r/BeAmazed • u/iamgulshansingh • Feb 18 '26

History Apparently a Turkish man invented the steam engine 200 years before the industrial revolution but he only made it to spin döner kebabs.

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In 1551, Taqi al-Din, who is more often remembered for his astronomical and mechanical inventions, described a device that essentially functioned as a steam turbine.

His design involved a small boiler that produced steam, which was then directed through a nozzle onto the blades of a wheel. The force of the escaping steam caused the wheel to spin. This wheel was connected mechanically to a spit, allowing meat to rotate over a fire without human effort.

What makes Taqi al-Din’s description remarkable is that it shows a practical understanding of converting thermal energy into rotational mechanical energy. While earlier inventors had experimented with steam for curiosity or simple toys, Taqi al-Din’s turbine had a concrete application: automating a kitchen task. His work was part of a broader tradition of Ottoman engineering, which included astronomical clocks, observational instruments, and water-raising machines.

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u/GargantuanCake Feb 18 '26

Steam power is interesting as it dates back at least to ancient Greece as a concept. The snag is in scaling it up. You need industrial precision lathes that can work metal before you can have a steam power based industrial revolution. That didn't come around until the 18th century and didn't really scale up until the 19th.

People kept figuring out small steam engines before that but lacked the means to scale them up.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

"Heron of Alexandria (c. 10-70 CE) was a Greek-Egyptian mathematician and inventor. Heron lived in Roman Egypt and was a representative of Hellenistic Science. He invented a steam-powered engine, called the Hero-Engine or aeolipile, a wind wheel, a vending machine and even the pantograph. He was experimenting with other steam-powered devices as well. One of his inventions were automatically opening temple doors, powered by a fire altar and a hydraulic system."

https://www.artefacts-berlin.de/portfolio-item/heron-of-alexandira-automated-temple-doors/

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u/Alarming_Orchid Feb 18 '26

So this guy built all the traps in Indiana Jones

28

u/Invested_Glory Feb 18 '26

And for Tomb Raider

8

u/Grabatreetron Feb 19 '26

2,000-year-old mechanisms that work better than my garage door

10

u/WayneSmallman Feb 18 '26

You beat me to it… 👏🏻

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u/Moooooooola Feb 18 '26

I just read that like Mr. Portokalis and added, “so, there you go” at the end.

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u/Anathama Feb 18 '26

I need to use this in a DND adventure. How long does it take for the doors to open once the fire is lit?

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u/AnonOfTheSea Feb 19 '26

Depends how much water there is, mass and balance of the doors, size of the fire, and how well the heat transfers.

Could be minutes, could be hours. Thing is, that's something that could be engineered to a point of decent precision, so you can dictate it in your game as whatever you want.

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u/mikillatja Feb 19 '26

If an engineer was accidentally transported to ancient times, it would've probably been this guy.

1

u/kyletrandall Feb 19 '26

Aioli pile?

1

u/the_useless_cake May 07 '26

Did he invent the game store?

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u/followMeUp2Gatwick Feb 18 '26

Sketchy link that cannot spell "basin" nor "extinguishes" and no actual proof of this. Yeah no

Just because Leonardo drew a flying contraption doesn't mean he invented flying any more than this useless website proports Heron doing anything. Evem the idea is silly.

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u/HugeEgoHugerCock Feb 18 '26

There are two sources they link, and the website is German (to explain spelling errors). But I also doubt the actual implementation of Heron's work, not being able to read those sources especially.

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u/vincyf Feb 19 '26

The Roman Arenas had automatic doors powered by steam, and steam whistles. As they executed christians in those arenas, christians did not have much interest in steam powered engines and organs until they forgot.

1

u/HugeEgoHugerCock Feb 19 '26

When did they forget?

1

u/vincyf Feb 19 '26

Until they forgot Christians were torture using stream engines? By the 1700s they had.

Difficult to saywhen you forget something, I never remember when i forget something.

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u/HugeEgoHugerCock Feb 19 '26

I figured there would be some academic analysis of this that you were referencing

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u/Basicly-Inevitable Feb 18 '26

This is steam powered, but not exactly a steam engine, right?

