Modern Marvels: How Engines Work (S9, E32) | Full Episode |

History

NARRATOR: They power our lives... from cars to lawnmowers... from

ships to steam trains. They've transformed our world, and taken us to
the moon. Now, "Engines" on Modern Marvels.

Captioning sponsored by A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS.

It's no accident that the root word of engine is "ingenious." For three
centuries, these ingenious designs have been the ultimate expression of
man's desire for technical excellence, and through many generations of
technological progress, they've had a profound effect on the way people
travel and work. Steam engines replaced the horse. Electric motors and
gasoline engines replaced the steam engine. Then the jet engine and the
rocket engine took things to a higher level. And now, microtechnology
engines are proving that less is more.

This march through the centuries began when the steam engine ushered
in the Industrial Revolution. It freed mankind from total dependence on
primary sources of power, like wind, water and muscle. Steam engines
would be used to power factory machinery, trains, ships, tractors and
automobiles.

PAUL RONNEY: Before steam, mostly we used animals as our mode of

transportation. When steam came along, of course, we could move more
material faster and more reliably than we could, of course, with animals,
and so that was a big transformation. People became less tied to being
in small cities. They could live out on the farm and still be connected, if
you will, to the cities.

NARRATOR: In a steam piston engine, steam enters one end of a

cylinder and pushes a piston back. Then it enters the other end, pushing
it the other way. The steam comes from a boiler, a metal water container
that is heated, usually by burning fuels like wood, coal, oil or natural gas.
A steam turbine engine is like a windmill, except that it's blades are
propelled by hot steam under high pressure, instead of wind. To this day,
steam turbines are widely used. In fact, they are used to generate most
of our electricity.

The Greek scientist Hero of Alexandria built the world's first steam
engine about 2,000 years ago. It was, basically, just a round metal ball
with two kettle-like spouts coming out of it. When steam was piped into
the ball, it spun around. Hero put it on display at the Serapeum, a
museum in Athens, where it entertained visitors for years, although it
was never viewed as anything more than an interesting toy.

In 1705, two British engineers, Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen,

produced a large steam engine that could be used to pump water out of
flooded coal mines. The engine used a piston, a rod-like device that
moved back and forth inside a tubular enclosure called a cylinder.

MERRITT ROE SMITH: These early engines didn't have the gearing that
could convert reciprocal motion into circular, machine-driving motion.
That didn't happen until the 1770s, when James Watt developed what is
probably the most famous steam engine of the 18th century.

NARRATOR: James Watt, a professor at the University of Glasgow,

developed several improvements for the steam engine, making it much
more practical to drive machinery. His "Flying Ball Governor" expanded
as the engine went faster. Centrifugal force caused the heavy metal balls
to spread out, and that closed a steam valve, which slowed the engine
down.

SMITH: And as it spread out, it would control the movement of steam

into the cylinder, and that was a very efficient device. They keep it from
revving out of control, but, more importantly, they keep it in a steady,
regular, uniform motion.

NARRATOR: By 1800, more than 1,500 steam engines were at work in

Britain, Europe and the United States. In addition to pumping water out
of mines, they were also powering factory machines.

4:53

SMITH: Britain was the first nation in the West, in the world really to
become industrialized, and so much of what was going on there was
built around the advent of steam power.

NARRATOR: By 1830, steamships were making regular crossings of on

high seas the Atlantic. The earliest steamships didn't look that much
different from the sailing ships of that period. They still had tall masts
and sails, but the big difference was the large paddle wheel in the
middle of the ship. Turned by a steam engine, it provided extra power for
the ship, as it clawed its way through the water.
SMITH: Both steamboats, then later railroads, you know, dramatically
shortened the time that people could traverse long distances. The
American politician, John C. Calhoun, often used the expression about
"conquering space." And basically that's what these machines did was
that they helped to conquer space. They shortened distances between
two places.

NARRATOR: That was particularly true of the steam piston engines riding
the ribbons of steel that opened up the American West in the 1800s. In
1860, there were more than 30,000 miles of railroad tracks in the U.S.,
and, in 1869, the Golden Spike was driven at Promontory Point, Utah to
unite the Union and Central tracks which ran from the east and west
coasts. Most American trains at the time were pulled by so-called "4-4-0"
steam engines, which had 4 lead wheels, and four driving wheels. They
weighed about 50 tons.

