Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

- [Narrator] Simply boil water to see what it can do.

Provide locomotion, generate electricity,

clean just about anything, and power outlandish gizmos.

But if you don't watch out, it can huff

and puff and blow your house down.

- Are you ready to go balls out?

Are you ready to go full steam ahead?

You'll find out where all these terms come from coming up.

- [Narrator] Now, steam power on "Modern Marvels".

[dramatic music]

[gears crunching]

-[Narrator] Steam cars.

In the early days of the automobile,

they were more popular than the internal combustion engine.

To learn about them from an expert,

we went to Jay Leno's garage.

In two enormous buildings, Jay has amassed a collection

of exceptional and unusual motor vehicles,

including some classic steamers.

- What I'm gonna do right now is fire up

a 1909 Stanley steam car.

The steam cars are quite popular

at the turn of the century because, don't forget,

cars back in the early days, you had to crank them,

and you had the magneto, and you had to set the choke,

and a lot of times they'd backfire

and people would break their arms.

Where steam, well, steam technology was 100 years old

by the time this car was built.

Steam technology was easily understood.

If you heat up water, it makes steam,

it pushes the pistons, and you go.

Let's open up the hood.

Okay, not as pretty as looking at a 289 Mustang

or a 327 Chevy, but this is not your engine.

This is just your boiler.

- [Narrator] Getting an old steamer

ready to run isn't simple.

It's a multi-step, time-consuming process,

and firing up the boiler can be an adventure.

- This is one of the few cars you can get

burned to death and scalded to death at the same time.

I mean, you're carrying an open flame,

and you're made of wood.

- [Narrator] Adding air pressure, easy.

Pilot light, no problem.

But then Jay's first attempt to ignite the gas injectors

that provide the heat for the boiler fails.

- Not good.

Okay, that's a bad sign.

[Jay blowing]

- [Narrator] Now he's not sure how much vaporized gas

is floating around.

- Let's take a chance.

[gas igniting] There you go.

Exactly what I'm talking about.

As you can see, it has burned.

See, when you go home, your wife knows where you've been.

She can't accuse you of being out or doing something

when your arm is on fire.

- [Narrator] Jay has better luck the second time around,

and soon the boiler is warming up.

The car lets out a loud moan.

[car moaning]

[Jay howling]

Next, Jay pushes the car outside

to fill up the car's 30 gallon water tank.

- I'm slowly building steam pressure.

Let's see if we've got any.

I'll check my whistle.

[steam whistle blowing]

We're getting there.

See, the nice thing about steam is a gasoline engine

might turn 3500 revolutions per minute.

This engine turns about 357 revolutions per mile.

It's just choo, choo, like that.

So when you pull away, dead silence.

[steam whistle blowing]

There's no gears to shift, there's no transmission,

there's no clutch.

Steam is so powerful, you don't need gears.

- [Narrator] A steam engine is known

as an external combustion engine,

because unlike an internal combustion engine,

the power is produced outside of the engine

in a boiler, or steam generator.

[suspenseful music]

When water boils, it converts from a liquid to a gas.

It expands in the process, creating pressure

in a closed system.

That pressure can be used to do work,

like running pistons in Jay's Stanley steamer.

While inside a pressurized system, steam is invisible.

It's when it vents into cooler temperatures

that it condenses into white clouds of water vapor.

- This is your throttle right here,

and you open your throttle and you go.

Let's see if we can beat the camera car.

[steam whistle blowing]

- [Narrator] Jay has hit 70 miles per hour in this car.

Not bad.

But the Stanley steamer land speed record

is 127 miles per hour, set in 1906.

- When you drive a steam car, you learn to shut off

your throttle as you approach a stop sign,

so you get a build up of steam.

You don't have limitless steam.

You're actually using steam faster than you're making it,

so you want to try to conserve as much steam as you can.

- [Narrator] After taking a spin in his Stanley,

Jay decides to roll out one of his more elegant steamers,

a 1907 White steam car.

- This was a bit more expensive, bit more prestigious

than the Stanley steam car.

This was a step up.

They built 10,000 of these.

This was the first White House car.

