Since Hero: A Mechanic's History of the Age of Power

Since Hero:

A Mechanic’s History of the Age of Power

Bruce A. Abbott

Published by Bruce A. Abbott at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Bruce A. Abbott

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Forward

Glossary

Notes on Sources

When Push (and Pull) Was All There Was…

Heat

A Need Arises

Running on Empty

The Age of Power Begins (almost)...

Beam Me Up…

…Scotty

A Change of Direction

Spin Cycle

Where’d All That Steam Come From?

Nukes

Into Thin (and Thick) Air

From Steam to Air

Fire in the Hole

Road Trip!

On the Waterfront

Also Ran

Inhale-Exhale

Putting the Squeeze On

Silent Otto

Of Patents and Strokes

Portable Power

The Fuel Problem

From Spark to Flame… To Spark

Kerosene Makes a Comeback

How Lubricants Evolved with Engines

The Moon Shot of 1892

Barber’s Dream is Reborn

Barber’s Baby Hits the Road

Wankel’s Wonder

The Gas Crisis of 1919

Down on the Farm

The IC Revolution Spreads

Batteries

Electric Motors: The Fuzzy History of the Electromagnet

Motion from Magnetism: The Long Childhood of the Electric Motor

Electricity from Motion: Not as Easy as It Looked

Alternating Current: Back to the Beginning

Electric Power Today

A Cambrian Explosion in Metal

The Future of Fuels

Global Warming

Epilogue

Bibliography

Dedication

Forward

In the fourth century before Christ, Rhacotis was a small Mediterranean seaport at the western edge of the Nile delta, little changed from its founding a thousand years earlier. It might have remained thus except that it had an illustrious visitor in 332BC, Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon, and called the Great. Alexander recognized the site for the strategic and commercial diamond in the rough that it was, and built a new section adjacent to the original town, naming the whole complex for himself: Alexandria.

When Alexander continued eastward on his mission to conquer the known world, he left a general in charge, Ptolemy, who succeeded to the throne of Egypt on the death of his leader. Ptolemy even went so far as to confiscate Alexander’s body on its trip back to Greece in 322 BC, and kept it in Alexandria as a token of legitimacy for his rule. Two years later he moved his capitol to that location, and began the works that would establish Alexandria as the center of the intellectual world for the next half-millennium.

Ptolemy established the Museum, literally ‘the home of the Muses’, as a teaching and research center, and included a library which was stocked by the simple means of seizing and copying scrolls found on board vessels that docked at the port. Within eighty years the library contained 500,000 scrolls; the index listing them occupied over one hundred more. Euclid taught at the Museum, and there created his text on Geometry which would be the standard reference for the next two thousand years. Archimedes studied there, and Eratosthenes did the first rough calculation of the circumference of the Earth during his tenure as Librarian, as well as completing a star-map of over 700 suns. When the Roman Empire annexed Egypt in about 80 BC, they wisely left the Museum alone, at least for a while.

The ultimate fate of the Museum is known; it was totally destroyed; we just don’t know for certain by what hand the deed was done. Julius Caesar may have started a fire in 48BC that damaged the main part of the library; Emperor Aurelian may have demolished the facility in the period during the ~270AD campaign against the Palmyrene Empire that had temporarily taken over Egypt during the Roman Empire’s succession struggles. Even if the main library was damaged, its ‘daughter’ annex at the Serapeum Temple in another part of the city probably continued its work unmolested up until Coptic Pope Theophilus ordered the destruction of all ‘pagan temples’ in 391 AD. Any remnants that may have survived were probably finished off by 640 AD when the second Islamic Caliph Omar ibn Al-khattāb issued an edict calling for their eradication.

The Museum became famous for inventions as well, including the first organ powered by an air pump. The most illustrious inventor of the complex is probably Hero (or possibly Heron) who lived in the first century AD. His birth and death dates are in dispute, but we know that he was working in 62 AD because, in one of his works, Hero mentioned a recent eclipse that modern researchers have pinned down to March 13th of that year.

