Another interesting fact

[Sylvester]

I've just finished watching a programme on the Industrial Revolution (not usually my thing but i felt a bit like it today).

You may well have known that Trevithick was the first person to build a steam engine (and a steam car) back in the first decade of the 19th century and that he helped pioneer the shift from using low pressure steam to using high pressure steam.

Well as it turns out not only does he have a connection with the coinage due to being honoured on the 2004 £2 coin but that he was despised by James Watt and Matthew Boulton who held the patent rights on the low pressure steam engines they had pioneered. The very same two that had led to the 1797 copper twopence's existence. How they'd shudder at the thought of Trevithick being honoured on a medium that they had help to progress. Interesting no?

Infact Watt suggested that Trevithick should have been hanged because he was a menace to society, at the time it was considered that high pressure steam boilers were extremely dangerous (they were, but of course Trevithick stuck on the one thing most people had forgot, a safety valve), so Watt probably though he was protecting people from a suicidal maniac. Than and he also wanted to ensure that Trevithick didn't outperform their technology and nick all of their customers.

[mint_mark]

That's right... one problem was that steel had not been perfected and it was hard to make a cast iron boiler that didn't have small imperfections... you found out where the imperfections were as it exploded under pressure. As better steel making developed, high pressure steam engines became feasable and won out because of their high power output for a given sized engine.

Another response to the exploding boilers problem was the Stirling engine (Stirling was another Scotsman). This uses trapped air at normal pressure and arranges for the air to be alternately heated and cooled. As it expands and contracts it moves a piston in and out. Sometimes called a heat engine or external combustion engine, they were used for pumping (where the water being pumped helps with cooling). They are relatively low power.

Both steam engines and heat engines lost out when small electric motors came along, and to the internal combustion engine later. Does anyone know how today's coining presses are powered? I imagine they are electric.

[Sylvester]

I would imagine it is electric also, can't say for sure though.

[krasnaya_vityaz]

Industrial rivalries back then sometimes did resort to violence. Even business rivalries did. There was a plot on the part of one of the Directors of the East Lothian Bank to kidnap a bank inspector and drop him off on some uninhabited north sea island off of Germany. The discovery of this plot did not ingratiate the bank inspector to William Borthwick, the director of East Lothian, and only hightened the need to close the bank in the early 1820's.