Teddy Roosevelt rode in a White steamer.

- [Narrator] Starting up this car doesn't take as long

because of its more efficient way of producing steam.

- With the Stanley heating up 15 gallons of water,

you have a big fire, like a giant kettle.

With this, you're never heating more

than two quarts of water at a time.

[ragtime music]

As you can see, the White was a lot more relaxed version

of the Stanley.

Not quite as hectic, big comfortable cars.

35 miles an hour was a nice cruising speed.

This is what they called a condensing car.

If you notice, unlike the Stanley,

you don't see plumes of steam coming out the back

because the steam is used by the engine,

it goes back up into the condenser,

which looks like a radiator, but it's a condenser.

The cool air from the fan cools the steam,

turns it into water, and you use it over and over again.

I mean, eventually it dissipates.

Whereas a Stanley you might get only

a mile and a half on a gallon of water,

on this you might get five miles on a gallon of water.

- [Narrator] The ride may have been quiet and comfortable,

but the lower sticker prices on gasoline powered cars,

along with a quicker starting internal combustion engine,

caused steamer sales to fizzle.

- Gasoline cars could do it quicker, better, faster,

and that's really the name of the game.

I love them, but if your wife's pregnant

and you need to get to the hospital,

you can't be out there with a match,

and "I'll be about another 10 minutes, honey."

It's not gonna work.

- [Narrator] Decades before steam cars,

and for decades after their fall,

steam locomotives ruled the rails.

In 1804, English inventor, Richard Trevithick

unveiled a steam locomotive capable of hauling 10 tons.

[steam whistle blowing]

They quickly grew in size and power

and became important work horses

in the industrial revolution.

Throughout the 1800s, the steam locomotive

played a major role in the settlement of the American west.

A defining moment occurred in 1869

when the completion of the trans-continental railroad

linked the United States from coast to coast.

In remote Ely, Nevada, the Nevada Northern Railway

houses its historic steam locomotives

in their original engine house.

- The locomotive we're gonna take out today

is locomotive 93.

She was purchased by the railroad in July of 1909.

Right now the fireman is preparing the fire

to produce the steam.

[coal sizzling]

- What I'm doing now is I'm shoveling coal

into the fire box.

We cover the grates evenly with fire,

and we build the pressure up for our operating pressure,

about 185 psi.

[shovel clanging]

This fire box is big.

It's about 12 feet deep and about six feet wide.

This engine takes a lot of coal to make it run.

- It's an incredibly labor-intensive machine.

Right now we're lubing it, getting it ready

to go out on the line.

- [Narrator] Once the boiler builds up enough pressure,

steam generates electricity for the train's lights,

and runs the air pumps on the front of the locomotive

that produce compressed air for braking and other functions.

Then up goes the engine house door,

and locomotive 93 slowly chugs out.

[train bell ringing]

[steam hissing]

- We just received a high ball, releasing the engine brake,

placing the power reverse and forward,

and pull out on the throttle and two blasts on the whistle.

[steam whistle tooting]

and off we go.

[locomotive chugging]

- [Narrator] This is copper mining country,

and for nearly 50 years, locomotive number 93's job

was to haul ore cars.

- This is a freight locomotive.

You can tell by the smaller wheels.

It has a lot of tractive effort,

but very little horse power.

Tractive effort's about 42,000 pounds,

but the horse power's only 905.

It's built for power and not for speed.

It used to pull about 33 oar cars up the hill.

[steam hissing]

Since this is a working locomotive,

you have to be careful what you touch.

Everything's extremely hot.

[train bell ringing]

- [Narrator] Before they return number 93

to the engine house, the crew performs

a boiler cleaning procedure that gives just a hint

of the amount of pressurized steam inside.

- After each run, we do what we call a blow down.

We do this because sediments build up in the boiler

and we have to clean the boiler out

and get those sediments out of the boiler.

So here goes.

[steam blowing]

[bell ringing]

In the 19th century, the steam engine

revolutionized how we live, and ushered in the dawn

of a new age of transportation.

A trip from New York to Philadelphia

that used to take two days, now took only two hours.

