Today, the steam engine comes to Russia. The University
of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series
about the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
The first steam engines came out of
southwestern England just after 1700. They were big and
complex. Europe was slow to adopt them, and it was 1755
before one reached the Western
hemisphere. Almost every engine installed during the
sixty years before James Watt
was a low-pressure engine built in, or copied from,
England.
A fine English engineer, John Desaguliers, was one of the
early developers of steam power. His father, a French
Protestant minister, smuggled him out of France in a wine
cask when he was a baby. That was just after the Edict of Nantes had been repealed,
stripping Protestants of religious freedom in Catholic
France.
Meanwhile, the French Sun King, Louis XIV, had created an
extraordinary array of fountains in the Gardens at
Versailles. The Russian Czar created a similar summer
garden for his palace in St. Petersburg. In 1717
Desaguliers went to Russia to create a steam-engine power
supply for the Czar's fountains. Russia was probably the
first country outside of England with a working steam
engine. The Czar gave no more thought to powering his
country's industries with steam than Louis XIV did. This
was about play, not work.
However, by 1750, a very bright young Russian engineer,
Ivan Polzunov, had become a manager in the Czar's Altai
silver mines in Central Siberia. The mines' headquarters
were located in St. Petersburg, next to the summer
gardens. Polzunov was struck by the potential of those
steam-powered pumps.
By 1763, he had a detailed plan for using steam to solve
the most serious energy-supply problem in the production
of gold and silver: blowing air into the smelters. As the
mines expanded their smelting operation, Polzunov was
given a free hand to build the engine. It became a
terrible task, since technicians didn't exist. Polzunov
had to do much of the manual labor himself.
But he was also at liberty to invent, and he created two
utterly new features as he built his engine. One was a
feedback controller to regulate the water level in the
boiler. The other was a back-and-forth rotating power
takeoff device, which he kept in balance by building two
side-by-side cylinders instead of just one. The result
was a remarkably original engine capable of delivering 32
horsepower, much more than a typical English engine
could.
Then two things caused this remarkable contribution
simply to be set aside. First, Polzunov, only 38 years
old, died of overwork just as he finished the engine. The
engine ran for several months; but, when it failed, there
was no sustaining expertise to keep it running.
The other reason that Russia lost the running start that
Polzunov had given her was, perhaps, even sadder. The
Czar was in the mining business for profit. Polzunov's
work was there to serve the Czar, not Russia. It never
occurred to the Czar to capitalize upon this young man's
brilliant lead and to serve the nation with it.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
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