Very cool! Though my ChemEng degree obligates me to say that the animation in the "steam" section should really show boiling all the time if the pressure gauge is indeed showing the pressure in the container. Though in reality you'd never heat water at below atmospheric pressure in a real engine, if you did it would be boiling at any temperature at or above the triple point, and below the critical point, so long as there is no air in there.

Piston rings were really bad in the early days.

Remember, this was all iron, not steel. The mass production of steel didn't get going until the 1880s. It's amazing that railroads predate steel.

These could really use a way to really pause everything so one can read the text without distracting animations.

Interesting that many of the early steam mills used a steam engine to pump water into a water tower, which then drove a conventional water wheel to power the millworks.

Have you read "The Perfectionists" by Simon Winchester? Great book if you're into this stuff!

Armchair metrologist here. Did metalworkers back then use 16ths, or 12ths and 24ths? I'm familiar with the use of 1/12th lines ''' and multiples of 1/144th points ''''.

How was AI used when writing the article? Not implying anything, I haven't started reading it (yet).

Oh my, I forgot to add him into the credits for this one! The Beam Engine article has this: "Thanks to Bartosz Ciechanowski, whose exceptionally well written and designed articles inspired this one."

Some of your ideas have been covered before, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58 , https://www.youtube.com/@machinethinking/videos . But I would love to see your take on the topic and see a more complete story.

Awesome, glad they helped :).

It's a mixture of techniques. Using fully rigged CAD models is a huge help, it ensure physically realistic motions. Then, I built a custom exporter / renderer to render them realistically in CAD style.

For a lot of the animations, I first develop storyboards to cover the main beats, and decide on what would be interactive or not. Then a lot of iteration with Fable (and Opus 5.5 now!) on how to show things clearly. A lot of time is spent trying to show the key ideas visually. Eg. in the bench micrometer adding an overlay with the size of the micrometer closing over the part, as well as showing the screw spinning was a big improvement in "readability".