X-Nico

6 unusual facts about Steam Engine


Federal Boiler Inspection Act

The Federal Boiler Inspection Act, also called the Railroad Inspection Act, expanded the Boiler Inspection Act of 1911 to include I.C.C. regulation not just of train engine boilers, but of the entire train as well as cargo to ensure safety for workers and passengers.

Geneva steam bicycle

The Geneva steam bicycle was a steam powered motorcycle made in the United States in the late 19th century.

Le Moule

Shared farming has become necessary as well as industrial modernization and steam machines replaced traditional windmills.

River Bourne, Kent

The mill burnt down in 1917 and was rebuilt and worked by steam power until 1960.

Roper steam velocipede

The Roper steam velocipede was a steam-powered velocipede built by inventor Sylvester H. Roper of Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts, United States sometime from 1867–1869.

Steam engine

Tower's engines were used by the Great Eastern Railway to drive lighting dynamos on their locomotives, and by the Admiralty for driving dynamos on board the ships of the Royal Navy.


Ader Éole

The Ader Éole, also called Avion, was an early steam-powered aircraft developed by Clément Ader in the 1890s and named after the Greco-Roman wind god Aeolos.

Architonnerre

Leonardo's description was hidden amongst his papers until it was rediscovered by Étienne-Jean Delécluze of the French Institute in 1838 and published in the magazine L'Artiste in 1841, well after the modern high pressure steam engine had been independently invented.

Baguley valve gear

The Baguley valve gear is a type of steam engine valve gear invented by Ernest E. Baguley, the Chief Draughtsman of the W.G. Bagnall company of locomotive manufacturers.

Bertha von Suttner

Also depicted in the coin are Martin Luther (symbolising the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern period); Antonio Vivaldi (exemplifying the importance of European cultural life); and James Watt (representing the industrialization of Europe, inventor of the first steam engine in the 18th century).

Berthold Schwarz

This historical Master Berthold, who would not have invented gunpowder ex nihilo, but who would rather have developed an effective recipe which opened technological possibilities and initiated the development of gunpowder warfare during the 15th century, is likened by Feldhaus to James Watt who did not so much "invent" the steam engine as improve the invention of Denis Papin to a point where its application became worthwhile.

Coal mining in the United Kingdom

Coal production increased dramatically in the 19th century as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, as a fuel for steam engines such as the Newcomen engine, and later, the Watt steam engine.

Denis Papin

While in Marburg in 1690, having observed the mechanical power of atmospheric pressure on his 'digester', Papin built a model of a piston steam engine, the first of its kind.

Dugald Clerk

Most engine designs that pre-dated the Otto engine (and Clerk engine), such as those of de Rivaz, the Niépce brothers, Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir, Samuel Morey, and others, did use two stroke engines, which were "natural" in the times of steam engine.

Firemen and Deckhands' Union of New South Wales

The union covered deckhands employed on ferries, tugs, launches, lighters and hoppers, as well as enginemen, wharf hands, turnstill hands, change hands, firemen, motorboat coxmen and assistants.

Flywheel

In the Industrial Revolution, James Watt contributed to the development of the flywheel in the steam engine, and his contemporary James Pickard used a flywheel combined with a crank to transform reciprocating into rotary motion.

Hem Vejakorn

He worked for a while for the royal irrigation department in Saraburi Province and was a steam engine mechanic.

HMS G11

The body of Telegraphist George Philip Back was recovered and buried in the churchyard of St Peter & St Paul, Longhoughton; the body of Stoker Pliny Foster was never found.

Japanese corvette Amagi

Amagi was designed as a wooden-hulled three-masted bark-rigged sloop with a coal-fired triple expansion reciprocating steam engine driving a single screw.

Japanese corvette Tenryū

Tenryū was designed as an iron-ribbed, wooden-hulled, three-masted bark-rigged sloop with a coal-fired double expansion reciprocating steam engine with four boilers driving a single screw.

Japanese corvette Yamato

Yamato was designed as an iron-ribbed, wooden-hulled, three-masted bark-rigged sloop-of-war with a coal-fired double expansion reciprocating steam engine with six boilers driving a single screw.

Kalmar

In more recent times, Kalmar has been an industrial city with Kalmar Verkstad making steam engines, trains and large machinery, later bought by Bombardier who closed the factory in 2005.

Life in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is the period encompassing the vast social and economic changes that resulted from the development of steam-powered machinery and mass-production methods, beginning in about 1760 in Great Britain and extending through some of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Line shaft

Queen Street Mill, Burnley, line shafting operating 600 Lancashire looms, driven by a 500 horsepower coal fired steam engine.

