Stirling engines - A complete history of Engines

Some time ago, somebody invented the steam engine. The steam engine works by heating water in an airtight container to make steam. The steam is massively expanded water, and the result is lots of pressure.  Once you have lots of pressure you bleed a bit of that pressure intermittently into a piston, and the piston gets pushed. Connect that to a crank, and you have rotational motion, and an industrial revolution. You also have lots of factory workers being blown up in hideous, explosive  accidents, with all the screaming, and loss of productivity that goes with being killed.

Later someone invented the internal combustion engine, and the turbine engine. These run on fossil fuel. They had a pretty good run until somebody discovered it was making us sick and killing everyone.

The turbine engine is a big thing you tend to stick to the ground in a power plant and make electricity. That way the factories could all have much safer working conditions where hardly anyone ever got blown up, but it also kills the earth a bit. Just a little every day. And sometimes some of them explode anyway. That's not so good, because some use uranium to make the heat, and that never ends well.

Anyway...

The internal combustion engine tends to be used in portable things like cars, because they pack such a lot of punch for such a small weight in fuel. They also kill the world, just a little bit each day, and sometimes explode, and sometimes just mash into each other, and mash into other things that tend to be near roads. They do a lot of mashing.

The main advantage with the turbine, and internal combustion engines, is that they spread out the damage. Just one or two people from any given factory at any given time get killed by them rather than taking out half the factory's workforce all in one go like a steam engine disaster might. The mayhem and disaster is spread out so that each factory takes just a small share of the disruption to productivity. Except perhaps with the uranium stuff. I think that's why Australia is shipping all our uranium to distant countries. To move it as far away as possible.

Anyway...

A Stirling engine on the other hand is a slightly more peaceful beast that doesn't really do a lot, but what it does, it does pretty thoughtfully. Historically it fits between the steam engine and the stuff we use today (2013, just in case someone reads this in 40 years). The Stirling engine is an engine that uses the difference in heat between two of it's bits of kit, to make stuff spin around without all the explosions.

There.

That's the design description out of the way.

It's very safe, because it doesn't have a pressurised container. It needs a source of heat, but that can be solar, or waste heat from something else. Rotting compost, your wireless router, whatever. They are not a very powerful engine, which is why the internal combustion engine took over, and they are not very responsive to sudden changes in desired power output. That's also why the internal combustion engine took over. And they are not very powerful... Internal combustion engine blah blah blah.

So...

The most beneficial thing as far as I'm concerned is that they wont blow up and kill me.

They're not very useful. But that's not going to stop me making one.

The kind of thing that will stop me making one, is more likely to be that I have no idea how.

I've never made an engine before, and have also never met anyone who has, but it turns out they are a pretty simple kind of beast, and with a bit of luck, wire, string, and the total combined wealth of human knowledge stored on the Internet, I might be able to make one.

People are very clever, and there are some really helpful ones out there that are willing to help me.

I'll be trying to make a very small Stirling engine that runs on the power of a small candle, that will do no work, but will hopefully work.



120 Things in 20 years - Stirling engine - It might go round and round.

Wind energy - History

I often find the history of an invention or method to be very interesting reading. Not so with the history of wind energy.

The history of wind energy goes something like this....

Someone in Persia (Iran (Islamic Repiblic of Iran)) came up with the idea somewhere around 700 - 800 BCE, but we only have someone else's word for that as there is no record of it anywhere.
It's also claimed someone in Europe came up with it at roughly the same time, but there's no record of that either.
I'd put my money on Persia. They had a stack of good ideas coming out of that area at that time. But who knows. Europe was just gearing up to start burning interesting and particularly intelligent women at the stake, so perhaps the dark ages were brought on by a hundred years or so of property developers getting upset about all the windmills being built. Anyway...

Then the Dutch did a bit of work.

yada yada yada... industrial revolution...

Some farmers used them a lot to pump water, and a bit for generating electricity.

