Greetings. I really appreciate your video(s). I would love to see a Wednesday special on the (rarely mentioned) tug- and towboats in WW2 and the brave men (and sometimes women) who crewed them. For example how Captain Jan Kalkman prevented a pontoon from ramming a munition ship on D-day or how the “de Schelde” saved a drydock, on tow to Iceland, that had become adrift in a (particularly harsh) storm. Let them Dutch have a crack at it, see what happens! I hope to hear your thoughts on the matter and thank you in advance for your consideration. Muddy, from the Netherlands.
English Twin brothers, colonists in India and Burma and invested in mines, smelting, farming, construction... had become rediculously rich notice gathering clouds of war and by 1935 have built 4 1200x200 foot drydocks and you have been selected to design four battleships to be named HMIS Shiva, HMS Demolisher, HMS Obliterator, and HMS Annihilator and have been specifically instructed cost is not an objection and to ignore treaty limits in your design what do the ship look like?
As an ex-Navy Boiler Tech who served on an old Gearing Class Destroyer, D.D. 890, I still have nightmares about having to crawl inside the firebox of a Babcock and Wilcox 600 P.S.I. M-Type separate super-heater marine boiler to "Do Firesides" and clean the tubes!
I crawled inside a steam locomotives firebox (firetube boiler) once when they were replacing some firebox grates. While the inside is surprisingly roomy, the door is tiny as hell and you can barely get it and out.
Many thanks for the interesting collaboration with Drachinifel. Steam cars are a highly relevant subject people should learn about. It is curious how quickly these old cars got forgotten. Instead of ignoring all that history, the large-scale push of modern electric vehicles into the car market practically begs for a good look at earlier propulsion options, the variety of which may appear to be bewildering at first glance. Keep up the good work!
OUTSTANDING RESEARCH GUYS. THANK YOU. I DIDN'T KNOW THAT PEUGEOT WAS MAKING CAR'S BEFORE BENZ AND DAIMLER. LOVED PEUGEOT CAR'S SINCE COLUMBO HAD THE PRETTY LITTLE CONVERTIBLE. LOVE2ALL FROM LLANELLI WALES
I live in the south of the US eastern mountain range. Occasionally I will see a century old tractor in a field to this day. Usually its not worth firing up but if you need to pull a stump or move something heavy a modern machine sure as hell cant do it without a significant chain tack whereas the old one you just loop a chain around the stump, hook it to the back and away they go.
A friend of mine served on the Newport News and was part of the USS Salem museum. They had a damage control chart outlining what speeds varous mixes of boilers and screw states could provide. The massive jump in power output to get those last knots is tops speed was impressive. That is why cruising ranges are figured for speeds well below the ship's maximum speed. Under nuclear power modern carriers can mostly forget the old ways. I read that under emergency conditions some carriers can make well over 40 knots. But then they are using enough power for a small city.
This video struck a note with me drach. You, amongst other youtubers, have inspired me as well. I too am planning on starting a UA-cam channel. I’ve been a railroader for 10 years now, and have decided I want to share my profession and interest with those who are interested. It would cover all aspects of railroading, including the history behind it. Who knows, maybe we can do a collaboration like this one day if my channel takes off.
I was an engineer in the U.S. Navy from 1998-2004. The Kitty Hawk was my first ship, and as awe inspiring and POWERFUL those 8 Foster Wheeler boilers were it did make engineering life suck a bit. Our liberty was secured normally 24 hours prior to departure. At that point the boilers were brought online checks were done and made sure we had the required pressure. Then we'd notice our "brothers" on our gas turbine powered escorts show up in the morning "light off" 30 minutes prior to departure and be ready to go. Saying we were a bit envious is an understatement, that is until we were underway and all that power we could generate. I was an HT Hull Maintenance Technician, a "Fresh air snipe" as opposed to being a "Hole snipe". It's amazing what 1200psi can do to piping much of which was pretty exotic, nothing stands up to the brute force of 1200psi for long. The few drag races we would do with the Nimitz classes was fun. 1200psi vs a fairly whimpy 600psi meant we walked them hard. Not being happy they got beat and beat hard would challenge us to another race. "Okay how about one lap around the world? No unreps, flank all the way??" Sore losers lol. As envious as we were of our fellow engineers on the missile sponges when Guam was our final port before we went back to Yokosuka it was always a mad dash for home. We took our time getting underway but once we were clear it was max speed all the way. Within 1 or 2 hours we would pass our Perry class FFG, a few hours later we'd pass our Ticonderoga and a few hours after that we'd pass by the Arliegh Burkes the rooster tails they could kick up pre stern flap was very impressive. It would mostly always end up with us moored up 24 hours ahead of the rest of them. One last bit and since Task Force sword doesn't seem to be fully declassified but it is known the platform was the Kitty Hawk. From Yokosuka to the operation area we averaged 30+ knots only slowing to 25 knots to take on fuel. A high speed run through the Straits of Malacca at night was VERY interesting. Normally civilian ships would get as close to us as possible and it was one of the few areas we did not enforce the 300 yard rule. They all knew the pirates would leave them alone so during that high speed run it confused A LOT of ships.
@@zaneandre6387 Its not quite true. The first thing we would recognize as a car used an internal combustion engine. But most of the development of automobiles was around electric and steam until after WW I. The development of aircraft rapidly accelerated the development of combustion engines, while electric and steam engines slowed down their pace of improvement. Steam and electric cars were better than combustion engine ones for longer than most people realize.
@@lobsterbark To clear this argument- The first true steam car (A personal vehicle that could be operated by a single person) was built by De Dion Bouton in 1884. The first internal combustion engined steam car was built by Benz in 1885 and the first true electric car was built by Gustave Trouve in 1881.
@@lobsterbark I was being facetious, I was admitted to UCSD out of high school in the mechanical and aerospace engineering program for car and engine design. This is a topic I am very familiar with but thank you for your insight.
Gasoline/petrol was a nuisance byproduct that came off first when crude oil was being distilled into Kerosene ( the improved version of lamp/ stove oil which was in turn) the replacement for whale oil lamps room lighting. The fact gasoline was readily available and had close to zero value starting out was the major attraction for ICE inventors. Gasoline would have remained mostly an abundant fuel for commercial vehicles and hobby cars for the rich, with no mass market possible but for the discovery of massive new oil fields around the world.
yup, they used to just dump the gasoline in the creek and cask up the kerosene. Rockefellers Standard Oil was one of the first major companies the EPA would turn themselves inside out to imprison had they existed at the time. Edit: Standard oil's major marketing gimmick was their kerosene didn't contain gasoline, and was a "Pure" standard. Others who didn't refine out all the gasoline were smeared as dangerous products because your lantern or whatever could explode.
@@Binkophile Hemp oil. Diesel designed the engine to run on hemp oil. The petroleum byproduct happened to work just as well, and hemp oil was more costly at the time. (Hemp oil being used to cure timber for piers and wharfs or pilings, diesel had noted it's capability to be highly compressed without detonating)
It was available at the source but frankly even in 1900 it didnt exist in the UK. To do the great 1900 road trip. See 'Thousand Mile Trial' by Elizabeth Bennett. Gasoline had to be ordered in advance and stocked at prepositioned stores along the route.