Farmers could ship their products to distant markets,

as the speed of railroads meant crops wouldn't spoil

before being sold.

But it's not just locomotives that demonstrate

the awesome power of steam.

At the Nevada Northern Railway Museum,

this 100 ton steam crane is called the big hook.

Built in 1907, its main purpose was to clear train wrecks

and place derailed cars back on the tracks.

- This steam-powered crane is similar to a steam locomotive

except that we're not running wheels on steel rails.

What we're running here are large gears

that pick up the boom, and also the two hooks in the front.

- [Narrator] Before it can pick up a derailed car,

the crane's outriggers much be extended.

Then the crew places wood blocks underneath each

to stabilize the crane.

Now the heavy lifting can begin.

[steam hissing]

- Next, we're gonna swing the crane over to the load

we're gonna pick up, and to do that,

I have to engage the swing hook

and then I have to put a direction on it,

and then I will apply steam, which is power,

by these levers.

Here we go.

[dramatic music]

Next, we're gonna lower the hook to pick up the load,

which would mean first I engage this one here, this clutch.

[steam hissing]

It's engaged.

Now we're gonna let her down.

- [Narrator] The big hook may look huge,

and it's brawny enough to lift up this ore car,

but it's nothing in size compared to some

of the largest steam-powered machines ever constructed,

the great ocean liners of the 19th and 20th centuries,

which changed travel and transportation forever.

The Titanic was the largest,

when it sank on its maiden voyage in 1912.

But the RMS Queen Elizabeth, launched in 1938,

was the biggest steam ship ever built.

We know the smaller vessels designed to navigate

rivers and lakes as steamboats.

It was in New York in 1807 that Robert Fulton's Clermont

offered the first successful commercial

steam boat service in the world.

Today there are only a few working steam boats in America.

In New Orleans, the Natchez provides a reminder

of the golden age of steam boating on the Mississippi.

While the boat is a re-creation, built in 1975,

the enormous steam engines are hand me downs

from a bygone era.

- These engines that you see right here were built in 1925.

They were built for the steam boat Clairton,

which was a push boat for the U.S. Steel Company

in Pennsylvania.

- It wasn't unusual for steam boats to get machinery

from the previous vessel.

The wooden boats only lasted a short time,

and the machinery would quite often be moved

from one older vessel onto the new one.

- [Narrator] Both engines work in tandem

to move the huge arms that turn the 26 ton

oak and steel paddle wheel.

The total maximum output of the two engines

is equivalent to about 1600 horse power.

The boilers that supply the steam aren't vintage equipment,

because of safety, economic and environmental reasons.

- The old boats used coal.

Unlike us, we're using diesel fuel.

There are two boilers.

We only use one at a time.

- [Narrator] Not all the steam produced

heads right to the engines.

One small pipe goes up to the top of the boat.

[steam whistle blowing]

- The few boats that are in service now

have a very distinctive whistle.

Most steam boat people can automatically hear them

and know what exact boat they're from.

- [Narrator] A whistle isn't the only way

to get people's attention on this boat.

Another pipe runs across the top deck

to supply steam to the calliope.

- The first thing you have to do is clear the condensation

that's built up in the whistles.

We have 32 keys on our keyboard.

Each key corresponds to a steam whistle.

The steam organ was patented by Joshua C. Stoddard

of Worcester, Massachusetts in 1856.

His brother was a river boat captain.

He gave it to his brother, who put it on the boat,

and it became a principal means of advertising

and welcoming passengers aboard steamboats

by the late 1850s.

It was later named calliope for the Greek muse of voice.

[steam organ playing]

I'm gonna close this act with a theme

you should all recognize.

[steam organ playing]

- [Narrator] Trains, boats and steam cars

created a more mobile world.

But just as important was steam's role

in the factories of the industrial revolution.

Jay Leno decided to go back 150 years

and see what some old, but proven technology had to offer.

He acquired a Wright stationary steam engine,

built in the 1860s, and installed it

in his huge automotive garage.

- Abraham Lincoln was president

when this thing was designed.

It weighs 11 tons.

This flywheel here is three tons.

It's built in two pieces, but the rest of it

is all one casting.