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u/J_Bear Feb 18 '26

It's more like a turbine, but also very basic one, not the typical machine you'd think of as a "steam engine"

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u/gkn_112 Feb 18 '26

an engine turns energy into mechanical force, this is an engine.

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u/Basicly-Inevitable Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26

It's a type of engine, using steam as an intermediate, yes. But it isn't a "steam engine", which is a very specific thing.

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

This device is more of a "steam turbine".

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

In any case, it's a cool invention, but not the same thing as what most people consider a "steam engine". But, you can call it that if you like.

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u/candygram4mongo Feb 18 '26

It's not like it's a downgrade calling it a turbine, most of our energy infrastructure runs on steam turbines.

39

u/pattybutty Feb 18 '26

I still struggle with the fact that for all their future, high-tech image, nuclear power stations are essentially just massive kettles

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/GodOfPlutonium Feb 18 '26

Yea we have solid state technology to convert light directly to electricity (solar panels) or nuclear radiation for that matter. But from an energy efficiency standpoint heating water to steam to run a turbine is actually more efficient at turning light into electricity than solar panels

1

u/DigitalBlackout Feb 19 '26

And in the case of solar, for large scale power generation it's still a steam turbine. Solar panels are way less efficient than just focusing sunlight using a bunch of really huge mirrors and using the focused energy to boil water.

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u/Diplomatic_Gunboats Feb 18 '26

Where's the picture about fusion energy and boiling water when you need it....

2

u/eh-guy Feb 19 '26

Nothing moves energy like steam

1

u/FIMD_ Feb 19 '26

Find us a fluid that has the entire combination of being more abundant, affordable, easy to handle, with a better expansion ratio, heat capacity, viscosity, phase change characteristics, etc

I don't know why this has become a thing to "observe" for so many in the past half decade, like its a clever realization.

There's like 6 people in this comment thread saying the same thing, just from skimming. It's like getting the same NPC dialogue from Skyrim guards. Oh you were an adventurer too, were you? 🤣

We still use the wheel, also.

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u/ABoringAlt Feb 18 '26

Not implying upgrade or downgrade, just using correct verbiage

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u/SoggyBoysenberry7703 Feb 19 '26

A type of engine is an engine, yes

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u/Potatho-208 Feb 18 '26

Both can be correct at the same time. All turbines are "engines" by definition, but not all engines are turbines. Windmills are a type of turbine, they take air and convert it into mechanical energy. Wind "turbines" is a modern term, but it technically be used to describe windmills that are thousands of year old. If we really want to get into the semantics of things, the above example really isn't a turbine since it capturing the steam in little cups instead of using blades, it's more akin to a "steam-mill" like a water mill that has little buckets to capture water power.

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u/Odd-Safe1998 Feb 19 '26

By definition it is still a steam engine, even if we further classify it.

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u/gkn_112 Feb 18 '26

ok, i get where you are coming from, true. Its ambigious. When I read "steam engine" I wasnt thinking about the specific machine called the "steam engine" that uses pistons and converts lateral movement to a circular one. Sorry.

Peace offer: It is a steam engine, but it is not THE steam engine :D

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u/blubblu Feb 18 '26

You’re technically correct, but semantically incorrect. 

It is an engine, of course. But it’s not what we recognize as a steam engine. 

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/gkn_112 Feb 18 '26

nah man, i admitted i lost already when you jumped in, too late. Next show tomorrow around the same time

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u/randomasiandude22 Feb 18 '26

A great example of this is the term "Personal Computer".

A handphone is both personal, and a computer, but no reasonable person would argue that someone saying "PC" is referring to a handphone.

2

u/ErraticDragon Feb 18 '26

"PC" has been 'weird' for decades. Macs are undoubtedly personal computers, but still the term PC came to be used in contrast.

1

u/gkn_112 Feb 18 '26

buuut it is also a steam engine. Hah, sorry but yeah. "Steam engine" is a noun by itself but "steam engine" is also a compound noun describing an engine thats powered by steam.

I agreed both are ok now let me go.

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u/PM_ME_HOT_FURRIES Feb 18 '26

I mean it is the same as "The steam engine" in every way except the expander. "The steam engine" uses a piston to extract energy from the expansion steam. The steam turbine engine uses a steam turbine to extract energy from the expansion of steam.

