoveling coal? No, they
were mining. Okay, so I guess in a way, they're
shoveling coal, but they were getting out of the ground.
They were extracting it rather than depositing it into a fire.
That was all wrong. So let's go back to and
(05:46):
a true hero named Hero, the Great mathematician Hero. He
was writing books on mechanics. He was thinking a lot
about air and payback he us, and way back in
he actually conceived of steam as an engine in a
(06:07):
way that we'll see came back to roost a bit,
back to roosts at the right. It left for a
while like a chicken, and then it came back and roosted. Yeah, exactly. Uh.
He didn't have the technology to pull it off at
the time, but what he thought about was a hollow
sphere with these bent two tubes coming out the side,
and then fill that that thing with water. Let's say
(06:29):
it looks like a football with arms. Fill up that
football with water, put it over a fire, and eventually
that water is gonna boil. It's going to turn into water.
Vapor inside and it's gonna come out those arms and
it's gonna spin that little football and its perfectly thrown spiral,
or it's gonna go spin around in an axis like
(06:51):
Curly on his shoulder on the on the floor from
the Three Stooges. Yeah, but it's attached to something over
the fire. Yeah, exactly, so it's spinning, spinning. Um. He
called that thing in a Leo pile. And he actually
had a number of different ideas and inventions too, theoretical
ones using steam. One was a steam powered bird and
(07:12):
this would have been about the right time for the
Clash of the Titans. Remember that little robot steam bird
in there? Uh the first movie, Yeah, the original one
with Harry Hamlin. Yeah, I mean that's basically this guy
is the one who came up with that boy. That
Medusa really scared me when I was here, and I'd
completely avoided that remake because it looks so bad. Yeah,
(07:35):
I was thinking about that when I was like, oh wait,
that was a Clash of the Titans, and I thought
about the remake Clash of the Titans. Nobody's actually they're
not making these movies as like an homage to a
great movie. They're doing it because they're like, uh, we
don't have any ideas, so we're just gonna poke your
nostalgia and and hopefully get a few bucks out of
(07:56):
you and disappoint you and probably ruined the original one
for you. That's true. But while I do love nostalgia.
Is evidence in our show on Nostalgia, my nostalgia poke
button as a cover over it, so when people go
to poke it, they just get rebuffed. You should get
one of those ones that shock people when they should.
(08:16):
But I have to raise that cover to allow my
button to be pushed. So how do you I mean, like,
how did that cover get raised? I have to allow it,
you know, I have to want to dive into the
pool of nostalgia. You can't just come along and be like,
oh look another red dawn poke button. You know, did
that ever get made? Yeah? Okay, so Hero right, yeah, hero,
(08:40):
Hero comes up with this thing. He was very much limited,
and this would be the case for hundreds tens of centuries.
Um that steam power was the theoretically far more advanced
than practical material science. Yeah they were. He was way
ahead of his time. Yeah, I mean steam that the
(09:01):
power you can harness from steam is practically unlimited by
the depending on the materials that can hold the thing. Right,
if you have material that can hold the infinitely dense
amount of steam or infinitely pressurized pressurized amount of steam,
(09:22):
you could run the world, my friend. But we don't
have that, and Hero definitely didn't have it. He basically
could just draw it and say this will be great someday. Yeah,
which was great. I mean, that's that's how things get made.
He was just ahead of his time, like by about
six years. He was a futurist. Uh So flash forward
(09:44):
will rev up the machine again and we'll put her
along to sixteen o six. We're in Italy now, and
one that Giovanni Batista de la Porte, the of Naples, said,
you know what, I've got some theories about steam too,
(10:04):
and I think what we can do is actually create
a vacuum. So if we take that water that's steam
and it's in a closed container, it's going to increase
pressure in there, like we're talking about. So if we
condense it back down to water by cooling it in
that same chamber. Because they hadn't quite figured out that
you should do this separately, which we'll get to uh.
He said, that will decrease pressure in in theory, it'll
(10:28):
create a vacuum, it'll create a pull. Right, they went genius, Yeah,
that's great. In the French of course, said let's see
how we can apply this to cooking, and they did,
oh yeah, yeah. Within them, I think about seventy years
a guy named Denipe Papin who was not related to
Jacques Pepin. I wonder why I heard that name, but
(10:51):
may have been who was Jacque Pepin, very famous French chef. Okay, right,
great guy, I couldn't I thought you were talking about
Mario Tally. No, that's Italy. This is France. Right. They
basically took this idea and they said, surely there's a
way to use this for cooking, and Dinny Popan created
what is essentially the first pressure cooker. Yeah, the name
(11:13):
is so great, the digester or engine for softening bones.
