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Quotes: Knock, knock, who's there? 20724 Views
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Description:
Find out the meaning behind "knock knock, who's there?"
Transcript
- 00:00
the first successful steamship was built in the 1790s by an American named
- 00:07
John Fitch. it was bulky slow and if we're being [Fitch on steam ships]
- 00:11
honest pretty ugly. that's a face only a mother could love.
- 00:14
well uglier not Fitch's steamship could carry 30 people up and down a river at a
- 00:19
galloping 6 miles an hour. whoa hold on to your bonnets there ladies. as we
Full Transcript
- 00:24
already know the steam engine was in need of revisions if it was gonna be an
- 00:27
efficient source of power. well by the early 1800s a standard kind of steamer
- 00:32
had been built using the new Watt steam engines and a giant paddle wheel. think [steam ship sinks a little]
- 00:38
about a classic Mark Twain kind of riverboat paddling up the Mississippi.
- 00:42
paddle boats looked awesome but they had some problems. the worst being that their
- 00:46
paddles operated best at a certain depth. if we loaded our boat down with heavy
- 00:51
goods or too many people the boat would sink a little and the paddles well
- 00:55
wouldn't work as well. it wasn't great especially in Gator country. yeah.
- 01:00
ventually a new kind of steam propulsion swooped in to save the day. these new
- 01:05
engines were called screw propellers which were giant underwater fans powered [men smile standing next to steamboat]
- 01:10
by a steam engine.. well screw propellers just rolls off the
- 01:14
tongue a little nicer don't you think? well propellers were smaller and more
- 01:18
efficient but they already had that over big clunky paddle wheels. but on top of
- 01:22
that they worked reliably no matter how deep they were in the water. great for
- 01:26
people not so great for Gators. one last step in steam engine evolution was the
- 01:31
steam turbine. aka high-pressure steam engines. these bad boys forced [kid smiles next to steam turbine]
- 01:36
high-pressure steam through a narrow channel where it turned a turbine
- 01:41
superfast. way more efficient way faster and probably way scarier for the Gators.
- 01:46
whatever the technical details steamers had a few things in common. like the fact
- 01:50
that they burn mountains of coal. they needed extra storage space and crews of
- 01:56
unfortunate workers to feed the coal into the boiler widow. no one's idea
- 02:01
of fun. working in a boiler room was kind of like sucking on a smokestack for a
- 02:05
living. they all took some pretty serious industrial scale equipment to build and [men build equipment]
- 02:10
assemble, including huge iron furnaces and gigantic welders. but they totally
- 02:15
blew sailing ships out of the water. no more waiting for the correct wind and
- 02:19
tide or current ,no more complicated rigging arrangements and no more 40 days
- 02:23
to get across the Atlantic. well by the early 1900's we can cross the Atlantic
- 02:28
in just nine days - and sure we can take a transatlantic flight in six hours these [airplane flies by]
- 02:33
days but to don't tell our ancestors. only depress them .though probably no
- 02:38
more than the whole being dead thing.
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