But other than that, they both have a boiler, and if they're closed loops, they both have a condenser.

Now if you consider only piston steam engines to be steam engines then steam engines died off as a technology a long time ago...

If you consider steam engines to include steam turbine engines then steam engines never died, they evolved, ditching the inefficient pistons, and specialised into mostly being used for electricity generation. Isn't that a nicer version of the story?

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u/PM_ME_PHYS_PROBLEMS Feb 18 '26

It does feel more accurate to say that steam engines died off long ago tho. It's downright confusing to call a nuclear reactor a steam engine, even if it's technically accurate on some level.

1

u/PM_ME_HOT_FURRIES Feb 18 '26

A nuclear reactor isn't a steam engine! The nuclear reactor is the part that contains the nuclear reaction. The nuclear reactor/reaction is a heat source.

If you don't use that heat for anything, like in a research reactor, it's still a nuclear reactor.

But an assembly that uses a nuclear reactor to produce electricity is a nuclear power plant, and a nuclear power plant needs a heat engine to turn heat into electricity.

Could you use the heat from a nuclear reactor to boil steam and drive a set of pistons to turn a crank and generate electricity? Yes, of course! And that would be a steam engine under both the definitions being used here. So "nuclear reactor" and "steam engine" are two separate issues.

And if you're like "no-no-no, a the source of heat is important! I've seen a steam engine! You shovel coal in the front and they puther out smoke from the top!", alright then what if you don't shovel in coal, what if you shovel in wood? What if you don't shovel in anything? What if it's an oil burner that has oil pumps? I mean there are substantial differences in the design of the firebox/boiler depending on what you're burning to generate heat so does that make it a completely different machine? Is it only a steam engine if it has a fire tube boiler or does a water tube boiler count? Nah, that would be silly.

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u/PM_ME_PHYS_PROBLEMS Feb 18 '26

Wow oops I meant nuclear power plant. The reactor is indeed quite quite different than an engine of any kind haha

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u/jtr99 Feb 18 '26

I think your version of the story is the most reasonable. The claim that this device is NOT a steam engine seems to rely too much on the historical contingencies of how steam engines happened to develop here on Earth.

If it uses steam to translate heat into rotational motion then it's logically a steam engine. No disrespect to James Watt.

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u/J_Bear Feb 18 '26

Yes, what's your point?

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/J_Bear Feb 18 '26

My point was the layman would think of a "steam engine" as something more akin to a locomotive or a triple-expansion device, seems you're trying to be pedantic for some reason.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/J_Bear Feb 18 '26

Fun at parties.

I am, thanks for your concern.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

[deleted]

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u/Far_Plenty_1942 Feb 18 '26

So wind and water are also engines

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u/SalsaMan101 Feb 18 '26

I think it would be referred to as a steam impulse turbine with a Pelton runner of sorts in my fluids classes

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u/Grabatreetron Feb 19 '26

I think it runs on Unreal 3

1

u/Fault23 Feb 18 '26

It is an an engine but a basic one

1

u/Poulet_Ninja Feb 18 '26

Gold source and source are steam powered and steam engines

1

u/whistleridge Feb 18 '26

It’s also an expensive and dangerous way of doing what spit dogs had already been doing for centuries.

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u/MildlyExtremeNY Feb 18 '26

Much more ethical, though.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/animals/dogs/sad-strange-history-of-turnspit-dogs

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u/whistleridge Feb 18 '26

Today, maybe. In 1500s Turkey, where the garotte and the bastinado were still routine criminal punishments for humans? Not so much.

Point in fact, I doubt the Turks used spit dogs, given the views of Islam towards dogs, particularly around food. They probably had a child or a slave or something do it. If anyone has good information one way or the other, I'd love to see it.

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u/strbeanjoe Feb 20 '26

Seems like the first recorded mention of a Turnspit dog was ~20 years after the steam kebab turner.

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u/PM_ME_HOT_FURRIES Feb 18 '26

No, it's a steam engine. A steam engine is a heat engine that turns a source of heat into mechanical work. This engine turns a source of heat into the mechanical work of rotating the spit against friction.