LMS Stanier Class 8F 8233

In 1948 it was at Suez, needing a new firebox, and was almost scrapped, but was then returned to England in 1952 and overhauled at Derby Works.

Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway

Having had an eye for high-tech from the outset, the LC&N company's founders decided to try some of the railroad solutions put into place in England around Coalbrookdale, which birthed not only railroads, but both the Steam locomotive, and the fixed cable winch enginess which were used in many steep grades as well as for mining hoists.

Melbourne Steam Traction Engine Club

On site there is an extensive collection of Mobile Steam, Stationary Steam Engines, Stationary IC Engines, Diesel engines, Diesel Generator sets, Tractors and other mobile machinery.

Motorboat

Although the screw propeller had been added to an engine (steam engine) as early as the 18th century in Birmingham, England by James Watt, the petrol engine only came about in the later part of the 19th century, at which point Frederick William Lanchester recognized the potential of combining the two components to create the first all British powerboat; tested in Oxford, England, the powerboat was born.

Museum of Lake Minnetonka

In 1905, TCRT commissioned naval architect Royal C. Moore of Wayzata, Minnesota to design each of these identical vessels to be 70' long, 14'10" wide, and draw 5.5' of water. Each would be powered by a single coal-fired boiler and triple-expansion steam engine, with a single 46" screw for propulsion.

Newcomen Society of the United States

Both groups took their name from Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729), the British industrial pioneer whose invention of the atmospheric steam engine in 1712 led to the first practical use of such a device -- lifting water out of mines.

Sankey diagram

Sankey diagrams are named after Irish Captain Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey, who used this type of diagram in 1898 in a classic figure (see panel on right) showing the energy efficiency of a steam engine.

Screw sloop

In the 19th century, during the introduction of the steam engine, ships driven by propellers were differentiated from those driven by paddle-wheels by referring to the ship's screws (propellers).

Sir James Lowther, 4th Baronet

The first problem to be confronted in such an enterprise was drainage, which was dealt with by using early Newcomen steam engines.

Solomon the Wise

Solomon Kaus, the title character, was an actual Jew who lived in Paris at that time, and believed he could build a machine that could run on water power; it is unclear whether he may have had an early idea along the lines of a steam engine or if he was simply pursuing an impossibility.

Stationary engineer

The early steam engines developed by Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen which drew water from mines and the industrial steam engines perfected by James Watt and others employed the ancestors of today's engineers.

Steam dummy

A steam dummy or dummy engine, in the United States of America and Canada, was a steam engine enclosed in a wooden box structure made to resemble a railroad passenger coach.

The End of Oil

Though The End of Oil is not a chronological history of humanity's use of fossil fuels, Roberts begins by recounting how Thomas Newcomen, in 1712, presented the first large steam engine, and thus helped spark the Industrial Revolution.

Thermodynamics

Historically, thermodynamics developed out of a desire to increase the efficiency and power output of early steam engines, particularly through the work of French physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1824) who believed that the efficiency of heat engines was the key that could help France win the Napoleonic Wars.


see also

A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe

He conducts various schemes with his two friends: Half-breed Steam Engine Bill (Robert Charlebois) and his girlfriend Lucy (Miou-Miou).

Barring

Barring engine, a small engine that forms part of the installation of a large stationary steam engine

Black Country Living Museum

In 1712, Thomas Newcomen built the world's first successful steam engine which was used for pumping water from coal mines on Lord Dudley's estates.

Buckeye gasoline buggy

Charles H. Black reported that he completed and tested his first steam engine "chug buggy" in 1891.

Carolwood Pacific Railroad

On October 21, 2003, Walt Disney World Railroad Steam Engine #3, the Roger E. Broggie was re-dedicated in honor of the late, longtime Disney Imagineer Roger Broggie, who was named a Disney Legend in 1990.

Cornish Pump

Cornish engine, a type of steam engine developed in Cornwall, England, mainly for pumping water from a mine.

Chapin Mine Steam Pump Engine, a steam engine located in Iron Mountain, Michigan, commonly called The Cornish Pump

David Mach

Recently Mach has produced some permanent public works such as Out of Order in Kingston upon Thames, the Brick Train (a depiction of an LNER Class A4 steam engine made from 185,000 bricks, which can be seen near Morrison's supermarket on the A66 just outside Darlington) and the Big Heids visible from the M8 between Glasgow and Edinburgh.