Another important application for the steam engine was in farm

equipment.

ROD GROENEWOLD: Whether you're burning straw in a field with an

agricultural engine, whether you're burning wood, whether you're back
East and you're burning coal, you know, the steam engine was very
adaptable, and hungry for any fuel you could feed it.

NARRATOR: And that made it ideal for farm use. Huge steam tractors
began to transform agriculture in the late 1800s.

GROENEWOLD: That was an era when terms like Behemoth, Leviathan,

some of those terms were very commonly used. Some of these engines,
you know, weighed up to 10, 20 tons—huge!

NARRATOR: In the mid-1800's an American, George Corliss, developed

the most important new steam engine invention since James Watt. His
new governor system allowed the engine to run more steadily, making it
ideal for use in textile mills. This Corliss-designed engine, recently
restored, was one of three installed at a sugar mill in Southern California
in 1911. For the next 67 years, it powered machinery that refined sugar
beets into sugar.

GROENEWOLD: They had steam readily available to cook and clean the
beets, power all the machinery. It powered a generator in that factory, so
they had the lights and the power for everything else, and the motive
power to run the centrifuge to run the sugar out of the beet pulp, so, you
know, a very efficient system. That steam engine just did it all.
NARRATOR: The huge flywheel weighs 19,000 pounds, and the entire
engine weighs 90,000 pounds. The 300-horsepower engine was in
service until 1978, when the Holly Sugar Mill in Santa Ana was torn
down.

A completely new kind of steam engine, one that had no pistons, was
pioneered in the late 1800's by two engineers, Charles Parsons of Britain
and Carl de Laval of Sweden, and it's the only type of steam engine that
is still in wide use today. Steam turbines, which use steam pressure to
turn fan-like blades on a rotor, are more compact than steam piston
engines, and usually permit higher temperatures and greater steam
expansion. That means more power.

By the early 1900s, several steam turbine ocean liners were in Atlantic
service. By 1920, the steam turbine had eliminated the older steam
piston engines on major vessels. The great transatlantic liners, from the
Queen Mary, launched in 1934, to the United States, launched in 1951,
were all driven by steam turbines. Today, U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and
submarines are powered by nuclear steam turbine plants. The TV you're
watching right now is, in all likelihood, being powered by steam... since
the majority of electric power plants in America use steam turbine
engines, including nuclear plants like this one.

9:48

RONNEY: The power plant engine is indeed a steam engine, whether

again the heat source is a nuclear source or coal or natural gas, it is a
steam engine. It's somewhat ironic that we still use technology that was
invented almost 200 years ago.

DAVID GARCHOW: The water circulates through the core, picks up the
heat from the fission event, takes it to the steam generators, where it
flashes to steam, goes out of the steam generator into the main steam
pipes, into the main turbine where it turns the turbine to make
electricity.

NARRATOR: Steam turbines may be going strong, but steam piston

engines have long been silent. They haven't been manufactured in the
U.S. since the 1950s. But the sound of the steam piston is all around at
the antique engine museum in Vista, California, near San Diego, where
they have dozens of working steam engines.

RONNEY: Heat transfer is a slow process, and in the steam engine, one
needs to transfer heat from a hot fluid, namely the combustion gases, to
the working fluid that actually produces the power, namely steam, and
people found that by using an internal combustion engine where the
thing that does the expansion and the thing that generates the heat is
one and the same material, namely the fuel/air mixture, that one could
get much more power out of a given size engine.

NARRATOR: But before the internal combustion engine came along,

another new machine showed up to help power the world. It wasn't an
engine, and it didn't burn fuel. Up next: The electric motor wins a place
among the engines of the world.

"Engines" will return on Modern Marvels.

NARRATOR: We now return to "Engines" on Modern Marvels. When

steam engines first came into widespread use in the early 1800s, they
were extremely powerful, but that power came at a price. They were
also extremely dangerous. To create maximum power, their boilers had
to contain steam at high pressures, and they weren't always up to the
task.

SMITH: There were a lot of problems in the 19th century with the
explosion of boilers. Before you know it, you'd have an explosion that
could kill everyone.