Love this topic, as you're basically covering the genesis of what I worked on in my time in the navy. I was an engineering rate on a nuclear sub and nuclear propulsion is arguably the final expression of the steam propulsion plant. Despite the mythical powers that people like to ascribe to nuclear powered ships, basically they are nothing but a regular steam plant that replace coal or fuel oil with nuclear fission to heat the boiler water into steam. Their real advantage over traditional steam plants is endurance, not power output. (of course, nuclear power is outside the period this channel normally covers)
Hello, I am the president of the Steam Automobile Club of America (SACA), a group that has been in existence since 1958. I am also a retired naval reservist, having been a Machinists' Mate on both active and reserve duty, with much of my experience being in the field of steam propulsion and auxiliaries. Undoubtedly, this naval background is the factor that has made me a fan of your channel. My interest in steam automobiles is partly rooted in this practical naval steam background and partly due to my current employment in powertrain development for General Motors. Suffice it to say that I have authored some articles and a couple of books on the subject of steam cars. Being a fan of your channel, and seeing the title of this episode, I promptly stuck in my earbuds and eagerly tuned in. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed. The discussion seemed to be an equal mixture of fact, miscomprehension, and outright misinformation. As a trivial example, real steam car fans know that the creator of the White steam automobiles was Rollin and not Colin White. Serpollet did NOT invent the water tube boiler -- Herreshoff was using them in marine applications well before Serpollet arrived on the scene. By 1824, John Buchanan (a polymath involved in medicine, education, psychology, engineering, and newspaper publishing) had developed his "Capillary Steam Generator" in which water was forced into a heated coil and steam was emitted from the opposite end -- which is PRECISELY what Serpollet did with some flourishes. Buchanan was trying to build a flying machine, and failed, but installed the engine and boiler in a boat and a carriage, the latter of which drove around the streets of Louisville, Kentucky on or about August 18, 1824. This not only precedes Serpollet's boiler, it precedes his birth by a good quarter-century. Come to think of it, this precedes Stephenson's "Rocket" locomotive by a few years. Water-tube boilers were in regular operation on both sides of the Atlantic by the 1850s. We find the famous Herreshoff concern building marine steam generators in the 1870's, and so on. Steam automobiles did not exclusively use water tube steam generators. We have all heard of the Stanley steamer, undoubtedly the most famous steam car of all time. Like most makes of steam cars, it used a fire tube boiler....which was very compact. The tubes were arranged vertically, rather than horizontally. These tubes were, however, very small in diameter and there were a great number of them. This permitted the boiler to have a large heating surface in a small package. While water tube steam generators had advantages, they also had problems -- the worst being that they were very difficult to control. When you only have a small amount of water in your steam generator, it takes only a small unbalance between the amount of water fed into the boiler and the rate at which the burner provides heat. Get these ratios wrong and the unit will either emit hot water or burn itself out. The reason that you weren't supposed to alter the White powerplant wasn't that the entire powerplant was so integrated that "you couldn't improve upon it" White prohibited owners from making changes to the power plant because the flowmotor controlling the delivery of fuel to the burner in response to the flow of feed water into the boiler was tuned for that particular car. The specific White design required the mechanic to physically modify the flowmotor for that particular vehicle, something for which the average owner was incapable. White appears to have swiped the design from Edward C. Newcomb, without paying him patent royalties.. It would have been better if they had simply used Newcomb's flow motor which could be adjusted with wrench and screwdriver. In any case, the control of a fire tube boiler is vastly more simple -- you simply install a valve that adds more water to the boiler when the water level drops below the desired point and a pressure-operated valve that adds more fuel to the fire when the pressure drops below its set point. This works because the greater volume of hot, pressurized water in the boiler acts as a reserve which tides the system over as the control system responds to changes in temperature and pressure. Anyhow, the errors go on. The Lane was not a British steam car, it came from Poughkeepsie, New York. Low-pressure cylinders in compound engines are larger than the high-pressure cylinder simply because the steam is expanded in the high-pressure cylinder and it now occupies more volume as it enters the low-pressure cylinder. Thornycroft manufactured steam-driven lorries. Most steam cars burned kerosene and not gasoline -- steam engines are less efficient than internal combustion engines and were more expensive to run due to the latent heat of vaporization. But, this cost deficit could be overcome by burning kerosene, which was cheaper than gasoline. This fact induced internal combustion engine builders to build kerosene-fueled models. Triple expansion steam cars are quite rare, but we can't say that there were none ... The Doble "Broad Arrow" engine comes to mind. Steam cars were not operating at 1,000 degrees F, the cylinder oil would decompose at that temperature. I'm sorry that I went on this long, and have been so negative. As I said, I am a fan of the channel and had high hopes for this particular discussion.
If I remember correctly, you started to need special steel alloys at around 450psi, and by the time you got anywhere near 1,000psi or 1,2000 psi the alloys got extremely specialized!!! (Hence why the steam powered cars that ran at 750psi had boiler, piping, and cylinder issues!)
I want to say "nerd" and I mean that with the highest degree of respect for nitpicking all the details. Comments and attention to detail like this is why I never watch TV docs anymore
You're right on all points sir. No mention of the speed and advances of the Doble system, not acknowledging the massive delays in the US auto industry caused by the Selden Patent... this guy knows no real history.
This was FAR more fascinating than I thought it would be (based on reading the title). I learned a lot! This was an excellent presentation. My "other interest" is railroad history and modeling and the material has a lot of cross-over. Most US steam locomotives were fire tube boilers. There was a big interest in compound steam locomotives around the early 20th Century. Steam locomotives generally were two-stage affairs, often on the big articulated locomotives with two engine beds under one boiler. Like in autos, tripling never really caught on due to the massive increase in reciprocating mass involved. In fact, the increased mass of the low-pressure cylinders in compound locomotives greatly limited their speed. Many US railroads wanted to speed up their schedules but the compound engines just couldn't be operated at the higher speed, some of the designers looked at other ways to increase horsepower AND speed. Another cross-over was the information about steam generators. US railroads traditionally used steam, drawn from the locomotive and piped through the train, to provide heat and to operate early air conditioning for passenger cars. When internal combustion power (with electric transmission) was applied to rail propulsion it was necessary to provide steam generators in the passenger locomotives to provide this "hotel power". During the flirtation with gas-turbine-electric power for US railroads, steam generators were used to heat the fuel oil (residual heavy oil being used) to allow the fuel to flow to the turbine's combustion chamber.
@@vikkimcdonough6153 I think it was because size limits the locomotive boilers were only 6 to 8 foot outside diameter but got a lot of heating surface inside from masses of tunes where the water tube would be taller the lower tank and the upper tank with the water tube in-between more limited in length
Interestingly enough, TimeGhost just yesterday (March 1, 2022) released a new video about WWII military tech that crossed over to/from civilian usage. Check it out: ua-cam.com/video/YMsPmBWUzcQ/v-deo.html
Oh I had a feeling this was gonna come at some point! I love his channel, found it through your recommended channels like a year ago. It's fascinating.
I love Wild Bill's channel. Even if you have only a passing interest in automobiles or mechanical things the history he covers is the history of how we became modern and were able to move about. His delivery is spot on and his engagement with his audience is excellent! I highly recommend everyone at least watch one video to see if it is their thing!
Older subs still use diesel. Newer subs use "Air-Independed Propulsion" (AIP) Sterling engines. Sterlings were originally a steam engine, but in Naval AIP they use a mostly closed gas loop operating by thermal difference from ambient temperature and liquid oxygen. They're quieter than nuclear because they can run ultra-low frequency electrics, but they can only run for a few days on a tank of O2. The Swedish Gotland class is an example, and not the only.
I was a bit surprised to see, starting at about the 17:52 mark during the oil infrastructure discussion, to see a ship named _Zoroaster_ (spelled in Cyrillic).
At 6:53 the drawing shows the water entering the boiler at the feed water drum at the bottom. I have never seen this. It always enters at the top left steam drum. I have worked on ships made in WWII and after. Also there has to be a 2 bd relief velvet after the superheater set lower than the drum safety so it goes off first so the steam passing out will”cool” the water tubes. Despite being steel at these Temperatures the steel will soften unless water or flowing steam is in them to carry away heat.
Yea the feedwater inlet should be going to the steam drum, but thats a very elementary diagram, if we were to list all the things that it is missing we'd be here all day. (No steam separator, gauge glass, desuperheater, the burner is jank, missing waterwall tubes, no surface/bottom blow...)
Something that is a continual surprise to people is that there is a fundamental difference between Rankine cycle (steam) engines and both Otto cycle (spark ignition reciprocating piston) engines and Diesel cycle engines-- maximum torque at zero! Internal combustion engines need auxiliary starter motors because they produce zero torque at zero. Steam engines produce maximum torque at zero, because the expanding steam does not have to chase a moving piston to press against it, so they only need auxiliary motors at start if they were stopped at either Top Dead Center or Bottom Dead Center and it only needed to run long enough to move the piston past the center, not repeatedly crank the engine through full rotations. The closest that internal combustion engines came to multiple expansions is turbo compounding, where the heat recovery turbine of the supercharger extracts more energy than is needed to drive the compressor and the excess is coupled to the engine's crankshaft.
Fun fact on Gasoline, my family has been in the oil business for quite a long time. Spindle Top Texas was the first large find where the world realized all the uses they had for it. The second large find was in Sour Lake Texas, that's where my family comes in. They sold Texaco thier first oil land wells etc.. The house they rented to the workers is still being lived in. When production slacked Texaco sold off the land which my family bought back and we've been working it ever since. In the earlier days when they found small fields around the east coast up to close to Canadian border. They didn't know what to do with most of it, they took the kerosene and what we would consider the unrefined gas was just dumped out, it could be an empty field, streams, creeks lakes etc.. A huge amount of fuel was wasted because they didn't know what to do with it, all it did was pollute the ground.
We have a regular visitor at the Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway - at our annual gala, a Stanley Steamer. That's in addition to Sentinel steam waggons, various road locos, and rollers. The Stanley has notably loud almost organ-like "horns".
Water to steam has a 1000 to 1 expansion ratio. However, the specific heat capacity of water means that steam power can never be as efficient as internal combustion. A phenomenal amount of heat is used to simply turn water to steam. Even more heat has to be added to make a useful power source and that heat of evaporation is lost to the condenser. The practical efficiency limit is around 35%. Diesels can get to over 50% - a significant benefit in fuel consumption with far less technical complication.
To be completely unfair, a nuclear engine could (would?) utilize steam and its fuel/power ratio would be crazy. I mean, so would be driving a nuclear car, but why let sanity get in the way of technicalities?
Steam engines don't have to idle at stop lights and give high toque at low revs, give high revs, and runs backward eliminating the need for a gear box. Steam also has the advantage of running on multiple fuels. There is also waste heat recovery.
One cubic foot of water converted to steam, at the same pressure, expands to approximately 1600 cubic feet. As for efficiency, consider the power to weight ratio, A steam engine requires a boiler and water supply as well as the engine. An internal combustion engine is just the engine and the fuel supply, so less weight for the same power. There is also the issue of space, the volume taken up by your equipment. In transportation this can be quite significant.
@@calvingreene90 I like steam too, but there is a very good reason they aren't used today for cars, trains or ships. They just aren't efficient thermally!
@@mahbriggs Steam initially went out of use for trains in the drier regions of the US due shortage of water. Then the manufacturing capacity for diesel electric made it competitive. Steam in Europe was phased out primarily due to the maintenance costs associated with the use of coal. Thermal efficiency had and has little to do with the choice. Steam locomotives built for tourist routes in the 1990s run on light oil. In practice they use about the same amount of fuel for the same amount of work. Steam locomotives have smaller transmission losses due to direct drive, and waste heat can be utilised for train heating and auxiliary services. In theory internal combustion wins hands down. In practice the advantages are tighter. Steam has not been able to make a comeback due to inertia and lack of infrastructure. Given a decent sized production run the lower unit cost would make it competitive for lightly trafficked routes.