It would extract like proteins and fats and all that
stuff from the bones and leave the bones brittle, so
you can turn the bones into bone powder and get
all the good stuff from it and cook with that. Right, yeah, well,
I'm not sure though. He ended up attaching a piston
essentially to it. Why did he do that as a
(11:37):
pressure release valve? Okay, yeah, alright, now that that makes sense, right,
So he added basically the world's first pressure relief valve
to the world's first pressure cooker. Yeah, the first steam
powered piston. Like he didn't know it yet, he was
laying the groundwork for an engine. Yeah. That's definitely one
thing that emerged from researching this, Chuck, is that, like
the history of steam power is definitely built on the
(12:02):
backs of earlier people. That's neat you can trace it
all back to one guy. Yeah, who's like, go forth
and make this. Do you know what struck me was
I was researching all these great men doing these things,
and I thought, how much further would we be along
in the world if women, all throughout antiquity just could
(12:23):
do whatever they wanted as well? Yeah, and contribute themselves. Yeah,
Like they literally cut off half of society and said
you just go do this and that that's valuable to
two raise families and to you know, cooking clean and
do all the things that women were forced to do
back then. But they could also do other things. I bet.
I mean they were doing other things. And I'm not
(12:44):
trying to say that they weren't making advances, but they
certainly taking it that way. They weren't allowed to go
into the science labs. No, but you make a good point,
like if if raising a family is an extremely important pursuit,
which I think we both agree it is, would society
be as far as it is now if men and
(13:06):
women had been equally involved in pursuing science and nobody
was raising the family. Yeah, Like, what two hundred years ago,
there's a lady who could have figured out a cure
for cancer, but in her family like no, no, no,
you you scrubbed that thing and turned that butter wonder
and she just muttered to herself, like I cure you anyway. Uh.
(13:31):
And necessity as a mother of invention is the other
thing that really came to mind, because all these advancements
usually came along because they wanted to do something like specifically, well,
almost every time there was an advancement, and definitely material science,
there was somebody who had invented a new steam thing
that was limited by the the poor materials available at
(13:52):
the time. When the new materials came along, they just
immediately used it for the steam invention that had been
drummed up a hundred years but four yeah, you know,
so it just constantly was advancing. Now I think I
have just bungled my message so poorly that people are
gonna say, chuck, there were plenty of women of science
in the early days. So to make up for that,
(14:14):
we're gonna have to do a podcast on the early
pioneers of science who are women? Alright, I pledged to
do that now. But my message was pure, you know
what I'm saying. Anybody who doesn't get that, sometimes I
don't talk so good, which is funny because it's your job, right.
All right, So seventeenth century, we're going forward in time
(14:36):
a little bit more, and over in England where we
just got back from, they had a timber crisis because
they were they were advancing. They were building so many
things made out of wood, uh, namely ships and of
course homes and things. Uh. And they were in those
homes they need a lot of firewood. So you still
needed the wood to build ships and things. But they
(14:58):
found out, hey, we can use coal for fires at least. Yeah,
we're running low on timber, so we need to allocate
it smartly. Yeah, so let's use coal, which was great,
but to get more coal, you have to dig deeper,
and to dig deeper means it's gonna be wetter. You're
gonna hit the water table eventually. And so eventually this
all led to a problem, which was, Hey, we're down
in this coal mine now and it's full of water.
(15:22):
How can we rectify this? Right? So necessity once again
pops up. Everybody just stood around thinking for about fifty years.
Everything came to halt, and then finally was a woman
in the background going, I'll tell you how to do
this the student name. Finally a man spoke up and
everyone listen, that's right. The guy in named Thomas Savory.
(15:43):
He was a military engineer. He had come up with
something that he called a miner's friend, right, which I
don't know if that's the best name for it, but
maybe it was. So his miner's Friend was basically, it's
it's really neat. So it's very tough to describe this
stuff from here on out. Every time we describe something,
(16:05):
you're gonna get lost. So just go look up a
diagram of what we're talking about helps and it definitely helps.
For sure, it helped me big time. Basically, what it
was was there was a pot of boiling water. And
in this pot of boiling water there the steam would
be created. And a pot I mean an enclosed pot
with like pipes coming out but valves keeping it shut, right,
(16:26):
and they you would create steam and this the steam
would be transferred into another chamber with a pipe that
was going down into the to the water that you
wanted to get out of the ground. Okay, okay, you
would introduce steam into this right, and then you would
introduce cold water into that steam filled chamber and it
would suddenly condense the water, create a vacuum, and that
(16:50):
vacuum would pump the water out of the ground. Then
you had another pipe that would siphon off the water
from that chamber because there was a non return valve.
Once the water came up, it couldn't go back down.
That was the key. And then they would pump the
water out of that tube that pipe and then do
the whole process over again. Yeah, and it worked pretty well.