NARRATOR: Robert Stirling, a clergyman in Scotland in the early 1800s,

was tired of seeing his parishioners getting injured or killed by exploding
steam engines, so he decided to do something about it.

BRENT VAN ARSDELL: Part inventor, part preacher, 100% renaissance

man. He was an incredible guy.

NARRATOR: Stirling came up with an entirely new engine design in

1816, which he called "a hot air engine." Today, it's known as the Stirling
engine.

VAN ARSDELL: The Stirling engines that he developed were low

pressure engines and so there was nothing really in there that was high
pressure that could explode, even if the machine failed. Stirling engines
are engines that heat one side of the engine and cool the other side of
the engine, and then there's a mechanism inside the engine that moves
the air back and forth between the hot side and the cold side. When the
air is on the hot side it expands and pushes up on a piston, and when
the air's on a cold side, it contracts and pulls down on a piston.
NARRATOR: But there was a problem with Reverend Stirling's
invention-- the metals used in the 1800s were not heat resistant enough
to make the Stirling engine as durable as a steam engine.

VAN ARSDELL: The metals didn't stand up to the high temperature of

continuous flame. The... boiler is the part of the steam engine that is
exposed to continuous flame. In a Stirling engine, it's the hot cylinder of
the engine, so it's a different part of the engine.

NARRATOR: But with today's modern metallurgy, some believe the

Stirling Engine may now be viable. Brent Van Arsdell manufactures small
demonstration engines that show off the unique capabilities of Reverend
Stirling's invention. One of the engines runs on the hot air from a cup of
coffee. But surprisingly, it also runs on the cold air from a bowl of ice. All
it needs is a temperature difference to make it run.

VAN ARSDELL: All you've got to do is keep one side hot and the other
side cold. You can do that any place that you can keep the temperature
difference and these things will run.

NARRATOR: This Stirling engine can run on the heat from the palm of
your hand.

JOHN HEYWOOD: Now over the decades, people have tried to put
Stirling engines in vehicles, and the conclusion right now is, no, it's an
expensive engine, much more expensive than the sort of alternative, like
gasoline, diesel engines, and it's very hard to make it efficient on a
vehicle, because the way the engine is running changes all the time. As
you and I drive, we speed up, we slow down, we accelerate. That makes
it hard for the engine to stay efficient all the time, and especially hard
for the Stirling engine.

15:04

NARRATOR: The steam engines and Stirling engines of the 1800s soon
had a new competitor to help power the machinery of the Industrial
Revolution. And today, that new competitor is still with us. We don't have
steam engines in our houses, but we do have lots of electric motors.
Look around your house. It's loaded with them-- electric clocks, air
conditioners, CD players, VCRs, fans, vacuum cleaners, blenders, and of
course, who could forget the electric toothbrush? They are all powered
by electric motors.
BOB PALMBACK: Without it, we wouldn't even be able to sit here and
make this interview. It wouldn't be worth getting out of bed, unless you
wanted to be back in the horse and buggy days.

NARRATOR: Unlike most engines, which use some kind of combustion

to create heat, the electric motor is powered by an entirely different
principle. It's based on the fact that when electricity flows through a
wire, an electromagnetic field is created, which means you've
temporarily turned that wire into a magnet. Turn the electricity off, it's
not a magnet anymore. Hook it up the opposite way and its north and
south poles reverse. An electric motor does this over and over, using the
magnetic force to create motion.

PALMBACK: What it does is creates a magnetic field and it actually

drives it, just like Doug and I are doing. As the power's going through
this field, this is a magnetic field and it's revolving around here and it's
sucking this around.

NARRATOR: Of course, electric motors need electricity. So their history

begins with the earliest electrical experimenters. In 1824, Michael
Faraday patented his Direct Current or DC motor. In 1888, the eccentric
genius Nikola Tesla patented his Alternating Current or AC motor. Today,
we use both. If it runs on batteries, it's a DC motor. If it plugs into the
wall, it's an AC motor.

FREDERICK DESANTI: Tesla was the first one who introduced the
concept of alternating current, where you would change the polarity
back and forth 60 times or 50 times a second, as it was, and Edison
didn't believe in that, and Edison actually fired Tesla and he went to work
for George Westinghouse. Tesla was right. Alternating current could be
transmitted over miles and miles, and there were significant limitations
for direct current transmission distribution systems.

