Chapter energy and technology the enhancement of skin

6.4. Steam power

1776 was a memorable year in human history or several reasons. Most of all, it was because the “Declaration of Independence” was approved on July 4 by the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. It starts the history of the United States of America with the noble words written by Thomas Jefferson:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It is interesting that Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence included a denunciation of the slave trade, which was later edited out by southerners in Congress. It seems that, only after industrialization had provided enough “energy slaves”, could the words of the Declaration be finally put into practice – even then, not without great suffering.

As it happens, 1776 was also the year of publication of a book “The Wealth of Nations” written by a moral philosopher named Adam Smith {Smith, 1759 [2013] #7562}. This book is widely credited for laying the foundation for economic science, although the French physiocrats also deserve credit. In any case, Smith’s book was the source of the powerful ideas like “division of labor”, “free trade” and the beneficent “invisible hand” of the market. (To be accurate, Adam Smith never suggested that the “invisible hand” was always beneficent. We will return to this important point later in Chapter 7.) But Adam Smith’s thesis was focused mainly on trade as an engine of economic growth and prosperity. That was a new idea at the time, but it came to dominate economic thought, and policy, in the two centuries following.

But Human Rights, as proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence, and market economics, as established by “The Wealth of Nations”, could not have become ruling principles of free societies without a revolutionary technology.

We could mention the fact that in 1776 coke-based iron-making, overtook charcoal-based iron making in England, as mentioned in Section 5.5. And 1776 was also the year that the first steam engines designed by James Watt and manufactured by the newly created firm of Watt and Boulton, were installed and working in commercial enterprises. This constuted the second “kick” of the Industrial Revolution and the start of the “age of steam”. It is not too outlandish to suggest that steam engines, and later developments, created the preconditions for human freedom from the hardest kinds of muscular work such as pumping water from a well, grinding grain, cutting trees digging for coal, quarrying stone, plowing and harrowing the soil, “puddling” iron, and carrying bricks.

James Watt was not the first to employ steam power in place of muscles. That honor probably belongs to Thomas Savery or Thomas Newcomen. Newcomen’s atmospheric pumping engine represented tremendous technical progress as compared to earlier muscle-powered pumps,. His first engine, in 1711, was able to replace a team of horses that had been harnessed to a wheel to pump the water out of a flooded coal mine. This was the origin of the “horse-power” unit. The invention solved a serious problem. By 1776 coal was increasingly needed as a substitute for scarce charcoal.⁶ But as coal near the surface was removed, the mines got deeper, and as they got deeper they were usually flooded by water. Getting that water out of the mines was essential.

Newcomen’s clever trick was to use the energy from burning the coal itself to produce steam. In the Newcomen engine, low pressure steam – barely above the boiling point of water – entered the bottom of the cylinder, while the piston was at its highest position, and pushed the air out. Then cold water was injected to condense the steam, creating a partial vacuum. Then the air pressure above the piston forced it back down, lifting the other end of a rocker-arm enabling it to operate the pump. (It was a reciprocating pump similar to the ones still found in some wells.) The steam was at atmospheric pressure. In the Newcomen engine it was not a source of power to drive the piston itself.

During the next fifty years, seventy-five of these engines were installed in coal mines all over England. Very few changes were made to the basic design until James Watt came along.

James Watt was a Scottish instrument maker. He had been given the job of repairing a model of the Newcomen steam pump for the University of Glasgow. In so doing he became aware of the extreme inefficiency of this engine. (Considering that thermodynamics was not yet a science, this realization on his part required some insight.) Moreover, Watt had a simple and better idea. Watt realized that this arrangement wasted a lot of heat unnecessarily. By saving the condensed steam (which was still hot) in a separate chamber, much less fuel was needed to turn it back into steam.

At a crucial moment, Watt met Mathew Boulton, a dynamic entrepreneur, and described his ideas about improving Newcomen’s engine design. Boulton agreed to fund development of a test engine and became Watt/s business partner. For a while, progress was frustratingly slow and several times Watt almost gave up on the project. But Boulton persuaded him to continue. The main problem was that they had to work with crude iron castings that couldn’t be shaped to a satisfactory degree of precision by the tools they had to work with. They needed to manufacture a large cylinder with a tightly fitting piston to prevent the slippery steam from leaking out.

The solution to that problem was an invention by another engineer, John Wilkinson, who owned an iron works and had developed the first practical machine for boring cannon barrels – a fairly big business in England at the time. Wilkinson’s boring machine worked just as well for boring the cylinders of Watt’s steam engines. The first customer of Watt and Boulton was John Wilkinson himself. He used the engine to drive the boring machine. The next engines were used as pumps in coal mines, like the Newcomen engines. Orders began to pour in and for the next five years Watt was very busy installing his engines, mostly in Cornwall, for pumping water out of tin and copper mines. The efficiency improvement, in terms of lower fuel requirements, was dramatic: The addition of an external condenser saved about 75 percent of the fuel used by a similar Newcomen engine. Since the changes (at first) were fairly easy to make, Boulton and Watt began to license the idea to existing Newcomen engine owners, taking a share of the cost of fuel saved by their improvement.

