I must be wrong though, since nobody has tried to do it for the past 97 years.

Wasn't it you years ago that had a thread about the Cyclone engine? Or at least we talked about it -
https://cyclonepower.com/ Since it's not an internal combustion engine ,burning gasoline or diesel doesn't produce the bad stuff or not as much as in an ICE. And since it doesn't use a boiler but does use a flash steam generator instead, no worries about a stationary engineer license to drive it. Because there is no water in a boiler there is no risk of an explosion. It's the incompressibility of water that causes boiler explosions.

 

Wasn't it you years ago that had a thread about the Cyclone engine? Or at least we talked about it -
https://cyclonepower.com/ Since it's not an internal combustion engine ,burning gasoline or diesel doesn't produce the bad stuff or not as much as in an ICE. And since it doesn't use a boiler but does use a flash steam generator instead, no worries about a stationary engineer license to drive it. Because there is no water in a boiler there is no risk of an explosion. It's the incompressibility of water that causes boiler explosions.

I don't remember said conversation but the cyclone engines are familiar and you're almost certainly correct. This has been a topic of fascination for me for many many years.

 

I don't remember said conversation but the cyclone engines are familiar and you're almost certainly correct. This has been a topic of fascination for me for many many years.

Mine too. If I didn't already have to many unfinished projects I'd try making a small one from not running weed wacker cylinders.

 

The conditions under which this thing operates sound like they would be a nightmare to design around today with computer modeling. Back then, just amazing. I haven't been as impressed by anything in a long time.

 

The conditions under which this thing operates sound like they would be a nightmare to design around today with computer modeling. Back then, just amazing. I haven't been as impressed by anything in a long time.

The engineering effort we humans have exerted for the sake of killing of other humans has always been impressive.

 

The engineering effort we humans have exerted for the sake of killing of other humans has always been impressive.

You're not wrong, I think most of our crowning inventions have been born of necessity tied to warfare. Or were applied to warfare immediately after having been born to more innocuous needs.

The SR71 wasn't a killing machine though. Just the (un-)calm before the storm.

 

You're not wrong, I think most of our crowning inventions have been born of necessity tied to warfare. Or were applied to warfare immediately after having been born to more innocuous needs.

The SR71 wasn't a killing machine though. Just the (un-)calm before the storm.

Military Intelligence is always part of the killing machine. They aim the big rocks on little caves.

 

In an effort to get the thread back on the TS's intended track, one thing that really impressed me when I first read about it was the Jacquard Loom. While invented ~1800, its principles date back more than half a century earlier.

I suspect that if you were to write a fictional story from that era and describe that machine and how it worked in detail, most readers would insist that it is a pure flight-of-fancy in which the author was just taking relatively modern technology (punch cards from the mid-20th century computers, which is when most people likely think that the whole notion of punched cards to any purpose was invented) and retrofitting it into a historical anachronism tp make the story more interesting.

 

In an effort to get the thread back on the TS's intended track, one thing that really impressed me when I first read about it was the Jacquard Loom. While invented ~1800, its principles date back more than half a century earlier.

I suspect that if you were to write a fictional story from that era and describe that machine and how it worked in detail, most readers would insist that it is a pure flight-of-fancy in which the author was just taking relatively modern technology (punch cards from the mid-20th century computers, which is when most people likely think that the whole notion of punched cards to any purpose was invented) and retrofitting it into a historical anachronism tp make the story more interesting.

If anyone of that era saw an automatic bell ringer or an organ played from pins on a cylinder (like a music box) from more than 1000-years ago, they may not think it is too far fetched.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_box#Timeline

 

We were still using easily copied punched cards for encryption keys (crypto variables) in the 1980's until Walker showed how stupid that was.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...y-spy-who-defined-crypto-betrayal-dead-at-77/

Those old peg and punch cards systems were finally replaced.
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/usa/kg84/index.htm

 

If anyone of that era saw an automatic bell ringer or an organ played from pins on a cylinder (like a music box) from more than 1000-years ago, they may not think it is too far fetched.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_box#Timeline

But that wasn't what the TS asked for. The quest is for past technologies that people TODAY might have a hard time believing existed. Furthermore, I don't think very many people today can't related to music box mechanisms -- they are still quite common and how they work is easily understood by nearly every ten year old that looks inside one. The general notion of the existence of player pianos is also far from forgotten. But the notion of such mechanisms controlling quite sophisticated and large manufacturing machines nearly three centuries ago is not something that most people are likely to believe was possible, even though once you look into the mechanisms that actually performed it, they are pretty straightforward (which is not to say that they aren't extremely cleverly designed).

 

The conditions under which this thing operates sound like they would be a nightmare to design around today with computer modeling. Back then, just amazing. I haven't been as impressed by anything in a long time.

Frankly, the Skunk Works itself, like the Apollo program, is something I don’t think we can reproduce today. There are different prevailing social conditions which dictate things like safety measures and some sorts of accountability that those programs didn’t have as constraints.

Even the way the SR71 would intentionally leak fuel while it sat on the tarmac waiting for take off would probably not be acceptable. This is certainly not to say we don’t have amazing engineering efforts today, but they are of a different character. The was a reason that test pilots were legendary, and it came from that era.

 

But that wasn't what the TS asked for. The quest is for past technologies that people TODAY might have a hard time believing existed. Furthermore, I don't think very many people today can't related to music box mechanisms -- they are still quite common and how they work is easily understood by nearly every ten year old that looks inside one. The general notion of the existence of player pianos is also far from forgotten. But the notion of such mechanisms controlling quite sophisticated and large manufacturing machines nearly three centuries ago is not something that most people are likely to believe was possible, even though once you look into the mechanisms that actually performed it, they are pretty straightforward (which is not to say that they aren't extremely cleverly designed).

First, my music box example was not intended to be what the TS asked for. It was said to dispel your fantasy claim that the weaving control technology was beyond science fiction and a flight of fancy. It was simply a next logical step of "programmable" machinery. The punched cards are a next step to an interchangeable cylinders of a self playing organ or automatic churchbell ringer.

Second, your claim that a loom of the 1700s is a "huge industrial machine", well, I think you need to define huge or visit a technology museum. At that time, a huge loom was about the size of two upright pianos. Also, they were mostly manually operated - cranking the next and hand-throwing the shuttle across the loom.

Finally, the economic success of the Jacquard controller is, in itself, proof that the technology is immediately understandable, trusted and valuable to anyone in the weaving industry. After all, the jacquard is simply doing something automatically that some poor sod was doing manually (adjusting the hundreds of yarns into a specific pattern before throwing the shuttle). Where were his patterns coming from? Little cards very similar to the cards - hand written instead of punched but not a technological leap. I just don't think a Jacquard system is any more complex than a self-playing organ and certainly not a "flight of fancy".