De Winton

The steam engine at Glynllifon was restored by Fred Dibnah after he was originally called to the park to quote for the demolition of the chimney.

DRG Class 61

In 2002, number 18 201 was totally overhauled in the Meiningen steam engine shop and is now in the possession of the Steam Plus company (Dampf-Plus GmbH) owned by Christian Goldschagg and Axel Zwingenberger.

DRG Kleinlokomotive Class II

Light locomotives mainly used diesel motors (originally classified as Kö/Köf/Köe by the DRG), as their source of energy, but there were also versions with Benzolmotors, designated as Kb/Kbf/Kbe, and with electrical batteries (accumulator cars: Ks/Ka), as well as one locomotive with a steam engine.

Emergency Shipbuilding program

All the ships to be built were collectively called the Ocean class and to be of an existing British design for 5-hatch cargo ships of about 10,000 tons' load displacement and 11 knots' service speed using obsolete, but readily available, triple-expansion reciprocating steam engine and coal-fired Scotch-type fire tube boilers.

Emu Bay Railway

(Junction with the North East Dundas Tramway to Montezuma and Williamsford on the southern slopes of Mount Read the first railway in the world to have a working Garratt steam engine - K-1.)

Engine efficiency

The first piston steam engine, developed by Thomas Newcomen around 1710, was slightly over one half percent (0.5%) efficient.

Eric James Eames

A former steam engine driver, Eames represented the city's Small Heath ward on Birmingham City Council from 1949-1992, without break.

Guns of the Timberland

The scene where the steam engine goes over the tall "bridge" was shot using the Clio trestle.

History of the steam engine

On February 21, 1804 at the Penydarren ironworks at Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, the first self-propelled railway steam engine or steam locomotive, built by Richard Trevithick, was demonstrated.

Houston Fire Museum

The collection also features firefighting vehicles such as a hand-drawn and hand-powered pumper, a horse-drawn steam engine, and a 1912 American Automatic ware tower with an American LaFrance engine, the only vehicle of its type ever used by the HFD.

Jan Hope

After observing the 'fire engine' on display at Leiden University, he wrote to James Watt and Matthew Boulton and had his own 'fire machine', the first steam engine for a garden, installed on the high wooded grounds of his summer home.

La Dawri

In 1956 Keen had used Abner Doble as a consultant in the development of the cars steam engine.

Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey

Just four years later in 1902 Robert Henry Thurston among others acknowledged, that the heat distribution of the then modern steam engine was best shown by the use of the so-called "Sankey Diagram".

Matthew Murray

In 1811 the firm made a Trevithick-pattern high-pressure steam engine for John Wright, a Quaker of Yarmouth.

McIver railway station

The station was opened on 1 September 1989 and named after Ken McIver, a long serving steam engine driver and Labor member of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly for Northam and Avon from 1968 until 1986.

Mount Morgan railway station

The Rail Heritage Museum includes artefacts from the rail and mining history of Mount Morgan, including a restored Hunslett steam engine, "Silver Bullet" rail motor and timber rail carriages.

Paxton Phoenix

Engine options that were considered included an alternative fuel steam engine, based on earlier designs by Abner Doble, or a two-cycle gasoline engine with a McCulloch/Paxton supercharger.

Plattling station

As a memorial of the steam era, railway fans have put a DRG Class 64 steam engine on display in the station yard.

PS Decoy

Decoy is powered by a 1905 Ransome Sims and Jefferies twin cylinder steam engine, which was salvaged and restored from Bunnings engineering workshops in Manjimup.

Ralph Hone

A steam engine was named in his honour, the Hunslet-built 40604T "Sir H. Ralph Hone", which is now displayed in the Sabah Museum, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.

Reverser

Reversing gear, often called a reverser, controls the valves on a steam engine

Serampore

Another outstanding contribution of the missionaries was the installation of India's first paper mill,in Bot Tala,set up by John Clark Marshman (the son of Joshua and Hannah Marshman) which was powered by a steam engine.

Stationary steam engine

This series reproduces some 1,500 images from the Steam Engine Record made by George Watkins between 1930 and 1980, which is now in the Watkins Collection at English Heritage's National Monuments Record at Swindon, Wilts.

Tacony, Philadelphia

In 1894, Frank Shuman, inventor of wire glass and a pioneer in solar power twice featured on the cover of Scientific American, built a large inventor's compound on Disston Street and there built the first solar-powered steam engine.

Zeehan, Tasmania

One had the honour of having the first Garratt steam engine designed and built for its operations.