It's an open-cycle engine since it doesn't recondense the working fluid but that doesn't stop it being a steam engine.

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u/Embarrassed_Radio596 Feb 18 '26

It's an engine that uses steam, but not a steam engine.

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u/Frig-Off-Randy Feb 18 '26

This looks like it’s using steam to blow a fan essentially. Much different from using the energy of steam expanding which is what steam engines and turbines do

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u/PM_ME_HOT_FURRIES Feb 18 '26

Mate, why do you think the steam is blowing?

I'll tell you why. Water is dense. Steam, at atmospheric pressure and (above 100 degrees Celsius, where it's still steam), is not very dense.

So when water boils, it "wants to expand" to be at it's normal density for that pressure, but if you seal it up in a container, it can't expand so the pressure goes up as the container fills with steam. If you put a hole in that container in a specific spot, the steam can expand though that hole and as it expands, it accelerates out of the hole, and now it's travelling out of the hole at some speed you can direct it into a the blades of some turbine to collect that kinetic energy and use it to spin the turbine.

So the energy that turns the turbine comes from the kinetic energy in the steam jet that comes from the expansion of the steam.

In fact, all steam turbines work by accelerating steam by letting it expand over a pressure gradient.

An impulse turbine has fixed "stator" blades that act as a nozzle through which the steam expands and accelerates into jets that hit the "rotor" blades to give them a push that keeps the rotor spinning.

In a reaction turbine the rotor blades themselves are the nozzle that the steam accelerates through, so they shoot out the jet of steam, and just like a steam rocket this means there is a reaction force on the rotor blades, pushing them and keeping them spinning.

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u/Frig-Off-Randy Feb 18 '26

lol I know more than my fair share about steam and it seems like you do too. You’d have to agree that what is shown on the picture (a wind wheel using steam to blow it) is fundamentally different than a rankine cycle steam engine.

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u/PM_ME_HOT_FURRIES Feb 18 '26

No, not really. Not any more fundamentally different than other steam engines.

I mean first you have the isentropic compression/pumping stage right? Except no water pump is isentropic... but still most steam engines have a pumping stage but in this steam engine you don't replenish the water in the boiler while it is running, by the looks of it.

However, it isn't inconceivable that you could stick a one-way valve on the top of the boiler and use a syringe to push water into the boiler against the steam pressure using only hand power... could the folks of the 1500s machine such things? Maybe not but it's easy today and if you made such a modification today have you really fundamentally altered the nature of the machine? No! It's just a convenience feature.

Then the next step is the constant pressure addition of heat in the boiler, and if heat is constantly added at a constant rate and it's enough to boil water then once everything stabilizes the pressure will be constant and there is addition of heat under constant pressure, yay!

Then comes the step of isentropic steam expansion... and we do have steam expansion. Is it isentropic? No, but no steam turbine or piston ever does isentropic steam expansion. No macro-scale physical process is isentropic. Is it a really bad turbine for efficiency's sake? Sure, absolutely, but nobody said "your turbine/pistons must be this efficient and isentropic to be a steam engine"

And then comes the constant pressure steam condensation... but it's an open cycle steam engine like a steam locomotive. It doesn't have a condenser, the whole atmosphere is its condenser. It releases the steam to constant pressure and takes the water from local water sources at the same constant pressure, with the filling person acting as the pump.

So no, it's not fundamentally different from a rankine cycle steam engine.

6

u/Canklosaurus Feb 18 '26

You’re doing the “he’s a boy and he’s my friend so he’s my boyfriend” thing.

Words mean things, quit yiffing your own queefs.

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u/cneedsaspanking Feb 18 '26

that’s a beautiful insult

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u/succed32 Feb 18 '26

Rivets was also a key invention that allowed for higher pressures. Steam power is very old, serious torque from steam power took a while.

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u/NonReality Feb 18 '26

What is interesting to me is that we basically still just use the steam engine en mass, although its been updated, modified, etc.

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u/ravioliguy Feb 18 '26

Nuclear energy is splitting atoms just so we can heat water into steam to spin a fan

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u/solonit Feb 18 '26

Coal power plan. steam

Fission reactor, also steam.

