While this is not a story about computing, it is a story about technology, and a very fascinating technology at that. Sure, steam heating systems may not sound particularly exciting, but trust me – you’d be wrong.
Back in 2016, The New Yorker ran a short story about a presentation by Dan Holohan.
Dan Holohan, a tall, bespectacled man, took the floor. Through such books as “The Lost Art of Steam Heating” and “We Got Steam Heat! A Homeowner’s Guide to Peaceful Coexistence”, as well as the Web site HeatingHelp.com, Holohan has built a community among those who work on and live with the nineteenth-century heating technology that is still common, if not commonly understood, in New York and in other older cities across the country.
It turns out a version of this presentation, held at the Central Park Arsenal for The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York (what a magnificent name!), is available on YouTube, and let me tell you – like you right now, I didn’t think this subject could be even remotely interesting. As it turns out, though, ancient steam heating systems are an absolutely fascinating subject and kind of a neat piece of engineering. Did you know, for instance, that the 102 floors of the Empire State Building are heated with only one and a half pounds of steam pressure?
Holohan is clearly a man proud of his knowledge and trade, and his excitement about this arcane subject is palpable. I highly suggest taking 50 minutes out of your day to watch his presentation.
An excellent video.
It is also a timely reminder of the old maxim: “If it ain’t broke…don’t fix it.”
Lost art? Steam district heating is very common in parts of Europe, although pressurized hot water is taking over due to lower thermal energy loss in distribution.
You need to watch the video. It is about the complexities of maintaining heritage listed 19th century steam heating systems in NYC.
I watched it.
Charles Babbage wanted to perform computations by steam:
.. ana he might have if he had used steam relays (logic gates) instead of gears!
We can do calculations with liquid water, so a steam-based logic gate wouldn’t be impossible.
The digital information age has wrought a general disrespect towards analog technologies based in physics and the physical world.
My pet topic is how we hear music and audio tech, and the total ignorance around consumer music technology seems to be getting worse, not better. Hearing and feeling music is analog so digital types have trouble quantifying any of it. The assumption that we are progressing forward towards better quality is false.
In other artforms digital products are replacing tried and true analogs, like filmmaking (CGI), cooking (artificial ingredients), game making (avatars & iterations), etc.
These digital replicas are often missing much of the raw analog ingredients that touch our bodies and evoke emotional responses.
Anyway…. get off my lawn you damn kids!
Digital technologies are very much grounded in physics, in the physical world, they blossomed out of firm understanding of it, despite however much you convinced yourself you “feel” otherwise…
Digital technologies, software in particular, have nothing to do with physics.
Infinite replication without degradation is found nowhere I know of in the physical world.
Funny (sad) how we can replicate digital for eternity but we don’t usually bother getting the quality as high as possible to start with.
The digital age, so far, has mostly replicated crappy quality ad infinitum.
Heh, so you hang onto this one (good) theoretical (no such thing as “infinite” in the real world; and error correction is necessary, which not always works) property, that out of all possible seems most to confirm your “feel” that digital has nothing to do with hard physics… (I’m not surprised) All the while digital simply wouldn’t work if it weren’t built upon physics, bound by physical world; is made possible by, say, qm or signal theory (or, in the future, even operating directly on qm; also, https://imgur.com/4sRfN4V
). Whole Universe obeys the harmony of numbers.
And riiight, as if analog past was of course of higher quality… (but it’s kinda hilarious how you’d seem to prefer flawed copies)
I didn’t watch the vid, yet. Probably won’t. However my elderly Father is an engineer who owned an HVAC company. If people think steam heat is… somehow gone, they’re crazy.
Edited 2018-11-15 20:52 UTC