Stuff You Should Know - The Delightful History of Steam Technology

Episode Date: August 18, 2016

One of the coolest things humans have ever figured out is how to use steam as power. It made the Industrial Revolution possible and even today, 88% of America's electricty comes from steam turbines. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry over there. Oh, this is Stuff You Should Know. What was that? That was, I don't know, a little extra something on top, I guess. A little hot sauce? Yeah. To Lula.

So we just got back from our wonderful tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland. Yeah. And it could not have gone better. Right. And you may be hearing more about this in the future. Or we may never speak of it again. That's true too.

Oh, before we go though, before we go. Yeah, we're still, we're just starting out. Before we get started, I started my own little personal, Charles W. Chuck Bryant Facebook page. Nice. As a public figure. Yeah, I've got one of those too.

You do? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's largely neglected. That's probably pay attention to it, huh? So basically you say I have a haunted ghost house that I feel free to walk by every now and then. Exactly.

My house is populated by me and go like the page. And I'm going to be sharing a little more personal stuff. Like my opinion on things and sharing music I like. Photos of your bare knees. Photos of my knees. Photos of my animals. Nice.

Just a little more stuff like that. Because I get yelled at now when I do anything semi-personal on the stuff you should know, Benjamin. Yeah. I think I'll go and have a mind too. Yeah. So if you want a piece of me as gross as that sound, look for Charles W. Chuck Bryan on Facebook.

And it's going to be a party. It is, huh? That's the logo. I do, I neglect my Facebook page, but I am fairly active on Twitter. Yeah. You get your own Twitter thing. Yeah.

It's Josh underscore um underscore Clark. Of course it is. Yeah. That's, I do the same thing on that though. It's like I'm a little more opinionated and share more personal stuff. Yeah, we're a lot of real human beings. Exactly.

It's a needle. We don't have to be brand ambassadors. Yeah. We can take our sashes off. All right. So that's all for announcements for me. So, Chuck. Yes.

Have you ever encountered water? Yeah. Yeah. So you know that there's three states of matter. And water is a great demo of these different states, right? Yeah. I encounter it every morning when I watch my horse. Yeah.

You should share pictures of you washing your horse on your Facebook page. It's great. What's your horse's name? Gancho Ganev. It's nice, man. There's just a few hundred people who know what you're talking about.

That's right. So when you're washing Gancho and that nice water is like coming down all over his horsey body. Yes. When it's liquid state, right? Yes. And when it's in its liquid state,

its density is different than when it's in its solid state. That's right. It's more dense than its solid state, e.g. ice, or IE ice, sorry. Yeah. But then if you really heated it up and turned it into steam, it would turn into water vapor, right?

Yes. Then it's in its gaseous state and it's less dense. That's right. Those molecules could not get further apart. Well, they probably could. So while its density is smaller in ice, it actually takes up less space, right? That's correct.

So if you put that water in a space and you froze it, it would shrink inside the space. If you expanded it into water vapor, it would take up more space. That's right. And as it takes up more and more space, its pressure increases. That's right.

And if you could only be clever enough to figure out a way to harness that pressure, my friend, you would have harnessed what's called steam power. That's right. And that is the show for today. And Robert Lamb of Stuff to Blow Your Mind wrote this one, How Steam Technology Works,

on our website, How Stuff Works. And it's a good one. Robert can write a fine article. Oh yeah. That guy. For sure. So let's go back in time a little in the old wayback machine.

The steam powered one. Yeah, today it is. So it might take a little longer to get these coal fires burning. And sound different. But Jerry, it's hard at work over there. Shoveling coal. Throwing levers.

So let's go back. We're going to need a lot of coal, Jerry, because we're going back all the way to AD 75. Shovel faster, Jerry. How about a smile? Oh, it's just about to say you'd be a wonderful whip guy for the coal shovelers, but not if you're asking them to smile, because then it turns into a Broadway

show. How about a smile? Yeah. Then the next song is called How About a Smile. And all the coal shovelers sing it. Yeah, that's not bad, actually. I'm picturing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom all of a sudden.

Yeah. Were they shoveling coal? No, they were mining. Oh, OK. So I guess in a way they're shoveling coal, but they were getting it out of the ground. They were extracting it rather than depositing it into a fire.

Yeah. That was all wrong. So let's go back to AD 75 and a true hero named hero, the great mathematician hero. He was writing books on mechanics. He was thinking a lot about air. And way back, he was, and way back in AD 75, he actually conceived of steam as an engine in a way

that we'll see came back to roost a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Back to roost. Is that the right? Yeah. It left for a while like a chicken, and then it came back and roosted like a chicken.

Yeah, exactly. He didn't have the technology to pull it off at the time. But what he thought about was a hollow sphere with these bent tubes coming out the side. And then fill that thing with water. I would say it looks like a football with arms. Fill up that football with water, put it over a fire, and eventually that water is going to boil.