- [Narrator] Of course, if you decide to buy a steam engine,

you also need a source of steam.

- We've got a modern Clayton steam generator.

It's a little complicated.

Bernard has the cheat sheet.

Get the cheat sheet, Bernard.

We always want to make sure we fire this thing

right up properly, because it's a lot of vales to open

and things you have to do.

- First step, we've got to check the water

in the header tank up there.

- [Jay] The header tank looks good.

We've got water in the header tank.

- [Bernard] We've got it on, okay.

- [Narrator] Next, Jay and Bernard open a series of valves

to get the water flowing through the system.

- [Bernard] So that's starting to look pretty good there.

Let's push the till run button over there,

and we'll get some fire going.

- Aye, captain.

- Now we're waiting for steam to come out

of that pipe up on top.

- There she blows, captain.

Now that we've got steam, let's go back inside.

- Luckily this thing operates on natural gas

so I don't have to shovel coal all day.

That wouldn't do it.

- As you can see, we've got almost 140 pounds

of steam pressure, much more

than this would have run on in its time.

So let's open our valve here and see what happens.

And everything starts moving.

I still get a kick out of this each time it starts.

It's always amazing to me.

You know, we're so used to, rrr,

and machines starting machines.

The fact that this runs so quietly.

- [Narrator] One reason this 11 ton single piston

Wright steam engine does run so quietly

is that Jay installed a seven ton

perfectly level cement base for the engine to rest on.

- If you're a little off, your piston will eat into the bore

and wear your cylinder out.

So that's the real trick, making sure everything is level

and smooth and moves freely.

- [Narrator] So far, Jay hasn't put

his steam engine to work.

Back in the steam age, the rotating flywheel

would run a big belt to transfer its power

to saws and other mill or factory machinery.

- This is what the Luddites were afraid of.

You've all heard the expression Luddites,

people who don't like technology.

But you realize a machine like this

would probably replace 100 men working.

It was 125 horse power, which doesn't seem like much now.

We have engines this big to make 125 horse power.

But back in the day, this was almost

like space shuttle technology.

- [Narrator] What makes old steam engines fascinating

in this age of electronics, are the rhythmic sounds

and the enormous moving parts,

a potential hazard in 19th century factories.

- There was no OSHA back in the day.

There was no health and safety standards.

A guy would go, "Hey, I'll fix it."

Pshow, and that was pretty much the end of it.

- [Narrator] Next, Jay starts up his even older

1832 steam engine.

- Give it a little bit of a push here to get it going,

to get it over center, and there she goes.

[levers clicking]

As you can see, there's kind of

a quiet elegance to these things.

This is what they call a walking beam

because it's a beam and it looks like it's walking.

It's pretty self-explanatory.

This ran a color and dye factory in England

back in the early 1800s, and I'm told

this engine ran for almost 100 years continuously,

just like this, chug, chug, chug.

That's what it did.

- [Narrator] The engine isn't entirely original,

but there's a good reason the oilers were added later

to make lubrication easier.

- This is 1832.

How did they lubricate them?

What you'd do is you'd bring a pig in,

they'd slaughter a pig, they'd rub the greasy parts

all over the metal, run it for a while.

"Hey, we need another pig."

Bring another pig in, they'd slaughter another pig,

rub the greasy parts all over,

and probably ate a lot of pork chops.

That's probably what they did.

Luckily, we don't do that anymore.

- [Narrator] Centripetal force causes

these circulating balls to flare outward.

They're the engine's main safety feature.

- The faster you go, the higher this rises,

which moves that lever, which controls your throttle.

If you hear the expression balls out,

it doesn't mean what you think, okay?

What it means is your balls are running all the way out,

your engine is running at full speed,

and to keep them from over-revving it

and breaking your motor, it essentially works

as a governor, it limits how much throttle

you can put into it.

- [Narrator] Jay's engines may be antiques,

but steam is still a vital source of power.

- All your nuclear subs run on steam.

Steam turbines run a lot of power plants.

Steam is still a force to be reckoned with.

- [Narrator] Coal, natural gas and nuclear energy

all create steam, but there's a more

environmentally-friendly way to turn the turbines

that generate electricity.