Hero was primarily a mathematician, but used his esoteric knowledge to improve surveying, inventing an early form of theodolite which he called a dioptera; we still use a much-modified version known as a transit. He also made the first coin-operated vending machine for holy water at temples, and a device that used air heated by a fire to displace water in a sealed vessel and open and close temple doors as if by unseen hands.

Hero wrote many texts, only a fraction of which exist in their entirety. The ones we have covered surveying, mechanics, weapons of war, architecture, pneumatics and hydraulics, and mirrors, among other subjects. Yet his most famous work was a toy that he may not have actually invented, since something similar was described in texts from a century before. This toy boiled water in a kettle, and used it to spin a metal ball as the resulting steam escaped thru angled jets on the sphere’s perimeter. It was the world’s first known heat engine, but the seed that Hero planted in the form of his Aeolipile would slumber for 1600 years before bursting forth to power the Industrial Revolution.

This book started out as a mechanic’s account of the evolution of the internal combustion engine, but as JRR Tolkien said of his Lord of the Rings trilogy, It grew in the telling… My intention was to demonstrate why the machines I would describe worked as they did, or more often did not; that aim slowly but surely forced me back in time, and laterally into fields that I had not intended to explore; my simple catalog eventually became a History of the Age of Power.

Within these pages I will attempt to trace the evolution of heat engines from Hero’s toy to the present day. I also touch on Man’s harnessing of animals, water and wind to show why the deficiencies of those power sources instigated research into simpler, more portable, and stronger devices to replace them. It has been a fascinating journey for me, tracing this evolution to the miracles of today’s technology; I hope you can experience some of that thrill as well.

When Push (and pull) was all there was…

Humans have always had to move things; either themselves to where materials that they needed were located, or to move those materials to where they wanted to be. Dwellings had to be near a water source, and food and fuel for fires had to be adjacent to the site. Caves were convenient but not that plentiful, and population increases soon would outgrow useable room. Life revolved around food, fuel, and water; they were consumables and had to be replenished nearly on a daily basis, which meant lugging stuff. This required muscle power, driven by the conversion of the aforementioned food into energy that the body could then convert to useful work, usually the acquisition of more food. A big problem is immediately obvious; carry the food too far, and you burned up all the calories of fuel value in that food just moving it. The same problem arose with water and fuel; too much energy invested in transport, and you went in the hole. In the unforgiving accounting of prehistoric life, you died. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer said, Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.

The first effort at changing the equation that governed the early human energy budget took place when our ancestors figured out how to get somebody else’s muscles to do the work. Given the evidence of human ferocity and self-interest thru the ages, subjugating other humans and forcing them to do the work was probably tried early on, but they burned the same fuel as their masters, and if you tried to limit their food they weakened and died. What was needed was muscle-power that could burn fuel that humans didn’t, fuel that was readily available and cheap in terms of energy invested. It would be ideal if the muscle power could gather its own supplies, and the first answer came from the animal world.

Dogs were domesticated and began their long association with humans starting around 12,000 BC; whether they were used as pack animals that early is unknown. Goats came next, about 10,000 BC, and sheep some two thousand years later. The real breakthroughs came with the domestication of the aurochs, an ancestor of cattle, before 6000 BC, followed by the horse some 1500 years later. The wheel first showed up in the archeological record in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin after 5000 BC, and its usefulness in supporting loads and easing the friction of moving them would eventually lead to the first wagons. The wheeled platform that would become the modern handcart or wheelbarrow surely appeared in this time period as well, quite possibly first in China.

Transportation over water was probably ancient by that time, and men had already figured out centuries earlier how to use woven panels to harness the power of the wind to move their vessels; on the shore, the wind would also be used to drive stationary water pumps in Babylon by 1700 BC. In Persia, vertical shaft windmills using door-like vanes harnessed the strong prevailing winds of the deserts from the middle of the 7th century AD. The idea moved to Europe by the 12th century, but there the shaft carried sails and ran horizontally. The whole contraption sat on a large post, allowing it to be turned into the wind, hence the name post-mill. This was improved in 1784 by Andrew Maikle with the invention of the fantail gear. A smaller version of the main rotor sat behind the windmill and was geared to the ring gear supporting the main structure. If the wind turned enough to strike the small rotor it spun and turned the mill back until it faced head on. These mills were called smock mills, and reached heights of 120 feet with 80 foot sails.