It's going to turn into water vapor inside. And it's going to come out those arms, and it's going to spin that little football in a perfectly thrown spiral. Or it's going to go spin around in an axis, like curly on a shoulder on the floor from the three stooges. Yeah, but it's attached to something over the fire. Yeah, exactly.

So it's spinning. It's spinning. He called that thing an aliopile. And he actually had a number of different ideas and inventions, two theoretical ones using steam. One was a steam powered bird. And this would have been about the right time for the clash of the titans.

Remember that little robot steam bird in there? The first movie, I mean? Yeah, the original one with Harry Hamlin. Yeah. I mean, that's basically, this guy's the one who came up with that. Boy, that Medusa really scared me when I was a kid. Same here.

And I'd completely avoided that remake because it looked so bad. Yeah. I was thinking about that when I was like, oh wait, that was in Clash of the Titans. And I thought about the remake of Clash of the Titans. Nobody's actually, they're not making these movies as like an homage to a great movie.

They're doing it because they're like, we don't have any ideas, so we're just going to poke your nostalgia and hopefully get a few bucks out of you and disappoint you and probably ruin the original one for you. That's true, but while I do love nostalgia as evidence in our show on nostalgia,

my nostalgia poke button has a cover over it. So when people go to poke it, they just get rebuffed. You should get one of those ones that shock people when they get to poke it. But I have to raise that cover to allow my button to be pushed. So how do, I mean, like, how does that cover get raised? I have to allow it, you know?

I have to want to dive into the pool of nostalgia. I see, I got you. You can't just come along and be like, oh, look, another red dawn poke button, you know? Did that ever get made? Yeah, okay. So hero, right? Yeah, hero.

Hero comes up with this thing. He was very much limited, and this would be the case for hundreds, tens of centuries. Oh yeah. That steam power was theoretically far more advanced than practical material science. Yeah, they were, he was way ahead of his time. Yeah, I mean, steam, the power you can harness

from steam is practically unlimited by the, depending on the materials that can hold the thing. Right, yes. If you have material that can hold the infinitely dense amount of steam, or infinitely pressurized amount of steam, you could run the world, my friend. Yeah.

But we don't have that. And hero definitely didn't have it. He basically could just draw it and say, this'll be great someday. Yeah, which was great. I mean, that's how things get made. He was just ahead of his time. Like by about 1600 years.

Yeah, he was a futurist. Yeah. So flash forward, we'll rev up the machine again, and we'll putter along to 1606. We're in Italy now, and one Giovanni Battista della Porta of Naples said, you know what, I've got some theories about steam too, and I think what we can do is actually create a vacuum.

So if we take that water that's steam, and it's in a closed container, it's gonna increase pressure in there, like we're talking about. Sure. So if we condense it back down to water by cooling it in that same chamber, because they hadn't quite figured out

that you should do this separately, which we'll get to. He said that will decrease pressure, and in theory, it'll create a vacuum. It'll create a pool. Right, they went genius. That's great. And the French of course said,

let's see how we can apply this to cooking. And they did. Oh yeah? Yeah, within, I think about 70 years, a guy named Denis Papin, who was not related to Jacques Pepin. Oh, I wonder where I heard that name. But may have been.

Who was Jacques Pepin? Very famous French chef. Oh, okay, right. Great guy. I thought you were talking about Mario Batali. No, that's Italy. This is France, right? They basically took this idea,

and they said surely there's a way to use this for cooking. And Denis Pepin created what is essentially the first pressure cooker. Yeah, the name is so great. The digester or engine for softening bones. Right. It would extract like proteins and fats and all that stuff from the bones

and leave the bones brittle, so you could turn the bones into bone powder. Yeah. And get all the good stuff from it and cook with that, right? Yeah, what I'm not sure of though, he ended up attaching a piston essentially to it. Why did he do that?

As a pressure release valve. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right, no, that makes sense. Right, so he added basically the world's first pressure relief valve to the world's first pressure cooker. Yeah, the first steam powered piston, like he didn't know it yet,

but he was laying the groundwork for an engine. Yeah, that's definitely one thing that emerged from researching this, Chuck, is that like the history of steam power is definitely built on the backs of earlier people. That's neat, you can trace it all back to one guy. Yeah. Who's like, go forth and make this.

Do you know what struck me was I was researching all these great men doing these things and I thought, how much further would we be along in the world if women all throughout antiquity just could do whatever they wanted as well? Yeah, and contribute themselves. Yeah, like they literally cut off half of society

and said, you just go do this. And that's valuable to raise families and to cook and clean and do all the things that women were forced to do back then. But they could also do other things, I bet. I mean, they were doing other things. And I'm not trying to say that they weren't making advances, but they certainly weren't.

I don't think anybody's taking it that way. They weren't allowed to go into the science labs. No, but you make a good point. Like if raising a family is an extremely important pursuit, which I think we both agree it is. Yeah. Would society be as far as it is now if men and women had been equally involved

in pursuing science and nobody was raising the family? Yeah, like 200 years ago, there's a lady who could have figured out a cure for cancer, but in her family, I'm like, no, no, no, you scrub that thing and turn that butter. Wonder. And she just muttered to herself like, oh, I cure you. Anyway, and necessity is a mother of invention

is the other thing that really came to mind because all these advancements usually came along because they wanted to do something like specifically. Well, almost every time there was an advancement in definitely material science, there was somebody who had invented a new steam thing that was limited by the poor materials available at the time. Right.