(17:13):
He didn't sell a ton of them to the mining
It didn't become the miner's friend like he thought. What
it really became was the rich person who wanted to
garden friend this. Let's pump our swampy es stayed out
friend pretty much. And the reason why is because to
to run it effectively and safely, you could only get
about of water out. If you're pumping water of a
(17:36):
five foot mine, then then you had to have one
of these huge setups everyt and be pumping up to
a reservoir that eventually pumped it up out of the mine.
So there's no way you could do that. Plus, every
one of these setups had to have people running the valves,
like all the valves and things were operated manually, and
they had a pretty bad reputation for blowing up. Well
(17:58):
that too, right, but it was a really it was
almost this guy wanted to sell it and change the
mining industry. He didn't, but he did end up creating
a scientific and historical proof of concept. Yeah, and well,
you know what, let's take a break and we will
come back and pick back up with a couple of
other brilliant dudes who advanced on those inventions. Alright, so
(18:43):
was the miner's friend. I don't know why it's so
funny to me. Uh. And just about fourteen years later,
in seventeen twelve, there was a blacksmith named Thomas Newcoming
and his little buddy John Kelly, who was his assistant,
a plumber and glassblower. I get the feeling like everybody
back then, blue glass, I just knew what you're doing. Yeah,
(19:04):
make your own window. Like today how everyone? Uh what
do is something everyone can do today? Um? Drive a car? Yeah,
or complain on social media. That's stop posting personal stuff. Yeah,
that's the glass blowing of today, posting on social media,
complaining on it. I think you might be right. So
(19:25):
he was a glass blower and plumber. His assistant was
and um, they said, you know what, let's create a
better system. It's more efficient. He took it was called
the Newcoming Engine. I guess Callie as an assistant, getting
didn't get his name in there. I would have lobbied
for the new Callie or something, maybe combined the names.
It's clever, but newcoming. No, it's my name, assistant. So
(19:47):
they took Savori's uh separation of the boiler and then
added Poppins steam driven piston, and all of a sudden
they had the Newcoming Engine. Well they no, they took
the boiler and put it combined it together, right, so
like you had you had this piston and it was
heated and then cooled, and then heated and cooled, so
(20:12):
it's like combined into one. Yes, but it was a
piston that was moving up and down right. Well yeah,
but it was a piston that was moving up and
down via this thing that looks kind of like a seesaw. Yeah.
I was connected to that, right, And on the other
end of that seesaw was the pump. So one end
is a piston moving this thing up and down like
the seesaw. On the other ends the pump. Yeah, And
(20:34):
what it's really doing is it's pulling it down on
either side. Yeah, it's not pushing ever, like one side
pulls making it one side go up. On the other
side poles making the other side go up. Right, So
you've got a um, you've got that that steam being
generated and it's pushing the piston up and then you
hit it with some cold water and the vacuum is created. Right,
(20:54):
And this thing could go through twelve cycles a minute. Hey,
not bad, It's true, and um, it was. It was
beyond improved concept, Like this thing actually really worked. You
could use it to do all sorts of work with Yeah,
And it was in hundreds of minds all over Britain, uh,
and in Europe. So people were like digging into this
(21:17):
thing called the engine for the first time. Yeah, it
was pretty amazing. But what happened was with everything, these
engineers start to say, you know what, let's improve on this,
let's improve the efficiency with the pump, let's improve these cylinders. Uh.
You get better iron along the way, stronger iron. And
this newcoming engine is just kind of refined over a
(21:37):
period of years, right, just from people tinkering with it. Right,
it's working better and better. And there was one guy
whose name you'll probably recognized. His name is James Watt.
I think he was born in England, but he made
his name in Glasgow, Scotland. Yeah, my new favorite country. Yeah,
it's a great country. I think his his I think
his name was James the game change or what. Yeah,
(22:01):
if he was a boxer, that's what he would have
been called. Although he took he took the Newcomban engine
and changed it back closer to the miner's friend though,
because the new coming combined the um the the boiler
with the condenser and he separated him out again. What
he figured out was if you just keep the piston hot, right,
(22:24):
the piston chamber hot and you have a separate condenser,
you're gonna use less energy keeping the condenser cool and
the piston hot. Because one of the dumb things about
the Newcomban engine and the reason why it took so
long to go through these cycles so where you could
only do twelve a minute, was because when when it
was hot and the steam rose, when you hit hit
(22:44):
it with that cold water, it cooled off and a
vacuum was created. You had to wait for the thing
to heat up again to get the steam. If you
had the cool water over here and the steam over here,
you would keep the hot side hot and the cool
side cool. Dlt it us and you could hit him.
