AHC/WI Useful Steam Power before 1000AD

Haven't created a thread in about 12 months so let's make it a good one:

The basic effects and physics of heating water, expansion and creating steam were known in Roman Greece c. 1st Century AD but never developed into useful applications until the 1600s at the earliest.

AHC: Bring the utilisation of steam power 'significantly' forward.

WI: What are the effects of an ATL with useful steam power for industry before 1000?
 

longsword14

Banned
Haven't created a thread in about 12 months so let's make it a good one:

The basic effects and physics of heating water, expansion and creating steam were known in Roman Greece c. 1st Century AD but never developed into useful applications until the 1600s at the earliest.

AHC: Bring the utilisation of steam power 'significantly' forward.

WI: What are the effects of an ATL with useful steam power for industry before 1000?
As always :
1. The problem is that a steam engine that is worth the effort must give a significant advantage over traditional methods of production.
2. Knowing how bad decent production of precision-made parts would be, a steam engine would turn out to be a gizmo with little use. The skills and industrial base needed to build steam engines does not exist. The machine would gorge on fuel and the corresponding output would be low.
3. With the demand side of things not as large or rapidly expanding as in later times, the profits earned would not be enough to justify widespread use.

At best a king's attention is brought build some large scale works : large mines etc. that would be of importance to the crown. A large but crude steam engine may be enough to power such an application, where human labour is simply not enough.
 
I wonder if a different development tree would be more promising here. Steam power needs a lot of technological underpinnings to be useful, and IOTL these were developed in different fields. Speeding that up will be very difficult. Maybe, we posit steam technology becomes important for prestige reasons instead? Hydraulic and pneumatic automata were popular with the powerful of the Roman and Islamic world. If a basic steam application - even just a Newcomen-style vacuum cylinfder - were developed and applied to those purposes, it would allow for centuries of undisturbed development. The thing would still have all the problems that early steam technology had - hugely wasteful, demanding vast quantiites of expensive metals and skilled labour, easily replaced with horses or people - but it wouldn't matter. Nobody replaced al-Biruni's self-replenishing oil lamps because having a servant top them up regularly was cheaper and less fussy. Technological toys used on a grand scale are supposed to be wasteful, after all.

Then, when the time comes to open up Europe's mineral coal seams or drain the silver mines of the Alps, there already is a ready set of technologies like piston pumps, pressure valves, efficient cogwheel transmissions and connecting rods as well as a body of knowledge on how to run and maintain steam engines. The damn things still won't be good for much, but just maybe they will end up being good enough to power a boat one day soon.
 
Remember how very wasteful the early steam engines were. The ONLY places (iirc) they were economical was at flooding coal mines - where the coal was right there, and any coal mined out of what would be flooded sections was profit, so they could burn half to keep the water at bay.

Also, you really need 'cheap' iron, or your steam engine is just impossible.
 
Of course there was 150 years of development between the first 'useful' steam engine designs and the first early industrial applications.

Were the technological capabilities and industrial capacity of Early Modern Europe so far in advance of what was produced in the Early Roman Empire?

I agree the first steam engines were primarily experimental, the question is how can you move this 'start point' forward into the Early Medeival Period or late antiquity.

I like the idea of noble patronage from Carlton. after all, the artists of the Renaissance were in part enabled by Wealthy Landowners and Groups looking to display their wealth and status. What's not to say that intricate pneumatic steam machines couldn't become equally as popular amongst the ruling elite? Allowing the refinement of technologies for manufacturing and a better practical understanding of the physics involved.
 

longsword14

Banned
Of course there was 150 years of development between the first 'useful' steam engine designs and the first early industrial applications.

Were the technological capabilities and industrial capacity of Early Modern Europe so far in advance of what was produced in the Early Roman Empire?

I agree the first steam engines were primarily experimental, the question is how can you move this 'start point' forward into the Early Medeival Period or late antiquity.

I like the idea of noble patronage from Carlton. after all, the artists of the Renaissance were in part enabled by Wealthy Landowners and Groups looking to display their wealth and status. What's not to say that intricate pneumatic steam machines couldn't become equally as popular amongst the ruling elite? Allowing the refinement of technologies for manufacturing and a better practical understanding of the physics involved.
This could lead to faster development (how fast I do not know), but it makes me question just how many such gizmos were there in history that saw little use? How to ensure that steam 'toys' do not get sent into the bin? A great demand for mining would be essential, and to really get it off the grund the same economic constraints would exist as for all things before the modern era.
 
