[glinscott]

Author here. The beam engine created power from steam, and was a key part of the early Industrial Revolution. The article is a deep dive into the engine: how it works, the history behind it, and the engineering tradeoffs the builders faced. There are quite a few interactive figures that I hope make the concepts easier to see.

[spartanatreyu]

This reminds me a lot of the articles at: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/

Not just in terms of presentation, but also quality.

Amazing!

[glinscott]

Thank you, a lot of research went into it :).

And 100% inspired by Bartosz's articles - he is the first line in the credits section.

[pratio]

Indeed, and what amazing work it is. Fingers crossed you'll create more of this.

[spiderfarmer]

A fantastic website/person to be inspired by. You also did a great job.

[pratio]

I know right, I clicked on it and thought Bartosz got a new website.

[anunay_i]

anyone knows what Bartosz is working on these days? miss reading his articles.

[peterfirefly]

Despite all the details, you still left out a lot. Safety valve, pressure gauge(s), regulation of the water pump, water level gauge for the boiler, lubrication (you only have two of the glass/metal can reservoir types for the main axle), and then maybe also the valve gear (the control mechanism for the valves which takes into account where in the cycle the machine is and maybe also how fast it is going, how fast it should be going, and in which direction). And a way to drain water from the bottom of the cylinder + maybe a way to make the steam as dry as possible.

And each of those could be expanded to much more than the page you already made.

Things are almost always a lot more complicated than they seem. It seems so simple -- "water + heat makes steam, steam pushes piston, back and forth motion makes rotary motion" -- but it is really anything but.

[glinscott]

RE: Things are more complicated - I totally agree. My favorite part of the article is probably the belt transmission section. I wasn't sure how it was possible for a leather belt to transmit so much power. Super fun to just dig in deeper and deeper to see how it works. Even there though, I left out a lot - the material properties of leather that let it work, how they attached the belts, the problems they had with gears transmitting power (partly leading to the development of the involute shape for gears), etc.

RE: safety valve, pressure gauge, etc. - yes, there is definitely another article to be built here :). Another fun aspect is safely starting the machine, warming it up appropriately, flushing water from the system, and the bigger engines even had a small engine to get the wheel turning.

[peterfirefly]

Bearings is another good subject to dive into.

> I wasn't sure how it was possible for a leather belt to transmit so much power.

Friction is also one of the main reasons why rivets work. And why ropes work and why knots don't unwind and lashings work and, and, and ... and of course also nails and screws and worm drives. Friction is awesome.

> Another fun aspect is safely starting the machine

I saw them start this little beaty more than a decade ago:

https://dieselhouse.dk/en/videnom/#BW2000

It was not exactly a quick and simple job.

[adityaathalye]

Excellent work, glinscott. Thank you for sharing! I am about to send this to all my pals who are parents to schoolkids (um, and also pals who are still, like me, basically a schoolkid :p XD).

Building things up from first principles, and ideally also tactile / visceral examples, is my absolute favourite genre of explanations. Alas, a rarefied genre, because it is so much harder to do well (without doing disservice to the learner's intellect and ability) than expert talking to (presumed) expert. So thanks for contributing to it.

People like George Polya [0], Richard Feynman [1], Grace Hopper [2] are exemplars of this tradition.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0gbw-Ur_do

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR0ujwlvbkQ

(And I too try in my own meagre way through my blog and source code, albeit it's all plain text because visual explainers, animated ones that too are ridiculously difficult. So I have some idea of how much of a labour of love your piece is. <Claps hands, Whistles, Doffs hat>.)

[glinscott]

You are welcome! I agree, it's a really nice way to learn about something. Digging into the transfer of power with belts may have been one of my favorite parts here, even though it's not really steam directly :).

[Animats]

The capstan winding animation is beautiful.

The key thing to understand about early steam engine technology is that they didn't have steel. Good steel in quantity wasn't available until the Bessemer converter around 1880. The converter itself is simple. It took about 10,000 melts to get the metallurgy right, and analytical chemistry to get consistent ingredient mixes.

Without steel, the early engines were cast or wrought iron. So everything was very low pressure, or blew up. That's why "atmospheric" engines such as Newcomen's were built. That doesn't use steam pressure at all. It just uses condensing steam to create a partial vacuum so atmospheric pressure can push the piston. The technology got stuck there for 75 years.

Higher pressure engines made of iron were tried. They blew up frequently at first. This led to a useful institution, The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company, founded in 1866.[1] They still exist, owned by Munich Re. Hartford Steam Boiler had a tough approach to insurance. They'd insure risky things such as steamboats, but only after their inspectors had inspected them. Their insurance policies gave them the right to inspect at any time, which they used. The usual arrangement was that they inspected something, produced a list of things which had to be fixed, and came back for a second inspection after the fixes. Only then did they provide coverage. Steamboats mostly stopped blowing up.

(Today, Hartford Steam Boiler also sells business interruption insurance against cyberattacks, and even AI liability insurance. They probably still inspect first. That may be the good path to AI safety - liability lawyers suing for damages on one side, and an insurance company into tough inspections on the other.)

[1] https://www.munichre.com/hsb/en.html

[glinscott]

Thanks, yes the capstan animation is one of my favorites :).

Great point on steel not being an option, I should have mentioned that.

RE: Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection - cool, thanks for the details!

[Otterly99]

I don't have much to contribute to the conversation but I wanted to congratulate you on the work and thank you for sharing.

This is impressive work!

[monkmartinez]

Really cool site! Did you create the animations with videos of assemblies in a CAD package? Very noice!!!

[glinscott]

Thanks! Yes, some of the animations were created from this onshape model, which I rigged for motion: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/ebc9190f428cf30153c06148/w....

For other animations I put together a style guide and worked together with Fable to build them.

[lifeisstillgood]

This looks like a labour of love - fantastic

[holgerschurig]

> This push on every wall is pressure, and we will measure it in atmospheres, multiples of the ordinary pressure of the air around us.

No, don't do that. Because the pressure of the atmosphere isn't constant. It varies with weather and how high you are.

Instead use Pascal (Pa) or Hectopascal (hPA). I really pays back to use SI units for physical things. Suddenly you have formulas without weird constants, like 1 Pa = 1 N/m^2

It's a sad thing that new articles still propose units that are (since many, many years) outdated: the metric system is from 1793, the SI is from 1960.

BACK then people didn't knew better and used the varying atmosphere as base. But today ?!?!?

[biorach]

An Atmosphere (atm) is a standardised unit of pressure.

1 atm = 101,325 PA

It is not an SI unit but it is widely used and very useful in situations, such as this, where pressure relative to atmospheric pressure is relevant.