You could use them to hit the the piston as
(23:05):
often as you wanted, and it really really improved. Um
it's efficiency. Yeah, like the engine is really starting to
take hold now and hum like an engine should. So
he partners up with a guy named Matthew Bolton. Um,
I'm not sure now spelled differently than Michael. There's a
U in there. Michael's just b O L t O
(23:26):
N right. Well, the this guy's is the British spelling. Oh,
so he could be a distant relative. You never know.
I like to think, so, uh, whatever happened to Michael Bolton?
You guarantee he's still touring and making records and stuff.
Guys like that. They don't go away. They might not
be in the international limelight and more, but they're still
(23:48):
doing what they do. There's always a home in Branson,
Missouri or Vegas, all right. So what has partnered up
with Bolton? Um they are making it more fuel efficient
engine now with that separate condenser. And this led to
to other inventions, one called the flyball Governor and one
called the double acting Engine. The flyball Governor is so difficult,
(24:13):
got to look it up. There's videos on YouTube. You
can't just look up a picture of it. You have
to see like an animated version of it. Yeah, and
once you see it, it all makes sense. And I
want to say I want to give a huge shout
out to a site that I found extremely helpful. UM
it's called Animated Engines dot com and they have all
these like just just graphics of engines and you can
(24:34):
speed up the friends persecutor slow it down and it
shows you like all the moving parts. You get it,
You just get it. But the flyball governors. So we'll
confuse you now with words. Well, no, the fireball governor,
We're just gonna say just go look it up. But
basically it is a way to automate the opening and
closing of valves using steve the steam that's being produced itself.
(24:56):
So what figured out this thing is making a lot
of steam, and a lot of steam is going to waste.
What if I took this waste steam and redirected it
to do other stuff like open and closed valves. That
was a huge innovation. They also came up with the
double acting engine, where they figured out, like, you don't
need to create a vacuum anymore, guys, we can just
use steam to make the pists and go up and
(25:19):
steam to make the piston go down. Double acting engine.
Pretty neat. Yeah, that was Those were enormous, enormous changes.
Again that laid a bunch of groundwork, Like they kicked
the thing forward and said, hey, twenty years from now,
get your inventors together, because we just came up with
some new ideas that you guys need to go build
better metal to contain it with. And don't forget about us. Yeah,
(25:43):
James Watt and I'm the other guy exactly. So what
this is what would set the table for the beginnings
of the industrial revolution which began in the textile industry.
Uh and and wolves specifically, for many many years had
been process by hand. Then they eventually took it down
(26:03):
by the river and had a water mill that would
that would you had a van by the river and
this water mill would would you know? You've all seen
how those work if you've been to any think still
Mountain Park here still has one pretty neat basically just
using hydro well les but say hydro electric, but hydro
(26:23):
power to spin a wheel. And they figured out, hey,
why don't we steam instead? And Bolton and Watts engine
works really well and people are using it like crazy.
But they were so early in the game. They had
all these patents that sort of made it hard, Like
(26:43):
these mines were going broke paying money on these patents
to to use this technology. What are they called royalties.
And so this other dude comes along, a guy named
Richard Trevorth Thick from Cornwall in England, I think it's
southwest south what yeah, known for their game hens and
(27:06):
they're supposed to have a great witchcraft museum there. I've
always wanted to go to but still have not been
able to make it. So they're known for game hens,
the Cornish engine which we're talking about, and a witchcraft museum.
Yeah not bad. No, that's not bad at all. Uh
and corn Yeah corn. So he was living in Cornwall
and he saw what was going on with all these miners.
(27:26):
He said, you know what I'm gonna do. Screw those
guys in their patents. I'm gonna just think of brand
new technology. That's better that you don't have to pay
royalties on their patents on patent. He had a real
bad attitude. Yeah, but he was smart. He was he
actually was super smart. This guy may have pushed them
further ahead than even Watt. And I've never heard of
(27:49):
the guy before you. No, I have the impressiment. He's
a national hero in England probably so um. But he uh,
he had some he he had the great fortune of
having some much more improved materials available to him. So
for a long time people had said, like, man, if
we could just get these containing vessels to hold really
(28:11):
high pressure, we could do amazing stuff with this. Yeah,
the new pressure is what drove the pistons. So the
more pressure the better, right, yeah, I mean if you could,
if you can, like you also, not only the more
pressure the better, the less um initial input you would
have to put in with energy would be more energy efficient, right,
you could just get right, So try to think. Um
(28:34):
had the advantage of having really good, better materials available
to him to make this stuff. So he um created
this Cornish engine, and the Cornish engine used higher pressure.
But not only that, it was a compounding engine, meaning
that UM it had it used the steam in more
(28:56):
than one way. Right, So rather than like one piston,
He's like, why not have four pistons and one piston
is fired and then some steam from that piston escapes
and fires another pistons, another and another, and all of
a sudden you're doing four times the work. I'm from Cornwall.