NARRATOR: George Westinghouse acquired the patents for Tesla's

alternating current system and, in 1891, installed the first world's first
high-voltage AC transmission line in California, connecting San Antonio
Canyon with Pomona and San Bernardino. In 1894, Westinghouse began
manufacturing another one of Tesla's inventions, the AC motor. Early
electric motors were used to power some of the very first cars, along
with steam engines and internal combustion engines, which used an
ignited fuel, like gasoline, to propel a piston up and down.
SMITH: I don't think anyone knew, you know, at least for the first
decade or more of the automobile's existence, as to who was going to
win out.

NARRATOR: Around 1912, the internal combustion engine finally did

win, ironically, because of the addition of an electric motor. It was called
"the starter." And it did just that-- getting the pistons to start firing,
without throwing the driver's back out or worse.

SMITH: Up until that time, you had to crank an engine to get it started,
and it was not only difficult, but was dangerous. It could really break
bones in your arm. If one of those things jerked back on you, you could
really hurt yourself, but with the electric starter, that changed the whole
ball game, and immediately signaled the demise of both the electric
automobile, and the steam-powered automobile.

NARRATOR: Like the hand crank, the starter's electric motor initiated
the compression and combustion cycles necessary for the engine to run
on its own. Some of the largest electric motors have been made for use
in elevators. In 1933, Westinghouse built the world's fastest elevators for
New York's Rockefeller Center. In 1972, Westinghouse installed the
elevators in what was then the world's tallest building-- the Sears Tower
in Chicago. In the 1990s, the electric motor made an automotive
comeback when General Motors introduced the "EV-1." It was extremely
lightweight, with a strong, rigid frame, and one of the most aerodynamic
car bodies ever made. Some said it was built more like an airplane than
a car, but the highly-advanced EV-1 was a flop, and GM canceled
production in 2000. As with all electric cars, its biggest problem was
limited range between battery charges.

PALMBACK: If you're in a hurry to go someplace, and you can only get

100 miles and have to stop eight hours to charge, I mean, you might as
well have a covered wagon.

20:04

HEYWOOD: I think it's unlikely that in the next ten, 20 years, electric
vehicles will compete with standard cars. Battery technology is just not
good enough, and these batteries are expensive once you take them up
to the scale that you need to store enough energy to drive a vehicle.
Now if they get a bit smaller, and we're willing to have a limited range, it
might be that electric vehicles will be interesting, because they really
would have no emissions where the car is being driven.
NARRATOR: Electric cars may not pollute where they're driven, but
there's still pollution where the electricity is generated to charge their
batteries, since most of it comes from power stations that burn fossil
fuels. Because electric vehicles require either batteries with limited
range, or overhead power lines they can hook onto, they've been more
popular for public, rather than private transportation. Cities like Los
Angeles got their first electric trolley buses in the early 1900s, and some
cities still have them. Virtually all subway systems and light rapid transit
systems use electric motors.

And just why do we call them electric "motors" when we call the other
machines that power our lives "engines"? Well, that's a matter of debate,
and it's a debate that can keep scientists and engineers amused for
hours. They sometimes refer to it as "the great engines-versus-motors
debate."

HEYWOOD: Um, I don't think there's a clear answer. Technically, we use

the word engine for a device that takes energy from some source, like
fuel, and converts it into power that we can use to drive something.

RONNEY: Engines versus motors. In my personal opinion, I think that an

engine, when I think of engines, I think of heat engines. I'm a
thermodynamacist, and we talk about heat engines.

HERMANCE: There are many inconsistencies, even within the industry,

with regard to nomenclature.

RONNEY: The things that I would call motors, as opposed to engines,

would be primarily things like electric motors.

NARRATOR: And how do you explain "outboard motors," which almost

always have engines in them?

HERMANCE: Very good question. That... I never said we were consistent

in how we use those words. In the automotive industry, a motor is an
electrical machine, an engine is an internal combustion machine.

NARRATOR: Then how did Detroit get to be Motor City? (laughing)

HERMANCE: Another very good question.

