Pre Eighteenth Century
- Prehistory - The fire piston used by tribes in southeast Asia and the Pacific islands to kindle fire.
- c. 450 BC - Archytas of Tarentum used a jet of steam to propel a toy wooden bird suspended on wire.
- c. 200 BC - Hero of Alexandria's Engine. Demonstrates rotary motion produced by the reaction from jets of steam.
- c. 900s - China develops the earliest fire lances which were spear-like weapons combining a bamboo tube containing gunpowder and shrapnel like projectiles tied to a spear.
- c 1100s - China, the earliest depiction of a gun showing a metal body and a tight-fitting projectile which maximises the conversion of the hot gases to forward motion.
- 1120 - Gerbert, a professor in the schools at Rheims designed and built an organ blown by air escaping from a vessel in which it was compressed by heated water.
- 1232 - First recorded use of a rocket. In a battle between the Chinese and the Mongols. ( see Timeline of rocket and missile technology for a view of rocket development through time.)
- c. 1500 - Leonardo da Vinci builds the Architonnerre, a steam-powered cannon.
- 1551 - Taqi al-Din demonstrates a steam turbine, used to rotate a spit.
- 1629 - Giovanni Branca demonstrates a steam turbine.
- 1662 - Robert Boyle publishes Boyle's Law which defines the relationship between volume and pressure in a gas.
- 1665 - Edward Somerset, the Second Marquess of Worcester builds a working steam fountain.
- 1680 - Christiaan Huygens publishes a design for a piston engine powered by gunpowder but it is never built.
- 1690 - Denis Papin - produces design for the first piston steam engine.
- 1698 - Thomas Savery builds a pistonless steam-powered water pump for pumping water out of mines.
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Heat Engine Technology
Famous quotes containing the words eighteenth century and/or eighteenth:
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“F.R. Leavis’s “eat up your broccoli” approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel—for the eighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions—did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)