Watt kept on inventing. He smoothed the movement of the piston by injecting steam alternately on the two sides. He invented the “sun and planet” gear system to transform the natural reciprocating motion of the piston to rotary motion. He gradually made his engine smaller and faster. By 1786 it had become a flexible multi-purpose steam engine. This engine became the main source of mechanical work for the Industrial Revolution – apart from existing water wheels – at least in its earlier years.

In 1806 the first self-propelled traction vehicles on rails, called “locomotives”, were built for coal mines using a new generation of steam engines developed by Richard Trevithick, a Cornish engineer. Trevithick’s “strong” steam engines used steam pressure, in addition to the air pressure, to move the pistons. Since the steam pressure could be several times greater than the air pressure, Trevithick’s engines were more compact and more powerful than the Watt & Boulton engines, but also more dangerous. (Remember, both Newcomen and Watt were still using steam at atmospheric pressure, partly because boilers at the time were not capable of safely containing steam at higher pressures).

Engine development did not cease with Watt or Trevithick, of course. Reciprocating steam engines (with pistons) got bigger, faster and more efficient and better, over time. They were used for pumping water from mines, steamships, railroad locomotives and factories. The fastest of the early commercial automobiles (c. 1900) were the Stanley steamers. They were quite good at short races, but less good at other transport needs because they had to be refilled with water every few miles. The internal combustion engine displaced steam for automobiles by 1910 or so, except for a late entry with a condenser, the Doble, in the 1920s. However, the Doble was heavy, and offered no performance advantages over competitors in the luxury market like the Mercedes Benz, the Rolls Royce, or the Bentley. It was a victim of the Great Depression.

The basic components of railways – iron locomotives and iron rails – were mostly accomplished before 1820, thus opening the way to rapid and widespread railway-building, not only in Britain but in other countries. George Stevenson built an 8 mile railway for Hetton Colliery in 1819. Stevenson’s Stockton-Darlington line opened to passengers in 1825. The 29 mile Liverpool and Manchester line, which cost £820,000 was completed by Stephenson in 1830, and was an immediate success. Railways were opened for public traffic before 1830 in the United States, Austria, and France, and very soon afterwards in many other countries. The first steam locomotive used in the U.S. was the "Stourbridge Lion", purchased from England for the Delaware & Hudson (1827). Peter Cooper's "Tom Thumb", used by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was built in 1830. The first major railway-building boom in Britain occurred in 1835-37, when many companies were formed, mostly local, and a number of disconnected point-to-point lines were built.

These early railway investments produced high financial returns, commonly returning 10% or more per annum on their capital {Taylor, 1942 #4950}. This attracted more capital to the industry. In the second "boom" period (1844-46) new railway companies were formed with an aggregate capital of 180 million pounds. Indeed, this boom virtually consumed all the capital available for investment at the time {Taylor, 1942 #4950}. Returns began to fall when the main lines were finished and railway service was being extended into smaller towns by 1860 (in the UK) and by 1890 in the US.

Another direct consequence of the mid-19^th century railway-building boom was the very rapid introduction of telegraphy. Cooke and Wheatstone's first practical (5-needle) telegraph system was constructed for the Great Western Railway, from Paddington Station (London) to W. Drayton, a distance of 13 miles (1838). It was extended 4 years later to Slough {Garratt, 1958 #1985 p. 657}. Thereafter, virtually all newly built railway lines were accompanied by telegraph lines. Wheatstone and Cooke formed the Electric Telegraph Co. in 1846; 4000 miles of line had been built in Britain by 1852 (ibid).⁷ While telegraphic communication soon developed its own raison d'être, it was the needs of railways that provided a strong initial impetus and created a demand for still better means of communication.

Steamboats actually preceded railways. There were a number of experimental prototypes during the 18^th century: experiments began as early as 1763 (Henry), 1785 (Fitch), 1787 (Rumsey). Symington‘s Charlotte Dundas towed barges on the Forth and Clyde canal to Glasgow in 1803. Commercial service began in 1807 when Robert Fulton’s Clermont carried passengers 150 miles up the Hudson River from New York to Albany in 32 hours, and back in 8 hours {Briggs, 1982 #956 p. 127}. Fulton's rival, John Stevens, is credited with the first sea voyage by steamship (1809), from Hoboken to Philadelphia around Cape May, N.J. {Briggs, 1982 #956}.

Riverboats became quite common thereafter, especially in the US. Fulton and Livingston started steamboat service from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi in 1811 and on the lower Mississippi River in 1814. These boats all used paddle-wheels and high pressure steam engines evolved from Trevithick’s design. (Boiler explosions were a regular feature of Mississippi steam boats; at least 500 explosions occurred with more than 4000 fatalities, mostly in the first half of the 19^th century. However the problem of containing high pressure seam was finally solved by confining the steam to welded tubes and confining the tubes within a stronger outer container, as in the famous Stanley Steamer automobile).