Hey Drach, I have a request. Could you put your videos into playlists based on eras of naval history? I like to kick back and watch hours of Drach at times, and it would be great to just roll through videos on a particular era.
Great collaborative video: A couple of thoughts: until about 1900 gasoline or naphtha was basically an unwanted by-product of refining the oil industry's principal product ----kerosene (called paraffin or coal oil in the UK) for lighting. Starting in the 1860's, kerosene started being refined and distributed in vast quantities all over the world for lighting. It was my impression that steam cars usually used kerosene as their primary fuel, with a much smaller quantity of gasoline used to get the burner hot enough that kerosene-- which has a flash point of about 100 degrees F-- would vaporize and ignite. So a steam car owner in the early days could fuel his car with kerosene (usually in gallon or five-gallon cans) at his local hardware or general store. For a warship, using oil rather than coal had enormous advantages: reduced manpower requirements, greater range, rapidity of refueling, and far less smoke to give away the position of its ships. As it was starting to build capital ships powered exclusively by oil, the British Admiralty was extremely concerned about having a reliable supply of oil fuel for its new ships. It went to far as to purchase in 1914 a controlling interest in a British company called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which had rights to large amounts of oil in Persia (now Iran). Although warships quickly converted to oil fuel, most commercial steamships, with the exception of large express ocean liners, continued to be powered by coal until World War II. In this era coal was available in almost any port and was about one-third the cost of oil fuel.
Many a happy hour removing clinker with a tube saw from Admiralty three drum boilers..internal cleans more tricky..ok for the guy shooting wire bullets into the tubes..bag man lower down in the water drum better not lose his chalk...👍🇬🇧
A can assure you no Naval Officer Ensign ever went inside a boiler to Clean the water tubes. To inspect maybe but the enlisted did that type of work in the Navy.
Your photo at 23:10 is in fact a portable engine (pulled to where it was needed by horses) not a traction engine. It appears to me that the shafts for pulling the engine are visible at the right end of the engine in the photo. Portable engines were used for powering stationary farming equipment such as threshing machines.
Another point on fuel sources - in the old coal fired days the stokers were usually considered to be the.most insubordinate and mutiny prone crew members. Even in relatively "enlightened" navies such as France, British or the US , shoveling coal was brutal, filthy, and physically exhausting work. Ships couldn't maintain top speed for very long before even with relief crews the stokers started to fall out from exhaustion. When fuel oil came along the boiler room was still hot and dirty but a flank speed bell wouldn't put many of the engineers on the deck with heat stroke.
Most large coal fired North American steam locomotives from the same era were fitted with 'automatic stokers', basically a steam powered screw or auger that moved the coal from the tender bunker to the firebox, where steam jets would blow it around to wherever the fireman wanted it. It's always puzzled me that ships didn't start using this sort of setup as soon as it became available.
One story that I love from this saga is that of Maurice Ravel's dad, who not only built steam-powered and supercharged 2 stroke acetylene internal combustion powered cars in the 1860s. Wikipedia says that the ideas were well known at the time (he apparently drove both prototypes around Paris) but were buried during the defense of Paris from ze Germans (round 0).
Rough rule of thumb for naval architects during early design: increase design speed 3 knots, double the required shaft power. Usually a little conservative, but indicative...
@@dorn0531 Cant say how exact the rule of thumb is, but the proportions of increase should stay the same no matter what speed. Thats how fluid dynamics work. Without doing the math right now, it sounds about right to me.
@@GoldenCroc Awesome, thank you. I am not an engineer in any capacity so I really appreciate learning this stuff. Also why I enjoy Drach's engineering knowledge
23:15 Drach is talking about traction engines and what picture do we see? A horse drawn steam power plant driving a threshing machine. All we need now is Jonesy stuck inside the works... :-D
Thanks guys, lots of good points, and recalls a lady violinist who'd spent about 20 years in psychiatric hospitals, and would occasionally interpose in your or her own speech, the rule: traho, trahere, traxi, tractum; and then carry on much better.
It was definitely not enjoyable being one of the shorter people in R-Div, once they figured out they can shove me anywhere so long as nothing impeded my breathing as that was the only thing to make me claustrophobic. So my first time in the Persian gulf circa 1999 when I found out that yes a main space can infact get much hotter, I was volunteered aka "voluntold" I would be welding some of the economiser tubes. "Um, okay and where are they at on the boiler....?" Nothing quite like getting shoved behind a boiler that was very recently shut off than generation another 1500 degrees locally welding. "Why are all these people staring at me?" "Who, wait what!? Well I think we need to pull him out of there and give him a break.."
With regards to the Red Flag Act, the popular story is that people saw these newfangled steam vehicles as big, noisy, smelly, and dangerous; they could run down children in the roads, their boilers would explode, and all the rest, and that's why the Act was passed. The reality, at least according to some historians I've been reading, was a bit different. By the 1830's steam powered road vehicles were actually on their way to becoming commonplace. Engineers such as Walter Hancock and Goldsworthy Gurney were improving upon the initial concept of Richard Trevithick's 1802 London Steam Carriage to the point where starting in 1833 Hancock began offering a steam coach service between London and Bath that cut the travel time down from 2 days by horse-drawn stagecoach to a mere 8-10 hours. Other inventors were also building steam drays, smaller vehicles that could be hitched to ordinary carriages to take the place of horses. It doesn't take a great leap to imagine the faces of engineers like Brunel and Daniel Gooch, directors of the nascent Great Western Railway, to see this direct competition from road haulage whose capabilities were not a million miles away from their own railway trains; true, a train could still roughly double the speed of a steam coach and carry more people, but if more steam coaches started running and offered a more frequent, and more importantly cheaper service, the worry was that passengers might not mind the longer travel time if they could save a few bob by going by road rather than rail. Hence, it was actually lobbyists funded by the railways who pushed for the Red Flag Act as a means of squashing their competition. And as for traction engines being slow, that's also only partially true. Yes, for the most part they were built for power rather than speed (as mentioned before, the Red Flag Act made speed a non-option, at least in theory), but that didn't mean that they weren't capable of speed when called upon. When out on the open road away from the Constable's watch, a well-tuned Aveling & Porter could well make upwards of 12-15 mph under heavy load. That may not sound like much, but it's still almost double the Red Flag Act's limits, and that's with a line of wagons rumbling behind. Some could go even faster; a Fowler 8hp engine, particularly popular with house removal companies, could haul a line of furniture vans at the heady speed of 30 mph on good, flat road. Source: Traction Engines by Anthony Burton
Thank you for your comment. I was viewing another channel but drifted off to sleep. After that video finished the autoplay selected this one. I dreamt that there was a law in England limiting automobiles to a speed of 2 mph in cities, that the vehicle had to carry one person sounding a horn and another ringing a bell, that the car had to be led by a third person waving a red flag and blowing a whistle, and a team of these three people had to be employed for each vehicle owned. I awoke with this still on my mind. How am I going to check this out? Your post gave me the name of the Act and with that I was able to find some of my dream was true and other parts weren't.
As an aside, a chap I used to work with told me about his grandfather’s traction engine. His grandfather sold it to a local First Nation back in the early seventies and Bill told me it took two days to drive it about fifty miles. Not a competitor that the Roadrunner needs to worry about!
@24:12 Tractor engine vs moder tractor: in such tug-of-war you don't really count on power (measured in kW or horsepower), but effective pulling force (aka tractive effort, measured in kN or tons of force). As power is force times velocity, those huge tractors were capable still machines, although slow.
On My way to see BB 60 right now, I plan on going again when you get to the US and at the Alabama as well.And you have a new subscriber to your vintage car history channel as well.
In the Jay Leno's Garage series he has two high pressure (750psi if I remember correctly) steam cars that were made by a single company, which was almost a one man show! One of them was own by Howard Hughes and both were of a production run of under 27 cars!! The cars were direct drive (i.e. no transmission, the steam cylinders' con-rods were directly attached to the rear axle) and only took a few minutes before they could "get underway". A few more minutes they were ready for speeds over 45mph! Although, they weren't great at stopping quickly... the feed valve hand wheel was just inside of the steering wheel's rim and was almost the same diameter...
The problem they had in the early days of oil are the same we have with modern electric and other eco platforms. Until the point electric "refueling" points are as common as the gas station, Tesla and the others will be city only, just as the early gas powered vehicles were. For example, I live in a very rural area, and the only "public" charging point is a set of three in the Walmart parking lot. The next nearest charging point is nearly 50 miles away, meaning that a person in our area with an electric car has to charge at home... and that once his battery drops below the 40% line it is time for him to go home. Even better options like ethenol or hydrogen are even harder to find. While yes, we can in theory depend on the market forces, the fact that fossil fuels are literally every 10 miles at worst means that the newest options cannot compete.
It's worth noting that the Cugnot Steam Fardier was built in 1769 / 1770. Which is almost inconceivably early and 13 years before the first steam boat (Pyroscaphe)
29:06 - I can't help but wonder if _Prinz Eugen_ might've become a long-term presence in the U.S. Navy (instead of being nuked, ineffectually cleaned, and left to sink at Kwajalein) had the Navy actually looked at the size of her boiler documentation, held onto her trained engineers (at least long enough for them to train American replacements), and, thus, prevented the engine failures that plagued her real-life time in U.S. service.