It was amazing, and he was. There was an American
(29:17):
and men her name Oliver Evans, who was kind of
doing similar things in the United States, and then a
guy named Arthur wolf I'm sorry, Arthur Wolfe was the
when it came up with a compounding Oh right, yeah, yeah, Travis.
His main contribution was basically just making a more rock solid, cheaper, lighter,
more efficient engine that used high pressure Yeah, it's a wolf.
(29:41):
Have you O O l F Virginia Woolf not wolf?
Well wolf, It just seems funny looking. Uh. He was
a brewery engineer. He made beer, and he's the one
that said, yeah, why don't we get all these pistons going,
pistons firing more pistons, pistons everywhere? It just made total sense.
Should we take a break? Yes? All right? They got
(30:23):
steam coming out of everywhere, steam engines, they're working there,
they're turning pistons and so all of this eventually would
lead to used to move things and people around. People like,
I'm so tired of walking my legs for so bad?
Can you take the steam technology and like make a
(30:46):
steam powered car? And apparently people have been working on
it for a while. There's some debate over who created
the first steam powered vehicle, And supposedly there's a guy
named Ferdinand Verbist who's the verby Ist fir to end
he supposedly created a steam car in sixteen seventy two,
but I guess that's up for debate. Um, there's a
(31:07):
lot of like you could draw a schematic of something,
but it doesn't necessarily mean you actually created it. I
think is the issue, Like we we have no idea
what was actually on the other side of a newcomb
in um steam engine. We just because none of the
diagrams ever mentioned it. It's all about the steam engine itself.
They don't talk about like the pumps, so we don't
(31:29):
really know what kind of pumps they were using. That
kind of thing. So if we go back, we can't
say for certain that this guy did it. It's possible,
but I think widely the guy named Nicolau Joseph Kuno,
who is a friend inventor, obviously created a steam powered
vehicle in seventeen sixty nine. But steam powered cars they
went virtually nowhere. That's like when I've been at the snowboard,
(31:51):
I thought, because evidence by my crayon drawing the skiboard,
and then we heard from people who said, sorry, the
snowboarders actually before that even so whatever, But like you said,
I created that in a vacuum, a vacuum created by
condensing water vapors. So as far as I'm concerned, I
(32:13):
did in the snowboard. Sure, yeah, you're tapped into the zeitgeist.
People wanted to go really fast on a skateboard down
a mountain while it was snow covered, and you just
wanted to deliver on that. In six year old Chuck
and Stone Mountain, Georgia, it was I was so keyte
to see a water wheel, right, I'd seen my first
ski movie, which one Now I was just kidding, but
(32:36):
those were big back then. Sure remember Better Off Dead? Yeah,
sure that was a ski movie of sorts. Yeah, part
that was. Someone said something funny on Twitter today about
I can't remember who it was, some politician, he said,
reminds him of an eighties ski movie villain. It was
really good because every ski movie the eighties had a
(32:58):
bad guy. Oh yeah, it was always the developer looking
to build condos at the ski resort. Exactly. All right,
So you're right, the car is one thing, but what
if we could make something larger? Uh? Treviorthik actually was
kind of key in this, and he said, you know what,
we've got these things they whether, they don't call them
railroad tracks yet, they just called them rails on the ground.
(33:22):
But yeah, and you hook a donkey up to a cart. Yeah,
and it's to help. It's really to help the donkey, sure,
because they're so stupid they can't walk in a straight line. Really.
But but if they're pulling a cart on rails that
have already been laid out on the path they're supposed
to follow, they're fine. Just give him a couple of
carrots and maybe a nice scratch behind the ear and
(33:45):
they're okay. Yeah, they were called tramways officially. I was
just kidding. So Trevior think is like, hey, let's let's
put something steam powered on these tracks. Brilliant, and he
tried it. He actually came up with something UM called
Trevor Thicks portable steam engine, which he called the Puffing Devil.
That was his name for it, and uh, it worked.
(34:07):
He did a demonstration where it hauled ten tons of
iron for ten miles. You know how huge that is
at the time. Sure, yeah, amazing because everything, everything up
to that point had been hauled by donkeys horse power, Yeah,
literal horse power. Right, um yeah, obviously not just donkeys.
There were horses too, but everything was very much localized.
(34:28):
And I don't think we've said it yet, but steam
power was the um the literal engine for the industrial revolution.
This is where it all started, you know. And the
way that it started was you could suddenly take timber
in this area and move it over to this area
hundreds of miles away. The coal in this area to
(34:48):
power these steam engines over here changed the course of history.
It did water turning into water vapor and containing that.
