Full Steam Ahead!

Gabriellebirchak/ October 13, 2020/ Early Modern History, Late Modern History, Middle Ages, Modern History, Post Classical

These last six weeks, I have been lis­ten­ing to a fan­tas­tic pod­cast called The Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tions host­ed by Dave Bro­ker. Every month, Dave puts out a long-form pod­cast that pro­vides an extra­or­di­nary amount of fan­tas­tic detail about how we, as a pri­mate species, have evolved to cre­ate a world filled with inven­tions, tech­nolo­gies, and var­i­ous forms of mass trans­porta­tion, all while endur­ing soci­etal and eco­nom­ic changes. Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tions is a pod­cast that reminds us that we are a resilient species. With­out a doubt, these are thought-pro­vok­ing and infor­ma­tive pod­casts. You can find the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tions on your pod­cast app and at IndustrialRevolutionsPod.com. This month, Dave’s pod­cast, called Spring­time of the Peo­ples, address­es the end of the first indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion. It is a great pod­cast that moti­vat­ed me to write a pod­cast about a com­po­nent of the first indus­tri­al revolution.

What do the 2020 Mer­cedes-Benz AMG Project One, the McLaren Speed­tail, the Lucid Air, the His­pano-Suiza Car­men Boulogne, the Delage D12, the Aria FXE, the Aston Mar­tin Valkyrie, the Zen­vo TSR S, the Ulti­ma RS, the Czinger 21C, Koenigsegg Regera, the Koenigsegg Jes­go, the Bugat­ti Chi­ron Super Sport 300 Plus, the Koenigsegg Gemera, the SSC Tuatara, the Hen­nessey Ven­om F5, the Pin­in­fa­ri­na Bat­tista, the Rimac C_Two, the Aspark Owl, and the Lotus Evi­ja have in com­mon with the Indus­tri­al Revolution?

Horsepower

Each of these vehi­cles has a min­i­mum of 1,000 horse­pow­er, with the Lotus Evi­ja top­ping out at 2,000 horse­pow­er. AND this beau­ti­ful $2.1 mil­lion hyper­car is an elec­tric vehi­cle. One of this vehicle’s great fea­tures is that it pow­ers at 800 kilo­watts from 0 to 100% in only nine minutes.

But what does horse­pow­er mean? And where did the term come from? The term horse­pow­er comes from the pre-indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion era. It was used to define a steam pump’s pow­er for the steam engines used for min­ing and remov­ing water from flood­ed mines.

Though many con­sid­er that the first steam pump came from Thomas Sav­ery, the steam engines’ promi­nent design first began with Denis Papin.

Papin was an inven­tor who worked with the chemist Robert Boyle in the 1670s. In 1679, while work­ing with Boyle, Papin con­ceived and devel­oped a steam digester, which was a high-pres­sure cook­er that allowed peo­ple to extract fat from ani­mal bones. The steam digester was a con­tain­er with a tight­ly closed lid. As the water heat­ed, this tight­ly closed ves­sel would con­fine the steam. This con­fined steam would then raise the boil­ing point of water. While work­ing with his steam digester, Papin dis­cov­ered that the atmos­pher­ic pres­sure of the digester pro­vid­ed mechan­i­cal pow­er to the sys­tem. His obser­va­tion of this inspired him to cre­ate a high-pres­sure sys­tem with­in a cylin­der. As the water boiled and con­densed, atmos­pher­ic pres­sure would cause a pis­ton at the top of the cylin­der to move down­ward, there­by cre­at­ing a move­able sys­tem. Papin’s pis­ton steam engine was the begin­ning of the begin­ning of the first pre-indus­tri­al revolution.

On July 2, 1698, the British inven­tor Thomas Sav­ery wrote up a patent that described “A new inven­tion for rais­ing of water and occa­sion­ing motion to all sorts of mill­work by the impel­lent force of Fire…”[1]

Savery’s inven­tion was the begin­ning of the steam engine, also known as the steam pump. A month after he wrote his patent, on June 14, 1699, Sav­ery pre­sent­ed his steam pump to the Roy­al Soci­ety. This orig­i­nal steam pump was a fur­nace that held a boil­er on top. The boil­er would dis­trib­ute the steam to the two cocks at the top, which con­veyed the steam by turns to the ves­sels. As the steam entered the top, it would dis­charge out through a valve that was also on the top. There was a force pipe that forced hot water out, and a suck­ing pipe that pulled water in from the water source, which was at the bot­tom of the mine. 

It was a sim­ple engine. It had no pis­ton, and it expend­ed a great deal of high-pres­sure steam to heat water. The engines’ joints were not strong enough to han­dle the pres­sure, which caused a safe­ty prob­lem for deep min­ing. Final­ly, the entire appa­ra­tus worked hard at expend­ing ener­gy against a con­densed steam vac­u­um. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it could only work at a depth of 30 feet. Nev­er­the­less, Savory took legal mea­sures to make sure that his patent would last for 21 years. This mea­sure was coined the “Fire Engine Act.” 

Then, around 1712, Thomas New­comen designed the next gen­er­a­tion of this steam pump to pump water from a deep­er source using a com­bi­na­tion of Papin’s pump and Savery’s steam engine. Also, Newcomen’s inven­tion changed the design of the receiv­ing ves­sel. Thus, the vac­u­um that was used to draw in water was replaced by a piston. 