I visited the car museum of mulheouse with my mum a few years ago and was astounded by what we would call a buggey that had reached over 92kph in 1898. No seatbelts.
35:07 - I wonder if a multiple-expansion engine could be made more compact by nesting the higher-pressure cylinders _within_ the lower-pressure ones (using annular bores and pistons for all but the highest-pressure cylinders), which would also (theoretically, at least) increase efficiency somewhat by helping to keep the cylinders hot (because, instead of the outer surface of each cylinder being directly exposed to the external environment, now only the outer surface of the lowest-pressure cylinder would be so exposed, with the outer surfaces of all the other cylinders being bathed in still-fairly-hot steam, retarding heat loss by conduction through the cylinder bodies).
They have air operated turbines for cleaning tubes. they're little rotary brushes on the end of a long air hose. you shove them into a tube and the rotary action should clean the crud that's clogging up the tube.
Railways tried oil fired steam engines but cost and high fuel consumption killed the idea. Diesels did the job at far less cost and used far less fuel. Ships have more space so steam hung on for longer but its today's ships are almost entirely diesel powered.
@@Dave5843-d9m The fuel used on the various railroads also was dependent on the local availsbility of coal or oil. With steam is just wasn't the overall efficiency it was also the maintenance requirements of steam engines vs diesels.
The biggest difference between most steam locomotives and most ship or stationary boilers is that locomotives only use their water and steam once, there is no condenser, the used steam is simply exhausted to the atmosphere, (this is also used to create draft for the fire). This means that you are using vast quantities of makeup water, often of dubious quality because you have to get it from local water sources all across the land, which leads to big problems with scale buildup. The open space in fire tube boilers proved easier to clean out than water tubes. I'm a volunteer at a railway museum with an operating steam locomotive (oil fired), and it should also be noted that a locomotive's steam demands vary widely and abruptly, from almost nothing when the engine is 'drifting' (coasting with the throttle almost shut off) to sucking the boiler pressure down when the engineer opens the throttle up. The fire tube boiler also acts as a big steam reservoir.
Bob Smith is correct, although part of the use of the steam exhausting through the smoke stack was to supress sparks. Another problem with steam locomotives was that there were long stretches of rail lines where water had to be hauled, because there wasn't sufficient local water supplies. An old Santa Fe engineer once explained to me that was one of the reasons Santa Fe switched to diesil electric was because of expense of shipping water in Western Kansas. I imagine there were other areas with similar problems.
Good to see steam powered cars mentioned, thanks. If you want to see a White Steam Car or the intriguing Double Steamer on the road and being explained see : Jay Lenos Garage here on yt.
T he steam red flag law was not from the queen but from stage coach Lobbying groups! They also sabatoged roads and vehicles killing passengers of the steam passenger carrying vehicles. This was very early and the Red flag laws later discouraged car development. Interesting subject most do not know about even experts.
I was going to show off and mention the UK Locomotive Acts. 😅The reason for the acts was probably not a personal request from Queen Victoria but to protect the railways from potential competition.
The evolution of technology is an interest of mine. Consequently, the issue of preserving knowledge of old technology is one of my concerns. Books, unfortunately, seem to be out of favor. I find it increasingly more difficult to find old technical works. As I've learned from owners of used book stores, it is almost impossible to sell them ("We used to carry such stuff, but it just took up shelf space so we chucked it all out a few years ago." Ouch). Places I patronized in the past that peddled reprints of old manuals have gone out of business. Consequently, I find your technical presentations both interesting and encouraging. Unfortunately, while people talk about how anything put on the internet is out there forever, that just is not true (only the stuff that you wish was not there has any chance of remaining... it's the law of the contrary). I'm afraid that much of the historical knowledge has a short half-life. The trail of technical innovation will vanish just like knowledge of pyramid building has. I own a Lord Brassy's Naval Annual from the early 1880's (not "in range" of me as I write, so I cannot give a precise year with confidence). It speaks of the innovation of the "Pipe Boiler." The article describes a logical precursor to the water tube boiler. It also has an extensive discussion about the relative merits of iron vs. steel as a hull material. And have you ever heard of "Woodite"? (even Gooogle hasn't) It is the marvelous stuff that will make hulls self sealing and ships unsinkable. The iron/steel discussion contains the germs of how even better armor can be made. The Woodite failed due to fire risk (it was essentially rubber applied a foot or more thick on the hull's interior) and rapid loss of useful properties with age. However, the concept is reborn in self-sealing fuel tanks on WWII fighter aircraft. One old book, three early technical roots.
I can relate. The internet was supposed to be a medium that would help preserve and share technical information, but in the end, the rise of social media and the monetization of everything has caused the internet to become a black hole where information disappears, rather than being preserved. The ongoing dilution of intellectualism is also to blame, though of course the aforementioned corruption of the internet contributes to that, greatly.
No mention of the high pressure (200 psi) water tube boiler invented by Henry House around 1893. Used in both road vehicles (2 cylinder compound) and boats (1898). Also used as an airplane engine (never flew).
In the US two major Railroads, the SP (Southern Pacific) and the AT&SF (Santa Fe - the one with the War Bonnet paint scheme), began experimenting with oil fired steam locomotives in the mid 1890's and were converting large numbers of locomotives by the late 1890's. Oil firing was a well known and established art by 1899 so upscaling it would have just required wanting to do it, and accepting the occasional "OOPS!". (BOOM!!)
The Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve in Southern California, west of Bakersfield, was a large producer of heavy crude and much of it went to two uses. It was pumped to a simple refinery at Grapevine Pass and separated into heavy bunker fuel which was sent to Long Beach for ship's fuel, and light bunker fuel which went to Barstow to fuel the Southern Pacific locomotives. By the start of the 20th century most of the steam locomotives in the South West were oil fired.
Pinned post for Q&A :)
Any plans to tour or journey on the Titanic II, assuming it's ever finished?
Who has a shorter life expectancy, a captain in Ultimate Admirals Dreadnoughts or a Redshirt from original 1960s Star Trek?
Greetings.
I really appreciate your video(s).
I would love to see a Wednesday special on the (rarely mentioned) tug- and towboats in WW2 and the brave men (and sometimes women) who crewed them.
For example how Captain Jan Kalkman prevented a pontoon from ramming a munition ship on D-day or how the “de Schelde” saved a drydock, on tow to Iceland, that had become adrift in a (particularly harsh) storm. Let them Dutch have a crack at it, see what happens!
I hope to hear your thoughts on the matter and thank you in advance for your consideration.
Muddy, from the Netherlands.
Could you tell us about the Evacuation of Sørøya island by the Royal Navy in 1945?
English Twin brothers, colonists in India and Burma and invested in mines, smelting, farming, construction... had become rediculously rich notice gathering clouds of war and by 1935 have built 4 1200x200 foot drydocks and you have been selected to design four battleships to be named HMIS Shiva, HMS Demolisher, HMS Obliterator, and HMS Annihilator and have been specifically instructed cost is not an objection and to ignore treaty limits in your design what do the ship look like?
As an ex-Navy Boiler Tech who served on an old Gearing Class Destroyer, D.D. 890, I still have nightmares about having to crawl inside the firebox of a Babcock and Wilcox 600 P.S.I. M-Type separate super-heater marine boiler to "Do Firesides" and clean the tubes!
Me too, on a County class Destroyer, D16.!
As someone who's cleaned marine exhaust gas boilers before, that sounds like a hard pass.
same here....petrified I'd get stuck...
I crawled inside a steam locomotives firebox (firetube boiler) once when they were replacing some firebox grates. While the inside is surprisingly roomy, the door is tiny as hell and you can barely get it and out.
Big nope
Thank you for this opportunity! It was a thrill to have this discussion with you!
your channel is awesome sir - ty for the content
I just subscribed.. thanks for the cool content..!
Thanks to both of you for creating your content and especially for this crossover.
Many thanks for the interesting collaboration with Drachinifel. Steam cars are a highly relevant subject people should learn about. It is curious how quickly these old cars got forgotten. Instead of ignoring all that history, the large-scale push of modern electric vehicles into the car market practically begs for a good look at earlier propulsion options, the variety of which may appear to be bewildering at first glance. Keep up the good work!
OUTSTANDING RESEARCH GUYS. THANK YOU.
I DIDN'T KNOW THAT PEUGEOT WAS MAKING CAR'S BEFORE BENZ AND DAIMLER.
LOVED PEUGEOT CAR'S SINCE COLUMBO HAD THE PRETTY LITTLE CONVERTIBLE.
LOVE2ALL FROM LLANELLI WALES
The technical and logistical ones are always my favorites.
Me too. I'm eagerly awaiting the promised video on propeller design.
That's what makes this channel such a gem. It's not just a series of battle logs revisited
@@stefanlaskowski6660 I'm sure you _meant_ to say _"screw design."_ 🙄
😜
Agreed!
Heck yeah! Mine, too. I can't wait for the one detailing cannon manufacturing.
Now we just need a railway engineering historian appearing as a guest speaker, and we'll have Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
I live in the south of the US eastern mountain range. Occasionally I will see a century old tractor in a field to this day. Usually its not worth firing up but if you need to pull a stump or move something heavy a modern machine sure as hell cant do it without a significant chain tack whereas the old one you just loop a chain around the stump, hook it to the back and away they go.
Thank you both. I'm really struggling right now, and this helped me escape for a while from all my problems.
Be awesome, dude.
