Timeline of steam power

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See Steam engine, Steam power during the Industrial Revolution.

Steam power developed slowly over a period of several hundred years, progressing through expensive and fairly limited devices in the early 1600s, to useful pumps for mining in 1700, and then to Watt's improved designs in the late 1700s. It is these later designs, introduced just when the need for practical power was growing due to the Industrial Revolution, that truly made steam power commonplace.

Contents

[edit] Early examples

  • ~130 BC: Hero of Alexandria builds a small steam turbine, the aeolipile, as an example of the power of heated air or water. The device produced little power and had no practical application, but is nevertheless the first true steam engine. He also describes a way to pump water from one container to another, higher, one using steam pressure. The weight of the water was intended to open temple doors "magically".
  • 1601: Giovanni Battista della Porta describes a new pump which uses steam pressure to drive water out of a container. It is similar to Hero's design.
  • 1615: Salomon de Caus, who had been an engineer and architect under Louis XIII, publishes a book showing a device similar to that of Porta.
  • 1629: Giovanni Branca suggests using steam to blow a windmill-like device for power, intending it to be used as a power source for mills.
  • 1630: David Ramseye is granted a patent on a steam pump, although no description is given and the patent also covers a number of unrelated inventions. He refers to the device as a "fire engine", and this term is used for many years.

[edit] Working systems

  • 1663: Edward Somerset, 2nd Marquis of Worcester, publishes a selection of his inventions. One is a new sort of steam pump, essentially two devices like de Caus', but attached to a single boiler. A key invention is the addition of cooling around the containers to force the steam to condense. This produced a partial vacuum inside the chambers, which was used to draw a volume of water into the containers through a pipe, thus forming a pump. He builds one of very large size into the side of Raglan Castle, apparently the first "industrial scale" steam engine. He has plans to build them for mining, but dies before he can set up his company.
  • 1698: Thomas Savery introduces a steam pump he calls the Miner's Friend. it is almost certainly a direct copy of Somerset's design. One key improvement is added later, replacing the cold water flow on the outside of the cylinder with a spray directly inside it. A small number of his pumps are built, but like any system based on suction to lift the water, they have a maximum height of 32 feet (and typically much less). In order to be practical, his design can also use the pressure of additional steam to force the water out the top of the cylinder, allowing the pumps to be "stacked", but many mine owners were afraid of the risk of explosion and avoided this option.
  • 1705: Thomas Newcomen introduces the atmospheric engine, which uses an otherwise unmodified Savery-like engine to pump a piston instead of water, the vacuum pulling the piston down to the bottom of the cylinder instead of water to the top. The piston provides direct mechanical power to run external pumps, thus allowing water to be lifted to any height. In addition it is much more efficient than the Savery design, because the cylinder is not being cooled off between strokes by the water it is attempting to pump. Savery holds the patent on the condensing system, so Newcomen, Savery and Newcomen's partner John Calley share the initial patent.
  • 1707: Denis Papin publishes a study on steam power, including a number of ideas. One uses a Savery-like engine to lift water onto a water wheel for rotary power. The study also proposes replacing the water of a Savery engine with a piston, which is pulled on by the vacuum in a cylinder after steam inside is condensed, but he was unable to build the device.

[edit] Steam power in mining

  • 1712: Newcomen installs his first commercial engine, replacing a team of 500 horses. Over the next 50 years engines are installed in mines all over England, notably in Cornwall, and is also used for municipal water supply and draining wetlands. It was later stated that the Newcomen engine allowed mines to be made twice as deep as before.
  • 1713: Humphrey Potter, a boy charged with operating a Newcomen engine, installs a simple system to automatically open and close the operating valves. The engine can now be run at 15 strokes a minute with little work other than loading the fuel.
  • 1718: Henry Beighton introduces an improved and much more reliable version of Potter's operating system.
  • 1718: Desaguliers introduces an improved version of the Savery engine, which includes safety valves and a two-way valve that operated both the steam and cold water (as opposed to two separate valves).
  • 1720: ­Leopold designs an engine based on expansion, which he attributes to Papin, in which two cylinders alternately receive steam and then vent to the atmosphere. Although likely a useful design, it appears none were built.
  • 1766: two-cylinder steam engine was built in Barnaul under design of Ivan Polzunov.The steam engine was used to serve coal mine.

