This year's tree!
The Christmas tree is up! We got a corkbark fir this year, which is the first time we've gotten one.
A Corliss steam engine
We went to Henry Ford Museum on Saturday. I love the giant steam generators and seeing the machinery that powered the beginning of the industrial age. We watched a demonstration of the Corliss steam engine, which was (in this case) used to drive a 24-foot diameter wheel. The wheel was used to transfer power to machines via a giant belt. This particular engine powered 12 different businesses at a time, from textiles to woodworking. For demonstration purposes in the museum, the steam power was replaced by compressed air. This giant engine, with its 23-ton piston rod, can be powered by 2-3 psi of compressed air. That's it.
Because the engine could only be started with the piston rod in a certain position, factories that owned one of these engines often employed children whose job it was to rotate the wheel until the piston rod was in the right position. They did this by climbing onto the wheel's huge spokes; their weight would cause the wheel to slowly run the piston through its cycle until it was at its top position, ready to be started again.
A better picture, and more history, can be found here.
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