NARRATOR: Up next: The internal combustion engine creates a new

industry in Motown, and the world goes mad for motoring.

"Engines" will return on Modern Marvels.

NARRATOR: We now return to "Engines" on Modern Marvels. At rush
hour in a city like Los Angeles, it's painfully obvious how the internal
combustion engine changed the world. Next time you're caught in a
mess like this, thank Etienne Lenoir. He developed the first internal
combustion engine back in 1860. Like the very first steam engines, it
was developed for pumping water out of coal mines. It was a big
success, and about 5,000 of the engines were sold. 16 years later, in
1876, Nikolaus Otto patented the first four-stroke version of the internal
combustion engine. Otto's four-stroke system is used in nearly all of our
cars today, so it's fitting that we call it "the otto industry."

HEYWOOD: We're still using that same four stroke cycle, and roughly
our arrangement, we've got a piston and a cylinder, we've got a
connecting rod, and we've got a crank as our simple mechanism for
converting the up and down piston motion to rotation of a drive shaft.
That's what he came up with and we're still using that today, 150 years
later.

NARRATOR: In 1892, Rudolph Diesel patented the Diesel engine. Note

the absence of a sparkplug. It's similar to the regular internal
combustion engine, except that it has no spark plugs. Air is sucked into
the cylinder on the downstroke. Then it's compressed on the upstroke,
which makes the air extremely hot-- so hot, that when oil is injected, the
fuel/air mixture ignites. Mercedes Benz made the first production diesel
automobiles in the 1930s. Because of their brute power and ruggedness,
diesel engines made by various manufacturers are widely used in large
trucks and heavy equipment.

24:50

As both gasoline and diesel engines evolved, they changed the way
cities were built. They also changed the way wars were fought. In World
War II, U.S. engine production reached an all-time high, as new engines
made in Detroit powered the war effort.

American auto manufacturers used their production machinery and

know-how to build four million engines of all types and sizes-- for trucks,
tanks and aircraft. This mile-long factory outside of Dearborn, Michigan,
cost the government $65 million to build. Under Henry Ford's
management, it turned out 57,000 aircraft engines and 9,000 bombers.
Ford's other plants produced a quarter of a million tanks and jeeps.

HEYWOOD: Since we were relying on piston-engine aircraft for our

fighters and bombers, the automobile industry converted its engine
production facilities to producing engines for these applications, and the
new car production went down to very low numbers.

NARRATOR: Up until the 1950s, most engine development concentrated

on making engines more powerful and cheaper to build. Then, this
appeared on the horizon. It's called smog. And because of it, engine
technology had to accelerate in a different direction. Pollution control
systems introduced by all auto manufactures in the '60s and '70s
reduced emissions, but they also sapped power, since they had the
effect of reducing air intake. An engine that can't breathe freely
produces less power. In the life of the internal combustion engine, most
developments have been evolutionary, but one of them... was
revolutionary. German inventor Felix Wankel came up with a radically
new and simple design for an internal combustion engine way back in
1924, but it wasn't until 1957 that he built the first truly functional
Wankel rotary engine. It was a dramatic departure from the piston
engine, and because it spun around, instead of pumping up and down
like pistons, the rotary engine dramatically reduced vibration.

HEYWOOD: Many, many people over time have tried to think of a better
geometry. There are some negatives to this simple piston-connecting-
rod- cylinder arrangement. Masses move up and down, and that's hard
to prevent that causing vibration, but, so far, with the one exception of
the Wankel, nobody's invented a geometry that's got into "real world"
production. This roughly triangular-shaped rotor sort of moves around
inside a container, but not quite symmetrically, it's off center, and so, as
it rotates, this triangular rotor, it creates sort of smaller volumes and
larger volumes, in a similar way to the piston moving up and down in a
standard engine cylinder.

KOBAYAKOWA: I have a very strong attachment to the rotary engine,

without any questions.

NARRATOR: "Koby" Kobayakawa, recently retired, was project director

for Mazda's highly successful RX-7 rotary-engine sports car.

KOBAYAKOWA: This is the only moving part of the rotary engine, and
we don't have any intake or exhaust valve or cam shaft. Basically, we
have only two moving parts two, two rotors. In the case of a V6 engine,
the moving parts like pistons and connecting rod and valves and cam
shaft may be 50 moving parts.