Yellowstone National Park's spurting and gushing geysers

are examples of the volatile subterranean interaction

of heat and water.

Another is the biggest steam explosion in U.S. history,

the cataclysmic eruption of Mount St. Helens

in Washington state, on May 18th, 1980.

Inside the volcano, water hit superheated rock

and flashed into steam with the explosive force

of about 20 million tons of TNT.

The blast devastated 150 square miles

of forest in six minutes.

That's the power of steam uncontrolled.

Elsewhere, that natural power is being harnessed

to produce electricity.

The first geothermal power plants in the U.S.

were built in 1962, at the Geysers dry steam field,

located in northern California.

It's still the largest producing geothermal field

in the world, using high temperature dry steam

as the resource to generate electricity.

In dry steam power plants, the steam shoots up

from the wells and is used to turn turbines,

while most other geothermal plants, called flash plants,

use naturally occurring superheated water

as a source of steam.

In southern California's Imperial Valley,

along the shore of the Salton Sea,

the CalEnergy company currently has 10 flash plants,

all situated over a hot bed of geothermal activity.

- On those 10 plants, we're generating 340 megawatts

of power, which equates to about 333,000 homes

that it powers.

We sell, on long-term power contracts,

to utilities throughout southern California and Arizona.

- [Narrator] Just like the Salton Sea above,

the water below the ground is very salty.

It's referred to as brine.

Geothermal production wells, similar to oil wells,

drill down thousands of feet to tap into

the more than 360 degree Fahrenheit reservoirs of brine

trapped in the bedrock.

Tremendous pressure causes the superheated brine

to rush to the surface.

- This is Vonderahe One production well.

Vonderahe One was recognized

by the World Geothermal Resources Council

as being the most prolific geothermal well in the world.

Don't let all that noise scare you.

These yellow bars are actually restraints,

because the well head was moving so much,

and it was a little too prolific.

- [Narrator] The hot brine from the wells

flows through pipes into large cylindrical tanks.

This part of the process is why this type

of geothermal plant is called a flash plant.

- As the pressure is lowered inside the vessel,

steam is flashed, similar to what you would see

in a pressure cooker in your home.

As the steam is flashed, it's routed

from the top of the vessel.

The brine water that remains is exiting

on the bottom half so that there's no contamination

between the two.

- [Narrator] The steam without salts is then routed

to turn the blades inside the turbines

that generate electricity.

While the steam is used to turn the turbines,

the remaining liquid that didn't flash into steam

is pumped away from the plants to injection wells

that recycle it back into the underground reservoirs.

- We re-inject 80% of all the fluid

that we pull out in the production system,

so we're self sustaining the reservoir.

- [Narrator] Geologists estimate there's approximately

2000 megawatts of power still untapped in the area,

enough energy to supply about two million more homes.

They're the heavy lifters and big movers,

but they get gunky and grimy and need to be cleaned.

What can you do?

The Sioux Corporation of South Dakota has the answer.

Roll out one of its steam cleaning units,

attach a water supply, fire up the boiler, and blast away.

[steam hissing]

- Steam is just a fantastic way to remove grease and dirt

from heavy equipment.

- [Narrator] This steam cleaning unit

has a diesel tank that supplies fuel to the burner.

The upper portion is called a water tube boiler.

Hot air produced by the burners below

circulates around two coils of water-filled steel pipe,

up through the center, down between the coils,

the up the outside, before exhausting out

the top of the unit.

- To build one of these coils, we take 200 feet of pipe

and wind it on a drum into a cylinder,

and then we wind a smaller one for the inner cylinder

of another 100 feet, for a total of 300 feet

of pipe that's all wound together and welded together

to have one continuous pass of 300 feet.

When the water passes through this 300 feet of pipe,

it starts out at 60 degrees Fahrenheit,

and ends up at 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

- [Narrator] The hot pressurized water

flows out of the boiler through the hose,

and discharges from the steam nozzle.

These machines are designed so that only 15% of the water

flashes into steam as it exits the nozzle.

The 85% water, 15% steam ratio

provides the best cleaning power.