5:04 "I have come up with a miniature steam boiler, I shall now put it on this tiny bicycle"
Lol u do realize there was no such thing as paved roads in cities and towns?
Serpollet's tricycle inspired many people to build the same kind of cycle car- De Dion Bouton, Peugeot and Leon Bollee to mention a few.
@@MrJob91
Cobble stones are paving.
Bicycles don't need paved roads.
You seen the motorcycle with the Lister D engine on it yet? Push button start too..
@@MrJob91 I understand but still kinda funny
A friend of mine served on the Newport News and was part of the USS Salem museum. They had a damage control chart outlining what speeds varous mixes of boilers and screw states could provide. The massive jump in power output to get those last knots is tops speed was impressive. That is why cruising ranges are figured for speeds well below the ship's maximum speed. Under nuclear power modern carriers can mostly forget the old ways. I read that under emergency conditions some carriers can make well over 40 knots. But then they are using enough power for a small city.
Hey Drach, I just want to thank you for posting great content that helps me to stay positive in these crazy times!
A Big Thank You to the Author for being a welcome diversion from our geopolitical tensions ..and I’m glad I don’t have that boiler mechanic’s job …
This video struck a note with me drach. You, amongst other youtubers, have inspired me as well. I too am planning on starting a UA-cam channel. I’ve been a railroader for 10 years now, and have decided I want to share my profession and interest with those who are interested. It would cover all aspects of railroading, including the history behind it. Who knows, maybe we can do a collaboration like this one day if my channel takes off.
I was an engineer in the U.S. Navy from 1998-2004. The Kitty Hawk was my first ship, and as awe inspiring and POWERFUL those 8 Foster Wheeler boilers were it did make engineering life suck a bit. Our liberty was secured normally 24 hours prior to departure. At that point the boilers were brought online checks were done and made sure we had the required pressure. Then we'd notice our "brothers" on our gas turbine powered escorts show up in the morning "light off" 30 minutes prior to departure and be ready to go. Saying we were a bit envious is an understatement, that is until we were underway and all that power we could generate. I was an HT Hull Maintenance Technician, a "Fresh air snipe" as opposed to being a "Hole snipe". It's amazing what 1200psi can do to piping much of which was pretty exotic, nothing stands up to the brute force of 1200psi for long.
The few drag races we would do with the Nimitz classes was fun. 1200psi vs a fairly whimpy 600psi meant we walked them hard. Not being happy they got beat and beat hard would challenge us to another race. "Okay how about one lap around the world? No unreps, flank all the way??" Sore losers lol.
As envious as we were of our fellow engineers on the missile sponges when Guam was our final port before we went back to Yokosuka it was always a mad dash for home. We took our time getting underway but once we were clear it was max speed all the way. Within 1 or 2 hours we would pass our Perry class FFG, a few hours later we'd pass our Ticonderoga and a few hours after that we'd pass by the Arliegh Burkes the rooster tails they could kick up pre stern flap was very impressive. It would mostly always end up with us moored up 24 hours ahead of the rest of them.
One last bit and since Task Force sword doesn't seem to be fully declassified but it is known the platform was the Kitty Hawk. From Yokosuka to the operation area we averaged 30+ knots only slowing to 25 knots to take on fuel. A high speed run through the Straits of Malacca at night was VERY interesting. Normally civilian ships would get as close to us as possible and it was one of the few areas we did not enforce the 300 yard rule. They all knew the pirates would leave them alone so during that high speed run it confused A LOT of ships.
South African drivers licence (my Dad's) circa '30's gives means of propulsion as "petrol, electric or steam".
Little known fact that steam power and electric cars predates the combustion engine.
@@inisipisTV oh fuck, since when?
@@zaneandre6387 Its not quite true. The first thing we would recognize as a car used an internal combustion engine. But most of the development of automobiles was around electric and steam until after WW I. The development of aircraft rapidly accelerated the development of combustion engines, while electric and steam engines slowed down their pace of improvement. Steam and electric cars were better than combustion engine ones for longer than most people realize.
@@lobsterbark To clear this argument- The first true steam car (A personal vehicle that could be operated by a single person) was built by De Dion Bouton in 1884. The first internal combustion engined steam car was built by Benz in 1885 and the first true electric car was built by Gustave Trouve in 1881.
@@lobsterbark I was being facetious, I was admitted to UCSD out of high school in the mechanical and aerospace engineering program for car and engine design. This is a topic I am very familiar with but thank you for your insight.
Two of my favourite topics in one video to start the work week, amazing
Kriegsmarine tech manuals and courses were not to be messed with. Operating submarine toilets was a life and death matter as well.
Gasoline/petrol was a nuisance byproduct that came off first when crude oil was being distilled into Kerosene ( the improved version of lamp/ stove oil which was in turn) the replacement for whale oil lamps room lighting. The fact gasoline was readily available and had close to zero value starting out was the major attraction for ICE inventors. Gasoline would have remained mostly an abundant fuel for commercial vehicles and hobby cars for the rich, with no mass market possible but for the discovery of massive new oil fields around the world.
yup, they used to just dump the gasoline in the creek and cask up the kerosene. Rockefellers Standard Oil was one of the first major companies the EPA would turn themselves inside out to imprison had they existed at the time.
Edit: Standard oil's major marketing gimmick was their kerosene didn't contain gasoline, and was a "Pure" standard. Others who didn't refine out all the gasoline were smeared as dangerous products because your lantern or whatever could explode.
The same thing happened with diesel. A useless waste product of petroleum refining, until Rudolf Diesel designed an engine specifically to use it.
@@Binkophile Hemp oil. Diesel designed the engine to run on hemp oil. The petroleum byproduct happened to work just as well, and hemp oil was more costly at the time. (Hemp oil being used to cure timber for piers and wharfs or pilings, diesel had noted it's capability to be highly compressed without detonating)
@@nunyabidness674 Really? Oh that's very interesting. Thank you :)
It was available at the source but frankly even in 1900 it didnt exist in the UK. To do the great 1900 road trip. See 'Thousand Mile Trial' by Elizabeth Bennett. Gasoline had to be ordered in advance and stocked at prepositioned stores along the route.
Love this topic, as you're basically covering the genesis of what I worked on in my time in the navy. I was an engineering rate on a nuclear sub and nuclear propulsion is arguably the final expression of the steam propulsion plant. Despite the mythical powers that people like to ascribe to nuclear powered ships, basically they are nothing but a regular steam plant that replace coal or fuel oil with nuclear fission to heat the boiler water into steam. Their real advantage over traditional steam plants is endurance, not power output. (of course, nuclear power is outside the period this channel normally covers)
Hello, I am the president of the Steam Automobile Club of America (SACA), a group that has been in existence since 1958. I am also a retired naval reservist, having been a Machinists' Mate on both active and reserve duty, with much of my experience being in the field of steam propulsion and auxiliaries. Undoubtedly, this naval background is the factor that has made me a fan of your channel. My interest in steam automobiles is partly rooted in this practical naval steam background and partly due to my current employment in powertrain development for General Motors. Suffice it to say that I have authored some articles and a couple of books on the subject of steam cars.
Being a fan of your channel, and seeing the title of this episode, I promptly stuck in my earbuds and eagerly tuned in. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed. The discussion seemed to be an equal mixture of fact, miscomprehension, and outright misinformation. As a trivial example, real steam car fans know that the creator of the White steam automobiles was Rollin and not Colin White. Serpollet did NOT invent the water tube boiler -- Herreshoff was using them in marine applications well before Serpollet arrived on the scene. By 1824, John Buchanan (a polymath involved in medicine, education, psychology, engineering, and newspaper publishing) had developed his "Capillary Steam Generator" in which water was forced into a heated coil and steam was emitted from the opposite end -- which is PRECISELY what Serpollet did with some flourishes. Buchanan was trying to build a flying machine, and failed, but installed the engine and boiler in a boat and a carriage, the latter of which drove around the streets of Louisville, Kentucky on or about August 18, 1824. This not only precedes Serpollet's boiler, it precedes his birth by a good quarter-century. Come to think of it, this precedes Stephenson's "Rocket" locomotive by a few years. Water-tube boilers were in regular operation on both sides of the Atlantic by the 1850s. We find the famous Herreshoff concern building marine steam generators in the 1870's, and so on.
Steam automobiles did not exclusively use water tube steam generators. We have all heard of the Stanley steamer, undoubtedly the most famous steam car of all time. Like most makes of steam cars, it used a fire tube boiler....which was very compact. The tubes were arranged vertically, rather than horizontally. These tubes were, however, very small in diameter and there were a great number of them. This permitted the boiler to have a large heating surface in a small package. While water tube steam generators had advantages, they also had problems -- the worst being that they were very difficult to control. When you only have a small amount of water in your steam generator, it takes only a small unbalance between the amount of water fed into the boiler and the rate at which the burner provides heat. Get these ratios wrong and the unit will either emit hot water or burn itself out. The reason that you weren't supposed to alter the White powerplant wasn't that the entire powerplant was so integrated that "you couldn't improve upon it" White prohibited owners from making changes to the power plant because the flowmotor controlling the delivery of fuel to the burner in response to the flow of feed water into the boiler was tuned for that particular car. The specific White design required the mechanic to physically modify the flowmotor for that particular vehicle, something for which the average owner was incapable. White appears to have swiped the design from Edward C. Newcomb, without paying him patent royalties.. It would have been better if they had simply used Newcomb's flow motor which could be adjusted with wrench and screwdriver. In any case, the control of a fire tube boiler is vastly more simple -- you simply install a valve that adds more water to the boiler when the water level drops below the desired point and a pressure-operated valve that adds more fuel to the fire when the pressure drops below its set point. This works because the greater volume of hot, pressurized water in the boiler acts as a reserve which tides the system over as the control system responds to changes in temperature and pressure.