When the new materials came along, they just immediately used it for the steam invention that had been drummed up 100 years before. Yeah. So it's just constantly was advancing by leaps and bounds. Now I think I have just bungled my message so poorly that people are going to say, Chuck, there were plenty of women of science

in the early days. So to make up for that, we're going to have to do a podcast on the early pioneers of science who are women. Okay. All right. I pledge to do that now, but my message was pure.

You know what I'm saying? Sure. Anybody who doesn't get that. Sometimes I don't talk so good. Which is funny because that's your job. I know, right? I know what you mean. All right, so 17th century,

we're going forward in time a little bit more. And over in England, where we just got back from, they had a timber crisis because they were advancing. They were building so many things made out of wood, namely ships and of course homes and things. And they were in those homes, they need a lot of firewood. So you still needed the wood to build ships and things, but they found out, hey, we can use coal for fires at least.

Yeah, we're running low on timber. So we need to allocate it smartly. Yeah, so let's use coal, which was great. But to get more coal, you have to dig deeper. And to dig deeper means it's going to be wetter. You're going to hit the water table eventually. And so eventually this all led to a problem, which was, hey, we're down in this coal mine now

and it's full of water. How can we rectify this? Right. So necessity once again pops up. Everybody just stood around thinking for about 50 years. Everything came to a halt. And then finally- There's a woman in the background going,

I totally know how to do that. I got an idea, I can tell you how to do this. This dude named finally a man spoke up and everyone listened. That's right. A guy in 1698 named Thomas Savery. He was a military engineer. He had come up with something that he called a miner's friend. Right.

Which I don't know if that's the best name for it, but maybe 1698 it was. Sure. So his miner's friend was basically, it's really neat. So it's very tough to describe this stuff from here on out. Every time we describe something, you're gonna get lost. So just go look up a diagram of what we're talking about.

It helps. And it definitely helps for sure. It helped me big time. Yeah. Basically what it was was there was a pot of boiling water and in this pot of boiling water, there, a steam would be created and a pot, I mean an enclosed pot with like pipes coming out,

but valves keeping it shut. Right. And you would create steam and the steam would be transferred into another chamber with a pipe that was going down to the water that you wanted to get out of the ground, okay? That's right. Okay.

You would introduce steam into this, right? And then you would introduce cold water into that steam filled chamber and it would suddenly condense the water, create a vacuum and that vacuum would pump the water out of the ground. Right. Then you had another pipe

that would siphon off the water from that chamber because there was a non-return valve. Once the water came up, it couldn't go back down. Yeah, that was the key. Sure. Yeah. And then they would pump the water out of that tube, that pipe and then do the whole process over again.

Yeah. And it worked pretty well. Yeah. But he didn't sell a ton of them to the mining. It didn't become the miner's friend like he thought. What it really became was the rich person who wanted to garden a friend. This, let's pump our swampy estate out friend.

Pretty much. The reason why is because to run it effectively and safely, you could only get about 25 feet of water out. Yeah. If you're pumping water of a 500 foot mine, that meant you had to have one of these huge setups every 25 feet and be pumping up to a reservoir that eventually pumped it up out of the mine.

Yeah. So there's no way you could do that. Plus every one of these setups had to have people running the valves. Like all the valves and things were operated manually. And they had a pretty bad reputation for blowing up. That too. But it was a really, it was a almost,

this guy wanted to sell it and change the mining industry. He didn't, but he did end up creating a scientific and historical proof of concept. Yeah. And well, you know what, let's take a break and we will come back and pick back up with a couple of other brilliant dudes who advanced on those inventions.

And then it was like the gosh, the love shock. Alright, so 1698 was the miner's friend. I don't know why that's so funny to me. Don't know either. And just about 14 years later in 1712, there was a blacksmith named Thomas Newcomen and his little buddy, John Callie, who was his assistant, a plumber and glass blower. I get the feeling like everybody back then blew glass. You just knew what you were doing.

Yeah. Yeah. Like your own window. Like today, how everyone, what is something everyone can do today? Drive a car. Yeah. Or complain on social media. Sure.

That's it. Stop posting personal stuff. Yeah. That's the glass blowing of today. Posting on social media, complaining on it. Sure. I think you might be right. So he was a glass blower and plumber, his assistant was, and they said, you know what?

Let's create a better system. It's more efficient. He took, it was called the Newcomen engine, I guess Callie as an assistant didn't get his name in there. No. I would have lobbied for the new Callie or something, maybe. Combine the names. It's clever.

But Newcomen. No. It's my name. You're the assistant. Yeah. Savory's separation of the boiler and then added papines, steam driven piston, and all of a sudden they had the Newcomen engine. Well, they, they, no, they took the boiler and put it, combined it together, right?