Windmills eventually were harnessed to do other tasks besides pumping water or grinding grain. At least one powered a saw-mill in England (anti-machinery Luddites wrecked it in 1768), and by 1890 another was generating electricity in Denmark. The largest windmill generator of its era was the Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine, a 110 foot tower with a rotating head sporting two 87 foot blades. It was erected on Grandpa’s Knob in Vermont in 1941 and produced up to 1.2 megawatts of energy. During a wind storm in 1945 one blade broke free and smashed the other, and the backers could not get the necessary materials to repair it. Wind turbines are making a comeback today all over the world, but still have to contend with the times when the wind doesn’t blow.

The force of moving water was most likely harnessed early on, since it was available all over the globe. We know that the Egyptians by 2500 BC were using the power of river currents to lift water using a primitive sweep wheel; this device utilizes the momentum of the water in a river current to lift a small mass of water to above bank level. Romans were milling flour using undershot (the water passes under the wheel and pushes on the submerged paddles) waterwheels by 100 BC.; these worked the same way as the sweep wheel, but used the power stolen from the moving water to turn the millstones. Fear of civil unrest due to unemployment prevented much earlier use; the Luddites of 18th century Great Britain would prove that a valid concern.

Vitruvius of Rome, an engineer of the 1st century BC, improved the waterwheel by reshaping the paddles and adding a reduction gear train; by the Middle Ages his Vitruvian mill would be yielding up to 60 horsepower. The last improvement to the classic water wheel was the Poncelet undershot wheel of 1824; by careful shaping of the blades and chute he contrived to extract all the momentum from moving water so that it literally flowed straight down out of the curved blades at the bottom, giving up its last kinetic energy in the process.

A different kind of water-driven device arrived when the first modern water turbine was developed by Benoit Fourneyron in 1823. The shaft of the turbine was vertical and the water flowed down and outward. This emulated the configuration of the Barker Mill of 80 years earlier, in which water flowed down a vertical pipe with horizontal arms at the bottom like an upside-down cross, the whole resting on a bearing at the bottom. The hollow arms had water jets pointing in opposite directions at the ends, and when water was forced out at speed due to the head pressure the whole contraption spun in reaction. The Francis turbine of the 1840’s worked like the Fourneyron but the water flowed toward the shaft rather than away from it. The Pelton wheel reverted back to a waterwheel configuration, but used a water jet shooting at high velocity due to a high head of pressure. The jet struck buckets attached to the rim of the wheel and transferred its velocity to them. This turbine dates from 1870 and was also known as a ‘Hurdy-Gurdy’.

So by the time of Christ, Humans had harnessed (literally) muscle power in the form of animals and joined it with wheels. They had also begun using wind and water to move vessels; and to drive machinery to perform useful tasks. And that was the way it stayed for seventeen hundred years.

The ancestors of modern man started using chemical energy in the form of fire as long as a million years ago. The fuels were wood and its byproduct charcoal, animal fats, and dung; in a few isolated areas surface coal was exploited. Simple oil lamps of clay, and fire-pits in the dwellings for cooking, warmth, and illumination were the sum total of Man’s innovation until those unknown Chinese alchemists of the Wu Dynasty mixed sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal to make the first crude gunpowder around 275 AD. There is no documentation of gunpowder being packed into tubes to make rockets or propel projectiles until the 13th century, but chemical energy had already been used to create motion by a Greek tinkerer in Egypt in the first century AD.

In his book Pneumatica, Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria in Roman Egypt describes a sealed cauldron containing water set over a fire. Two tubes exited the top of the cauldron from opposite sides, then bent at 90 degrees and turned toward each other. A hollow sphere was supported on the ends of the inward facing tubes, the joints fitting tightly, but allowing the sphere to rotate on its tubular ‘axles’. Two more bent tubes exited the sphere at opposite sides, equidistant from the axle sockets (imagine the sphere as the Earth; the cauldron tubes enter at the poles and the outlet pipes are on the equator, both pointed west). These formed jets that pointed across the axis of rotation of the sphere, and caused it to rotate on its axles when the water in the cauldron boiled and formed steam which exited the jets at speed. For the first time motion had been created thru steam by fire, or more specifically by that quality of fire which could be felt even when it was not seen, which we called heat.

