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The origins of the steam engine (2023)
An essay with interactive animated diagrams
From Heinrich Hiesserle von Chodaw's 1612 Raiss Buch und Leben, MS vi A 12, f.49r, Prague National Museum Drebbel’s “perpetual motion” harnessed natural changes to both temperature and atmospheric pressure. In the late 1630s, at Vauxhall near London, the German or Danish gunmaker Kaspar Kalthoff attempted to apply the same water-raising properties on a much larger scale, as did the English writer William Petty in 1649. Aeolipiles were often used by alchemists to produce a blowtorch effect, and could also be directed at turbines, as suggested by Leonardo da Vinci in the fifteenth century, by the Ottoman scientist Taqi ad-Din in 1551, and by Giovanni Branca in 1629.
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