So like you had, you had this piston and it was heated and then cooled. Yeah. And then heated and cooled. Right. So it was like combined into one. Yes. But it was a piston that was moving up and down, right? Well, yeah.

But it was a piston that was moving up and down via this thing that looks kind of like a seesaw. Yeah. It was connected to that, right? Yeah. And on the other end of that seesaw was the pump. So one end is a piston moving this thing up and down like the seesaw and on the other end's the pump.

Yeah. And what it's really doing is it's pulling it down on either side. Yeah. It's not pushing ever, like one side pulls, making it one side go up and the other side pulls, making the other side go up. Right. So it's not a, you've got that steam being generated and it's pushing the piston up and then you hit it with some cold water and a vacuum's created.

That's right. And this thing could go through 12 cycles a minute. Hey, not bad for the early days. It's true. And it was beyond a proof of concept. Like this thing actually really worked. You could use it to do all sorts of work with. Yeah.

And it was in hundreds of mines all over Britain and in Europe. So people were like digging into this thing called the engine for the first time. Yeah. It was pretty amazing. Yeah. But what happened was with everything, these engineers start to say, you know what, let's improve on this, let's improve the efficiency with the pump, let's improve the cylinders. You get better iron along the way, stronger iron.

And this new coming engine is just kind of refined over a period of years. Right. Just from people tinkering with it, right? Yeah. It's working better and better. I don't know whose name you'll probably recognize, the name is James Watt. I think he was born in England, but he made his name in Glasgow, Scotland. Yeah.

My new favorite country. Yeah. It's a great country. I think his name was James, the game changer Watt. Yeah. If he was a boxer, that's what he would have been called. Although he took the new coming engine and changed it back closer to the miner's friend now, because the new coming combined the, um, the, the boiler with the condenser and

he separated them out again. What he figured out was if you just keep the piston hot, right? The piston chamber hot. Yeah. And you have a separate condenser. You're going to use less energy, keeping the condenser cool and the piston hot because one of the dumb things about the new common engine and the reason why it took so long to go through these cycles, so where you could only do 12 a minute was because when, when

it was hot and the steam rose, when you hit it with that cold water, it cooled off and a vacuum was created. You had to wait for the, the thing to heat up again to get the steam. If you had the cool water over here and the steam over here, you would keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool. It was the McDLT. It was. And you could hit them, you could use them to hit the, the, uh, piston as often as you

wanted and it really, really improved, um, its efficiency. Yeah. Like the engine is really starting to, to take hold now and hum like an engine should. Yeah. Uh, so he partners up with a guy named Matthew Bolton. Um, I'm not sure, no, spelled differently than Michael. There's a U in there. Michael's just B-O-L-T-O-N, right?

Well, the, the, this guy's is the British spelling. Oh, so he could be a distant relative. Right. You never know. I like to think so. Uh, whatever happened to Michael Bolton? Oh, I guarantee he's still touring and making records and stuff. Yeah.

Guys like that, they, they don't go away. They might not be in the, the international limelight anymore, but they're still doing what they do. There's always a home in Branson, Missouri. Sure. Or Vegas. Yeah. Uh, all right.

So WADA's partnered up with Bolton. Um, they are making it more fuel efficient engine now with that separate condenser. And this led to two other inventions, one called the fly ball governor and one called the double acting engine. The fly ball governor is so difficult to understand. Got to look it up. There's videos on YouTube. Yeah.

You can't just look up a picture of it. You have to see like an animated version of it. Yeah. And once you see it, it all makes sense. And I want to say, I want to give a huge shout out to a site that I found extremely helpful. Um, it's called animated engines.com. And they have all these like just, just graphics of engines and you can speed up the frames per second or slow it down and it shows you like all the moving parts.

Yeah. I saw that too. You get it. You just get it. But the fly ball governor is. So we'll confuse you now with words. Well, no, the fly ball governor, we're just going to say, just go look it up. But basically it is a way to automate the opening and closing of valves using the steam

that's being produced itself. So Watt figured out this thing's making a lot of steam and a lot of the steam is going to waste. What if I took this waste steam and redirected it to do other stuff like open and close valves? Yes. That was a huge innovation. They also came up with the double acting engine where they figured out like, you don't need to create a vacuum anymore guys.

We can just use steam to make the piston go up and steam to make the piston go down. Yep. Double acting engine. Pretty neat. Yeah. It's enormous, enormous changes again that laid a bunch of groundwork like they kicked the thing forward and said, hey, 20 years from now, get your inventors together because we just came up with some new ideas that you guys need to go build better metal to contain

it with. Yeah. And don't forget about us. Yeah. James Watt. And I'm the other guy. Exactly. So what this is would set the table for the beginnings of the industrial revolution which

began in the textile industry and wool specifically for many, many years had been processed by hand then they eventually took it down by the river and had a water mill that would ... In a van. Yeah, in a van by the river. And this water mill would, you know, you've all seen how those work. If you've been to any, I think still Mountain Park here, still has one. Sure.