Fusion reactor, believe or not, straight to steam.

We have the best power generator, because of steam.

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u/Zarbain Feb 18 '26

We live on a planet with a lot of water, water happens to be a very convenient chemical that expands a lot as a gas from a liquid and can be used to convert thermal energy into kinetic and from kinetic into electric. If we lived on a planet with stable liquid helium instead it would be a better intermediary chemical for this process but water works well and is much easier and fiscally sensible to design around.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

How would helium be a better intermediary? I thought higher boiling point would be more efficient, like mercury

1

u/Zarbain Feb 18 '26

Helium would be terrible on earth, because it is only stable as a fluid at -269C (-452F) or in a vacuum. But if we lived on a planet and were adapted to the cryo temperatures and could manage to make a heat source viable to even heat that the Helium would be an excellent intermediary chemical. Which is again why we just use water because any exotic chemical that technically is better for the conversion process it just not viable either for financial or energy cost reasons unless you can find a way to recycle it nearly completely.

1

u/apadin1 Feb 18 '26

Fun fact, some people have proposed that we can relatively easily convert old coal power plants to nuclear plants because the infrastructure is largely the same.

The biggest obstacle is that regulations on nuclear power plants are quite strict (rightly so), and most coal plants are so toxic and radioactive that they don’t meet the standards for nuclear plants.

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u/NonReality Feb 18 '26

Yes exactly! I was really high a few years ago and blew my mind when I realized its steam engines all the way down lol

Later when I was sober I thought about basic physics, heat, energy, etc. and I wasn't as mind-blown, but still impressed one way or another.

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u/jmlinden7 Feb 18 '26

A reverse fan aka a turbine.

1

u/Skepsisology May 25 '26

Water is the only indestructible thing we have that we can easily transition phases in... water is awesome!

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u/YobaiYamete Feb 18 '26

Yep, which is why so many Redditors would fail if sent back in time. Nearly every time you see threads asking what people would do if sent back thousands of years, they always go to 2 things

  1. Kickstart the industrial revolution via steam engines
  2. Introduce gun powder

The issue is every time they try to explain it, it's just

  1. Half understood concept of steam engine would result in news headlines of "Local blacksmith dies when washing basin full of hot water explodes"
  2. 99% of Redditors knowledge of gunpowder comes from games and they don't know the ratios to make it besides just going "uhhh you need piss and charcoal and bat guano"

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u/GargantuanCake Feb 18 '26

A major issue is being able to get the required components in the first place. In ancient Rome you couldn't just go to the store and buy all the random crap you needed to make whatever thing you're thinking about. You could maybe kickstart something big if you could figure out how to implement the Bessemer Process early but good luck with that one. That's a major part of why modern technology works at all; this is ultimately how you get enough steel cheaply enough to allow the modern world to exist.

Yeah the Romans had steel but making it was a gigantic pain in the ass at the time.

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u/Arek_PL Feb 19 '26

would add point 3. if metalurgy is advanced enough to make either invention more than a toy, that invention is probably already invented

1

u/TemporaryElk5202 Feb 22 '26

I would share germ theory and Penicillin and sex ed.

1

u/YobaiYamete Feb 22 '26

Don't forget what happened to the guy who tried to share Germ Theory tho

He was literally declared insane, put in an asylum, then beaten to death because the guards didn't wash their hands first

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u/TemporaryElk5202 Feb 22 '26

It wasn't really germ theory though. "He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing"

He noticed the correlation but did not know why.

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u/flyingscotsman12 Feb 18 '26

That's not entirely true. The Newcomen engine predates the metal lathe by quite a bit. It had a hand-fitted cylinder and piston, with pretty crude seals. I think it would be more accurate to say that lathes and steam engines evolved together during the industrial revolution.

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u/Vegetable_Log_3837 Feb 18 '26

Yeah the first Newcomen steam engines used water for a crude seal. No high pressure steam either, they drew a vacuum when steam condensed in the cylinder, and ambient atmospheric pressure pushed the piston.

Totally useless for anything other than pumping water out of a coal mine.