Anyhow, the errors go on. The Lane was not a British steam car, it came from Poughkeepsie, New York. Low-pressure cylinders in compound engines are larger than the high-pressure cylinder simply because the steam is expanded in the high-pressure cylinder and it now occupies more volume as it enters the low-pressure cylinder. Thornycroft manufactured steam-driven lorries. Most steam cars burned kerosene and not gasoline -- steam engines are less efficient than internal combustion engines and were more expensive to run due to the latent heat of vaporization. But, this cost deficit could be overcome by burning kerosene, which was cheaper than gasoline. This fact induced internal combustion engine builders to build kerosene-fueled models. Triple expansion steam cars are quite rare, but we can't say that there were none ... The Doble "Broad Arrow" engine comes to mind. Steam cars were not operating at 1,000 degrees F, the cylinder oil would decompose at that temperature.
I'm sorry that I went on this long, and have been so negative. As I said, I am a fan of the channel and had high hopes for this particular discussion.
The value of your comment will never be recognized by the masses, but personally I appreciate the detail oriented contribution of a true enthusiast.
I vote for another video with you as a guest
If I remember correctly, you started to need special steel alloys at around 450psi, and by the time you got anywhere near 1,000psi or 1,2000 psi the alloys got extremely specialized!!! (Hence why the steam powered cars that ran at 750psi had boiler, piping, and cylinder issues!)
I want to say "nerd" and I mean that with the highest degree of respect for nitpicking all the details. Comments and attention to detail like this is why I never watch TV docs anymore
You're right on all points sir. No mention of the speed and advances of the Doble system, not acknowledging the massive delays in the US auto industry caused by the Selden Patent... this guy knows no real history.
This was FAR more fascinating than I thought it would be (based on reading the title). I learned a lot! This was an excellent presentation. My "other interest" is railroad history and modeling and the material has a lot of cross-over. Most US steam locomotives were fire tube boilers. There was a big interest in compound steam locomotives around the early 20th Century. Steam locomotives generally were two-stage affairs, often on the big articulated locomotives with two engine beds under one boiler. Like in autos, tripling never really caught on due to the massive increase in reciprocating mass involved. In fact, the increased mass of the low-pressure cylinders in compound locomotives greatly limited their speed. Many US railroads wanted to speed up their schedules but the compound engines just couldn't be operated at the higher speed, some of the designers looked at other ways to increase horsepower AND speed. Another cross-over was the information about steam generators. US railroads traditionally used steam, drawn from the locomotive and piped through the train, to provide heat and to operate early air conditioning for passenger cars. When internal combustion power (with electric transmission) was applied to rail propulsion it was necessary to provide steam generators in the passenger locomotives to provide this "hotel power". During the flirtation with gas-turbine-electric power for US railroads, steam generators were used to heat the fuel oil (residual heavy oil being used) to allow the fuel to flow to the turbine's combustion chamber.
Now I have l learned something!
While I knew locomotive boilers were fire tube, I didn't know most if the rest.
Always something new to learn!
With diesel, there are a lot if interesting engine crossovers between rail and submarine technology.
Why did steam locomotives almost universally use fire-tube boilers, given the lower top pressures available and the extreme explosion risk they pose?
@@vikkimcdonough6153 I think it was because size limits the locomotive boilers were only 6 to 8 foot outside diameter but got a lot of heating surface inside from masses of tunes where the water tube would be taller the lower tank and the upper tank with the water tube in-between more limited in length
Its always suprising how much technology crosses over from military to non-military and vise-versa.
Interestingly enough, TimeGhost just yesterday (March 1, 2022) released a new video about WWII military tech that crossed over to/from civilian usage. Check it out: ua-cam.com/video/YMsPmBWUzcQ/v-deo.html
Oh I had a feeling this was gonna come at some point! I love his channel, found it through your recommended channels like a year ago. It's fascinating.
Yall guys doing these discussions far better than bbc or pbs. Thanks.
One of the best crossovers ever, have been subbed to VCH since the first time Drach mentioned him, he is as criminally undersubscribed to as Drach.
I love Wild Bill's channel. Even if you have only a passing interest in automobiles or mechanical things the history he covers is the history of how we became modern and were able to move about. His delivery is spot on and his engagement with his audience is excellent! I highly recommend everyone at least watch one video to see if it is their thing!
The ark of the covinent? The famous racing engine, Coventry Climax, was developed, during WW2, for British, portable water pumps.
With a couple of exceptions, nuclear submarines are steam driven so navies eventually were able to put steam powerplants into submarines.
It's funny to me that this period in history will probably be considered "the late steam era" by historians a few thousand years from now.
Steam powerplants were used in submarines quite early as well. Look at the British K Class
what are the exceptions then? :-)
@@alan-sk7ky The US Navy built a couple of subs with turbo-electric drive.
Older subs still use diesel. Newer subs use "Air-Independed Propulsion" (AIP) Sterling engines. Sterlings were originally a steam engine, but in Naval AIP they use a mostly closed gas loop operating by thermal difference from ambient temperature and liquid oxygen. They're quieter than nuclear because they can run ultra-low frequency electrics, but they can only run for a few days on a tank of O2. The Swedish Gotland class is an example, and not the only.
I was a bit surprised to see, starting at about the 17:52 mark during the oil infrastructure discussion, to see a ship named _Zoroaster_ (spelled in Cyrillic).
At 6:53 the drawing shows the water entering the boiler at the feed water drum at the bottom. I have never seen this. It always enters at the top left steam drum.
I have worked on ships made in WWII and after.
Also there has to be a 2 bd relief velvet after the superheater set lower than the drum safety so it goes off first so the steam passing out will”cool” the water tubes.
Despite being steel at these Temperatures the steel will soften unless water or flowing steam is in them to carry away heat.
Yea the feedwater inlet should be going to the steam drum, but thats a very elementary diagram, if we were to list all the things that it is missing we'd be here all day. (No steam separator, gauge glass, desuperheater, the burner is jank, missing waterwall tubes, no surface/bottom blow...)
Great to see a crossover by two of my favorite UA-camrs. 👍
I think I found Bill's channel from Drac's.
Sounds like Bill also found Bill’s channel from Drach, lol
@@gurk_the_magnificent9008 Well said!
Something that is a continual surprise to people is that there is a fundamental difference between Rankine cycle (steam) engines and both Otto cycle (spark ignition reciprocating piston) engines and Diesel cycle engines-- maximum torque at zero! Internal combustion engines need auxiliary starter motors because they produce zero torque at zero. Steam engines produce maximum torque at zero, because the expanding steam does not have to chase a moving piston to press against it, so they only need auxiliary motors at start if they were stopped at either Top Dead Center or Bottom Dead Center and it only needed to run long enough to move the piston past the center, not repeatedly crank the engine through full rotations.
The closest that internal combustion engines came to multiple expansions is turbo compounding, where the heat recovery turbine of the supercharger extracts more energy than is needed to drive the compressor and the excess is coupled to the engine's crankshaft.
History of cars and ships at the same time? Now we're talking
Now here is a video that a Machinest Mate will enjoy.
The machinists mate agrees
MM1(SS/SW) ret at your service lol
Fun fact on Gasoline, my family has been in the oil business for quite a long time. Spindle Top Texas was the first large find where the world realized all the uses they had for it. The second large find was in Sour Lake Texas, that's where my family comes in. They sold Texaco thier first oil land wells etc.. The house they rented to the workers is still being lived in. When production slacked Texaco sold off the land which my family bought back and we've been working it ever since. In the earlier days when they found small fields around the east coast up to close to Canadian border. They didn't know what to do with most of it, they took the kerosene and what we would consider the unrefined gas was just dumped out, it could be an empty field, streams, creeks lakes etc..
A huge amount of fuel was wasted because they didn't know what to do with it, all it did was pollute the ground.
We have a regular visitor at the Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway - at our annual gala, a Stanley Steamer. That's in addition to Sentinel steam waggons, various road locos, and rollers. The Stanley has notably loud almost organ-like "horns".
The discussion at the end was well worth the time. Well done gentlemen.
Water to steam has a 1000 to 1 expansion ratio. However, the specific heat capacity of water means that steam power can never be as efficient as internal combustion. A phenomenal amount of heat is used to simply turn water to steam. Even more heat has to be added to make a useful power source and that heat of evaporation is lost to the condenser. The practical efficiency limit is around 35%. Diesels can get to over 50% - a significant benefit in fuel consumption with far less technical complication.
To be completely unfair, a nuclear engine could (would?) utilize steam and its fuel/power ratio would be crazy.
I mean, so would be driving a nuclear car, but why let sanity get in the way of technicalities?
Steam engines don't have to idle at stop lights and give high toque at low revs, give high revs, and runs backward eliminating the need for a gear box.
Steam also has the advantage of running on multiple fuels.
There is also waste heat recovery.
One cubic foot of water converted to steam, at the same pressure, expands to approximately 1600 cubic feet. As for efficiency, consider the power to weight ratio, A steam engine requires a boiler and water supply as well as the engine. An internal combustion engine is just the engine and the fuel supply, so less weight for the same power. There is also the issue of space, the volume taken up by your equipment. In transportation this can be quite significant.