Pretty neat. They're usually just using hydro, well, I was about to say hydroelectric, but hydro power? Sure. To spin a wheel and they figured out, hey, why don't we steam instead and Bolton and Watts engine works really well and people are using it like crazy, but they were so early in the game, they had all these patents that sort of made it hard, like these mines were going broke paying money on these patents to use this technology. Right.

What are they called? Royalties. Yeah. And so this other dude comes along, a guy named Richard Trevethick from Cornwall in England. I think it's Southwest. Southwest, yeah. Known for their game hens.

And there's, suppose they have a great witchcraft museum there, I've always wanted to go to, but still have not been able to make it. So they're known for game hens, the Cornish engine, which we're talking about, and a witchcraft museum. Not bad. No, that's not bad at all. And corn. Yeah.

Corn. So he was living in Cornwall and he saw what was going on with all these miners. He said, you know what I'm going to do? Screw those guys and their patents. I'm going to just think of brand new technology that's better that you don't have to pay royalties on their patents. That's what he said too. Pay them on my patents.

He had a real bad attitude, but he was smart. He was. He actually was super smart. I may have pushed them further ahead than even Watt, and I'd never heard of the guy before you know, I have the impression he's a national hero in England. Probably so. But he, he had some, he had the great fortune of having some much more improved materials available to him.

Sure. So for a long time, people had said, like, man, if we could just get these containing vessels to hold really high pressure, we could do amazing stuff with this. Yeah. They knew pressure is what drove the pistons, so the more pressure, the better. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you could, if you can like, you also, not only the more pressure, the better

the less initial input you would have to put in with energy, it'd be more energy efficient, right? Fuel. You could just get right. So Trevathick had the advantage of having really good, better materials available to him to make this stuff. So he created this Cornish engine, and the Cornish engine used higher pressure. Yeah.

But not only that, it was a compounding engine, meaning that it had, it used the steam in more than one way. Right. Right. So rather than like one piston, he's like, why not have four pistons and one piston is fired and then some, this steam from that piston escapes and fires another piston, another and another, and all of a sudden you're doing four times the work. I'm from Cornwall.

It was amazing. Yeah. And he was, there was an American inventor named Oliver Evans, who was kind of doing similar things in the United States, and then a guy named Arthur Wolfe. I'm sorry. Arthur Wolfe was the one who came up with the compounding. Oh, right. Yeah.

So his main contribution was basically just making a more rock solid, cheaper, lighter, more efficient engine. That used high pressure. Yeah. Steam, yeah. So Wolfe, W-O-O-L-F. Like Virginia Wolfe. Not Wolfe.

Wolfe. Wolfe. It just seems funny looking. He was a brewery engineer. He made beer, and he's the one that said, yeah, why don't we get all these pistons going. Yeah. All pistons firing. More pistons.

Pistons everywhere. Yeah. Do you want me to take a break? Yes. All right. All right. We got steam coming out of everywhere. Steam engines, they're working.

They're turning pistons, and so all of this eventually would lead to use to move things and people around. Yeah. People are like, I'm so tired of walking my legs hurt so bad. Can you take the steam technology and like make a steam powered car? Yeah. And apparently people have been working on it for a while. There's some debate over who created the first steam powered vehicle.

And supposedly there's a guy named Ferdinand Verbiest. Who's the Verbiest? Ferdinand. He supposedly created a steam car in 1672, but I guess that's up for debate. There's a lot of, like you could draw a schematic of something, but it doesn't necessarily mean you actually created it, I think, is the issue. Yeah, that's true. Like we have no idea what was actually on the other side of a new common steam engine.

We just, because none of the diagrams ever mentioned it, it's all about the steam engine itself. They don't talk about like the pumps. So we don't really know what kind of pumps they were using that kind of thing. So if we go back, we can't say for certain that this guy did it. It's possible. But I think widely the guy named Nicolas Joseph Cuneau, who is a French inventor obviously created a steam powered vehicle in 1769.

But steam powered cars, they went virtually nowhere. It's like when I invented the snowboard, I thought, because evidence by my crayon drawing of the ski board, and then we heard from people that said, sorry, the snowboard was actually before that even, but like you said, I created that in a vacuum, a vacuum created by condensing water vapor. Yeah. So as far as I'm concerned, I did invent the snowboard. Sure.

Yeah. You're tapped into the zeitgeist. Yeah. It would go really fast on a skateboard down a mountain while it was snow covered, and you just wanted to deliver on that. And six year old Chuck in Snow Mountain, Georgia, I was so cute into that. You'd just seen a water wheel. Right?

I'd seen my first ski movie. Which one? No, I was just kidding. But those were big back then. Sure. Remember Better Off Dead? Yeah, sure. That was the ski movie of sorts, in part.