Heat

We are working our way toward the inception of the heat engine, but first we need to determine something; just exactly what heat is. What makes the topic really interesting is that until about 200 years ago, the accepted definition of heat was completely wrong.

The ancients believed that fire was one of the four main constituent materials of the world, along with water, earth and air. The physical effects of fire had long been observed, and it was well known that water boiled, air rose, metals glowed, and wood burned when exposed to the heat of the flame. These first natural philosophers believed Fire composed the outermost part of the universe, where the sun and stars were, and fire on earth rose in an attempt to return ‘home’. What eluded the philosophers was the mechanism by which it happened.

By the eighteenth century, the most popular explanation for the nature of heat was the Caloric theory, which held that most materials contained an invisible matter called caloric which could be transferred back and forth between substances. The relative amount of caloric in a mass determined its temperature; hot rocks or iron had a lot of caloric; ice had very little. As wood in a fire burned, it released caloric into its surroundings which then got ‘hot’. If that surrounding included water, the water first got hot, then boiled. The water eventually could hold no more of the invisible carrier of heat, and the excess was escaping, carrying some of the water away as steam until none was left. The bigger philosophical question was how much caloric a material could contain. That question was answered in part by an American émigré who chose the wrong side in the Revolutionary War, and went on to become, after Benjamin Franklin, the second most important American scientist of the eighteenth century. Even though his inventions are still in general use, most people have never heard of him.

Benjamin Thompson was born in Massachusetts in 1753, in what is now the town of Woburn. He had an undistinguished early life, marrying a wealthy widow on reaching his majority. When Britain and the Colonies came to blows Thompson placed his loyalty with the Mother country, serving as a spy. After the war he fled to England to avoid the wrath of his former countrymen, and then went on to Europe. Entering the service of the Elector of Bavaria (one of the Germanic Principalities), he held the offices of Chamberlain, Minister of War, and Minister of the Police. He reorganized the Army, created the prototype poorhouse, saved Munich from the French and Austrians, and was rewarded with the title of Count of the Holy Roman Empire. From thence forth he was known as Count Rumford.

In one of his capacities he was responsible for the manufacture of cannon for the army. At that time, cannon barrels were cast in one solid piece, and then bored out to their proper internal diameter using a cutting bit. As on modern lathes, the bit was held stationary and the work-piece (in this case the barrel) rotated, turned by horses walking a circular track pulling a beam rotating on a vertical shaft which drove the boring mechanism. Rumford noticed that ‘caloric’ was released when the bit was being pushed down the bore, cutting metal away. He also observed that a bit dulled by extended use not only took longer to cut out the bore, but seemed to release more ‘caloric’ as it worked. He started experiments in 1798 to see how much of the invisible carrier of heat was released per unit time, and under what conditions.

Using a tank of water to absorb the caloric from the boring operation, he found that he could bring 18 pounds of water to a boil in less than three hours. He then substituted a really dull bit, and found that he could bring the water to a boil, keep replenishing the water lost to steam, and never run out of ‘caloric’. As long as the boring went on, the water boiled. He reasoned that if ‘caloric’ was a physical substance, even an invisible one, it had to have a certain volume. No body of finite mass, in this case the cannon barrel, could hold an infinite amount of caloric, so the theory must be false. He felt that heat had to have something to do with motion. Count Rumford is a fascinating character, and well worth learning more about; he also invented the drip coffee maker, the double boiler, and the modern fireplace, and he established the Standard Candle as a unit of illumination. Rumford went on to found the Royal Philosophical Society, and late in life he married the widow of the executed French scientist Lavoisier.

The year after Rumford’s cannon test a British scientist named Humphrey Davy devised an experiment whereby two pieces of ice were rubbed together by a mechanical linkage in an environment kept below freezing. With both pieces of Ice and the container kept at the same temperature, no caloric should be able to flow, yet some of the ice melted. He concluded, like Rumford, that heat was related to motion.

