The a device that could convert heat to mechanical work.

Yet the steam engine wasn't developed all at once.

It was an invention that had its roots over 2,000 years in the past.

Learn more about the steam engine and how it was developed on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. It's become a running theme in many of my episodes that things we think of as

being recent inventions have their origins far earlier than most people

realize and this is most definitely true for the steam engine.

The concept behind a steam engine is pretty simple.

You boil water using some sort of heat source,

which was usually wood or coal in the early industrial revolution.

The water then turns to a steam which is a hot gas.

Because of its high temperature, this gas then exerts a pressure that can be used to do work.

This pressure can then spin a turbine or lift a piston, which in turn can be harnessed, turn a wheel, or a gear to produce

mechanical work. This is a gross simplification, but I think it captures the spirit of what a simple

steam engine does. The first documented case of using hot steam to create mechanical motion

dates back 2,000 years to the first century. An ancient engineer by the name of Hero of

Alexandria who taught at the Museum of

Alexandria if you remember the previous episode I did on it built a device that was called

an EOLA pile. An EOLA pile is a pretty simple device. It's a sphere with nozzles bent in opposite direction sticking out, with the sphere attached to an axle to allow it to spin.

When heated, the steam would shoot out the nozzles causing the entire device to rotate rapidly.

While Hero was often credited as the inventor of the EOLA pile,

he probably didn't create the first one.

The Roman architect Vattruvius had mentioned an Eola pile a few decades earlier, and that was probably based on the work done by an Alexandrian Greek by the name of Satibius as early as 200 years before that.

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