That was, someone said something funny on Twitter that day about, I can't remember who it was, some politician said, reminds him of a 80's ski movie villain. I thought it was really good, because every ski movie in the 80's had a bad guy. Oh yeah, it was always the developer looking to build condos at the ski resort. Exactly. All right, so you're right. The car is one thing, but what if we could make something larger? Trevor Thicke actually was kind of key in this, and he said, you know what, we've got

these things, they don't call them railroad tracks yet, they just call them rails on the ground. Yeah, and you hook a donkey up to a cart. And it's really to help the donkey, because they're so stupid they can't walk in a straight line really. Plus the terrain, I would imagine. Well that too. But if they're pulling a cart on rails that have already been laid out on the path they're

supposed to follow, they're fine. Just give them a couple of carrots, and maybe a nice scratch behind the ear, and they're okay. Yeah, they were called tramways, officially, I was just kidding. So Trevor Thicke is like, hey, let's put something steam powered on these tracks. Yeah, brilliant. And he tried it. He actually came up with something called Trevor Thicke's portable steam engine, which

he called the Puffing Devil, that was his name for it. And it worked, he did a demonstration where it hauled 10 tons of iron for 10 miles. Do you know how huge that is at the time? Sure, yeah. Amazing. Because everything up to that point had been hauled by donkeys. Yeah, horse power. Yeah.

Literal horse power, right? Yeah, obviously not just donkeys, there were horses too, but everything was very much localized. I don't think we've said it yet, but steam power was the literal engine for the Industrial Revolution. Yeah. This is where it all started. For sure.

And the way that it started was you could suddenly take timber in this area and move it over to this area hundreds of miles away, a coal in this area to power these steam engines over here. Change the course of history. It did. Water, turning into water vapor, and containing that. Yeah. It's amazing.

And it started in England. Yeah. It's just pretty neat. You're pandering. No, it's true that over here in America, we're like, yeah, the Industrial Revolution really picked up in the 19th century when it hit America, but I mean, its roots are definitely further back. Yeah.

This is in what, 1804? Yeah. I think I learned that England cannot be flattered with flattery. They know. Don't pander to us, pal. No. All right. So it's 1808.

You've got what do you call it? The Industrial Revolution? No. The Devil's Puffer? The Puffer Devil? The Puffing Devil. Puffing Devil. I like the Devil's Puffer.

I'm not sure what that is. You're like a miner's friend. You got those. You got a party. So this is a portable steam engine. He takes it to London, Central London, puts it on a circular track, and everyone goes blimey. What is that?

It is of the Devil. It's the Puffing Devil. Yeah. And it's amazing. There's a engineer there named George Stevenson. And a couple of decades after Trevathick, he said, you know what? I'm going to take that. And I'm going to, like everyone else before, say I'm going to make it better, more efficient.

And all of a sudden, things got so good, they actually opened up. What I think is the first town-to-town railroad line between, because they were trying to move coal from Durham to Stockton at a shipping port. Right. And it worked so well. They said, all right, let's do this. Let's put in the infrastructure, build what this guy is calling a locomotive track. And that was, I think, the very first operating locomotive track in the rail line.

And it didn't just carry cargo. It carried 600 passengers to their deaths. Well, that was Stevenson too. Yeah. Yeah. He said, why don't we put people on that thing? Right. And they're like, is this safe?

And he's like, no, not at all. But I really have a lot to prove. So just pick 600 criminals who cares. Yeah. Don't sit near the boiler and you'll be fine. So in the meantime, people are still tinkering around with the steam car that didn't go away. But it never took off. No.

And the steam locomotive was just this beautiful design to think about it. So let's go back to all the steam engines we talked about. This steam moving a piston back and forth, back and forth, right? Yeah. Or up and down, of course. Sure. But in this case, it's going, it's moving horizontally. The piston is.

And the piston is attached to a bar that's attached to a wheel. And if you want to get kind of fancy, you can attach several wheels to this bar. And as the pistons moving back and forth, this bar is actually making an ellipse. And as far as the wheels are concerned, they're making circles and you're moving forward as this is happening. And again, go to animated engines.com and look up a steam locomotive. And it's just amazing in its design. Like these people really just got in there and rolled up their shirt sleeves and had like

cold dust on their faces and really they were doing like some real engineering. Oh yeah. I'm just so impressed with the guys who made this stuff. It was amazing. Yeah. You know, they're, of course, this is no surprise, but there are, I don't know what they call themselves, but they're big time train aficionados that go and just watch trains. Trainoids.

They might be called train watchers even. Train spotters? No. Are you sure? I don't think so. Probably. But they. Trainees.

I can't remember where I came across it, but it was in another podcast I was researching and found this whole subculture of people that find these old, you know, I mean they watch all kinds of trains, but mainly they, what really like gets them going, we really get some out of bed in the morning. Really gets their miners friend up. Yeah. It's the promise of a old fashioned steam locomotive that's going through town because they still have them.

It's amazing. Yeah. It's pretty cool. I mean, I get why people do it. Sort of like birding. That's a very solitary kind of quiet thing. Yeah. And then that train rumbles by and I mean, like I understand I've never been into trains

or whatever. I'm more just, I think the steam engine on a steam locomotive is amazing. Yeah. And you like to take trains? Sure. We took a train from Manchester to Edinburgh. Lovely. It was a really nice ride to the English countryside.