It's amazing and it's it's started it in England. Yeah,
it's just pretty neat. You're pandering. No, it's true, the
like over here in America. We're like, yeah, the Industrial
Revolution really picked up in the nineteenth century with America.
(35:10):
But I mean it's it's roots are definitely further back. Yeah,
this is in uh what eighteen o four? I think
I learned that England cannot be flattered, right, flattery, don't
pander to us? All right, so it's eighteen o eight,
(35:30):
you've got what do you call it? The the Industrial Revolution? No,
the Devil's puffer, the puffer devil, the puffing devil, puffing devil,
like the Devil's puffer. Sure that is, uh miner's friend.
You got those got a party? Uh so this is
a portable steam engine. He takes it to London, Central London,
(35:52):
puts it on a circular track and everyone goes blind, me,
what is that it is of the devil? It's a
puffing devil. Yeah, and it's amazing. Uh And that was
an engineer there named George Stevenson and a couple of
decades after Treviorthick, he said, you know what, I'm gonna
take that and I'm gonna like everyone else before, saying
I'm gonna make it better, more efficient, And all of
(36:15):
a sudden things got so good. They actually opened up
what I think is the first town to town railroad
line between because they're trying to move coal from Durham
to Stockton at a shipping port and it works so well,
they said, all right, let's do this. Let's let's put
(36:36):
in the infrastructure, build what this guy is calling a
locomotive track, and that was I think the very first
operating locomotive track rail line and it didn't just carry cargo,
it carried six hundred passengers. Yeah. Yeah, so why don't
we put people on that thing? And they're like, is
this safe? And he's like, no, not at all, But
(36:58):
I really have a lot to prove. So just pick
six criminals who cares, Yeah, don't sit near the boiler
and you'll be fine. Yeah. Uh So in the meantime,
there's people are still tinkering around with the steam car
that didn't go away, but it never took off. No,
and um, the steam locomotive was just this beautiful design
(37:20):
to think about it. So let's go back to all
the steam engines we talked about. It's um, steam moving
a piston back and forth, back and forth, right or
up and down, of course, sure, but in this case
it's going um, it's moving horizontally. The piston is and
the piston is attached to a bar that's attached to
a wheel, and if you want to get kind of fancy,
(37:42):
you can attach several wheels to this bar. And as
the pistons moving back and forth, this bar is actually
making an a lipse and as far as the wheels
are concerned, they're making circles. And you're moving forward as
this is happening. And again, go to animated Engines dot
com and look up a steam locomotive and it's just
(38:06):
amazing and it's design like these people really just got
in there and roll up their shirt sleeves and they
had like cold dust down their faces and really they
were doing like some real engineering. Oh yeah, I'm just
so impressed with the guys who who made this stuff.
It was amazing. You know there, of course, there's no surprise.
But there are I don't know what they call themselves,
(38:27):
but there are big time train officionados that go and
just watch trains, trainoids. They might be called train watchers,
even train spotters. No, are you sure? I don't think so, probably,
but they trainees. I can't remember where I came across it,
but it was in another podcast I was researching and
(38:49):
found this whole subculture of people that that find these
old you know us. I mean they watch all kinds
of trains, but mainly they what really like get them going,
We really get some out of in the morning. It
really gets there's their miner's friend up. Yeah, it's the
promise stuff, the promise of an old fashioned steam locomotive
(39:09):
that's going through town because they still have them. You know,
it's amazing. It's pretty cool. I mean, I get white
people do it. It's sort of like birding, you know.
It's a very solitary kind of quiet thing. Yeah, and
then that train rumbles by, and I mean, like I
I understand, I've never been into trains or whatever. I'm
more just I think the steam engine on a steam
locomotive is amazing. Yeah, and you like to take trains. Sure,
(39:32):
we took a train from Manchester to Edinburgh. Lovely. It
was a really nice ride to the English countryside. In
Scottish I couldn't tell the difference. I could. I was like, yeah,
we're in Scotland now I know, all right. So the
(39:52):
steam engine is chugging along. Um Stephen, they called it
so so cool. He was a conductor on locomotion number one.
That one was six center passengers. Yeah, it's just so
cool that they named it like locomotion number one. This
is the very first time they've been done. They were
very prescient. Just so cool. It's like the first plane
(40:16):
flight or something. We need to do one on the right, brothers, Okay,
I'm happy to do that there from Ohio. No. Sorry, ever,
would't even say their name, So Chuck the steam locomotive is.
It was pretty much an out of the gate hit.
Some poor people were still working on the steam powered car.
