Watt Engine                                         

•  Watt's improved engines could be used to run factory machines--efficient enough and motion was smooth enough
• high pressure engines developed after 1800 were needed for transportation applications (the Watt engine was too heavy)
•  significance of steam power
• a whole new science was invented by scientists trying to understand how steam engines worked

Railroad:

• Rails are a much earlier innovation than locomotives: horsedrawn carts on wooden rails used in Germany since 16th century, in England since 17th century.  Iron rails about 1770.  Mostly used in mine but by the end of 1825 there were 300-400 miles of iron public railroad
• the idea of a moving steam engine was obvious, but there were problems.
  • you can use a stationary steam engine to wind a cable to pull a load
    
  • need for high pressure steam engines
  • widespread belief that there would not be enough friction, that rise would have to be less than 1 foot per 100
  • experiments with steam carriages--eg. Cugnot in France in 1770--had led to English laws to keep steam carriages from scaring horses by requiring a man walking in front of it with a flag or lantern
• early experiments on mine (colliery) railways

 

• First experimental locomotive built by Richard Trevithick in 1803-4 for the 10 mile Penydarren colliery railway.  One cylinder, 8 1/2 inches in diamter, 4 1/2 foot stroke, probably 30-50 lb/sq in. working pressure.  It was too heavy for the track so the owners used it as a stationary engine.
• Trevithick tried again in 1805 with no more success, went to South American in disgust
• by 1812 similar locomotives started to be used on colliery railroads (in the north of England--Leeds and on Tyneside) between mine and warf. They were useful to haul goods from the mine to the nearest water transportation Economical because Napoleonic wars increased price of animal feed.
• 1825 Stockton and Darlington Railroad was first common carrier to use locomotives, though the main need for the line was to haul coal from a mine to the coast.  
• Builders of Liverpool-Manchester railroad were locked in a debate over whether to use horses or locomotives.  Decided to sponsor a contest to see if locomotives were practical at all and pick the best design. Rainhill Trials (video of recreation)

•  held Oct. 1829.  Contest was to pull 20 tons at 10 mph and make 40 trips over a 1 1/2 mile course.
• 10 entries were expected but only three appeared--Timothy Hackworth, engineer of the Stockton and Darlington RR entered the Sans Pareil, John Braithwaite and John Ericsson entered the Novelty (which had the advantage of being a particularly light weight design), and Robert Stephenso n entered the Rocket (animation).

• Sans Pareil failed to complete the course, Novelty also broke down, but Rocket not only completed the course but averaged 15 mph, winning the 500 pound prize
• More important this convinced people of the practicality of locomotives.  It was a major spectator sport--more than 10,000 people saw the trials
• Liverpool-Manchester builders ordered seven locomotives.  They built their rails to the gauge of Stephenson's locomotive--the 4 ft. 8 1/2 inch gauge of the Killingworth Colliery Wagonway.  That is still the standard gauge today.
• Funded by merchants who wanted lower priced transportation than the existing canal, which had a monopoly.  This line competed for the first time with canals, since it connected an industrial center with its port.  Canal interests tried to block its building in Parliament.  Speed was the key advantage--unexpectedly 1/2 of revenue came from passengers.

• railroad spread rapidly after that--between 1830 and 1850 6,000 miles of railroad were built in England  National Railroad Museum
• railways were built far beyond any economic need, but they trained a generation of engineers.  In 1847 more than 1/4 million men were employed in constructing 6,455 miles of railways, with a total expenditure on railways about 10% of national income.
• where did the money come from for so much to be invested in building railroads?
• it came from investors--more people invested, not just rich people
• limited liability corporation--if the company goes broke you lose only what you invested, you aren't responsible to the creditors beyond that
  
• first general limited liability law New York state, 1811
• a similar law was passed in Britain in 1854
  
• some railroads were very profitable but many were not--over-enthusiasm for new technology when the market wasn't there yet

Oil:
sometimes found naturally--tar pits and bituminous springs
first extracted systematically in Balakhani in Azurbaijan

used for waterproofing boats, lighting was the use than led to larger scale extraction
the development of the internal combustion engine led to much larger demand
for the relationship between crude oil and gasoline see Modern Refining

invention of the automobile:
the automobile was revolutionary compared to the the railroad because it allowed individualized travel
notice the experimenting with different ideas of what an automobile should be before one wins out

before that there was the horse and carriage

• carriages weren't common until the 18th century even in Europe because roads weren't good enough
• early colonial roads were cleared paths that quickly became rutted, not to mention the problem of mud
• if you wanted to transport a heavy load in New England you waited until winter and used a sleigh
• the most characteristic carriage in the U.S. was the American buggy--lightweight practical vehicles

Inventions of self-propelled road vehicles started in the late 18th and early 19th century, but low pressure steam engines just didn't make a worthwhile vehicle.  (more early history )

 

•  A French artillery officer, Nicholas Joseph Cugnot, built and ran a 3 wheeled carriage powered by a steam engine in 1769, but which ran off the road the first time it went into a curve at its full speed--3 miles an hour.  It was the first self-propelled highway vehicle, but it was no improvement over the horse.