Yeah. In Scottish. Yeah. I couldn't tell the difference. I could. I was like, oh, yeah, we're in Scotland now. I know. All right.

So the steam engine is chugging along 1825 Steven, they called it so, so cool. He was a conductor on locomotion number one. That one was 600 passengers. Yeah. It's just so cool that they named it like locomotion number one. This is the very first time they've been done. They were very pressing. Just so cool.

Right. It's like the first plane flight or something. We need to do one on the Wright brothers. Okay. I'm happy to do that. They're from Ohio. Yeah. No.

Sorry. Screw those guys. I won't even say their name. So Chuck. Yeah. The steam locomotive is a, it was pretty much a out of the gate hit. Yeah. Some poor people were still working on the steam powered car.

But in the meantime, other people are like, what about steam boats? Yeah. It's come up with something like that and some people have been kicking around the idea for that as well. And apparently it followed pretty closely the evolution of the steam locomotive too. Just people building on ideas and people coming with proof of concepts. And it was an American guy named Robert Fulton who created the first steam powered paddle wheeled boat that showed that it was actually capable of moving up and down rivers.

Yeah. And there was, there was a guy in England and about 40 years earlier named Jonathan Hall who had the first steam powered tugboat, but it didn't work too well because again the technology with these newcomer and savory engines just weren't good enough. But it was really Fulton who said, you know, come aboard. How quaint is this? Yeah. Do you like my captain's hat?

Yeah. Traveling up and down the river with a paddle boat. How quaint is this? They're like, well, we don't have any future things to compare it to, so it's just contemporary to us. Fulton dudes that were professional oarsmen were like, no, I really like the looks of this thing. Exactly.

It's wonderful. So Fulton created the first one, but it was a guy named William Simington who gets credit for the first fully steam powered passenger boat. Yeah. The Charlotte Dundas. Yeah. And Fultons was the Claremont. Yep.

And in 18, 19, what they would do with these sailing ships is they would now outfit them with steam power for when the wind was down and just to augment the wind and it worked out great. And in 18, 19, the Savannah became the very first steam powered ship to make a transatlantic crossing. Yeah. And apparently this steam power was such a threat to sail makers that a consortium of sail makers lobbied the British government saying, hey, can you, can you do something?

Can you stifle the steam technology? Yeah. Can you shut down this amazing advancement? Right. Because we make sales. Yeah. Didn't work. That's, you know, every time something is automated, like the ATM or something and people

say, oh, people are going to lose jobs, you're looking at history, buddy. Because all history has been is one advancement that puts people out of work, right, creating a new industry where people can work. And it's sad in a way, but it's just part of it, you know, yeah, it's called moving forward. Yeah. Too bad. So sad for the sale industry.

Yeah. Sailmaking industry. But, you know, there's people still sail recreationally. Sure. It's saved. Yeah. So now we get to the best part, my opinion, Chuck. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. It's like a locomotive. So the steam turbine, the electricity producing steam powered turbine. Yeah. There's a good argument for that. I love it. Yeah. Remember how electricity works episode?

I do. So electricity is created when you spin a copper coil inside a magnet, right? Yeah. And Michael Faraday created what he called a dynamo, which is basically that. And he said, hey, steam guys of the future. I got an idea for you. Go ahead and come up with a steam powered dynamo. Can you do it?

Yeah. And they said about trying to make that happen. Part of the problem, though, is they figured out that with a steam powered piston, which is what all steam power or steam engines powered were pistons up to that point. You could only do so many cycles of minutes. RMS, yeah. And you need the dynamo going pretty fast to create some electricity or enough to use on an industrial scale.

So this dude named Charles Algernon Parsons, he was British. In 1884, he figured out that there was a new type of steel available and you could create a pretty nice turbine from it. And if you took that turbine and went all the way back to basically hero's original idea, which was spinning, but rather than having the steam spin the actual vessel, you had a vessel creating steam that you're shooting out at the turbine. You can spin a dynamo pretty fast. Yeah.

18,000 revolutions a minute was his dynamo. And in 1890, Jack, that was enough to generate electricity and they installed it fourth with at the fourth bank's power station. And the rest of Europe said, holy cow, we have electricity. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. It's something like 88% of the electricity in the United States still today is made through

steam. Yeah. Steam turbines. Amazing. 80% worldwide is made through steam turbines. So like this guy changed the world. Yep. Along with Faraday.

Yeah. Yeah, of course. And everyone else before. Right. Because everybody's building on the work of everybody else. And all the women who supported those men. Exactly. Everybody had better ideas.

Yeah. They were like, we could have come up with this 7, 800 years ago. So we've mentioned a few times that this was dangerous. Exploding boilers were a problem. Man. Even when they figured out safety valves, early safety valves wouldn't work, actually later safety valves have proved to not work on occasion. Yeah.

