I know about the post title rule but I would be surprised if anyone clicks on this not assuming it's about the video game digital distribution service and storefront.
That said, here's a lovely video from YouTuber "Aging Wheels" about a (working!) scale model of a British steam truck: https://youtu.be/PFKa8K9qZBQ
Author here. Having been neck-deep in steam engine history for years, the possible confusion caused by the title didn't even occur to me. It's obvious in retrospect. I guess I created accidental clickbait.
Thanks for your comment back… I clicked on it for game market Steam as well, but I learned a few years ago that my great grandfather built some steam cars in Rochester around 1900, so I found this fascinating. Thanks!
No clue what LORA is.
But I've assumed they choose confusing names so it's more difficult to search for reviews or technical info about the modems online.
See: "TVCABO" vs "NOS" ["We"]. "TMN" vs "Meo" ["mine", mispelled].
I confess when I saw "Steam" I thought it was about the game company. That said, working it into "Last Stand" made me think it was about the engine technology. The game company is still going strong, no?
There isn't a universal context for people to know or not know, you know? If anything I'd expect the most relevant 'Steam' in most readers lives to be the company
every coal and nuclear electric power station, and a good fraction of the oil ones and part of each combined-cycle gas power station, runs on steam. these are still the majority of the electric power grid. so all those electric cars you see on the road, as well as the streetlights above them and the factories they were built in, are powered primarily by steam. it's just coupled to them through wires instead of driveshafts
so 'The steam car was an inflection point where steam power, for so long an engine driving technological progress forward, instead yielded the right-of-way to a brash newcomer. Steam began to look like relic of the past, reduced to watching from the shoulder as the future rushed by' is utterly clueless
(so is contrasting steam engines with 'combustion engines'. steam engines are combustion engines, except for the ones in nuclear power stations; they're external combustion engines, while the onboard engines that commonly run cars are internal combustion engines. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion_engine)
so the overall framing of the article is wrong, but that isn't its main thesis. its main thesis is that steamers were slow to start up and complicated to run, and then the matthew effect took over. i don't know enough about early automotive history to evaluate this thesis, but an obvious alternative hypothesis is that only henry ford knew what the fuck he was doing, so everybody else (including gm, which he had sort of founded before he founded ford) copied him once he outsold them ten to one in the 01910s
Author here. Some of the apparent errors here are due to the fact that this is part of a larger series, more of a book in blog form.
> every coal and nuclear electric power station, and a good fraction of the oil ones and part of each combined-cycle gas power station, runs on steam.
I'm aware of this. This is written in the context of the cultural decline of steam power as something people think and dream and write science fiction about, not its physical elimination from the world. See this post [0], particularly the last section, "The Twilight of Steam."
> so is contrasting steam engines with 'combustion engines'. steam engines are combustion engines
I'm aware of this also. But internal combustion engine is a mouthful, so I elected to shorten it, as described this post [1]
> but an obvious alternative hypothesis is that only henry ford knew what the fuck he was doing, so everybody else (including gm, which he had sort of founded before he founded ford) copied him once he outsold them ten to one in the 01910s
This can't be correct, because internal combustion cars left steam cars in the dust well before the 1910s; it was obvious to most people that internal combustion was winning by 1903.