Newcomen’s design includ­ed a fur­nace, a boil­er, a cap­sule for steam, a con­dens­ing cylin­der, an injec­tion pipe between the con­dens­ing cylin­der and the top of the cylin­der, and a pis­ton at the top of the cylin­der. The fur­nace would heat water in the boil­er. This boil­er cre­at­ed steam that even­tu­al­ly escaped through a con­densed cylin­der when the steam inlet valve opened. While the steam sat in the con­dens­ing cylin­der, a mech­a­nism inject­ed a stream of cold water into this con­dens­ing cylinder’s base. As a result, the steam quick­ly cooled down, there­by cre­at­ing a vac­u­um. Since exter­nal air pres­sure is heav­ier than the air in the vac­u­um, this would cause the pis­ton to drop down. Once the pis­ton was at the bot­tom of the con­dens­ing cylin­der, the process would start all over again, cre­at­ing steam to push back up the piston. 

Only there was one problem…

It was a bril­liant idea that had only one big prob­lem. It used Savery’s inven­tion, which was patent­ed. As a result, New­comen was forced to go into part­ner­ship with Sav­ery. This part­ner­ship was prob­a­bly a good thing, as the part­ner­ship enforced Newcomen’s name on the inven­tion. Papin was not so lucky. Sav­ery nev­er gave cred­it to Papin for the use of the piston. 

Then we come to the third gen­er­a­tion of the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion steam engine as invent­ed by James Watt. James Watt, born in 1736, came from a bril­liant fam­i­ly. His moth­er was Agnes Muir­head, who was afflu­ent and edu­cat­ed. When Watt was 20 years old, he took a job at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Glas­gow, mak­ing astro­nom­i­cal instru­ments. While work­ing at the uni­ver­si­ty, he became fas­ci­nat­ed with the steam engine. Watt under­stood that Newcomen’s design was not ide­al because it extend­ed a lot of ener­gy in the process of cool­ing the steam in the cool­ing cylinder.

In 1765, Watt real­ized that instead of cool­ing the steam in the cool­ing cylin­der, he could con­dense the steam in a sep­a­rate con­dens­ing cylin­der. He con­tin­ued to work with it, and 11 years lat­er, he had a work­ing pro­to­type and a prod­uct to mar­ket. Watt was not only a bril­liant sci­en­tist; he was also a keen busi­nessper­son and an insight­ful mar­keter. He real­ized that his new engine could replace the work done by hors­es. And so, he cal­cu­lat­ed the num­ber of hors­es that his engine could replace, thus coin­ing the term “horse­pow­er.” 

Then, in 1801, Richard Tre­vithick began exper­i­ment­ing with steam engines, cre­at­ing the first steam-pow­ered pas­sen­ger vehi­cle called the “puff­ing dev­il” or “Puffer.” The Puffer had a short run and last­ed only a few days when on Christ­mas Eve, after using it to move pas­sen­gers around, it caught fire. Triv­ithick did not give up. Three years lat­er, at the Peny­dar­ren Iron­works in Wales, he built the first steam-pow­ered loco­mo­tive that ran along a nine-mile long track. It was a suc­cess. This first steam loco­mo­tive pulled five cars that held 70 iron­work­ers and ten tons of iron. How­ev­er, it could only move about five miles an hour, and it only worked three times before the rails broke. Nev­er­the­less, this was the begin­ning of the first Indus­tri­al Revolution. 

So, what exact­ly is the sci­en­tif­ic def­i­n­i­tion of horse­pow­er? When Watt came up with the name, it rep­re­sent­ed ft-lb/sec­ond. Watt cal­cu­lat­ed that in one minute, one horse could lift 150 pounds up a 220-foot mine shaft. As a result, one horse­pow­er came to be defined as 150 pounds times 220 feet, all divid­ed by 60 sec­onds. When you do the cal­cu­la­tions, it comes out to 550 ft-lb/sec­ond. 

The math­e­mat­i­cal def­i­n­i­tion of horse­pow­er is defined as

power = \frac{work}{time}

Thus, by the late 19th cen­tu­ry, steam-pow­ered trains had an out­put of about 700 horsepower. 

It is this pow­er, along with torque, that gives our auto­mo­biles the speed that we need. By 1904, the first Mod­el C Ford had a 10-horse­pow­er engine. By the 1930s, the Mod­el A Ford had a three-cylin­der engine with an out­put of 24 horse­pow­er. Twen­ty years lat­er we had the mus­cle cars of the 1950s. The 1957 Chevy had a V8 engine that put out 162 horse­pow­er. When I was in high school in the ear­ly 1980s, I drove a 1978 yel­low Dodge Dart that had a V8 engine with 195 horse­pow­er. By 1992, the BMW M5 had a 4.9 L V8 engine and pro­duced 400 horsepower.

As a side note, the rela­tion­ship between engine pow­er and torque is expressed as

Horsepower = \frac{torque (ft-lb) \times revolutions \space per \space  minute (RPM)}{5252}

And here we are, almost 350 years lat­er, in an age where are elec­tric cars can go 0 to 60 miles per hour in under three sec­onds. The Lotus Evi­ja elec­tric hyper­car pro­duces almost 2,000 horse­pow­er. Fur­ther­more, it is an all-elec­tric, all-car­bon-fiber car that can go from 0 to 186 miles per hour in 8.6 sec­onds. This vehi­cle is almost per­fect! How­ev­er, like the pro­le­tari­at fac­to­ry wages of the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion, the only thing stand­ing in the way between that vehi­cle and us is the $2.1 mil­lion that we would have to pay to buy it, or a well-con­nect­ed friend who can set us up with a test drive.

Until next time, carpe diem!

[1] Rhys Jenk­ins,The Col­lect­ed Papers of Rhys Jenk­ins … (Links in the His­to­ry of Engi­neer­ing and Tech­nol­o­gy from Tudor Times.) Com­pris­ing Arti­cles in the Pro­fes­sion­al and Tech­ni­cal Press Main­ly Pri­or to 1920 and a Cat­a­logue of Oth­er Pub­lished Work (1936), 66