@@calvingreene90
I like steam too, but there is a very good reason they aren't used today for cars, trains or ships.
They just aren't efficient thermally!
@@mahbriggs Steam initially went out of use for trains in the drier regions of the US due shortage of water. Then the manufacturing capacity for diesel electric made it competitive.
Steam in Europe was phased out primarily due to the maintenance costs associated with the use of coal. Thermal efficiency had and has little to do with the choice.
Steam locomotives built for tourist routes in the 1990s run on light oil. In practice they use about the same amount of fuel for the same amount of work.
Steam locomotives have smaller transmission losses due to direct drive, and waste heat can be utilised for train heating and auxiliary services. In theory internal combustion wins hands down. In practice the advantages are tighter. Steam has not been able to make a comeback due to inertia and lack of infrastructure. Given a decent sized production run the lower unit cost would make it competitive for lightly trafficked routes.
Hey Drach, I have a request. Could you put your videos into playlists based on eras of naval history? I like to kick back and watch hours of Drach at times, and it would be great to just roll through videos on a particular era.
Topic Idea. Boiler Water Chemistry. How does one treat their boiler water to preserve the tubes and prevent scale. Chemistry + Naval Engineering :)
Great collaborative video:
A couple of thoughts:
until about 1900 gasoline or naphtha was basically an unwanted by-product of refining the oil industry's principal product ----kerosene (called paraffin or coal oil in the UK) for lighting. Starting in the 1860's, kerosene started being refined and distributed in vast quantities all over the world for lighting.
It was my impression that steam cars usually used kerosene as their primary fuel, with a much smaller quantity of gasoline used to get the burner hot enough that kerosene-- which has a flash point of about 100 degrees F-- would vaporize and ignite. So a steam car owner in the early days could fuel his car with kerosene (usually in gallon or five-gallon cans) at his local hardware or general store.
For a warship, using oil rather than coal had enormous advantages: reduced manpower requirements, greater range, rapidity of refueling, and far less smoke to give away the position of its ships. As it was starting to build capital ships powered exclusively by oil, the British Admiralty was extremely concerned about having a reliable supply of oil fuel for its new ships. It went to far as to purchase in 1914 a controlling interest in a British company called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which had rights to large amounts of oil in Persia (now Iran).
Although warships quickly converted to oil fuel, most commercial steamships, with the exception of large express ocean liners, continued to be powered by coal until World War II. In this era coal was available in almost any port and was about one-third the cost of oil fuel.
Many a happy hour removing clinker with a tube saw from Admiralty three drum boilers..internal cleans more tricky..ok for the guy shooting wire bullets into the tubes..bag man lower down in the water drum better not lose his chalk...👍🇬🇧
A can assure you no Naval Officer Ensign ever went inside a boiler to Clean the water tubes.
To inspect maybe but the enlisted did that type of work in the Navy.
Depends, how much had that Ensign annoyed his superiors that week? 😀
@@Drachinifel
Depending on the Navy maybe if they annoy enough of the chief petty officers they will be given a learning experience.
@@Drachinifel No engineering officer would wish to risk his power plant by allowing junior officers to lay a wrench on it....
Your photo at 23:10 is in fact a portable engine (pulled to where it was needed by horses) not a traction engine. It appears to me that the shafts for pulling the engine are visible at the right end of the engine in the photo.
Portable engines were used for powering stationary farming equipment such as threshing machines.
Every time I see a hybrid car go down the road, I think to myself, "There goes a U-boat on wheels".
Another point on fuel sources - in the old coal fired days the stokers were usually considered to be the.most insubordinate and mutiny prone crew members. Even in relatively "enlightened" navies such as France, British or the US , shoveling coal was brutal, filthy, and physically exhausting work. Ships couldn't maintain top speed for very long before even with relief crews the stokers started to fall out from exhaustion. When fuel oil came along the boiler room was still hot and dirty but a flank speed bell wouldn't put many of the engineers on the deck with heat stroke.
Most large coal fired North American steam locomotives from the same era were fitted with 'automatic stokers', basically a steam powered screw or auger that moved the coal from the tender bunker to the firebox, where steam jets would blow it around to wherever the fireman wanted it. It's always puzzled me that ships didn't start using this sort of setup as soon as it became available.
One story that I love from this saga is that of Maurice Ravel's dad, who not only built steam-powered and supercharged 2 stroke acetylene internal combustion powered cars in the 1860s. Wikipedia says that the ideas were well known at the time (he apparently drove both prototypes around Paris) but were buried during the defense of Paris from ze Germans (round 0).
Rough rule of thumb for naval architects during early design: increase design speed 3 knots, double the required shaft power. Usually a little conservative, but indicative...
Does that stay true all the way to 30 or 40 knots? I always assumed it be far less than double at low speed & far more at high speed.
@@dorn0531 Cant say how exact the rule of thumb is, but the proportions of increase should stay the same no matter what speed. Thats how fluid dynamics work. Without doing the math right now, it sounds about right to me.
@@GoldenCroc Awesome, thank you. I am not an engineer in any capacity so I really appreciate learning this stuff. Also why I enjoy Drach's engineering knowledge
Doble is my favorite steam car builder. They built the most advanced steam cars ever and fastest as well, matched only by Duesenberg.
Been waiting for this one!
23:15 Drach is talking about traction engines and what picture do we see? A horse drawn steam power plant driving a threshing machine. All we need now is Jonesy stuck inside the works... :-D
Two thumbs up on this collaboration! As a naval architect and automobile enthusiast (I have a C6 Corvette Grand Sport) this was fun to watch!
Thanks guys, lots of good points, and recalls a lady violinist who'd spent about 20 years in psychiatric hospitals, and would occasionally interpose in your or her own speech, the rule: traho, trahere, traxi, tractum; and then carry on much better.
3:33 in. It is just time to press "Like".
Always love these deep dives into odd bits that are so important.
Oh HELL YES! Now this... THIS IS CONTENT!
It was definitely not enjoyable being one of the shorter people in R-Div, once they figured out they can shove me anywhere so long as nothing impeded my breathing as that was the only thing to make me claustrophobic. So my first time in the Persian gulf circa 1999 when I found out that yes a main space can infact get much hotter, I was volunteered aka "voluntold" I would be welding some of the economiser tubes. "Um, okay and where are they at on the boiler....?" Nothing quite like getting shoved behind a boiler that was very recently shut off than generation another 1500 degrees locally welding. "Why are all these people staring at me?" "Who, wait what!? Well I think we need to pull him out of there and give him a break.."
With regards to the Red Flag Act, the popular story is that people saw these newfangled steam vehicles as big, noisy, smelly, and dangerous; they could run down children in the roads, their boilers would explode, and all the rest, and that's why the Act was passed.
The reality, at least according to some historians I've been reading, was a bit different. By the 1830's steam powered road vehicles were actually on their way to becoming commonplace. Engineers such as Walter Hancock and Goldsworthy Gurney were improving upon the initial concept of Richard Trevithick's 1802 London Steam Carriage to the point where starting in 1833 Hancock began offering a steam coach service between London and Bath that cut the travel time down from 2 days by horse-drawn stagecoach to a mere 8-10 hours. Other inventors were also building steam drays, smaller vehicles that could be hitched to ordinary carriages to take the place of horses. It doesn't take a great leap to imagine the faces of engineers like Brunel and Daniel Gooch, directors of the nascent Great Western Railway, to see this direct competition from road haulage whose capabilities were not a million miles away from their own railway trains; true, a train could still roughly double the speed of a steam coach and carry more people, but if more steam coaches started running and offered a more frequent, and more importantly cheaper service, the worry was that passengers might not mind the longer travel time if they could save a few bob by going by road rather than rail. Hence, it was actually lobbyists funded by the railways who pushed for the Red Flag Act as a means of squashing their competition.
And as for traction engines being slow, that's also only partially true. Yes, for the most part they were built for power rather than speed (as mentioned before, the Red Flag Act made speed a non-option, at least in theory), but that didn't mean that they weren't capable of speed when called upon. When out on the open road away from the Constable's watch, a well-tuned Aveling & Porter could well make upwards of 12-15 mph under heavy load. That may not sound like much, but it's still almost double the Red Flag Act's limits, and that's with a line of wagons rumbling behind. Some could go even faster; a Fowler 8hp engine, particularly popular with house removal companies, could haul a line of furniture vans at the heady speed of 30 mph on good, flat road.
Source: Traction Engines by Anthony Burton
Thank you for your comment. I was viewing another channel but drifted off to sleep. After that video finished the autoplay selected this one. I dreamt that there was a law in England limiting automobiles to a speed of 2 mph in cities, that the vehicle had to carry one person sounding a horn and another ringing a bell, that the car had to be led by a third person waving a red flag and blowing a whistle, and a team of these three people had to be employed for each vehicle owned. I awoke with this still on my mind. How am I going to check this out? Your post gave me the name of the Act and with that I was able to find some of my dream was true and other parts weren't.
wow, I'm a total tech history nerd and this was almost TOO NERDY FOR ME! Thank you lads, love your bit Drach!
Wow, this is the crossover I never thought I'd see
Very informative, excellent podcast.
Thank you, Drachinifel.
Small, portable, gasoline powered pumps, we called them "Handy Billies", handy bilge pumps. (U.S. Navy Vietnam vet here)
Currently drawing up plans to build a steam car based on the Stanley steam car, the whole history of steam cars is fascinating
Have you looked into the Steam Automobile Club of America?
