The Beam Engine

The interactive article is so good!

(Sorry I am pasting my old comment.)

Some Model Engineering related resources:

Engineering drawings of small model engines used in model aircraft making. These designs are intended for manufacturing and practical operation, rather than merely for display, and can be used to build fully functional engines.

https://www.modelengineeringwebsite.com/Beam_Engine_drawings...

https://modelengineeringwebsite.com/Classic_ME_beam_engine.h...

https://outerzone.co.uk/plans.asp?cat=Engines&Xcardsperpage=...

https://modelenginenews.org/midge/index.html

https://modelengineeringwebsite.com/Midget_gas_engine_1.html

https://www.adriansmodelaeroengines.com/catalog/product.php?...

Ever hear the phrase "Balls out" when referring to pushing something to the max? Comes form the balls of the centrifugal engine governor. At maximum speed the balls extended all the way outward giving us the term "Running balls out."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor

edit: I once said this phrase at a work meeting and someone objected to my use of a crude term which I then explained much to everyone's surprise. They thought it had something to do with testicles.

The first steam engines were vacuum engines, fill a cylinder full of steam and as it condenses it sucks the piston down, Watt's improvement and patent was on a separated condenser unit so you did not have to reheat the whole cylinder each time. This doubled the efficiency, that is, reduced the amount of coal you had to burn by half. But Watt would not sell manufacturing rights to his patent he sold operating licenses, If you had an engine that utilized Watts patent idea you owed him half the price of the coal you did not have to burn by using it. Consequently there were a lot of "pirate" engines, the most common method of working around Watts patent was to claim that your condenser was integrated into(as opposed to separated from) the cylinder some how.

Quinn (Blondihacks) on youtube is a model engineer machinist and has, IMO, the most outsider-watchable content on building boilers and steam engines like this.

Highly recommend this primer titled "The Model Engineering Learning Curve" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps_BQJEMnGA

She's been building a model locomotive for years now, there are over 100 videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLY67-4BrEae-xhrvZX33gPk4...

One more: a little engine I'd never encountered before called a wobbler is, apparently, the hello world of machining model engines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrHDrIms7-0

One of the unexpected pleasures of having a 3 year old has been learning far more than I ever planned to about steam locomotives. It turns out steam engineering is fascinating, this article emphasized it for me even more. It really amazes me how much ingenuity there is in just connecting the right shapes and joints up so that the right thing happens at the right time, creating perfect cycles, regulators, etc. Seeing it explained in an iterative way like this is fantastic because you can understand what problem is solved by each part. I would love to see a piece like this strictly about locomotives.

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.

Ancient Greeks had a steam engine. They called it a Hero's engine. They used it as a toy.

They couldn't use it as anything else than a toy. The reason they couldn't because they didn't have the metallurgy and the machining to create pistons, valves, etc.

There's an important lesson that can be applied to every technology, I think: technological progress is always iterated, never revolutionized. If your novelty - a programming language, a framework, a methodology, whatever - doesn't stand on the shoulders of the giants, then you have simply nothing to apply this novelty to.

Fred Dibnah's BBC series "Age of Steam" is a fine overview of the development of steam engine technology and the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl_UA36ouzM&list=PL2vJ5Cg-wl...

This reminds me a lot of https://ciechanow.ski, down to the body typeface. (IBM Plex Sans?) Also, the SI units everywhere here make me beam. Thank you :)

For those in London who want to see one of these in the flesh, as it were, there's one in Tottenham: https://www.mbeam.org/

This has https://ciechanow.ski/ vibes, I like the form!

This is what finally made the idea behind Watt's condenser click for me.

Cool! If you're in New Zealand, there is a massive, two story Double Woolf beam engine at MOTAT museum in Auckland, along with an array of other steam driven engines that they run from time to time.

Great historical science book on the steam engine here: https://www.amazon.com/Most-Powerful-Idea-World-Invention/dp...

One of my favorites. Good read.

Love this article!

One nit: All three animations that show the governor and the flywheel have the governor turning the wrong way, causing the gears that join them to do physically impossible things.

First off, this is very cool, I love these kind of breakdowns from first principal.

This is sending me :)

> One cup of water becomes roughly 400 litres of steam, enough to fill two bathtubs

Three units of measurement in one sentence, my favorite unit is bathtubs.

How did you do the figures? Iterative design with Three.js and an agent? What did that process look like?

Ha. The title lead me to believe this was about Erlang. But this is great too.

my grandpa had a table top model of a beam engine that he would power with a pressure cooker

Nice replacement since B Ciechanowski joined OpenAI, we don't get those high quality articles anymore.