The tremendous expansion of the steam

accelerates the water droplets

so that they bombard the surface to be cleaned.

Pressure washers that just use hot water

aren't as effective when dealing with grease and grime,

and 100% steam would melt the grease,

but not wash it away.

- In addition to cleaning heavy equipment like this,

there are other uses for steam cleaners,

such as blasting away snow and ice.

It'll clean gum, sticky substances off of sidewalks.

It can be used to clean just about anything.

- [Narrator] The Sioux corporation

manufactures both steam cleaning

and steam generating machines.

The heart of each machine is a reliable boiler.

Workers make so-called fire tube boilers

to go inside the company's steam generators.

Unlike their water tube boiler, in a fire tube boiler,

the heat from the burners travels through the tubes

and boils the water inside the tank.

- And you have it filled with water to this level,

about approximately here, and the water boils

just like in a tea kettle,

and the steam comes out the exhaust right here.

- We're testing our SF20 boiler right now.

You'll see the steam start pouring out.

This machine will put out about 700 pounds

per hour of steam.

It's running at a temperature of about

240 degrees right now.

[steam hissing]

This is the discharge of our steam generator,

and when it boils inside the steam generator,

it expands at a rate of 1500 times.

So if we start off with one cubic foot of water,

we're gonna have 1500 cubic feet of steam at the discharge.

- [Narrator] Low pressure steam generators

can be used to accelerate concrete curing,

and even sterilize soil.

But what if you've got dirty clothes and wrinkles?

Steam again.

There are about 30,000 dry cleaners in the United States,

including Perfect Cleaners in Los Angeles,

and they all rely on steam.

- Here at this large 3500 square foot dry cleaning plant,

we process over 5000 pieces a week,

and every single one of them comes into contact with steam

in one form or another.

[water spraying]

- [Narrator] The maze of white pipes carries steam

to the various devices throughout the plant

that spew it out.

All the steam comes from the boiler in the back.

- Here we are in the boiler room,

the heart of the dry cleaning plant.

As you can see, I've taken the cover off my boiler here,

and you see the natural gas flaming

and heating these water tubes, creating steam and pressure,

carrying pressure up to 110 pounds per square inch.

- [Narrator] Some of the washers and dryers use steam.

When it comes to getting out wrinkles,

steam's heat and humidity have no equal

in getting the kinks out of cloth.

- This is a steam air form finisher,

otherwise known as a Suzie in the dry cleaning business.

I'm gonna put this wrinkled polo shirt on here,

push the button, we're gonna have hot steam

come out of there, and then hot air to dry it.

This is the first step in the dry cleaning pressing process

before it goes over to a utility press.

- [Narrator] Utility presses emit steam

from both the top and bottom inner surfaces.

Workers also have steam irons available

to target specific areas.

- This is our largest press, also known as a hot head press.

This large metal surface is filled with steam,

gets up to a temperature of 300 plus degrees.

It is dry, though.

When she brings the press down,

she'll press this wet sheet here with some bottom steam,

and it'll give the sheet a nice crisp finish

without using any starch.

- [Narrator] Wrinkles aren't the only laundry problem

that steam can obliterate.

- We use here steam to remove stains,

and this is how we do it.

I put it on the spotting board,

take my spotting gun, which shoots steam through it,

and I can use a variety of distance,

depending on the garment, so I don't damage the fabric

or the color on the garment.

[steam spraying]

The steam is allowing me to remove the stain as I go.

- [Narrator] While one small boiler can supply the steam

for this cleaning business, in New York,

enormous boilers send steam surging under the city streets

and into some of the world's most famous skyscrapers.

Unless things go wrong.

What do the Empire State Building,

the Chrysler Building, the United Nations,

along with hospitals and hundreds of other

Manhattan businesses have in common?

Instead of having big boilers in their basements,

they receive steam from one of Consolidated Edison Company's

six steam generation stations,

the largest steam system in the world.

- Over the course of a year, they're putting

30 billion pounds of steam into the Con Ed steam system.

It's sent out into 105 miles of underground pipe

throughout Manhattan, going from the tip of Manhattan

up to 96th Street.

