today at 10:42 PM
Industrial history and the history of precision manufacturing is extremely exciting to me. This is an excellent overview and the animations — while not quite as smooth as https://ciechanow.ski/ — add to the experience.
If you liked this blog post, you may enjoy the book “English and American Tool Builders" by Joseph Wickham Roe.
today at 9:54 PM
Thank you for making this. My dad(now retired) owned a machine tool manufacturing space in the 70s and 80s in a small town in north india. After foreign CNC machines left no demand for manual/semi automatic ones in the country, he switched over to a foundry to manufacture cast iron parts in a blast cupola furnace and later a rotary furnace(better for smaller on demand work). But he kept the lathe around along with an employee to finish the parts. And your animation brings back a lot of memories for me. I learned to operate the lathe and had all manners of fun. It is kind of like yak shaving. Your clothes turn black but you just love the mechanical back and forth of it. He made pulleys, Truck engine parts, housing for water motors(fun fact municipal water is scarce and not of adequate pressurized in homes, farms, factories etc so these are ubiquitous) etc.
I sent this to my dad. I am sure he will enjoy reading this.
today at 10:20 PM
You are welcome! Thank you for the background, I'm glad it brought back some pleasant memories.
today at 9:46 PM
Anyone interested in this might also enjoy the book The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World, by Simon Winchester. I read it a few years ago, and thought it was a really interesting journey through bootstrapping precision and how that fundamentally changed our relationship to certain types of things, particularly related to mass production of "good enough".
yesterday at 4:14 PM
Author here. This is a sequel to my beam engine article: https://glinscott.github.io/beam-engine/.
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.
today at 8:15 PM
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.
yesterday at 9:05 PM
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.
today at 8:03 PM
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 :).
today at 8:11 PM
Reliable too, I suppose.
today at 8:30 PM
Piston rings were really bad in the early days.
Remember, this was all iron, not steel. The mass production of steel didn't get going until the 1880s. It's amazing that railroads predate steel.
today at 9:55 PM
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.
today at 9:05 PM
These could really use a way to really pause everything so one can read the text without distracting animations.
yesterday at 6:23 PM
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 ''''.
yesterday at 9:10 PM
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.
today at 9:01 PM
Have you read "The Perfectionists" by Simon Winchester? Great book if you're into this stuff!
today at 10:04 PM
Yes, a wonderful book :).
today at 7:44 PM
How was AI used when writing the article? Not implying anything, I haven't started reading it (yet).
today at 7:53 PM
Certainly a fair question!
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).
The article itself was built over about 4 months.
today at 10:06 PM
Hey, so a bit of self-promotion for some free software I built that you may be interested in.
https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/Aetheris/
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.
I built two 3D mechanical demos with it a couple of weeks ago that you can check out as well. https://aetheris-difference-engine-showcase.yuechenli.worker... https://aetheris-editable-v8.yuechenli.workers.dev/
today at 8:46 PM
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.
today at 10:34 PM
I love these kinds of articles, of how we bootstrapped technology.
I would welcome suggestions for books that describe the advance of technology from early times.
Im a distractible reader so I prefer books that are a bit more personal and story telling rather than dry.
Thanks!
today at 10:41 PM
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Maybe this one? Haven't read it but I think a machinist youtuber recommended it.
today at 10:29 PM
What really surprises me about these precision machines is how recent all of these inventions are, only a couple hundred years
today at 10:30 PM
The pace of technological progress is incredible these days. It's amazing and also scary and unpredictable. Like, will we understand ME/CFS within my lifetime? The rate of achievement is so insane that it very well may be possible, but we just won't know unless it happens (or I die first).
The dystopian surveillance panopticon is progressing nicely, though, and new generations are growing up without any notion that privacy was ever possible in the first place. I had a harsh reality check when I met someone online who didn't even know old Reddit existed and then even disliked it. It made me so sad.
Also, there's a meme floating around that technological progress came to a screeching halt during the "Christian dark ages", so maybe it's just that we're finally getting back up to how we were before then! (Lmao)
today at 7:43 PM
> After repeated copying and correction, Maudslay made a master screw five feet long and two inches across, with fifty threads to the inch and a foot-long nut that engaged six hundred of them at once.
That's the stuff I like to read about the historical endeavors. A fifty-threads nut doesn't average the distance between the grooves quite accurately enough? Then let's make a nut with six-hundred threads on it, and so what if it's foot long.
today at 9:58 PM
This sort of thing makes me wonder what the successor is to the Gingery Books now that they're going away:
Chris Borges has done some pretty cool little machines using 3D printed forms filled with concrete:
https://www.printables.com/@ChrisBorge
and of course there are more CNC router designs than one can shake a stick at (ob. discl., I work for a company which makes one)
today at 8:31 PM
I've sometimes thought of making a YouTube series where the foundations of precision are created as increasingly precise artifacts, building on each other and following the history. Something like the "Primitive Technology" channel but for machine tools.
today at 9:04 PM
Some of your ideas have been covered before, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58 , https://www.youtube.com/@machinethinking/videos . But I would love to see your take on the topic and see a more complete story.
today at 9:07 PM
Good work! Your style of animated articles reminds me of the work of Bartosz Ciechanowski: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ , https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ciechanow.ski
today at 9:12 PM
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."
today at 8:46 PM
how did you make these videos? ive struggled to understand mechanical systems from static figures and these are super helpful
today at 9:30 PM
Awesome, glad they helped :).
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".