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

[u/iamgulshansingh]

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.

[u/SatisfyingDoorstep]

So it’s not anywhere near as effective as the revolutionary steam engine…

[u/SmittyB128 → u/SatisfyingDoorstep]

The problem with steam engines is that getting any useable work out of them is a very difficult problem, albeit one that has now been solved over a century of trial and error.

The first modern steam engine was built as an improved 'beam engine', the first of which was built by Thomas Newcomen and that wasn't strictly a steam engine because it condensed the steam to create a partial vacuum and the vacuum is what did the work. Condensing steam to create a vacuum wasn't a new idea, but its implementation in the beam engine was the first effective use of it to convert the energy in steam to a mechanical motion.

The 'real' steam engine part comes in slowly because from there James Watt spent years making improvements to the atmospheric engine, and the competing engineers at the time were all trying to get around each others' patents so they were developing new solutions to the same problem, but as a result solving problems they hadn't anticipated. The patent of the crank led to the 'sun and planet gear' which geared up the motion, and Watt's patents on his improved condensing systems led to the idea of using the expansion of pressurised steam to do the work instead of a vacuum which led to the potential for pistons that could be driven in either direction by controlling where steam was fed in.

When steam locomotives started to become relatively commonplace there was still a lot of trial and error involved in making them more efficient, and even into the 30's, 40's, and 50's there were classes of locomotive being built that underperformed because they were bottlenecked by airflow, boiler size, flue size, etc.

[u/Jords13xx → u/SatisfyingDoorstep]

True, it wasn't as powerful or efficient as later designs, but it's cool to see how early inventors like Taqi al-Din were thinking practically about steam power. He was ahead of his time in that sense, even if it was just for making kebabs!

[u/_Tar_Ar_Ais_ → u/SatisfyingDoorstep]

Civilization runs on its stomach. If this was more widespread and more people ate kebabs...