What is a Steam Engine?
A steam engine is an engine that uses steam to power itself. The steam engine is one of the oldest engines, dating back some two-thousand years. The steam engine has played an important role in the Industrial Revolution, and in the modern world the steam engine accounts for more than half of the electricity in the entire world. A steam engine consists of basically two parts: a motor, and a steam generator. A steam engine might also include condensers to collect the steam and return it as water to the system, superheaters to allow the steam to reach temperatures it wouldn’t naturally achieve, and pumps to provide a consistent flow of water. Traditionally, heat for a steam engine was provided by burning something, usually either wood or coal, in a steam box. In modern times this heat may instead be provided by tapping geothermal heat, or by creating nuclear reactions and capturing the heat from that process. Hero of Alexandria described the earliest known steam engine in the 1st century.
“Food” for the journey. The coal supply in this compact steam engine sits in a hopper just behind the cab. It takes energy to do absolutely anything you can think of—to ride on a skateboard, to fly on an aeroplane, to walk to the shops, or to drive a car down the street. Most of the energy we use for transportation today comes from oil, but that wasn’t always the case. A few decades ago, coal was the world’s favourite fuel and it powered everything from trains and ships to the ill-fated steam planes invented by American scientist Samuel P. Langley, an early rival of the Wright brothers. What was so special about coal? There’s lots of it inside Earth, so it was relatively inexpensive and widely available. Coal is an organic chemical, which means it’s based on the element carbon. Coal forms over millions of years when the remains of dead plants get buried under rocks, squeezed by pressure, and cooked by Earth’s internal heat. Lumps of coal are really lumps of energy. The carbon inside th
