Talk:Stationary steam engine

For further research

Have already added a link to the Old Engine House (OEH) website, which contains a wealth of infomation, links and source material.

Also of interest:

• OEH – Home page
• OEH – links page (lots to follow-up here!)

EdJogg 16:19, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Order of Evolution?

I'm curious about this. Why does Newcomen come before Savery, and Trevithick before Watt and Hornblower?

Also, should this list describe more specifically what aspect of each designer's engine determines its position in the list? -- EdJogg (talk) 15:03, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

I'd favour shifting the whole lot sideways into an article "Development of the stationary steam engine".

Mind you, I'd probably do it by writing the sub-articles first. Andy Dingley (talk) 15:45, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Andy. I have a lot of pet theories on why a whole slew of industry and technology articles are so bad. In enthusiasm to kill a red link many editors , in good faith, cobbled together a stub. This was then expanded, and bits bolted on and like Topsy, grew and grew. There was never a real structure so articles like Steam Engine have as much backbone as a Jellyfish. But it does grab a page_title that should have been used more globally. There is History of the steam engine which needs to be finished. Steam locomotives seems to be more complete. Often an article will be lifted from the EB (11th edition), with the false assumption that it was accurate at the time- then we have 80 years of knowlege to roll back.

EB obsolete? Have you seen Painterwork? 8-) Andy Dingley (talk) 20:18, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

The list needs to sorted. But then I suggest that the way forward is to slash the Steam Engine article, rewrite the History of the steam engine, extract useless byways and creating their own stubs. This will in effect become the article you want to write, so create Development of the stationary steam engine as a #redirect. When this is done, prune gently this article getting rid of flab, and we may have something that is useful. There are times when an axe is more appropriate than a scalpel --ClemRutter (talk) 18:31, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

I've been doing a fair bit of reading on stationary engines lately, which was really interesting given how much of my youth was spent hanging around locomotives and how little I ever knew about stationary engines. The more I learn, the more I think that the stationary engine deserves its own history - there's so much to them that never had the slightest influence on locomotives. Compounding and condensing are obvious, but then there are lesser known topics like trip valvegears, the ubiquitous and near-daily use of indicators by engine operators themselves not just a one-off in a flying hut and the deliberate use of cut-off as a governing mechanism (rather than throttle valves) in the automatic engines. The more I look, the more I wonder at how backward locomotives remained. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:15, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Might I suggest that this is the information missing "post-Trevithick" in the History of the Steam Engine article? That article will want to spawn-off details to other appropriate sub-articles (eg steam locomotive, traction engine, steam car, steam wagon) with only the most significant developments left for the parent article, and leaving the way free for the stationary stuff. (NB - that 'other' history isn't there yet...)

Let's face it, the steam engine in its many forms was the main power source for a couple of centuries, yet its coverage on WP so far is relatively small (eg compared to the 150+ articles about Nokia mobile phones -- sheesh!) so the more history we can get in place the better!

Incidentally, no-one has answered my first question yet...

EdJogg (talk) 00:40, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

BOLDed. 8-) Andy Dingley (talk) 00:57, 10 July 2009 (UTC)