i see, thanks! i still think 'combustion engine' is incorrect terminology. maybe your blog will turn out to be so popular that everyone will adopt your terminology, and it'll just be a pet peeve for the olds like me, like using 'literally' as a figurative intensifier. until then, though, it will make people familiar with the field cringe when they read your posts
i think there were a lot of things that were obviously true to people about motorcars in 01903 that turned out to be false; to mention a few, the ridiculous level of danger involved in traveling over fifteen miles an hour, the impossibility of them ever becoming as widespread as horses (due to their overwhelming mechanical complexity), and the utter impracticality of electric cars, though that one took quite a while to change. hindsight is 20:20
maybe if henry ford had still been building steam cars in 01899 when he founded the company that eventually became cadillac (acquired by gm in 01909), the first decade of the twentieth century would have seen the kinds of advances in low-thermal-mass heat exchangers and flash boilers that ford instead had to make in areas such as transmissions and the engine block. but maybe that wouldn't have been enough, or maybe ford's mind was better suited to mechanical and industrial engineering than to thermodynamics. maybe the inherently larger thermal mass of a steam engine doomed it for this application in a non-path-dependent way, much as there are no diesel motorcycles
you probably know more than i do about the relevant history, so you're more likely to be right
just to clarify, the standard definition of 'combustion engine' includes steam engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion_engine, while it's mcdonald's personal definition of it that doesn't
as for the pedantry, though, guilty as charged
there is a shorter term for 'internal combustion engine' that doesn't have a conflicting standard definition; you could call them 'explosion engines', which is what we call them in spanish (because 'motor de combustión interna' is even longer). sometimes this term is limited to otto-cycle engines (as in https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_de_explosi%C3%B3n) but logically should include diesel engines as well
in addition to lacking a conflicting standard definition, 'explosion engines' has the advantage that, like 'dynamic programming', it makes the subject sound more exciting
In this day and age where we have lots of extra bits to store values, why go with only five digits? We're just kicking the can down the road. I propose we move to at least 12 digit years starting today: May 31, 000000002024
Side note: supercritical CO2 turbines could supplant steam turbines. They could be much more compact. Steam turbines are expensive! I don't know why supercritical CO2 is not more popular so far, the technology has been talked about for 20 years or so and products have existed for over a decade.
that's very interesting! i had only heard about the supercritical pentane turbines, which i don't think you can buy as an off-the-shelf product yet (or possibly ever)
It's surprising that the Watery nature of steam isn't mentioned in the article at all, as it is a terrible material on which to build any reliable consumer technology:
* Corrosive
* Heavy
* Does not lubricate
* Huge heat capacity, i.e. you get cooked if even a little bit of it gets on you)
About the only advantage it has is being cheap, available, and nontoxic which is cool for factories built on rivers
Steam has fundamental problems beyond engine startup time that are just not solvable. Gas engines can quickly switch from low-power to high-power, meaning that you can kick it up quickly to pass another car or maintain speed up a hill.
It's all tradeoffs, but responsiveness matters. And in terms of responsiveness steam < diesel < gas < electric. There's a reason both diesel and gas have long coexisted: sometimes you need more responsiveness, and sometimes more constant power. Steam was just too far from acceptable for high speed responsive output.
That's not the problem. If you have boiler pressure, going to higher power briefly is fast. But you might run out of steam on a long hill if the thermal inertia of the boiler is high and something isn't done to increase the fuel feed.
In locomotives, thermal inertia is so great that fuel input has to be increased in advance of long hills. That's part of the fireman's job. Lack of advance planning can result in a train stuck on an upgrade, with the locomotive unable to generate enough power to get the train started again.[1] (There's some wheel slip, too.)
"Little and Often", a training film for steam locomotive fireman, covers this.[2]
This is the source of the phrase "running out of steam".
This is the full startup procedure for a Stanley Steamer.[3] Shows what all the gauges, levers, valves, and pumps do. Cold startup takes 20 minutes, is very tricky, and if botched the vehicle will be seriously damaged. Nice looking car, though. Pinstriping on the leaf springs!
The stanly was a much earlier tech, perhaps the best car of it's generation. But compare that to the doble, perhaps the high point of steam car technology before that personal motive power route was abandoned.
If you had a larger boiler volume, you could have a far larger reserve of power on demand... however, that would have come with a huge amount of danger. Steam explosions killed far too many people back in that era. Keeping the boilers small was a wise precaution.
Response time would be one of steams solvable problems. There has not been much research on this aspect in the last hundred years, but off the top of my head.
1. Response time is already great, You have a reservoir of instantly available energy in the form of steam pressure ready to go whenever you need it. look up steam engines slipping their wheels, in fact one big problem with steam is that it is much easier to apply too much energy. Same problem with electric. they need a good torque management system to deliver only the power that is needed.