Many scientists and experimentalists worked on the problem of heat. Galileo invented a thermometer. The Englishman Joseph Black examined the relationship between heat and temperature, and showed that the amount of heat necessary to raise a unit of a substance by one degree was different for different substances. Joseph Joule spent 35 years carefully measuring heat and temperature, and proved that mechanical work (like rubbing surfaces together or stirring fluids) always produced the same amount of heat per unit work, no matter what form the mechanical work took. He called it the ‘mechanical equivalent of heat’ and had realized by 1847 that it must be a form of energy. Heinrich von Helmholtz formalized a proposition that had been suspected since Isaac Newton’s time, that energy could be converted from one form into another, but neither created nor destroyed.

The caloric theory was finally killed off when the investigation of heat turned to gases. Scientists like Pascal, Boyle, and Avogadro had studied air; Lavoisier and others had proved that air was made up of at least two gases, and John Dalton had built on their work to theorize that all matter, including gases, was composed of discrete particles. By 1860, James Clerk Maxwell of England, and Ludwig Boltzmann of Austria had collaborated on the mathematics of an equation that proved that the temperature of a gas was directly proportional to the square of the average speed of the particles of which it was composed. By this time it had been established that these particles were atoms, either singly or in combinations as molecules. Thus it was proved that heat was nothing more than the motion of the particles of which a substance was made. When fire heated the cauldron of Heron’s steam toy, it increased the vibrations of the molecules of the metal. These molecules bumped into the water molecules in the cauldron and accelerated them too. Finally, some of the water molecules gained so much speed that they ‘escaped’ from the surface of the water, and were forced out thru the axles, the sphere, and the jets, thus producing motion by reaction.

The science of the study of heat, especially its movement, is called thermodynamics. The father of that science is generally acknowledged to have been a French physicist and artilleryman named Nicholas Leonard Sadi Carnot. His life was short (he died aged 35 in 1832 from cholera) but his contribution to science was enormous. It might have been even more momentous, and the world might have had the internal combustion engine sooner than it did, if the majority of his papers had not been burned when he died, out of fear of contagion. What we have was written in 1819, and published 6 years later. In that pamphlet he speculated:

We have long sought to ascertain whether there are in existence agents preferable to the vapor of water for developing the motive power of heat; whether atmospheric air, for example, would not be preferable. We propose to submit these questions to a deliberate examination.

He also wrote that:

Vapors can only be formed thru the intervention of a boiler, while atmospheric air could be heated directly by combustion carried on within its own mass.

What the above quote illustrates is that Carnot was on the track of defining the operation of an internal combustion engine as expanding air by burning fuel within its volume, and using that expansion to power the engine. And that is how all modern internal combustion engines work, from your old lawnmower to the jet engines that push planes thru the skies over our heads.

So we know now that the early technologists misunderstood the nature of heat, but that it didn’t stop them from exploiting its properties to propel the industries of the era. John F. Sandfort, author of Heat Engines, best expresses the astonishment we all should feel at the situation. He said;

"It seems almost incomprehensible to us now that scientific knowledge could advance thru Galileo, Descartes, and Sir Isaac Newton without a clear understanding of the principle of conservation of energy, and that until the middle of the nineteenth century most of the world’s respected physicists should still be convinced that heat was a material substance that somehow could be squeezed in and out of matter."

By the middle of the sixteenth century learned men had begun to investigate the properties of heat and air and steam. Many of them suspected that there was something there which might serve to alleviate Man’s dependence on muscle, water, and wind. Heron’s toy had pointed the way, but the practical innovators of the future required an incentive to pursue the goal of power from heat; their brainchildren had to be needed.

A Need Arises

Need is what drives humans to action; the search for food, shelter, and warmth are basic physical motivations, and the needs of the intellect and emotions (what we usually call desires) are just as strong. For some the motivation is curiosity, for others it is greed, or quest for fame, or devotion to an ideal. The first heat engines were created to fill a need for an effective power source that could run day and night, and cost less in time and money and space than the muscle power of horses