before electric motors were mainstream , during the early parts of the industrial revolution there were no electric motors. Steam engines were invented first.
before steam , people used horses to plow fields.
when steam engines were installed, instead of the expensive motor being used for a single purpose they installed line shafting. the steam engine typically turned a shaft that ran across the shop. machines such as stamping machines, printing machinery, drill presses, etc were then run with belts off the mainshaft and clutches could engage the machines to run or de-clutch if they were stopped, but the shaft would run pretty much continuously.
they were used for single puropses, like the early cars, tractors, road building equipment, trains etc used an engine specific to one purpose.
later when electric motors were perfected, they were used more widely then the first would run the line shafting and later as motor production costs decreased each machine began to have its own motor..
steampunking is basically taking antiques and using the parts to make art, jewlery or to repurpose , things like making an old typewriter work as a keyboard so your friends go oh neato.. or putting fish in an old TV set. the drawback is that often antiques are destroyed this way and people aren't always very sensitive about preservation of antiquities, but sometimes , lets say if you found a part of an old machine that could be re-purposed in a different way, is it ok ? You can see the different viewpoints that result from it.. some have a restoration perspective and to others its just old junk finding a new purpose and there are a lot of variants.
I like steampunking because it's artistic and I enjoy re-purposing things but I'm sensitive about destroying antiques.. as an example I had an old printing press that was from long ago. I moved it about until one day I just said I don't have the space and it doesn't have value so I disassembled it. i use the stand it was on for my grinder table. I found some neat castings that can make neat wall brackets for a shelf..
this steam engine I bought is a toy from about 1965. its good to show people the principles of how a steam engine works. the little boiler is heated by burning pellets, the steam creates pressure , which is then fed to a little valve and so arranged so it pushes the piston out , exhausts the steam pressure, then returns with the flywheel driving it back. It is a very simple model. there is more sophistication that can be applied with better valving and such but it's good to show kids the basic principles of what is known of an external combustion engine..
something like a car or lawnmower uses an internal combustion engine, which is in some ways an advancement, except for the fact that they are actually really inefficient. Your car creates a huge amount of heat and we blow the heat energy away through the fan and radiator and that was known to be wasteful but gas was cheap. the engineering will again improve as we can't continue the pollution and also live on earth the way we do because it is not sustainable in our environment..
going to other planets like in star wars is kind of a pipe dream. most things are so far apart that even at the speed of light we'd never get there even in a lifetime and we don't yet even have machines that can travel that fast. the chances of perfecting travel at above light speeds with the little window of time humans have left before pollution kills our environment is quite a challenge and perhaps an impossibility.
Going faster than light is pretty well abstract science and may not be realistic ever. People like to think it's possible, maybe so? the problems came with the industrial revolution that's when we started to have the abilities to create huge environmental issues with our machines and at that time the problem of poisoning the earth seemed like an impossibility. I think I'm on to a different subject now
where I stand the wheel didn't even exist just a few generations ago. now we are here. I'm not sure if humans can care enough about the future of the environment to stop using the inventions that we are now so dependent on and it isn't easy to go backwards with science and invention.
the steam engine represents a time when things changed dramatically for us and machinery made it possible to have mass production of food and thing like that We now need to sustain our higher populations. In order for humans to co exist with nature we would need to bring upon dramatic change very quickly as the environmental issues are happening at an ever increasing rate an some say it's too late to stop the sequence of events.. some are more optimistic. My take on it is that this is just a sad reality. We can't even get governments to work together on enviro issues. We would need to find world cooperation.. your take on it might be different from mine. Its interesting how little we think about it and how we continue to live on ignoring the outcome we will face in another generation or two. that's a blink of the eye compared to human's existence on earth. Our great inventions perhaps caused more catastrophe than they were worth? I think we tend to live for now as humans we care about our lives , maybe the lives of our kids, and we never developed instincts that would care about future generations.. Maybe some have religious beliefs around that. I guess it isn't the place for religious debate and I do respect that others have completely different perspectives than mine.