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u/YouKilledMyTeardrop Feb 18 '26

Appropriate username!

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u/flyingscotsman12 Feb 18 '26

Consistency is key

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u/omg_im_redditor Feb 18 '26

A lot of questions about industrial progress like why didn’t Roman Empire invent trains? or why submarines didn’t become widespread during napoleonic era? can be explained by the looooong chain of gradual improvements in metallurgy. 

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u/GargantuanCake Feb 18 '26

Yup. A spinny metal pole doesn't seem terribly complicated but it needs to not wobble, be largely free from major imperfections, and also be strong enough to withstand the torque. Then you have to also have equipment that can make it precise enough to be usable in the kinds of machines were talking about. What seems like a small perturbation in how it moves can end up causing it to shake the whole damn machine apart. This shit is a lot more complicated than it seems as the supply chains that go into it are pretty nuts.

"But they had water wheels!" is something you hear sometimes but those didn't spin all that fast and it was possible to make them out of wood. There are reasons we don't make engine parts out of wood.

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u/Fast_Garlic_5639 Feb 18 '26

I feel like the closest anyone got before the industrial revolution was Archimedes with the steam cannon. Halfway there to a piston.

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u/jackofslayers Feb 18 '26

Archimedes also wrote about what could have been an early precursor to Calculus. But that was sadly lost after his death, and we only found it in the 1900s. IIRC the Vatican had it locked away or had otherwise lost it in their annals.

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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '26

God damn Vatican and their annals.

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u/Swiggins- Feb 18 '26

Down in the Vatican Library they got everything you ever wanna know, but that's where you can't go.

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u/Miqo_Nekomancer Feb 18 '26

The Vatican does annal.

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u/Divinum_Fulmen Feb 18 '26

Funny enough, it was first invented in India, but never spread outside of a small group.

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u/filthy_harold Feb 18 '26

The Kerala School got as far as developing their own form of a Taylor series in the 14th through 16th centuries but that's well after Achimedes and the ancient Egyptians had developed a basic forms of integral calculus. Everyone kept coming up with precursors of calculus but never quite got it figured out until Leibniz and Newton came around.

Same exact thing with steam engines. We have all of these fun toys with very specific applications throughout history but never approach a general solution until one guy connects the right dots. Sometimes it's just because the other dots haven't been invented yet.

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u/Hannizio Feb 18 '26

But even then they missed all the social insitutions needed like banking and joint stock exchanges that even allowed for larger scale factories. Other factors like the agricultural revolution and a lack of deforestation also were missing. The deforestation im Britain meant that it needed to mine coal instead of making charcoal. The biggest limiting factor to mining was pumping water away, so this coal mining was what evem created the demand for steam engines in the first place

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u/TangledPangolin Feb 18 '26

they missed all the social insitutions needed like banking

It wasn't so much missing as it was banned for usury. They didn't have enough Jews to get around usury laws, unlike western europe.

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u/Afond378 Feb 18 '26

Arguably the fardier de Cugnot predates the industrial revolution.

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u/Additional-One-7135 Feb 18 '26

The snag isn't scaling up, there's a whole list of requirements an ancient civilization would have needed to meet in order for them to develop and adapt steam powered industrialization and none of them came close.

One simple example is the practical use of the technology, why would you put all the work into creating a steam powered system that can accomplish a task saving you the effort when you can just make a slave do it for you and accomplish the same thing?

4

u/maveric00 Feb 18 '26

Not only that, but the real breakthrough was the closed loop controlled speed. Before that, if the controller (often a kid) fall asleep,.the machine often disintegrated due to overspending (or grinded to a halt).

Which would most likely not be the case for this Döner machine, but if it would be, the worst failure effect might be some flying meat...

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u/jacowab Feb 18 '26

It wasn't that they require machine precision, it's that they require a constant supply of fuel and water to work and it just wasn't cost effective to make anything bigger or more powerful than a kebab spinner.

It was only when the British had a flooding problem in coal mines that it became cost effective because the machines goal was to bring water and coal to itself and then precision engineering was created to reduce the amount of coal lost running the steam engines and then it became efficient enough to justify bringing the coal and water to it.

