Hmm, I don't think Savery's engine would have required that - it's just a copper vessel, and the pipes were often even made of wood. I've often seen the cannon theory applied to piston-using engines, but that was the next stage with Papin and Newcomen and beyond (hopefully our chapter II)
Not an expert, but apperently this design was hard even with the modern tech_
"Second, the next stage of the process required high-pressure steam to force the water up, and the pump's soldered joints were barely capable of withstanding high pressure steam and needed frequent repair."
Though note, from the post, that there were some applications of stationary aeolipiles with their spouts directed at vanes to do some light mechanical work - things like turning roasting spits and grinding pigments. All known throughout the fourteenth through to the seventeenth centuries, if not earlier, though it's unclear how widely any of them were adopted.
OP here: I'd recommend Daniel Defoe's travels through Britain as a good place to start, written in the 1720s. You might also like Celia Fiennes's travels in the 1690s. The travel diaries of the brothers Rochefoucauld, whom I cited, can all be easily cited - their travel through Suffolk (which is more interesting than it sounds, as it contains their general early impressions of England) can be found in its entirety online. All can be found with a little googling.
It has not been, as far as I'm aware. But King has prepared a proper reply for publication, which I expect will end up being published - if not in H&T then in some other journal.
Yes, it's the difference in pressure/heat that is exploited, as Sadi Carnot noted (by analogising the steam engine to a water-wheel exploiting a fall of water, treating it as a "fall of heat")
One thing I’ll be mentioning in Part III, as I ran out of space in this one: Drebbel in the 1610s applied his insights into perpetual motion to invent a self-regulating oven/furnace. Using mercury rather than water to trap air in a tube, much like the inverted flask I described, rising temperatures would raise a float sitting on the mercury that would then close the aperture for the air feeding the oven’s flame.
Fun tidbit, which I didn’t mention in the piece: Drebbel proposed creating some kind of solar-powered central heating system for London in the 1610s. We don’t have many details, other than the fact he thought it would cost £20,000 and would involve heating some kind of very heat-conductive material on top of a hill nearby. Historians assume it would have then involved heating water to be run in pipes to London’s houses.
That's amazing! I suppose that because Fahrenheit wouldn't invent the mercury thermometer until 01714, energy wouldn't be discovered until Emilie du Chatelet's work in 01749, and the heat equation wouldn't be discovered until 01822, Drebbel might have had a hard time in the 01610s calculating how much sunlight and how much heat transfer medium would be needed. But Drebbel consistently did things that should have been impossible in the 17th century (homeostasis with negative feedback, submarines with oxygen generators, high-explosive weapons, and androids, as well as the atmosphere-powered orrery you profiled here), so maybe he had some way.
You could probably make something like this a lot more efficient with TCES, eliminating the losses from conduction in the pipes between the power plant and the houses, but that's pretty hard to do with copper pipes. Maybe salt-fired ceramic pipes would work for TCES transfer. But even sensible heat transfer with a copper heat exchanger would probably have worked fine.
