Steam Turbine - History

History

The first device that may be classified as a reaction steam turbine was little more than a toy, the classic Aeolipile, described in the 1st century by Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria in Roman Egypt. In 1551, Taqi al-Din in Ottoman Egypt described a steam turbine with the practical application of rotating a spit. Steam turbines were also described by the Italian Giovanni Branca (1629) and John Wilkins in England (1648). The devices described by al-Din and Wilkins are today known as steam jacks.

The modern steam turbine was invented in 1884 by Sir Charles Parsons, whose first model was connected to a dynamo that generated 7.5 kW (10 hp) of electricity. The invention of Parson's steam turbine made cheap and plentiful electricity possible and revolutionised marine transport and naval warfare. His patent was licensed and the turbine scaled-up shortly after by an American, George Westinghouse. The Parsons turbine also turned out to be easy to scale up. Parsons had the satisfaction of seeing his invention adopted for all major world power stations, and the size of generators had increased from his first 7.5 kW set up to units of 50,000 kW capacity. Within Parson's lifetime, the generating capacity of a unit was scaled up by about 10,000 times, and the total output from turbo-generators constructed by his firm C. A. Parsons and Company and by their licensees, for land purposes alone, had exceeded thirty million horse-power.

A number of other variations of turbines have been developed that work effectively with steam. The de Laval turbine (invented by Gustaf de Laval) accelerated the steam to full speed before running it against a turbine blade. Hence the (impulse) turbine is simpler, less expensive and does not need to be pressure-proof. It can operate with any pressure of steam, but is considerably less efficient.

One of the founders of the modern theory of steam and gas turbines was also Aurel Stodola, a Slovak physicist and engineer and professor at Swiss Polytechnical Institute (now ETH) in Zurich. His mature work was Die Dampfturbinen und ihre Aussichten als Wärmekraftmaschinen (English: The Steam Turbine and its perspective as a Heat Energy Machine) which was published in Berlin in 1903. In 1922, in Berlin, was published another important book Dampf und Gas-Turbinen (English: Steam and Gas Turbines).

The Brown-Curtis turbine which had been originally developed and patented by the U.S. company International Curtis Marine Turbine Company was developed in the 1900s in conjunction with John Brown & Company. It was used in John Brown's merchant ships and warships, including liners and Royal Navy warships.