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.
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 :).
Yes, great details! Not sure if you've read it, but "Richard L. Hills, Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine (1989)." is a truly wonderful overview, that really digs deep into the business. It has many letters directly from Watt, including the problems they had getting these huge engines built (before any decent roads!).
Thanks for the pointers! That is an area I've not explored much - reciprocating steam using modern technology. Using modern electronics, sensors and valves to optimize steam expansion would be a fun project. Perfect cutoff every time :).
It was a mix of techniques, this article has been in progress for quite a while :). The first part was modeling all the relationships for an accurate beam engine in onshape (great cad tool). Then, I built a custom exporter to cleanly export it to three.js. This ensured physical realism for the hero of the article. All of these are linked from the article.
For the figures, I had prototyped some by hand, and it was slow going. Fable was the first LLM I found that was actually able to understand and model mechanical linkages correctly enough to be useful. I built a style guide, and iterated many times on each figure and animation until we arrived at something useful. There are also quite a few backing tests to ensure physical correctness of the animations (as far as reasonably possible :).
Thank you! I have a few ideas for the next article. Locomotives are up there on the list, but they are the final challenge of steam engineering, there is so much to cover.
Also considering the origins of precision - the intertwined evolution of machining tools and measuring systems that allowed these machines to be built.
RE: 3 year old - yes, mechanical systems are wonderful for children (and adults). There is something incredibly satisfying about watching them in motion doing work.
Oh my. Yes, you are totally right. This was tricky because I needed to merge two different animations (the governor moves independently from the rotation of the wheel), and I seem to have messed that up.
Definitely a fun note :). I think I heard it first from a Jay Leno youtube video where he was showing his amazing collection of steam powered machinery.
This is from the article, but governors also played a role in kicking off modern control theory!
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In 1868, James Clerk Maxwell studied when these oscillations grow or die away in his paper “On Governors”[https://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gold/pdfs/teaching/old_lite...]. This became one of the beginnings of modern control theory.
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RE: units - Good catch - there is almost certainly a better way to phrase this one. I always tried to give physical examples to make things more concrete. But who knows, maybe the bathtub will take off as a unit :).
Awesome! It's pretty amazing all the concepts that need to come together for even these very old engines. I found I built a better understanding of what was going on as I built out the animations as well.
100% - his articles were a major inspiration, and first line in the credits:
- Thanks to Bartosz Ciechanowski, whose exceptionally well written and designed articles inspired this one.
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.
This is the second article in a series discussing modern compression techniques. The first one covered Huffman + LZ. This one covers optimal entropy coders (FSE and Arithmetic), and some additional tricks to get closer to the state of the art.
Btw, some great books on Steam locomotives/engines:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NQ9JG2M - American steam locomotives 1880–1960. The author of drove locomotives, and was the transportation curator at the Smithsonian Museum. He wrote it over 30 years, and you can tell the amount of care and detail he put into with the details and history.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072BFJB3Z - The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Talks about how precision engineering was critical to the invention and wider use of steam engines.