• Some steam powered busses were actually used commercially in England in the first half of the 19th century, but once the railroad took off it was clearly superior.
• The railroad and stagecoach industries succeeded in having a law passed to stop these in 1865 (repealed 1896)--on the ground of the dangers of frightening horses self-propelled vehicles on public highways were limited to a speed of 4 miles an hour and had to be preceded by a man on foot carrying a red flag

what you need is an internal combustion engine (or a much improved steam engine or battery) and a market for highway vehicles:

• An internal combustion engine burns the fuel inside the engine (as different from a steam engine)--usually uses gasoline
  
• Etienne Lenoir (a Belgian mechanic working in Paris) developed a workable two cycle internal combustion engine in 1860, but it weighed several hundred pounds and developed 2 horsepower.  He actually built and ran a vehicle using his engine, but it was an isolated experiment that didn't lead to anything.
• Nicholas Otto did better with a four stroke engine, and a number of German inventors immediately wanted to put it in a road vehicle.  Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach and Karl Benz built the first workable vehicles with one cylinder engines (first a motorcycle and a tricycle) and developed workable automobiles in the 1880s and had them in commercial production in the early 1890s.  Significant commercial production developed in the 1890s in Germany and France (whose advantage was good roads), with Britain trying to catch up.  These were mostly playthings for wealthy sportsmen, though by 1900 touring cars were used some by wealthy families instead of carriages and there was some use of electric automobiles by wealthy ladies in the city.

  Daimler 1886

you also needed decent roads, and the bicycle boom provided these, as well as a sense of the market.  The automobile probably could have been built 20 years earlier, but the interest was not there.

• J. K. Starley introduced the safety bicycle in 1885.  People had been satisfied with the railroad--only with the bicycle did they think of long-distance travel over ordinary roads.  Freedom to travel where you wanted.
• the pneumatic tire was invented by John Dunlop in Ireland in 1888 specifically for use in bicycles
• the automobile would not have been able to compete with the railroad in comfort and speed without the hard-surface road and the pneumatic tire

Flight had a long prehistory before the Wright Brothers, but inventors who don't successfully market a product don't usually get credit

• Flight had been a dream for a long time
• the legend of Icarus is best know, but occurs in other cultures
• in the Arab world Ibn Firnas launched himself from a tower in a glider (glided down from the tower)  in 875 AD and lived to tell the tale
• a monk named Eilmer in England made a similar flight just after 1000 AD
• should gliders (that soar like a bird) count?  video, records
  
• early designs for airplanes were usually by direct analogy to birds and therefore with flapping wings (Leonardo).  

The first successful products were balloons

• Montgolfier brothers used both hot air and hydrogen
• Balloons came into use in the late 18th century and saw significant use in the Civil War and for sport, so there was some familiarity with the atmosphere as an environment.
• 
  

Early flight theory and experiments

• Sir George Cayley laid out much of the necessary theory for flight in the early 1800s 
• the Reverend Burrell Cannon felt called by God in 1900 to build an Ezekiel wheel flying machine
• Frederick Marriott built a steam powered dirigible in 1869
• his nephew John Montgomery made some key inventions in wing shape for gliders in 1883
• In France starting in 1871 Alphonse Penaud designed rubber band powered model airplanes using propellers instead of flapping wings
  
• Octave Chanute experimented with gliders and promoted flight

So what was left for the Wright Brothers to do?

• a successful engine
• how to turn without just slipping sideways

The invention of the airplane:

• By the end of the 1800s gliders had been flown successfully up to 250 meters and a number of people were working on powered gliders.
• The Smithsonian Institution's head, Samuel Pierpont Langley, had a government grant to build a heavier-than-air craft.  His approach was to "urge a system of rigid planes through the air at great velocity"--in other words like running a knife through butter.  He visualized air as a series of identical elastic cubes.

• He successfully flew an unpiloted engine-driven plane before the Wright brothers but his manned version failed to fly and had fundamental problems with control.  He owned the Washington establishment--nobody paid any attention to the Wright Brothers.

The Wright Brothers (video: the first filmed Wright brothers flight)

• the Wright brothers emphasized the fluid nature of air, and sought a plane that was flexible and adjustable, not rigid.
• Now mind you, they were not scientists, but they were bicycle-makers and racers who read the professional literature, studied the problems of aviation with great care and corresponded with other aeronautical researchers such as Octave Chanute.  The Wright brothers even built their own wind tunnel--6 feet long and 16 inches square--to study the relationship of various wing shapes and lift and also propellers.
• 
  
• Some of the other researchers were professional engineers and scientists, but the Wrights could do just as good empirical research
  • they used existing scientific knowledge, but this wasn't good enough to actually predict flight characteristics
  • they were lucky in the analogies they picked when there wasn't a clear scientific answer
    
  • they used the scientific method
  • they didn't publish scientific results, they were just trying to solve problems
    
• they developed a system to turn the plane with a rudder linked to a system to warping the entire wing so that the plane would bank in flight, tested it extensively in gliders.

• They built their own gasoline engine, because they could not find a suitable one on the market, and a much more efficient propeller.  They successfully flew a powered airplane Dec. 17, 1903 (for more on the Wright Brothers and their process of invention--and lots of pictures and quick-time movies--see To Fly is Everything and to listen to a story about their forgotten sister go to: The forgotten Wright and click listen)
  

 
 Wright Brothers flight, National Air and Space Museum

Flight was initially used more for entertainment than for practical purposes:

barnstorming

Electricity:

• gas lighting in public use about 1815
• intention of the battery by Volta in 1800
• telegraph into practical use around 1850
• effective electrical generator to produce electricity from steam power or water power--mid 19th century
• electric arc lights 1870s
• Edison's incandescent light: first commercial use 1882
• streetcar (trolley, tram): 1880s
• electric motors:
• direct current: 1880s for streetcars
• alternating current: Tesla and Westinghouse, early 1890s