I think a solution could be solar steam engines. You could have Egypt which develop steam engine pumps, which watered the desert away from the Nile. Egypt have the benefit of lots of sun and near unlimited fresh water.
 

longsword14

Banned
I think a solution could be solar steam engines. You could have Egypt which develop steam engine pumps, which watered the desert away from the Nile. Egypt have the benefit of lots of sun and near unlimited fresh water.
Solar steam engines? What would they do fill half a bucket water an hour?:p
 
Solar steam engines? What would they do fill half a bucket water an hour?:p


You use mirrors or magnification glass to concentrate the sun light.

mouchotssolarengine.jpg


maxresdefault.jpg
 
And how big would these mirrors have to be? Better use traditional methods.& glass, so much glass.



That's why the solar power concentrators in the 1800s were so big for the power they produced. Read 'The Golden Thread' if you can find it. Even with modern materials commercial solar steam installations are huge.
 
Remember how very wasteful the early steam engines were. The ONLY places (iirc) they were economical was at flooding coal mines - where the coal was right there, and any coal mined out of what would be flooded sections was profit, so they could burn half to keep the water at bay.

Also, you really need 'cheap' iron, or your steam engine is just impossible.




The first mine pumping steam engines didn't use iron, didn't have pistons-'the miners friend', just partial vacuum in a copper boiler, remember. Or that Hero copper steam engine toy could be modified to rotate a shaft to drive a series of piston pumps. But wasteful, yes.
 
Then, when the time comes to open up Europe's mineral coal seams or drain the silver mines of the Alps, there already is a ready set of technologies like piston pumps, pressure valves, efficient cogwheel transmissions and connecting rods as well as a body of knowledge on how to run and maintain steam engines. The damn things still won't be good for much, but just maybe they will end up being good enough to power a boat one day soon.
This is brilliant.
 
The first mine pumping steam engines didn't use iron, didn't have pistons-'the miners friend', just partial vacuum in a copper boiler, remember. Or that Hero copper steam engine toy could be modified to rotate a shaft to drive a series of piston pumps. But wasteful, yes.
Ummm... According to Wiki
A theoretical problem with Savery's device stemmed from the fact that a vacuum could only raise water to a maximum height of about 30 ft (9 m), to this could be added another 40 ft (12 m), or so, raised by steam pressure. This was insufficient to pump water out of a mine
Emphasis added.

It would seem that cylinders were, indeed, needed to pump water out of actual mines.

Even a copper boiler requires that copper.
 

longsword14

Banned
The first mine pumping steam engines didn't use iron, didn't have pistons-'the miners friend', just partial vacuum in a copper boiler, remember. Or that Hero copper steam engine toy could be modified to rotate a shaft to drive a series of piston pumps. But wasteful, yes.
It was a toy. The pressure is too low and it is inefficient.
 

Pomphis

Banned
I agree the first steam engines were primarily experimental, the question is how can you move this 'start point' forward into the Early Medeival Period or late antiquity.

But even if you do that, they still have to compete with human and animal labor as has been pointed out above. It took comparatively very expensive human labor to make it worthwhile to invest into steam engines and their development. Maybe have another plague to make human labor scarce and therefore expensive ?
 
It would seem that cylinders were, indeed, needed to pump water out of actual mines.



From reading-a series of miners friends was used. Steam piston pumps were more efficient, for sure. Horses were also used in water removal before steam-how? Treadmills, or what? Agricola showed bucket hoists.
 

SRBO

Banned
Haven't created a thread in about 12 months so let's make it a good one:

The basic effects and physics of heating water, expansion and creating steam were known in Roman Greece c. 1st Century AD but never developed into useful applications until the 1600s at the earliest.

AHC: Bring the utilisation of steam power 'significantly' forward.

WI: What are the effects of an ATL with useful steam power for industry before 1000?

The problem that prevented big useful steam engines is garbage tier manufacturing techniques - any practical attempt to use the engine would just make it explode
 
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