Ah, heh. That's a very fair point. To be honest, I struggled with the title and subtitle, because most of my ideas had "Precision" in them, and it sounded like I was repeating myself.
I had thought about talking more deeply about the difference between them, but the article was already getting too long! It's certainly worth a footnote though. Revision upcoming :).
It's a mixture of techniques. Using fully rigged CAD models is a huge help, it ensure physically realistic motions. Then, I built a custom exporter / renderer to render them realistically in CAD style.
For a lot of the animations, I first develop storyboards to cover the main beats, and decide on what would be interactive or not. Then a lot of iteration with Fable (and Opus 5.5 now!) on how to show things clearly. A lot of time is spent trying to show the key ideas visually. Eg. in the bench micrometer adding an overlay with the size of the micrometer closing over the part, as well as showing the screw spinning was a big improvement in "readability".
Oh my, I forgot to add him into the credits for this one! The Beam Engine article has this: "Thanks to Bartosz Ciechanowski, whose exceptionally well written and designed articles inspired this one."
I started digging into Watt's challenges getting an accurate cylinder bore for his pistons, and it spiraled out from there :).
The article covers some of the key techniques developed during the industrial revolution to measure and make incredibly precise parts. There are a lot of animations and interactive figures to explore how it works.
Very cool! Though my ChemEng degree obligates me to say that the animation in the "steam" section should really show boiling all the time if the pressure gauge is indeed showing the pressure in the container. Though in reality you'd never heat water at below atmospheric pressure in a real engine, if you did it would be boiling at any temperature at or above the triple point, and below the critical point, so long as there is no air in there.
Interesting that many of the early steam mills used a steam engine to pump water into a water tower, which then drove a conventional water wheel to power the millworks.
Yes, until they were able to get smooth rotation out of the engines, the water wheel was a much smoother source of power. Especially for looms and weaving machines, stable, smooth power was critical. "Power in the Industrial Revolution" by Richard L Hills is a deep exploration of the history there :).
The rivers and streams actually turned into a battleground! This is an excerpt from my beam engine article:
The fight for water
Richard Arkwright's water-powered mill at Cromford opened in 1771, and the factory system that followed created fierce demand for the best river sites. Water-powered mills were also dependent on the weather: a dry season could shut down the factory.
Steam pumping engines offered a solution. An engine lifted the water that had passed beneath the wheel back up the hill, allowing the same water to fall through the wheel again. This kept the smooth turn of the water wheel, but wasted coal moving the water. Watt sold sixteen to twenty horsepower pumping engines to deliver ten horsepower to the machines.
Watt's double-acting engine, beam, crank and flywheel let the engine directly turn the line shaft. This met a huge demand from mill owners who wanted to build near workers and materials rather than around a particular stretch of river.11 One problem remained, though: every time a machine was turned on or off, the load on the engine changed.
Early electric mills replaced their big centralised steam engine with a big centralised electric motor. And the first web browser was a program running within a non-web-based operating system.
Yeah, saw one house that was this kind of "electric mill" originally - electric motors were expensive so it made perfect sense to just have one big motor and transfer the power using leather transmission belts. Not to mention all the machines needing power at that point expecting it to come from a belt drive.
The big motor and most of the machinery was long gone but you could still see where the belts went through duento various holes and cutouts, now usually closed by wooden blanks.
That reminds of those old belt-driven ceiling fan systems. You'd have a single motor and a system of belts arranged on the ceiling to drive an array of ceiling fans. I think that'd be a super charming feature to bring back in bars and cafés.
It was worse than that. No one really understood or had a handle on the production process. During this time period the notion of iron being a chemical element was a recent discovery.
So what you got may have been called cast iron but what it actually was might be pig iron, gray cast iron, ductile iron, and even a bit of steel and possibly carbides mixed in. Properties varied - sometimes by a lot.
If you know even a bit about metals then when you hear "cast iron piston ring" you imagine that ring to have certain properties that match a specific type of cast iron. But in those days every single ring might vary significantly entirely due to the ore load the foundry happened to get, how they melted/cast it, how it was cooled, etc.
> No one really understood or had a handle on the production process.
That was the problem with the Bessemer converter. It took about 10,000 trials and advances in analytical chemistry to make that process work. Once the thing starts the chemical reaction that makes it go, all you can do is watch until something steel-like comes out. With the wrong inputs, you get crappy steel. Bessemer only got good steel because he accidentally had the right composition of inputs. He had to refund some customers who bought converters and got nothing useful out.
The Romans could have built a Bessemer converter, but it wouldn't have worked consistently.
It took a long time to get open hearth furnaces working. They're a collection of brickwork chambers and plumbing which can get up to 3000F and hold that temperature.
The exhaust gases heat brickwork which in turn heats incoming air. It takes some understanding of thermodynamics, and really good firebricks, to make such a furnace. Otherwise the furnace never gets hot enough to make steel. Much of the early history of iron and steel making is the story of trying to get something done with a furnace that isn't hot enough to do it right.
Early iron rails wore out and had to be replaced after a given usage (measured in years on a heavily traveled section) --- this was a big part of the need for the Bessemer process to be developed.
Armchair metrologist here. Did metalworkers back then use 16ths, or 12ths and 24ths? I'm familiar with the use of 1/12th lines ''' and multiples of 1/144th points ''''.
Good question! From my reading, English engineering shops like these used 1/8ths and 1/16ths. Whitworth did push for "decimal inches" (1/10, 1/100, etc). It seems like the 1/12th and 1/144th were more common in watchmaking and optics.
Ditto the makers of scientific instruments, and the manufacturers of moveable type. The printer's ligne was 1/6 of a continental inch, and the typographic pointe was 1/12 of a ligne.
The text was hand written, but reviewed by AI and light edits were made. The CAD models that drive a lot of the animations were either sourced or built based on pictures of historical machines. As called out in the credits, the interactive figures were built by myself and Claude Fable 5 (mostly - a bit of Opus 5.5 in there now).
It's a code-first CAD kernel/toolkit specifically to help LLMs with CAD stuff, it's currently AI usable but not very human usable yet since I'm working on the editor UI. Get your Claude to clone it and give it a try and see if it's easier than your current workflow.
What CAD do you use for the models, and does it have a CAM simulator (for example, you might actually be able to simulate the tread cutting in Fusion 360 CAM's simulator.
Yes, great details! Not sure if you've read it, but "Richard L. Hills, Power from Steam: A History of the Stationary Steam Engine (1989)." is a truly wonderful overview, that really digs deep into the business. It has many letters directly from Watt, including the problems they had getting these huge engines built (before any decent roads!).