[edit] Watt's engine

  • 1763: James Watt is granted a patent on his improved Newcomen design. The key was to further separate the condensing water, this time to a completely different cylinder of smaller size. This ensured that the main cylinder could be kept hot at all times, unlike in the Newcomen engines where the cooling water also cooled the cylinder as a side-effect. This cooling meant that some of the steam in the Newcomen engine was used to re-warm the cylinder, which Watt's improvement avoided, just as Newcomen's design avoided cooling the cylinder with the water it was pumping. The increase in efficiency was enough that Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton licensed the design based on the savings in coal per year, as opposed to a fixed fee. To some, this development marks the start of the Industrial Revolution.
  • 1774: John Smeaton experimented with Newcomen engines, and also starts building engines with much longer cylinders than normal. Later designs delivered about 80 horsepower (60 kW).
  • 1775: Watt builds his first "double acting" engine, which blows steam on one side of the piston, then allows it to move to the other where it finally enters the condensor. This change doubles the engine power for little extra complexity or space.
  • 1781: Jonathan Hornblower patents a two-cylinder "compound" engine, in which the steam pushes on one piston (as opposed to pulling via vacuum as in previous designs), and when it reaches the end of its stroke it is valved into a second piston that works with a condenser, as "normal". Hornblower's design is considerably more efficient than Watt's single-acting designs, but is similar enough to his double-acting system that his patent is later broken.
  • 1782: Watt is able to re-negotiate his patents for another 15 years. That year he also builds a steam-powered tilt hammer for John Wilkinson. Over the next few years he adds a number of features to his designs, including a throttle, the centrifugal governor, and mercury steam gauges.
  • 1793: Edmund Cartwright designs a new type of condenser that sits around the main cylinder and makes the engine as a whole considerably smaller. It appears none were built, however.
  • 1798: William Bull makes a seemingly obvious design change by inverting the steam engine directly above the mine pumps, eliminating the large beam used since Newcomen's designs.

[edit] Improving power

  • 1804: Arthur Woolf re-introduces Hornblower's double-cylinder designs now that Watt's patents have expired. He goes on to build a number of examples with up to nine cylinders as boiler pressures increase through better manufacturing and materials.
  • 1854: John Ramsbottom publishes a report on his use of oversized steel piston rings which maintain a seal by outward spring tension in the cylinder. This allows much better sealing (compared to earlier brass seals) which leads to significantly higher system pressures before "blow-by" is experienced.
  • 1865: Auguste Mouchout invents the first device to convert solar energy into mechanical steam power, using a cauldron filled with water enclosed in glass, which would be put in the sun to boil the water.
  • 1867: Stephen Wilcox and his partner Herman Babcock patent the "Babcock & Wilcox Non-Explosive Boiler", which uses water inside clusters of tubing to generate steam, typically with higher pressures and more efficiently than the typical "firetube" boilers of that time. Babcock and Wilcox -type boiler designs become popular in new installations.
  • 1897: Charles Algernon Parsons patented a steam turbine, which was used to power a ship. The turbine works like a multi-cylinder steam engine, but with any number of "cylinders" in series, built of simple bladed wheels. The efficiency of large steam turbines is considerably better than the best compound engines, while also being much simpler, more reliable, smaller and lighter all at the same time. Steam turbines have replaced piston engines for power generation almost universally since then.
  • 1902: The Stanley Motor Carriage Company begins manufacture of the Stanley Steamer, the first production steam-powered car.
  • 1903: Commonwealth Edison Fisk Street Station opens in Chicago, using 32 Babcock and Wilcox boilers driving several GE Curtis turbines, at 5000 and 9000 kilowatts each, the largest turbine-generators in the world at that time. Almost all electric power generation, from the time of the Fisk Station to the present, is based on steam driven turbine-generators.
  • 1913: Nikola Tesla patented a bladeless steam turbine that utilizes the boundary layer effect. This design has not been used commercially due to its low efficiency.
  • 1923: Alan Arnold Griffith publishes An Aerodynamic Theory of Turbine Design, describing a way to dramatically improve the efficiency of all turbines. In addition to making newer power plants more economical, it also provides enough efficiency to build a jet engine.

[edit] External links

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