Ah, yes, Steve, the return of the ‘hanging chad’, that would be so much fun.
]]>The belt system is still used on farms throughout the world, and may be powered by a waterwheel, or turbine, or by a jacked-up tractor [as my neighbor in Germany did]. There are a lot of farms in New York state that still use waterwheels to power a lot of things.
One of my earliest jobs was in a factory that had shafts running the length of the shop I worked in, with various pieces of equipment run by belts dropping down from the shaft. As I was young and stupid, I would be sent up the ladder to throw a belt over a pulley on the shaft when a belt broke, or a new piece of equipment needed to be used.
From what I have read, Babbage would go off on tangents, and might well have decided to build a new type of steam engine while he was working on the Analytical Engine. The government was constantly complaining that he wasn’t what we would now call ‘goal oriented’.
]]>I had the privilege of seeing one of these early machine shops run by water power when I visited one of our state museums, the belts are all there, as is the Pelton water wheel which powered it (and later on I hiked upstream to where the water came from for the Pelton wheel, it was piped from a height of approximately 300 feet above the machine shop to get sufficient head to drive the water wheel fast), and following the arrangement of belts from the wheel up to a rotating shaft that has pullies on it and down to the individual machine tools is fascinating. Well, early factories were like that, scaled up by a factor of 1,000, but if they weren’t built near a source of water that could be tapped that way, a steam engine got put in place of the Pelton wheel instead.
– Badtux the Steampunk Penguin
]]>This is one of those great ‘what if’ events, i.e. ‘What if it could have been built?’ How would history have been altered?
Badtux, the Brits are doing it, and if a steam engine was specified, they will build the steam engine too. When they do reproductions, they don’t settle for half measures. They would really go for authenticity. They might never fire up the steam engine again, after testing the system, but they would really want to see if it worked. Think reenactors on steroids.
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