NARRATOR: In 2001, Mazda completed development of an all-new

rotary-engine model called the RX-8. It may look small, but the 255-
horsepower engine is competitive with much larger piston engines. And
it's still the only car engine in mass production that has no pistons. Koby
Kobayakawa talked to Felix Wankel just a few years before the inventor's
death in 1988.

KOBAYAKOWA: I had been admiring him so many years. His eye to look
into Mazda rotary engine is always more like a father's eye when looking
at the children. He's so nice and he was very, very pleased with Mazda's
effort and result about the rotary engine.

NARRATOR: Felix Wankel would be proud that the radical idea he came
up with in 1924 spins on. Up next: tiny engines that make a dust mite
look like a monster. It's called microtechnology, and it's the next "small"
thing in engines and motors.

"Engines" will return on Modern Marvels.

29:40

NARRATOR: We now return to "Engines" on Modern Marvels. 1941... the

world was at war, and it was time for the next new engine technology to
change the world. Enter the jet.

HEYWOOD: A jet engine is a gas turbine where you throw the exhaust
gases fast out the back end to provide thrust, and the compressor and
turbine of the gas turbine do the compressing to give you the high flow
you need to throw out, and the turbine provides the work to drive the
compressor, and what's left is what you use for thrust.

RONNEY: Imagine if you're baking cookies. Imagine if you baked the

cookies one at a time, you put some dough on a tray, you shove it into
the oven, you wait for it to bake, and then you pull it out. That's what we
do in the internal combustion engine with the reciprocating piston. We
put the fuel/air mixture in, stop. We compress it, stop. Burn it, expand it,
stop. Push it out, stop. It's constantly stop start, stop start. Whereas,
with the jet engine, it's basically like a continuous process. Imagine
putting all your cookie dough on a conveyor belt and running it through
an oven.
NARRATOR: It all started about 60 years ago, when Britain and
Germany were racing to develop the first-ever jet aircraft. In 1941,
Germany was the first into the air with a fighter prototype, the He-280. A
year later, the Germans had an even better jet fighter, the Me-262, and
that was the world's first jet plane to go into mass production. Britain's
first jet, the Gloster Meteor twin-engined fighter, had its first test flight in
March of 1943. From there, we've come all the way to this: Airbus
Industries is developing what some are calling "The Super Jumbo." It's a
double-decker plane that's 50% bigger than a Boeing 747, and it's
capable of carrying 600 or 700 passengers.

In the early days of their development, rocket engines and jet engines
were closely related, and people made little distinction between them. A
rocket is similar to a jet, except that it carries it's own supply of oxygen
to create combustion. Jets get their oxygen from the air. Rockets get it
from the oxygen tank they carry on board. That means a rocket can fly in
space, where there is no oxygen. Robert Goddard's rocket experiments
in the United States in the early 1930s were followed by Werner von
Braun's rocket experiments in Nazi Germany, which led to the V2
rockets, which rained down on Britain during World War II.

ARCHIVAL CLIP: We knew that, uh, we had created a new means of

warfare.

NARRATOR: The rocket technology pioneered by Goddard and von Braun

enabled future developments like the breaking of the sound barrier by
Chuck Yeager in 1947, the launch by the USSR of Sputnik in 1957, and
the Apollo 11 landing on the moon in 1969. Today, the three main rocket
engines that power the space shuttle produce thrust equivalent to 37
million horsepower. That's as much as 23 Hoover Dams. Together, the
engines consume 64,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen fuel per minute. The
engines are movable and are used to steer the shuttle during flights.
They also provide additional thrust for launch, supplementing the two
huge booster rockets, which are jettisoned after takeoff.

For decades now, advancements in the world of engine technology have

led to bigger engines, but one of the most exciting areas today involves
creating tiny engines that can fit on the tip of your finger.
Microtechnology is a fast- growing area of research that has grown out of
the miniaturization of electronic components. Some of the same
manufacturing techniques are being used to build microtechnology
engines.
MARTIN SCHMIDT: There are actually advantages to making things
small. As you miniaturize something, the weight goes down as the third
power of the dimension, but the propulsive force goes down as the
second power of the dimension. So as it gets smaller, the actual
propulsion-to-weight goes up.

