Early Power and Transport Young Engineer s Guide to Various and Ingenious Machines Bryan Lawton
Portions Reprinted from Various and Ingenious Machines, published by Brill, Copyright 2004 (with permission). This edition published in 2017 by ASME Press (The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Two Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA, www.asme.org). All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS WORK HAS BEEN OBTAINED BY THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS FROM SOURCES BELIEVED TO BE RELIABLE. HOWEVER, NEITHER ASME NOR ITS AUTHORS OR EDITORS GUARANTEE THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF ANY INFORMATION PUBLISHED IN THIS WORK. NEITHER ASME NOR ITS AUTHORS AND EDITORS SHALL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ERRORS, OMISSIONS, OR DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS INFORMATION. THE WORK IS PUBLISHED WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT ASME AND ITS AUTHORS AND EDITORS ARE SUPPLYING INFORMATION BUT ARE NOT ATTEMPTING TO RENDER ENGINEERING OR OTHER PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. IF SUCH ENGINEERING OR PROFESSIONAL SERVICES ARE REQUIRED, THE ASSISTANCE OF AN APPROPRIATE PROFESSIONAL SHOULD BE SOUGHT. ASME shall not be responsible for statements or opinions advanced in papers or... printed in its publications (B7.1.3). Statement from the Bylaws. For authorization to photocopy material for internal or personal use under those circumstances not falling within the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act, contact the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, Tel: 978-750-8400, www.copyright.com. Requests for special permission or bulk reproduction should be addressed to the ASME Publishing Department, or submitted online at: https://www.asme.org/shop/books/ book-proposals/permissions ASME Press books are available at special quantity discounts to use as premiums or for use in corporate training programs. For more information, contact Special Sales at CustomerCare@asme.org Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lawton, B. (Bryan) author. Title: Early power and transport : young engineer s guide to various and ingenious machines / Bryan Lawton. Description: New York, NY, USA : ASME Press, 2017. Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017042509 ISBN 9780791861417 Subjects: LCSH: Power resources--history. Transportation--History. Conveying machinery--history. Classification: LCC TJ163.2.L374 2017 DDC 621.8/12--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017042509
For my grandsons, Tom and Kit.
Table of Contents Foreword Preface vii ix 1. Animal Power 1 Introduction 1 Man Power 3 Slavery 7 Animal Power 9 Appendices 15 Treadmills 16 Muscular Activity in Animals 19 2. Water Power 23 Introduction 23 Vertical-Axis (Norse or Greek) Mills 23 Horizontal-Axis (Roman) Mills 29 Appendices 41 Power Output of Water Wheels 41 Horizontal-Axis Undershot Wheels (Roman Mills) 42 Vertical-Axis Wheels (Greek or Norse Mills) and Pelton s Wheel. 46 3. Wind Power 51 Introduction 51 Vertical-axis Windmills 51 Horizontal-axis Windmills 53 Appendices 67 Theoretical Power of Windmills 67 Wind Distribution 70 4. Land Transport 75 Introduction 75 Prehistory and the Ancient Civilisations 75 Riding 80 Greece and Rome 81 Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern 85 Early Modern Period 87 Appendices 95 Two-wheeled Vehicles 95 Forces on Draught Beasts: Limits of Traction 98 Wheels on Soft Surfaces 101 Wheels on Hard Surfaces 106 v
Power and Maximum Velocity 109 Steering 110 5. Water Transport 115 Introduction 115 Ancient Civilisations 115 Greece and Rome 121 Medieval and Renaissance 125 Early Modern 132 Appendices 138 Force and Power Required by Ships 138 Strength of Hulls 143 Rowing 146 Sailing 150 6. Undersea and Aerial Transport 153 Introduction 153 Undersea Craft 153 Air Craft 159 Bibliography 165 Author Index 171 Subject Index 175 vi
Foreword Bryan Lawton is the author of the acclaimed Various and Ingenious Machines. VIM is a 1300 page, two-volume work, which provides a well-researched history of mechanical engineering worldwide, from prehistory to roughly the beginnings of industrialization. The author received the American Society of Mechanical Engineering s Engineering-Historian Award for VIM, in 2016. Dr. Lawton is a retired Reader in Thermal Power at Cranfield University in Shrivenham, UK. One of the main purposes of his two-volume VIM is to not only deliver an outline of mechanical engineering history, but also to provide an adequate mathematical treatment for each topic, without straying beyond an engineering first degree level. Thus the reader can enjoy a well-written history and can supplement it with a concise mathematical explanation in the appendices at the end of most of the chapters. The author has told me that VIM represents about ten years of research and three years of solid writing. The result is a seminal work on the historical mechanical engineering theme, If it moves, it s mechanical. It is here, we are now treated by Dr. Lawton to a vade mecum of VIM, the Young Engineer s Guide to Various and Ingenious Machines. What follows this Foreword is a guidebook to the magisterial 1300 page VIM, with shortened chapters but still containing elements of the mathematical appendices. Thus we have VIM in a shortened, more affordable and accessible form, to serve as a guide for possibly probing deeper into the parent work. In this Volume 1, we have six chapters on Power and Transportation which provide a synopsis of the thirteen chapters in VIM s Volume 1. Briefly they are: Chapter 1 deals with muscular work and power, from both humans and animals. Even as late as 1850, 94% of America s industrial power was supplied by humans and animal muscle, with machines supplying the remaining 6%. Waterpower, the subject of Chapter 2, is shown to have origins going back to early Greek times, even chronicled in poetry. Chapter 3 deals with wind power, tracing the development of windmills which appear some 700 years after the first use of water power. Land transport is dealt with in Chapter 4, covering the development of wheeled vehicles. Chapter 5 covers the history of transport by water, with a history of sailing ships. Balloons and submarines are subjects in Chapter 6 on undersea and aerial transport. vii
In these chapters, the reader will be rewarded with appendices giving mathematical explanations to supplement the written material. Lee S. Langston ASME Life Fellow Professor Emeritus Mechanical Engineering University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06269 viii
Preface This volume grew out of Various and Ingenious Machines: The Early History of Mechanical Engineering, which was first published in 2004 in two volumes. It was intended to cover the whole of early mechanical engineering history from Palaeolithic flint mining through to the start of the industrial revolution. It was quite extensive, but in 2016, Lee S. Langston, Professor Emeritus, University of Connecticut, suggested that some key chapters from the original might be condensed to produce something shorter and less expensive. He thought that engineering students, many of whom are very interested in the history of mechanical devices and how they work, might benefit. Thus, the task was to reduce the 1274 pages of the original to two volumes, each of about 150 pages. This could be achieved only by selecting key sections of the original and condensing them without losing too much of their impact. Consequently, this volume contains six chapters on power generation and transport during the ancient, classical, medieval, and early modern periods. A sister volume covers mining and metalworking. Each chapter closes with a short appendix covering the elementary mathematical theory, up to first degree level. Such analysis should be of interest to engineering students and may also be useful to experimental archaeologists and others who, not being content simply to read about the alleged performance of historical machines, re-create and test them. And if the reader prefers, he can simply omit the appendices without losing the historical development of the subject. Thanks are due to Professor Lee S. Langston, for his suggestion, mentioned above, and for generously agreeing to write a Foreword. I am also grateful to the original publishers, E J Brill, Leiden, for permission to make this selection. Finally, I must thank my wife, Barbara, for her careful checking of the manuscript, for many useful suggestions, and for her great forbearance. Bryan Lawton. ix