We service nearly 1800 customers.

[upbeat music]

- [Narrator] The 74th Street Con Ed steam generating plant

alone puts out about 2 million pounds of steam per hour.

- [Charles] We have three high pressure boilers

here at 74th Street, and we create a fireball

inside the boiler, which heats up 60 thousand gallons

per hour of water, which goes up to the drum,

that flashes into steam.

- Each of our three high pressure boilers

has two steam drums.

They produce approximately 450 thousand pounds of steam

per hour, at a temperature of 800 degrees.

Each drum extends back 25 to 30 feet,

so you're only seeing the face of it right here.

- [Narrator] In a central control room,

workers carefully monitor both the steam production process

and the delivery system.

- We produce steam at 800 psi,

and a high temperature of 840 degrees.

For the safety of the steam system unit,

we reduce that pressure to 200 psi and 410 degrees,

which we send out in the underground pipes.

- This is our steam mimic system.

This system monitors over 105 miles of piping

in the steam system.

It monitors the pressure in the steam system,

so if there is a problem anywhere in the system

throughout Manhattan, we'll know immediately

where that problem is, and we can dispatch crews there

to correct the problem.

- [Narrator] Con Edison has been

in the steam business since 1930.

The underground pipe responsible for this explosion

was laid in 1923.

It was part of the pre-existing steam system

Con Edison purchased that first began supplying steam

to Manhattan customers in 1882.

Does that mean steam is outdated?

Not a chance.

The Hearst Tower, considered technologically

and environmentally state of the art,

is one of Con Edison's customers,

- We're in the basement of the Hearst Tower,

where the steam from the Con Edison plant

comes in through the street, in this pipe,

at 175 pounds per square inch.

It then gets reduced through the control panel here

to 60 pounds, ultimately getting reduced to 15 pounds,

and it then supplies all the heat

and hot water to the building.

- [Narrator] Inside the building's 10 story high atrium,

there are no old-fashioned radiators or hot air vents.

Instead, the heat derived from the steam

flows in tubes under the tile flooring,

creating a comfortable ambient temperature

in the huge space.

- The steam that we use is calculated

in these meters here that Con Edison comes to read.

We're using far less steam than was originally projected

due to the efficiency of our heating systems.

- [Narrator] While Con Ed boils water to provide steam heat,

the goal of other companies is to turn steam

back into water.

This facility processes and packages

a variety of water products, including distilled water.

Distillation involves boiling water

and vaporizing it into steam.

Boiling sterilizes the water, and when the steam

lifts out of it, salts and other solids are left behind.

Then the steam is cooled, and when it condenses back

into liquid form, it's as close to pure H2O as possible.

While distillation can produce clean water

from a very contaminated source,

this process begins with the municipal water supply.

- It arrives in the pipe above,

fairly directly from the Sierras, as it turns out,

but we treat it before processing

through the distilled.

First, we run it through some sand filters

to take out particulate matter.

We run it through carbon filters to take out chlorine

that might be present, and then we run it through softeners

to take out the hardness.

All this is done to provide very clean water

before we even enter the distillation process.

- [Narrator] To eliminate any contaminants

picked up in the system, the distilled water

runs through sub-micron filters, and then into a tank

where ozone gas bubbles up through it

to treat any remaining impurities.

Now it's ready for bottling.

- This is about as pure as you can get for water.

It's half a part of so per million of dissolved solids.

- [Narrator] The water in the gallon containers

is an all purpose product that's recommended

for use in steam irons, but compared to regular water,

distilled water is relatively tasteless.

So to bottle drinking water, these tanks add back

brand-specific electrolytes and minerals.

These actually make the water healthier to drink

and give it a more appealing taste.

[fun electronic music]

While this plodding mechanized oddity

may look like it just walked off the pages

of a Jules Verne novel, it's actually part of a trend

known as steam punk.

The term has been around since the late 1980s

to label contemporary drawings and objects

designed with a pseudo Victorian bent.

In his garage in a quiet central California neighborhood,

I-Wei Huang began turning his steam punk art

into a steam-powered reality.

- I've drawn steam punk kind of inspired art

pretty much all my life, drawing old robots and stuff

that uses old Victorian technology.