NARRATOR: Professor Martin Schmidt of MIT has developed a turbo-jet

engine the size of a postage stamp. And why did he want to do that?

SCHMIDT: Well, first, it's awful fun. Second, there's propulsion

applications: miniature aircraft, miniature satellites.

NARRATOR: Professor Schmidt's tiny turbo-jet engine works exactly like

the ones on a Boeing 747.

SCHMIDT: This would be a turbine engine where air would come in

through the center hole, and then fuel would be injected through a
variety of these ports located here. The air and fuel would mix after
going across a compressor, enter a combustion volume that's in a
circular region that surrounds this, and then go across a set of turbine
blades and be exhausted out through this port here. Inside of that
lamination is this little disc, and that's the disc that'll spin at 1.5 million
RPM.

35:04

NARRATOR: Scientists at MIT believe this engine might power a tiny

airplane with a wingspan of about three inches. Hundreds of such
inexpensive, disposable micro-jet airplanes could be used for
surveillance by the military, or for weather exploration. Another
application scientists have great hopes for is the use of these tiny
engines to generate electricity, so they could replace the heavy and less
efficient battery packs in things like laptop computers. Some scientists
are working on new micro-engine concepts that don't even exist at
larger scales.

RONNEY: But again, the target device is about shirt button size, and we
hope will generate about 50 milowatts, which is enough to drive your
cell phone or a personal organizer. You put a few of these together you
could drive your laptop computer. If we take a fuel/air mixture, bring it
into the center of a spiral heat exchanger like this, burn the fuel/air
mixture in the middle, and then as the combustion products go out, use
those outgoing products to preheat the fuel/air mixture that's coming in,
you can actually get combustion under situations that otherwise the
flame would extinguish. If we put devices called thermoelectric materials
in these walls, we can actually use that to generate electrical power.

NARRATOR: Some microtechnology engines have gears the size of a

grain of pollen, and gear teeth the size of a red blood cell. If you want to
make a microtechnology engine look big, just put it beside a
nanotechnology motor. Nano-machines are so small, you can't even see
them under a microscope.

ROSS KELLY: Nano means a billionth. So things that are a billionth of a

meter would be a nanometer, which is what is often discussed.

NARRATOR: Line up ten atoms in a row and that row will be about one
nanometer long. The roots of nanotechnology can be traced all the way
back to 1959, when the late scientist Richard Feynman gave a legendary
talk at the California Institute of Technology. It was entitled: "There's
Plenty of Room at the Bottom."

ARCHIVAL CLIP (FEYNMAN): If we go down far enough, all of our

devices can be mass produced so that they are absolutely perfect copies
of one another. I want to build a billion tiny factories, models of each
other, which are manufacturing simultaneously, drilling holes, stamping
parts, and so on.

KELLY: The issue was making things smaller and smaller, and that he
didn't see any major violations of the basic physical laws like the laws of
thermodynamics if you made something really small.

ARCHIVAL CLIP (FEYNMAN): It is my intention to offer a prize of

$1,000 to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor which is
only 1/64 inch cubed.

NARRATOR: The prize was claimed years ago, but Professor Ross Kelly
of Boston College wanted to go beyond Feynman's challenge of 1/64
inch cubed.

KELLY: Coming up with a molecule, which is much, much smaller than

that, is sort of the ultimate answer to his challenge. So it's taken us
another 40 years to get down to the smallest possible scale.

NARRATOR: Professor Kelly succeeded in arranging 78 atoms to create

a motor that consists of one single, custom-built molecule.

KELLY: The original design, of course much smaller than this, had two
parts: something that was going to rotate that looks like a gear, has
three blades on it, and something else that was going to function like the
pall on a ratchet, and it was supposed to rotate like this. Each corner
represents a carbon atom with a hydrogen atom on it. It's connected to
the next corner by a bond between two carbon atoms. Next corner,
another bond between two carbon atoms, and because of the laws of
chemistry, one can predict how long the distances are going to be, and
what the geometries are going to be.

NARRATOR: In other words, even though it's so tiny he can't actually

see it, Kelly knows he's created a single molecule whose atoms function
like a motor. It took him four years to develop his motor molecule, but
now it can be produced in batches... large batches.