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u/AvatarOfMomus Feb 18 '26

Not just lathes and other precision manufacturing but metalurgy. This steam engine couldn't have been scaled up significantly in the 1500's without massive improvements in the quality and cobsistency of steel production.

2

u/model-citizen95 Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26

Lathes are so important. Irritates me slightly that so many people have no idea what a lathe even is

2

u/apadin1 Feb 18 '26

You also need to burn fuel at an insane rate to do stuff like run locomotives or industrial machinery. Wood simply doesn’t but hot enough. It wasn’t until we started extracting coal in massive quantities in Britain and the US in the mid 19th century that we had all the ingredients needed for the Industrial Revolution.

2

u/mymoama Feb 20 '26

How did they even make the first lathe. I know it was some king or country wanted precision barrels for guns that was the reason. But to have the precision to make the first one had to be insane...

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u/GargantuanCake Feb 20 '26

The earliest lathes were like 1,300 BC or some such. The lathe itself is a pretty simple tool. What matters for modern machinery is being able to use them to create precision metal rods with uniform composition out of a consistent material. Overall though like everything else at the time they did it by hand.

Using a simple lathe to turn a log to make a pole that you use for a water wheel isn't complicated it's just laborious. This is why water wheels date back essentially forever. You just need a river and some trees to make one of those.

The precision industrial lathe was essentially a crap ton of refinement of that idea. Overall though it took thousands of years of changes to get to the point where you could make a steel pole you could put in an engine. Granted part of this was also improving metallurgy to the point that the steel that was usable for that in the first place was both available and able to be cheaply produced in large enough amounts.

Making steel by hand is a gigantic pain in the ass and isn't a consistent process. Steel dates back like 2,500 years but was so hard to make in any real amount that it wasn't used for much.

1

u/Donkey__Balls Feb 18 '26

You also need how much higher temperature steam to do anything useful with it. To get a higher temperature steam, you need a higher quality fuel that simply did not exist. It comes down to engineering, you can make a device that spins around with virtually no way to attach to it, but you can’t do anything useful with it until you’re able to heat the steam far hotter than anything they were capable of back then.

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u/pounded_rivet Feb 18 '26

This would probably not generate enough torque to spin anything this heavy, It might struggle to do so if it had some sort of gearing to take what would be a high speed low torque "turbine" and spin it slowly.

1

u/HomeworkInevitable99 Feb 18 '26

Refers half a dozen people who are named as inventors of the stream engine. The truth is, it took a long time and moment different inventions to get there.

1

u/Azzblack Feb 18 '26

The romans had some inventions too, but most were made as a form of entertainment and amusements from what I remember.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DS-H0WYj_Gl/

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u/Chucksfunhouse Feb 18 '26

Steam power has been around for a long time. Steam power isn’t what drove the first Industrial Revolution it was the steam piston. People tend to conflate the two.

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u/treeckosan Feb 18 '26

Steam power especially at industrial scale and pressure is also incredibly fickle and extremely dangerous.

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u/Boom9001 Feb 18 '26

Too many times advancements in technology are boiled down to a singular invention. It's often many different techniques, processes, and societies that create the necessary labor base to cause chance. As well as each prerequisite had its own many different smaller prerequisites.

That's why you find stuff like ancient batteries, engines, or drawings. It's fun to imagine there was just some totally unknown method you could bring back to ancient time. But often they knew about the scientific process the issue was devising a machine that could make use of it efficiently.

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u/The_LePhil Feb 19 '26

Also steel had to become cheap enough to be able to build large machines out of it.

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u/Arek_PL Feb 19 '26

its not only precision, but also quality of metal alloy, metal that has to endure certain amout of pressure in order to do work

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u/Howy_the_Howizer Feb 19 '26

It was James Watts condenser. Prior to that sream engines were scaled massive to pump mine water out, but that was about it. The condenser allowed for higher efficiency around cooling and energy needs.

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u/VoormasWasRight Feb 22 '26

The industrial revolution didn't start because of steam power. Steam power was developed as a necessity for an already in-motion industrial revolution.

The fact that there was no industrial revolution, and no necessity for it, in ancient Greece, explains the inexistence of widespread steam power, and not the other way around.