As an aside, a chap I used to work with told me about his grandfather’s traction engine. His grandfather sold it to a local First Nation back in the early seventies and Bill told me it took two days to drive it about fifty miles. Not a competitor that the Roadrunner needs to worry about!
Oh boy Oh boy. Drach on wheels. 👍
@24:12 Tractor engine vs moder tractor: in such tug-of-war you don't really count on power (measured in kW or horsepower), but effective pulling force (aka tractive effort, measured in kN or tons of force). As power is force times velocity, those huge tractors were capable still machines, although slow.
Cars and ships!!!!!!
I’ve actually worked on a turn of the century Baker electric car
On My way to see BB 60 right now, I plan on going again when you get to the US and at the Alabama as well.And you have a new subscriber to your vintage car history channel as well.
In the Jay Leno's Garage series he has two high pressure (750psi if I remember correctly) steam cars that were made by a single company, which was almost a one man show!
One of them was own by Howard Hughes and both were of a production run of under 27 cars!! The cars were direct drive (i.e. no transmission, the steam cylinders' con-rods were directly attached to the rear axle) and only took a few minutes before they could "get underway". A few more minutes they were ready for speeds over 45mph! Although, they weren't great at stopping quickly... the feed valve hand wheel was just inside of the steering wheel's rim and was almost the same diameter...
The problem they had in the early days of oil are the same we have with modern electric and other eco platforms. Until the point electric "refueling" points are as common as the gas station, Tesla and the others will be city only, just as the early gas powered vehicles were. For example, I live in a very rural area, and the only "public" charging point is a set of three in the Walmart parking lot. The next nearest charging point is nearly 50 miles away, meaning that a person in our area with an electric car has to charge at home... and that once his battery drops below the 40% line it is time for him to go home. Even better options like ethenol or hydrogen are even harder to find. While yes, we can in theory depend on the market forces, the fact that fossil fuels are literally every 10 miles at worst means that the newest options cannot compete.
It's worth noting that the Cugnot Steam Fardier was built in 1769 / 1770. Which is almost inconceivably early and 13 years before the first steam boat (Pyroscaphe)
29:06 - I can't help but wonder if _Prinz Eugen_ might've become a long-term presence in the U.S. Navy (instead of being nuked, ineffectually cleaned, and left to sink at Kwajalein) had the Navy actually looked at the size of her boiler documentation, held onto her trained engineers (at least long enough for them to train American replacements), and, thus, prevented the engine failures that plagued her real-life time in U.S. service.
"while commuting" Yup watch all the drydocks as I head to work and back hehe
I visited the car museum of mulheouse with my mum a few years ago and was astounded by what we would call a buggey that had reached over 92kph in 1898. No seatbelts.
Thanks guys. That was fascinating.
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I too was an FTM on the Long Beach 1974-77, Talos Type
0:15 "... Hang on, is that? That is! That "N" in RATION has a second top!"
35:07 - I wonder if a multiple-expansion engine could be made more compact by nesting the higher-pressure cylinders _within_ the lower-pressure ones (using annular bores and pistons for all but the highest-pressure cylinders), which would also (theoretically, at least) increase efficiency somewhat by helping to keep the cylinders hot (because, instead of the outer surface of each cylinder being directly exposed to the external environment, now only the outer surface of the lowest-pressure cylinder would be so exposed, with the outer surfaces of all the other cylinders being bathed in still-fairly-hot steam, retarding heat loss by conduction through the cylinder bodies).
I was at antique car museum near LAX over the weekend, although mostly from the 1910's and forward.
They have air operated turbines for cleaning tubes. they're little rotary brushes on the end of a long air hose. you shove them into a tube and the rotary action should clean the crud that's clogging up the tube.
And me working on developing a dry steam CPU...I question my life.
nobody ever could get water tube boilers to work on trains, but then by the 1900s engines were already producing too much steam to use anyways
Railways tried oil fired steam engines but cost and high fuel consumption killed the idea. Diesels did the job at far less cost and used far less fuel. Ships have more space so steam hung on for longer but its today's ships are almost entirely diesel powered.
@@Dave5843-d9m
The fuel used on the various railroads also was dependent on the local availsbility of coal or oil. With steam is just wasn't the overall efficiency it was also the maintenance requirements of steam engines vs diesels.
Conversely, attempts by the RN to use loco boilers in destroyers were even less successful.
The biggest difference between most steam locomotives and most ship or stationary boilers is that locomotives only use their water and steam once, there is no condenser, the used steam is simply exhausted to the atmosphere, (this is also used to create draft for the fire). This means that you are using vast quantities of makeup water, often of dubious quality because you have to get it from local water sources all across the land, which leads to big problems with scale buildup. The open space in fire tube boilers proved easier to clean out than water tubes.
I'm a volunteer at a railway museum with an operating steam locomotive (oil fired), and it should also be noted that a locomotive's steam demands vary widely and abruptly, from almost nothing when the engine is 'drifting' (coasting with the throttle almost shut off) to sucking the boiler pressure down when the engineer opens the throttle up. The fire tube boiler also acts as a big steam reservoir.
Bob Smith is correct, although part of the use of the steam exhausting through the smoke stack was to supress sparks. Another problem with steam locomotives was that there were long stretches of rail lines where water had to be hauled, because there wasn't sufficient local water supplies.
An old Santa Fe engineer once explained to me that was one of the reasons Santa Fe switched to diesil electric was because of expense of shipping water in Western Kansas. I imagine there were other areas with similar problems.
Good to see steam powered cars mentioned, thanks.
If you want to see a White Steam Car or the intriguing Double Steamer on the road and being explained see : Jay Lenos Garage here on yt.
Ohohoh one more tech video from drach.. I thumbed it up now.. I will watch it later...
Great video! Thank you.
Reducing scale was the main reason water chemistry became so important. Maintain optimal hardness and pH is vital in reducing boiler downtime
T he steam red flag law was not from the queen but from stage coach Lobbying groups!
They also sabatoged roads and vehicles killing passengers of the steam passenger carrying vehicles.
This was very early and the Red flag laws later discouraged car development.
Interesting subject most do not know about even experts.
Horses were still there though. One of the tankers at the quay and the farmyard engine are both horse-drawn.
Nice to see Drach has good taste in modern cars!! Volvo does not get enough credit 🙂
Drach, you are an inspiration! sm
Hello Wild Bill! That’s always been my unassigned nick name as well!
I was going to show off and mention the UK Locomotive Acts. 😅The reason for the acts was probably not a personal request from Queen Victoria but to protect the railways from potential competition.
At 36:12, a Jeep Carrier!
Seriously though, why would that Essex carrier there be filled with jeeps?
The evolution of technology is an interest of mine. Consequently, the issue of preserving knowledge of old technology is one of my concerns. Books, unfortunately, seem to be out of favor. I find it increasingly more difficult to find old technical works. As I've learned from owners of used book stores, it is almost impossible to sell them ("We used to carry such stuff, but it just took up shelf space so we chucked it all out a few years ago." Ouch). Places I patronized in the past that peddled reprints of old manuals have gone out of business. Consequently, I find your technical presentations both interesting and encouraging. Unfortunately, while people talk about how anything put on the internet is out there forever, that just is not true (only the stuff that you wish was not there has any chance of remaining... it's the law of the contrary). I'm afraid that much of the historical knowledge has a short half-life. The trail of technical innovation will vanish just like knowledge of pyramid building has.
I own a Lord Brassy's Naval Annual from the early 1880's (not "in range" of me as I write, so I cannot give a precise year with confidence). It speaks of the innovation of the "Pipe Boiler." The article describes a logical precursor to the water tube boiler. It also has an extensive discussion about the relative merits of iron vs. steel as a hull material. And have you ever heard of "Woodite"? (even Gooogle hasn't) It is the marvelous stuff that will make hulls self sealing and ships unsinkable. The iron/steel discussion contains the germs of how even better armor can be made. The Woodite failed due to fire risk (it was essentially rubber applied a foot or more thick on the hull's interior) and rapid loss of useful properties with age. However, the concept is reborn in self-sealing fuel tanks on WWII fighter aircraft. One old book, three early technical roots.
I can relate. The internet was supposed to be a medium that would help preserve and share technical information, but in the end, the rise of social media and the monetization of everything has caused the internet to become a black hole where information disappears, rather than being preserved. The ongoing dilution of intellectualism is also to blame, though of course the aforementioned corruption of the internet contributes to that, greatly.
No mention of the high pressure (200 psi) water tube boiler invented by Henry House around 1893. Used in both road vehicles (2 cylinder compound) and boats (1898). Also used as an airplane engine (never flew).
loved this
Always look forward to your Wednesday videos drach
In the US two major Railroads, the SP (Southern Pacific) and the AT&SF (Santa Fe - the one with the War Bonnet paint scheme), began experimenting with oil fired steam locomotives in the mid 1890's and were converting large numbers of locomotives by the late 1890's. Oil firing was a well known and established art by 1899 so upscaling it would have just required wanting to do it, and accepting the occasional "OOPS!". (BOOM!!)
The Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve in Southern California, west of Bakersfield, was a large producer of heavy crude and much of it went to two uses. It was pumped to a simple refinery at Grapevine Pass and separated into heavy bunker fuel which was sent to Long Beach for ship's fuel, and light bunker fuel which went to Barstow to fuel the Southern Pacific locomotives. By the start of the 20th century most of the steam locomotives in the South West were oil fired.
At this rate Drach will have to give us our own Mess... another Engineer video...... please lead on Sir.