I know about the post title rule but I would be surprised if anyone clicks on this not assuming it's about the video game digital distribution service and storefront.<p>That said, here's a lovely video from YouTuber "Aging Wheels" about a (working!) scale model of a British steam truck: <a href="https://youtu.be/PFKa8K9qZBQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/PFKa8K9qZBQ</a>
every coal and nuclear electric power station, and a good fraction of the oil ones and part of each combined-cycle gas power station, runs on steam. these are still the majority of the electric power grid. so all those electric cars you see on the road, as well as the streetlights above them and the factories they were built in, are powered primarily by steam. it's just coupled to them through wires instead of driveshafts<p>so 'The steam car was an inflection point where steam power, for so long an engine driving technological progress forward, instead yielded the right-of-way to a brash newcomer. Steam began to look like relic of the past, reduced to watching from the shoulder as the future rushed by' is utterly clueless<p>(so is contrasting steam engines with 'combustion engines'. steam engines <i>are</i> combustion engines, except for the ones in nuclear power stations; they're <i>external</i> combustion engines, while the onboard engines that commonly run cars are <i>internal</i> combustion engines. see <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion_engine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion_engine</a>)<p>so the overall framing of the article is wrong, but that isn't its main thesis. its main thesis is that steamers were slow to start up and complicated to run, and then the matthew effect took over. i don't know enough about early automotive history to evaluate this thesis, but an obvious alternative hypothesis is that only henry ford knew what the fuck he was doing, so everybody else (including gm, which he had sort of founded before he founded ford) copied him once he outsold them ten to one in the 01910s
It's surprising that the Watery nature of steam isn't mentioned in the article at all, as it is a terrible material on which to build any reliable consumer technology:<p><pre><code> * Corrosive
* Heavy
* Does not lubricate
* Huge heat capacity, i.e. you get cooked if even a little bit of it gets on you)
</code></pre>
About the only advantage it has is being cheap, available, and nontoxic which is cool for factories built on rivers
Steam has fundamental problems beyond engine startup time that are just not solvable. Gas engines can quickly switch from low-power to high-power, meaning that you can kick it up quickly to pass another car or maintain speed up a hill.<p>It's all tradeoffs, but responsiveness matters. And in terms of responsiveness steam < diesel < gas < electric. There's a reason both diesel and gas have long coexisted: sometimes you need more responsiveness, and sometimes more constant power. Steam was just too far from acceptable for high speed responsive output.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly mysterious here. Of the three early automotive propulsion technologies, internal combustion engines were the best compromise at the time, as it was compared to the gas turbine in the 1950s and 1960s, rotary engines in the 1960s and 1970s, and lead-acid and NiMH battery vehicles in the 1990s.
Jay Leno has a Doble car (mentioned in the article as a 1920s attempt at a "user-friendly" steam car revival). The video has great production and really shows the starting and driving processes: <a href="https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rUg_ukBwsyo</a>
If you are interested experiencing old steam engines running
and can get to western Oregon
there is the "Great Oregon Steam-up" every summer.<p><a href="https://www.antiquepowerland.com/steam-up/" rel="nofollow">https://www.antiquepowerland.com/steam-up/</a>
I thought maybe the <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Steemer" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Steemer</a> carpet cleaning company might be a descendant of the Stanley steam car company. But it doesn’t look like it - the carpet cleaning company just wanted a memorable name, and a nostalgic name for a ridiculous but charming machine from 40 years earlier fit the bill.