Then a semi-famous actor by the name of Ronald Reagan took some cash that was put aside for R & D on wind energy , and spent it all on ray guns in space or something. I presume that was a good idea.

Then along came the recent past, where we see wind power being a pretty mainstream way of generating lots of nice clean electricity.

This bit's interesting....
According to a recent survey, the present seems to indicate every single person* on earth is taking an intense interest in home made wind energy.

And that's pretty much it for the history of wind.

Did I mention I had a big day yesterday? I'm going back to bed.



*It's possible that there is a fair degree of error in that statistic as my sample size is quite limited, but I'm pretty sure I speak for everyone in this room when I say "Everyone here is actively involved in wind energy."

Mold making - History

We call jelly "jelly". Where you are from, you call jelly, "jello".

Around five or six thousand years ago, someone sat in the sand. Then a man named Voyeuris Paparatzzis poured melted wax into the depression, and the first casting was made. Like all new technology, for the first few years, mold making was used primarily as a medium for the distribution of pornography, and tempting people into the original Egyptian pyramid schemes. But not very long after that, molds started to become used in more productive capers like war.

The very popular xS1000 model
spearhead mold from 1400-1000 BCE 

Molds were useful tools in the waging of war because of their ability to rapidly reproduce things like spear, and arrow heads. Molds also came in handy when taking over a recently conquered country, because the conquerer could flood the market with counterfeit copies of the local currency, and inexpensive plastic furniture. This would destabilize and undermine the existing regime, leading to it's eventual collapse and subsequent overthrow.

Using war as a method of transportation, molds migrated all over the shop, and started to pop up everywhere. Soon the pottery, glass and jewelery manufacturing industry got hold of the idea, and began making household items. 

Prior to the invention of the casting process, artisans would simply pour their molten silver onto the ground and hope it would spontaneously take the intricate dolphin shape they desired. Interestingly it was also around this time that prayer and swearing were invented.

Casting was about to change everything.

It's later, and the mold has found its place in mainstream society. At around this time a clerk working in the US patent office named Ike Andy predicted that "In the future there will be as many as seven of these so called molds in use around the world." 

The future often surpasses our expectations.

It's now the future, and today, like many others, I have a jelly mold all of my own. So common and inexpensive has the mold become, that I owe nothing on my jelly mold and own it outright. 

The world has come full circle, and now that everyone in the developed world has a jelly mold, we find ourselves so affluent, that we don't even use them. We now get robots to mold our jelly in massive jelly making robot dormitories, called "factories". Now, not only do we not mold our own jelly, we no longer even eat it. It's rapidly becoming something only the very young will have anything to do with, because it really only has the attribute "wobbly" going for it in the first place.

Now our once valuable molds sit idle in the cupboard next to the sink, even though future archaeologists will unearth our jelly molds, and rightly attribute great significance to them.

And that, is the history of the casting process.*

*Actual history may differ from that depicted.

Cheese - Legend

It turns out cheese isn't complex magic after all.

Cheese is made from milk, and the interesting bits of milk are it's fat, and it's protein. Cheeses also often contains rennet. Rennet is found in young mammal stomachs. Which is odd because young mammals don't eat cheese. It seems the rennet acts on a protein called "casein" within the milk, causing it to coagulate. Perhaps the young mammals use it to digest milk.

Vegetarian rennet is made from some microbe or another.

As with many of the yummy things in life, I've read that monks are thanked for their input into making cheese as we know it, but before that it may have been discovered that if you milk a goat and store that milk in an animal stomach you get a cheese of sorts. Apparently, in the Middle East, there is a legend of a Nomad doing just this and discovering the beginnings of cheese. It's also possible that cheese was first discovered by me in the delicatessen section of a supermarket, but from my research I find fewer facts, and only one anecdote supporting this history.

Pictured here is our goat Granger. Granger is male, and as such, has no place in the legend of cheese other than having some rennet in his gut as a kid.