The Age of Steam, and the capturing of its power, was one of the driving forces behind the Industrial Revolution. What had previously been seen as a theoretical curiosity was suddenly harnessed with stunning effectiveness.
Steam drove the great cranks of ships and made enormous vessels able to cross the ocean, their sheer size allowing them to face the dangers of the high seas with impunity, mostly. The great boilers of the 18th century powered our factories, our trains, and ushered in a new age of electricity. Never again would mankind be afraid of the dark.
It is true, the idea of harnessing steam and using it to drive mechanical contraptions was nothing new. The Greeks had toyed with the idea 2,000 years ago, as had Leonardo da Vinci 1,500 years later, but these were sidenotes, interesting observations and nothing more.
Neither da Vinci nor the ancient Greeks realized the full potential of such engines, and such things were never brought into practical use. One can only speculate as to what the world would be like today if they had.
But it is not universally true that the enormous usefulness of a steam engine was overlooked for millennia. One enterprising inventor found a use for a steam engine, and they did so two centuries before the Industrial Revolution.
Some would argue that they had their priorities fully worked out, too.
The Tastiest Thing in Istanbul
In the Istanbul Museum of Science and Technology there is a working steam engine from the 16th century. And it was used for something eminently practical in the Ottoman Empire: cooking doner kebabs.
A simple open fire heats a reservoir of water above it, with a tapering tube allowing steam to escape in a narrow jet. The steam is directly to escape horizontally, and as it does it forces a horizontal windmill made of copper cups standing next to it to turn.
These cups are at the top of a doner kebab, held vertically on a spit in a way which would be instantly recognizable to anyone who frequents such restaurants today. The steam powered doner replaced the manual turning of the kebab.
This early labor-saving device would have allowed for a more evenly cooked kebab, all using the most basic of raw materials and the simplest of construction. The boiler has no moving parts, and all you need for this engine was a supply of wood and water.
This extraordinary ingenuity should tell us something about the Ottomans: that they liked their kebabs. But it also tells us something about the history of inventions, too.
It can be said that discoveries come in two phases. The first is obviously the realization that something is possible, the discovery of a fundamental interaction in the natural world which can be harnessed to effectiveness.
But the second is the realization of how a discovery, once made, can be used to greatest effect. The Greeks, and da Vinci, missed this second opportunity (and one can hardly blame them, they were coming up with a lot of new stuff and couldn’t be expected to figure it all out) but the lowly Ottoman kebab seller did not.
One is led to wonder what other inventions lie unrecognized in history. How many things are there out there, which we know all about and yet have not harnessed to their full potential?
Top Image: The great steam engines of the Industrial Revolution were not that first time steam power had been captured to useful effect. Nor, some would argue, were these later application more important. Source: Trencherfield Mill steam engine by Chris Allen / CC BY-SA 2.0.
By Joseph Green
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