In the case of Three Mile Island. But it got a bad rap in the press, of course, and that probably slowed progress a bit. But progress continued nevertheless. Well, even today there's boiler explosions. Like there's a big one at a plant, a Dana Corporation plant in Tennessee. Yeah. Just blew up like a significant portion of the plant. And it's not just that it's like throwing hot water out everywhere.

The pressure that can build up in these high pressure systems in these vessels, if the vessel gives, when that steam hits the regular atmosphere, it expands. And you have basically, I think I read something like a 10,000 kilogram vessel of water, which is what you would find in like a steam locomotive. If it blew up, it would blow up to with a force equivalent of one ton of TNT. Crazy. Yeah. So it's a big deal if your blower blows up.

Yeah. And it all comes down to the safety valves and whether or not they're allowing too much pressure to build up. And then your vessel's ability to withstand that added pressure. Yeah. Pretty scary. It is kind of scary. But it's, yeah.

No, it's, my sentence ends there. It's pretty scary. I don't want to be involved in a boiler accident. No. I don't think anyone wants to. All right, we're going to finish, I think with this, right, unless you have other stuff no beyond supercritical fluid. Oh, I do kind of.

All right. We'll finish with that then. But right now, supercritical fluid, we'll talk about it is earlier when you talked about solid, liquid and gas, each having their molecule distribution at different densities, right? Something really strange happens, as Robert points out, when you heat, when you go through the, from solid to liquid to gas, and if you heat up that gas enough, those molecules actually eventually are forced back together and it becomes like a liquid again, but it still has the properties of a gas.

Yeah. It's kind of like a plasma state or something almost. It's supercritical fluid. Yeah. You know, that has its own name. Right. So when, when water in particular hits its critical point is that 705 degrees Fahrenheit and 217 atmospheres, right?

So it's very high temperature, very high pressure. Yeah. When it goes beyond that point and it starts behaving quite weirdly, you actually can get more steam power out of less initial fossil fuel input. Yes. So it's actually, it's more, it's more efficient when you can heat something to these higher pressures, these supercritical pressures. Way more.

Yeah. So again, the reason that you can do this is we could have always done it. We could have heated it up to this, this amount, but we never had the materials to hold it. Right. Now we have the materials to hold it and they're, they're creating more and more electricity with supercritical steam. Yeah. And here's a little mind blowing fact for you.

This water to create the supercritical liquid fluid is heated at such a high pressure that it doesn't even boil. No. It goes right from water to water vapor. Amazing. Yeah. That's fast. Yeah.

And apparently they're figuring out now that you could actually use CO2 instead of water because it has a much lower critical point. It's like 85 degrees Fahrenheit and 73 atmospheres, which is like nothing. Wow. They're figuring out, well, wait a minute, we could use a bunch of CO2 in lieu of water vapor and get even more energy out of this, but from less input. So they're trying to figure out how to, how to use supercritical CO2 to create electricity now to power steam turbines.

It's a decent band name. Supercritical CO2? Sure. Sure. It's not bad. So you got one more tidbit. That was it. Oh, that was a tidbit.

Yeah. Oh, great. Can I go home? Yeah. In just a minute. Since we don't have anything else, if you want to know more about steam power, you can type those words into the search bar at howstuffworks.com. Since I said steam power, it's time for listener mail.

This was written by one of our jingle writers, you know, our little jingle bumpers. Sure. Yeah. Hey guys, just want to appreciate the fact that SYSK gives jokes, moes like me the opportunity to feel famous for just a fleeting moment whenever I'm listening to an episode and cut to commercial. I hear one of my little songs. It really takes me by surprise and I think that sounds familiar.

Oh, yeah. I wrote that. Yippee. I'm a stay-at-home dad. I'm trying to make my name for myself as a stay-at-home dad as a versatile graphic artist and film composer. And it's nice to know that at least something of mine is making it out to the masses. And speaking of being a dad, I just finished my first children's e-book.

Awesome. Yeah, we're going to plug since he gave us his, oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. We plug it anyway. I'm very proud of it. It's called Hector's Song. It's a tale about being who you are no matter what. It's a great message.

Nice. It is a good message. You can get the regular read words on a page version on Kindle or an enhanced version with narration and music on iBooks. That jacks into your brain. Yeah. He recommends it for kids zero to six or so and you can go to his website, which is Elaine Osborn, E-A-L-A-N, Elon probably.

Yeah. O-S-B-O-R-N-E dot com or just go to iBooks or Amazon and thanks again guys, J Money and Chuck E.D. That's right. You guys are the real deal. Thanks Elon. We appreciate that man. Yeah.

You're the real deal too man, writing books and music and stay at home daddin. Yeah. Pretty neat. Yeah. Super neat. Thanks for getting in touch with us because you submitted a jingle and have now written a book. Well, we want to hear from you.

You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast or Josh M. Clark too. You can hang with us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. Check me and Chuck out on Facebook for the more personal stuff Chuck's needs. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastathousethefirst.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.