Steam Turbine

The Gearwork Prophets: Mechanical Minds Before the Machine Age 1 The Gearwork Prophets - Part 1: The Antikythera Mechanism: The First Analog Computer 2 The Gearwork Prophets - Part 2: South-Pointing Chariot: The Inertial Guidance System 3 The Gearwork Prophets - Part 3: Heron’s Automation: Steam Engines & Holy Water Vending Machines 4 The Gearwork Prophets - Part 4: Archimedes' Mechanical Planetariums 5 The Gearwork Prophets - Part 5: Zhang Heng’s Seismoscope: The First Earthquake Detector ← Series Home The Mechanized Miracles of Alexandria In the 1st century CE, the brilliant Greek inventor Heron of Alexandria detailed devices in his book Pneumatica that blurred the line between machinery and life,. His workshops produced automata, or self-operating devices, designed both to serve practical needs and to astonish. Heron engineered temple doors that opened by “divine magic” and even created a rudimentary vending machine,. His most prophetic invention, however, was a simple spinning sphere that demonstrated a profound truth about energy: controlled mechanical motion could be generated from raw heat. ...

Harvesting the Elements: Pre-Industrial Energy & Extraction 1 Harvesting the Elements – Part 1: The Deep Earth Blueprint: Chinese Gas Extraction and the 1,000m Well 2 Harvesting the Elements – Part 2: Focused Fire: Re-examining the Reality of Archimedes’ Solar Weapon 3 Harvesting the Elements – Part 3: The Automated Current: How Water and Tide Mills Revolutionized Labor 4 Harvesting the Elements – Part 4: The Untapped Revolution: Heron’s Aeolipile and the First Steam Turbine ← Series Home The Spinning Sphere of Alexandria In the first century CE, the brilliant Greek inventor Heron of Alexandria documented a device that seemed to defy its era: the Aeolipile. Often dismissed as a curious novelty or philosophical plaything, this deceptively simple machine was, in its purest form, the world’s first recorded steam turbine. This invention provided a working demonstration of a fundamental law of physics that would not be formally defined until Sir Isaac Newton developed his principles 1,600 years later. ...