Steamships began to displace sailing ships in the second decade of the 19th century. By 1820 the U.S. merchant marine had only 22,000 tons of steam powered shipping, 1.7% of the total fleet {United States Bureau of the Census, 1975 #5174}. By 1850 this fraction had increased to 15% {United States Bureau of the Census, 1975 #5174}. The pace of substitution slowed in the 1850's, for some reason (partly, the development of large full-rigged schooners with small crews and power-assisted rigging) but increased thereafter. The year 1863 seems to have been a turning point: it was the year the first steel (as opposed to iron-clad) ship was built, as well as the year of the first steel locomotive {Forbes, 1963 #1859}. Nevertheless, only 33% of the fleet was steam powered as late as 1880 {United States Bureau of the Census, 1975 #5174}. Thereafter, penetration was very rapid, even though the last sailing ships were still working in the 1930s.

The days of the great three, four and five masted sailing schooners that carried tea from China and grain and wool from Australia to England and passengers in the other direction for much of the 19^th and part of the 20^th century were the essence of romance. They were also an effective way of projecting European military and economic power, in their day. But those days were cut short by a new and dirtier kind of power. The change is symbolized by Turner’s painting “The Fighting Temeraire”, which depicts a huge, pale, three-masted battleship with tied up sails. A small, black tugboat, its chimney belching flames and smoke, is seen towing her up the River Thames to her last berth, where she is to be broken up. We know, of course, that the tugboat is powered by a coal-burning steam engine. And we understand that Turner’s painting from 1839 signals the triumph of coal and steam

Most early ocean-going steamships also carried sails to keep fuel costs down. Iron-clads started replacing wooden hulls in the 1840s, as the price of timber kept rising, whereas the price of iron-plates kept falling as iron-works got more and more efficient. The screw propeller (1849) put too much strain on the structure of wooden hulls, so screw propellers and iron-clad ships became standard by the 1860s. Ships began to get much larger after that time.

Undoubtedly the most important early application of steam power after railways and ships was in the textile industry, as a supplement (and later, substitute) for water power. Yet in 1800, when Watt's master patent expired, it is estimated that there were fewer than 1000 stationary steam engines in Britain, totaling perhaps 10,000 hp. {Landes, 1969 #3064 p 104}. By 1815, however, the total was apparently twenty times greater (210,000 hp), all in mines or mills. By mid-century the total of stationary engines had increased to 500,000 hp, in addition to nearly 800,000 hp in locomotives and ships {Landes, 1969 #3064}. At that point (1850), the cotton industry was still using 11,000 hp of water power, but 71,000 hp of steam. The woolen industry, which was slower to mechanize, used 6800 hp of water power, as against 12,600 hp steam power {Landes, 1969 #3064}. Mechanization of textile manufacturing was one of the few examples of a purely labor-saving technology introduced during the industrial revolution.

The steam engine did not die, however. It merely got smaller (in size) but faster and more powerful. It became a turbine. The conversion from reciprocating to turbine steam engines after 1900 was remarkably fast. In fact the last and biggest reciprocating steam engine, which produced 10,000 hp, was completed in 1899 to power the growing New York City subway (metro) system. The pistons needed a tower 40 feet high. But by 1902 it was obsolete and had to be junked and replaced by a steam turbine only one tenth of its size {Forbes, 1963 #1859} p.453.

Turbines powered by steam or (later) by high temperature combustion products (gas turbine) deserve special mention. This is because they have to operate at very high speeds and very high temperatures, constituting a major technological challenge. The first effective multi-rotor steam turbines were built in 1884 by Sir Charles Parsons. His first axial-flow design was based on earlier hydraulic turbines⁸ was quickly followed by a prototype high speed turbo-generator.⁹ The first installation for electric power generation was a 75 kw unit for the Newcastle and District Electric Lighting Company (1888). By 1900 Parsons installed a pair of 1000 kw turbo-generators for the City of Elberfeld, in Germany. Radial flow designs and compounding designs soon followed. Other successful inventors in the field included C.G.P. de Laval (Sweden), C. G. Curtis (USA) and A.C.E. Rateau (France).

The steam turbine rotor wheels utilize high quality carbon steel with some alloying elements such as molybdenum for machinability. They now operate at steam temperatures above 500° Celsius. The first effective gas turbines (for aircraft) were built in 1937 by Frank Whittle, and adapted to electric power generation by Siemens and GE in the 1950s and 1960s. Gas turbine wheels must now withstand much higher temperatures, as high as 1200° Celsius. To do they must be made from so-called “superalloys” usually based on nickel, cobalt, molybdenum, chromium and various minor components. These metals are very hard to machine or mold accurately, as well as being costly to begin with, which is why gas turbines are used only by high performance aircraft and have never been successfully used for motorcars, buses or trucks.

Steam turbines now supply 90% of the electric power in the US and most of the world. Most of the rest is from hydraulic turbines. Steam turbine technology today is extremely sophisticated because steam moves faster and is much “slipperier” than liquid water. Combustion products from a gas turbine move even faster. Therefore turbine wheels need to turn much faster, too, requiring very good bearings and very precise machining. This need had a great influence on metallurgy, machining technology and ball bearing design and production in the early 20^thcentury.