2. The reservoir response time is too long, Probably not a problem, that is the whole point of having a reservoir, but if it is, make it faster, fire tube boilers, more surface area, etc, a solvable problem. Consider the response time of the reservoir of an electric car. it is far worse than any steam engine, yet you say it has a faster response time.
No the real reason we don't use steam cars is that the engines are more expensive than internal combustion engines without all that much benefit.
It's not solvable. Yes, temporary response is a thing. But if I'm driving around town but then go on a freeway then what? Does it always over-produce around town? Or does it take time to build the new head of steam needed for the freeway?
Also consider how complex a thing you are proposing vs a gas and electric simple solution of "more input gives more output now."
That said, as neat as steam cars are, there is a reason internal combustion engines won. Probably because they are smaller, lighter and most importantly cheaper.
> "Steam has fundamental problems beyond engine startup time that are just not solvable. Gas engines can quickly switch from low-power to high-power..."
A modern steam-powered vehicle could be based on a steam turbine creating electric power, with a battery and electric traction motor (effectively, a series hybrid). This is how many modern power plants work (coal, gas, nuclear) and would be much more efficient than classic steam engines, by targeting an optimal, constant RPM and torque and providing regenerative braking. It would have plenty of peak power and responsiveness, exceeding gas vehicles and similar to a fully electric vehicle.
But even with the high level of efficiency and performance that this configuration would allow, it's likely a non-starter for environmental reasons, unless you can use a much cleaner fuel than coal?
It also seems to me like running pressure vessels around at 70 mph is not going to be a very good idea. There's a variety of possible ways it may not be a good idea; for instance, you can build pressure vessels than can generally stand up to an impact even at that speed, but they will be quite heavy which causes efficiency problems no matter what other advantages may exist, and will be difficult to hit all our other collision safety metrics with. Keep it light enough to avoid that and now they burst on collision. Plus, you know, people drive cars for a long time and don't maintain them, and again, while you can generally engineer them not to explode any amount of sudden steam escape can become a problem in a lot of circumstances... even radiators, much much smaller by volume, have historically become dangerous at failure points due to the heat and pressure involved. I don't think there's a "sweet spot" for any of these concerns, only points in the middle where you end up with all the problems at once.
In reality we as a species are actually pretty good at handling risk. Look at gasoline cars those infernal firebombs on wheels ended up being ubiquitous.
Yeah, we are pretty good at handling risks... as evidenced by our decision to not put steam engines in all our cars.
Engineering solutions have to exist; we can not just will them into being. See also "why our electric cars have not improved in battery density by a factor of magnitude in the past 10 years".
I don’t think there’s anything particularly mysterious here. Of the three early automotive propulsion technologies, internal combustion engines were the best compromise at the time, as it was compared to the gas turbine in the 1950s and 1960s, rotary engines in the 1960s and 1970s, and lead-acid and NiMH battery vehicles in the 1990s.
Jay Leno has a Doble car (mentioned in the article as a 1920s attempt at a "user-friendly" steam car revival). The video has great production and really shows the starting and driving processes: https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo
I thought maybe the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Steemer carpet cleaning company might be a descendant of the Stanley steam car company. But it doesn’t look like it - the carpet cleaning company just wanted a memorable name, and a nostalgic name for a ridiculous but charming machine from 40 years earlier fit the bill.
They could focus on battery technology more for sure and much sooner than they did. Demand didn't drive it until much later primarily because they thought that combustion engine is good enough.
First electric cars existed already in 19th century by the way.
Maybe, maybe not. ICEs weren't developed in isolation - they were a part of the larger development, that of petrochemical industry, which is responsible for near everything we recognize as modernity. Rudimentary batteries are cool, but without petrochem, they'd be powering wooden cars with sheet metal exteriors, cleaned with fat and spring water, and moving slower than a horse.
That said, here's a lovely video from YouTuber "Aging Wheels" about a (working!) scale model of a British steam truck: https://youtu.be/PFKa8K9qZBQ