(40:36):
But in the meantime other people are like, what about
steam boats, let's come up with something like that, and um,
some people have been kicking around the idea for that
as well. And apparently it followed pretty closely the evolution
of the steam locomotive too. Um, just people building on
ideas and people coming with proof of concepts. And it
(40:58):
was an American guy named Rob Fulton who created the
first steam powered paddle wheeled boat that showed that it
was actually capable of moving up and down rivers. Yeah,
and that there was There was a guy in England
and about forty years earlier named Jonathan Hall who had
the first steam powered tugboat, but it didn't work too
well because again the technology with these newcomen and savory
(41:21):
engines just weren't good enough. But it was really Fulton
who said, you know, come aboard, how quaint is this? Yeah?
Do you like my captain's hat? Yeah? Traveling up and
down the river with a paddle boat? How quaint. They're like, well,
we don't have any future things to compare it to,
so it's just contemporary to us. Well in dudes that
were professional oarsmen were like, no, I really like the
(41:45):
looks of this exactly. It's wonderful. So Fulton created, um,
the first one. But it was a guy named WILLIAMS.
Symington who gets credit for the full first fully steampowered passenger. Yeah,
the Charlotte dun Duss and uh, Fulton's was the Claremont
(42:05):
yea and uh in eighteen nineteen, what what they would
do with these these sailing ships, because they would now
outfit them with steam power for when the wind was
down and just to augment the wind. And it worked
out great in in eighteen nineteen, the Savannah became the
very first steam powered ship to make a transatlantic crossing. Yeah,
(42:26):
and apparently this theme power was such a threat to
sail makers that this is a consortium of salemakers lobby
the British government saying hey, can you can you do something?
Can you stifle the steam technology? Can you shut down
this amazing evancement because we make sales? Yeah, it didn't work.
(42:48):
That's you know, every time something is automated, like the
A t M or something and people say, oh, people
are gonna lose jobs, you're looking at history, buddy. That's
all his tree has been is one advancement that puts
people out of work, creating a new industry where people
can work. And it's sad in a way, but it's
(43:09):
just part of it, you know. Yeah, it's called moving forward. Yeah,
too bad, So sad for the sale industry, sale making industry,
but you know, there's people still sale recreationally. Sure. Yeah,
so now he gets the best part in my opinion, Chuck, Yeah,
I like the locomotive. So the steam turbine, the electricity
(43:33):
producing steam powered turbine. Yeah, there's a good argument for that.
I love it. Remember how electricity works episode So electricity
is created when you spin a copper coil inside a magnet, right,
And Michael Faraday created what he called a dynamo, which
is basically that, And he said, hey, steam guys of
(43:55):
the future, I got an idea for you. Go ahead
and come up with a steam power our dynamo. Can
you do it? And they set about trying to make
that happen. Um. Part of the problem though, is they
figured out that with a steam powered piston, which is
what all steam power or steam engines powered were pistons
up to that point, you could only do so many
(44:16):
um cycles. Yeah yeah, and that's you need the dynamo
going pretty fast to create some electricity or enough to
use on an industrial scale. So this dude named um
Charles Algernon Parsons who's British. In four he figured out
that there was a new type of steel available and
(44:37):
you could create a pretty nice turbine from it. And
if you took that turbine and went all the way
back to basically Hero's original idea, which was spinning, but
rather than having the steam spin the actual vessel, you
had vessel vessel creating steam that you're shooting out at
the turbine. You can spin a dynamo pretty fast. Eighteen
(44:58):
thousand revolutions a minute was his dynamo, and in Jack
that was enough to generate electricity, and they installed it
forthwith at the Fourth Bank's power station, and the rest
of Europe said, holy cow, we have electricity. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah.
(45:19):
And as a matter of fact that something like eight
percent of the electricity in the United States still today
is made through steam steam turbines. Amazing worldwide is made
through steam turbines. So like this, this guy changed the world, um,
along with Faraday. Yeah, of course and everyone else before, right,
(45:43):
because everybody's building on the work of everybody else, and
all the women who supported those men who probably had
better ideas, who were like, we could have come up
with this years ago. So we mentioned a few times
that this was dangerous, uh, exploding boilers or a problem man.
Even when they figured out safety valves. Um, early safety
(46:05):
valves wouldn't work. Actually, later safety valves have proved to
not work on occasion in the case of Three Mile Island.
But um they it got a bad rap in the press,
of course, and that probably um slowed progress a bit,
but progress continued nevertheless. Well even today there's boiler explosions,
(46:25):
like there's a big one at a plant, a Danta
Corporation plant in Tennessee, just blew up like a significant
portion of the plant. And it's it's not just um
that it's like throwing hot water out everywhere. The the
pressure that can build up in these high pressure systems, uh,
(46:45):
in these vessels, if the vessel gives when that when
that steam hits the regular atmosphere, it expands right, and
you have basically I think I read something like a
ten m vessel of water, which is what you would
find on like a steam locomotive. If it blew up,
it would blow up to with a force equivalent of
(47:08):
one ton of TNT. Crazy. Yeah, so it's a it's
a big deal if you're blower blows up. And it
all comes down to the safety valves and whether or
not they're allowing too much pressure to build up, and
then your vessel's ability to withstand that added pressure pretty scary.