KELLY: Yeah, we had a flask with something like ten to the twentieth--
approximately a billion billion-- molecular motors in it. You could make as
many as you want-- trillions and trillions and trillions.

SCHMIDT: I think this will have an enormous impact. Being able to

manipulate things at the micro and nano level enables us to build a
nearly limitless number of devices and systems and those devices and
systems will have, certainly, as many applications as the devices we
built during the Industrial Revolution did.

NARRATOR: Up next, cars that combine the best of two worlds: hybrids
powered by both a gas engine, and an electric motor.

"Engines" will return on Modern Marvels.

ANNOUNCER: We now return to "Engines" on Modern Marvels. Hybrids,

seen by some as the way of the future for automobiles, are propelled by
both a gasoline engine and an electric motor. In hybrids like the Prius,
introduced by Toyota in 1997, the engine and the motor can propel the
car either separately or together. To reduce emissions, the electric motor
is used to take the vehicle up to about 15 mph, and then the gas engine
takes over. Electric cars put out no pollution, but the problem is they
have to be charged up constantly. Hybrids offer some the advantages of
the electric car, except you never have to plug it in at a recharging
station. That's because hybrids charge up their own batteries while
they're moving.

HERMANCE: It's actually re-gen, putting energy from the tire through
the motor, back into the battery pack.
ANNOUNCER: With regenerative braking, the car slows down by using
its electric motor as a generator. This creates drag on the drive line, and
charges the battery. In other words, by functioning as a brake, the
electric motor/generator actually creates energy, instead of wasting
energy in heat loss like a regular brake.

HERMANCE: As we turn the corner here, initial acceleration is motor,

and as I step into the throttle, the engine starts. Green is charge, red is
power. As I lift off the throttle, engine shuts off, and energy flow is from
the tires through the motor back into the battery pack.

ANNOUNCER: Toyota's competitor, Honda, began selling its two-seater

hybrid called the Insight in 2000. Both cars sell for around $20,000. In
Japan, over 34,000 hybrids have been sold since 1997.

HEYWOOD: They're more expensive because you've got a battery and a

motor to add to the engine that you're already paying for. And the
benefits depend on the kind of driving these vehicles go through. So, for
example, in Japan, they roughly doubt the fuel economy, because it's
very congested, slow speed driving, lots of stopping and starting. When
we come to the kind of driving we have in North America, less
congested, we drive at higher speeds, longer distances, then the
hybrid's not as attractive.

ANNOUNCER: Trains have been using the hybrid concept for years. The
locomotives we call "diesels" are really diesel-electric, with a powerful
diesel engine generating electricity for the electric motors that turn the
wheels. But the hybrid isn't the only bright hope on the horizon for
automobiles. There is also... hydrogen. In 2000, BMW came out with the
world's first production car run on either hydrogen or gasoline. When the
car is switched over to run on hydrogen, it's like turning off the pollution.
The only thing coming out of the exhaust pipe now is water vapor. But
hydrogen comes at a price.

HEYWOOD: The critical question is then, all right, if you want hydrogen,
where do you get it from? Well, the most economic way now is to make
hydrogen from natural gas. Natural gas has got carbon in it so, in
producing hydrogen, we release the carbon into the atmosphere. That
doesn't really help with the greenhouse gas problem. If we made
hydrogen from nuclear power or perhaps solar energy, maybe we could
find an economic way to do it that, that would let us produce hydrogen
without releasing any carbon dioxide.
ANNOUNCER: From steam engines to Stirling engines, from pistons to
turbines, tracking the history of engine technology is a rewarding
pilgrimage, a journey through a noble pantheon of man's greatest
technological achievements. Ever since Hero built his first steam engine
in ancient Greece, humans have been fascinated by the latest engines
and motors.

KELLY: I did it 'cause I thought it would be neat mostly, and I wasn't

terribly worried about applications.

ANNOUNCER: Undoubtedly that fascination will keep us connected to

the future and fuel our ability to continue changing our world by
inventing new kinds of engines... even if we're not quite sure what
they're good for.

Captioning sponsored by A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS. Captioned by

Media Access Group at WGBH, [Link].