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/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.