It is kind of scary, but it's yeah, no, that's
(47:29):
my scense there. Scary. I don't want to be evolving
a boiler accident. Uh No, I don't think anyone wants to. UM.
All right, we're gonna finish, I think with this, right
unless you have other stuff beyond super critical fluid. Oh,
I do kind of all right, we'll finish with that then,
but right now, super critical fluid we'll talk about it.
(47:51):
Is earlier when you talked about solid, liquid and gas
each having their molecule distribution at different densities. Um, something
really strange happens, as Robert points out, when you heat uh,
when you when you go through the from solid to
liquid to gas, and if you heat up that gas enough,
(48:13):
those molecules actually eventually are forced back together and it
becomes like a liquid again, but it still has the
properties of a gas. Yeah, it's kind of like a
plasma state or something almost. It's super critical fluid. Yeah,
you know, that has its own name. So when when
water in particular hits its um, its critical point is
(48:35):
that seven and five degrees fahrenh height and two seventeen atmospheres.
So it's very high temperature, very high pressure. When it
goes beyond that point and it starts behaving quite weirdly. Um,
you actually can get more steam power out of less
(48:57):
initial fossil fuel input. So it's a sleep, it's more um,
it's more efficient when you can heat something to these
higher pressures, these super critical pressures, way more. Yeah. So again,
the reason that you can do this is we could
have always done it. We could have heated it up
to this this amount, but we never had the materials
(49:18):
to hold it. Now we have the materials to hold it.
And they're they're um creating more and more electricity with
supercritical steam. Yeah. And here's a little mind blowing fact
for you. Uh. This water to create the supercritical liquid
fluid is heated at such a high pressure that it
doesn't even boil. No, it goes right from water to
water vapor. That's fast. And apparently they're figuring out now
(49:42):
that you could actually use c O two instead of
water because it has a much lower critical point. It's
like um five degrees fahrenheight and seventy three atmospheres, which
is like nothing, and they're figuring out, we'll wait a minute,
we could use a bunch of c O two in
lieu of water vapor and get even more um energy
(50:02):
out of this, Yeah, but from less input. So they're
trying to figure out how to how to use supercritical
c O two to create electricity now to power steam turbines.
It's a decent band name, super Critical CR two. Sure, sure,
it's not bad. You got one more tidbit? That was it? Oh?
That was a tidbit? Yeah? Oh great? Can I go home? Yeah,
(50:25):
in just a minute. Uh, since we don't have anything else.
If you want to know more about steam power, you
can type those words into the search bar at how
stuff works dot com. Since I said steam power, it's
time for listener mail. This was written by one of
our jingle writers, you know, our little jingle bumpers. Sure yeah, Hey, guys,
(50:45):
just want to appreciate the fact that s Y s
K gives joke mos like me the opportunity to feel
famous for just a leading moment. Whenever I'm listening to
an episode and I'm cut to commercially here one of
my little songs, it really takes me by surprise, and
I think that sounds familiar. Oh yeah, I wrote that. Yeppee.
I'm gonna stay at home dad. I'm trying to make
my name for myself as at home dad, as a
(51:08):
versatile graphic artist and film composer. And it's nice to
know that at least something of mine is making it
out to the masses. And speaking of being a dad,
I just finished my first children's e book, which we're
gonna plug since he give us says, uh, oh yeah
for sure, Yeah, we plug it anyway. I'm very proud
of it. It's called Hector's Song. It's a tale about
being who you are no matter what. That's a great message.
(51:32):
You can get the regular read words on a page
version on Kindle or or an enhanced version with narration
and music on eyebooks that jacks into your brain. Yeah.
He recommends it for kids zero to six or so.
And you can go to his website which is Elaine
Osborne E A L A N elon probably O S
(51:53):
B O R N E dot com, or just go
to e books or Amazon. And thanks again, guys, J
Money and Chuck E. D. You guys are the real deal.
Thanks so long. We appreciate that. Man. You're the real
deal too, man writing books and music and yeah stay
at home dad, and yeah pretty neat, yea super neat.
If you want to get in touch with us because
(52:15):
you submitted a jingle and have now written a book,
well we want to hear from you. You can tweet
to us at s y esk podcast or josh um
Clark too. You can hang with us on Facebook dot com,
slash stuff you Should Know, check me and check out
on Facebook for the more personal stuff with Chuck's needs. Uh.
You can send us an email to stuff podcast the
(52:37):
how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us
at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
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