And I put a lot of thought into how, in my work

and the technology behind it,

so much so that I decided that it might actually work.

- [Narrator] I-Wei, who makes a living

working for a video game company, doesn't build

his own parts, and the miniature steam engines he uses

come from hobby stores.

It's the unusual ways he cobbles everything together

that grabs people's attention.

[steam whistle blowing]

- This one actually won the best of show in RoboGames.

It's in the shape of a trilobite,

which is a prehistoric animal.

[steam whistle blowing]

Steam is very intriguing because you get to play with fire,

and you get to play with something

that's a little bit dangerous, a little bit unusual.

It's all visual.

You can see it, you can smell it.

So this is the steam rover.

It's basically a steam engine powered, it's six wheel drive,

four wheels steering, low steam machine.

It's one of the more powerful ones I have,

and it's just a blast to drive around.

- [Narrator] Most of I-Wei's engines

sound like tiny locomotives, but this one

makes a distinctly different sound.

[turbine spinning]

- I decided to do a turbine since I've done so many

piston-driven steam machines.

So it was a challenge finding a turbine

that actually works well.

It uses us a lot of steam very, very fast,

and has super high RPM, but not a whole lot of torque,

so a lot of gearing down is required.

The forward reverse is done by a clutch

because the turbine only turns one way.

This is the steam centipede.

It's one of my most complex machines that I've built.

It has 32 legs.

In old science fiction movies,

there's a lot of steam walking machines,

but there's a reason why it's really hard to pull off.

It's just not as efficient as wheels.

- [Narrator] I-Wei has managed to get even his most

complex designs up and running on a small scale.

But what about a full-sized version?

- I would love to see one of these huge steam machines,

something like this, that can carry people around,

but this already scares me that the boilers could fail.

On a big scale, that's not something

that I want to think about.

- [Narrator] But in nearby Oakland, a group of artisans

operating under the Kinetic Steam Works banner,

take on the challenge of dealing with fire and water

on a much bigger scale, with sometimes startling results.

[flame flaring]

- Here at Kinetic Steam Works, we have a complete reverence

for the vintage equipment and the stylings

of the way things used to be done.

We really like to take the vintage equipment

and then use it for contemporary art pieces.

[steam hissing]

- [Narrator] Like their 1920 traction engine named Hortense,

that provided the steam power for a belt drive

that turned a carousel.

- There were actually steam carousels back in the day.

This was a little bit more on an industrial scale,

and it really was a massive belt movement

and gear motion, reciprocating motion

that was as much of a pleasure to ride the carousel

as it was to watch the entire operation.

[steam hissing]

- [Narrator] At the Kinetic Steam Works'

6000 square foot shop, the group fires up a small boiler

to supply steam to some of their smaller projects.

- The boiler is called the Blister by some,

and Little Baby Steamy Pants by some others.

We have a fire box, and right now we're burning

liquid fuel and wood.

Here comes some steam.

[motor running]

- This is a mock up of what might have been used

in a factory at the turn of the century,

the last century, not this closest one,

where you've got steam coming to a small engine like this

and there's a PTO, a power take off here

that the sewing machine operator can tension this belt

or de-tension it.

It just basically takes steam power,

turns it into centripetal force,

and makes the flywheel on the sewing machine work.

- Not everything we do here is practical

at Kinetic Steam Works.

However, art can be a lot of fun.

This is a sculpture that I put together

out of old musical instruments.

One of the things that we as an organization did

was restore a steam boat, a paddle wheel

stern wheel steam boat, and it was a beautiful experience.

The artist that we collaborated with, Swoon,

she decorated our vessel, and despite the fact

that it didn't necessarily look like a steam boat

of the 1800s, it ran like one.

- [Narrator] The steam boat now sits quietly

in the back of the shop, while the Steam Works gang

is dreaming up their next project.

In the meantime, let's just blow off a little steam.

[steam hissing]

[steam whistle blowing]

[piston moving]

[water wheel turning]

[engine pumping]

[steam hissing]

[steam whistle blowing]

[car squeaking]

[steam organ playing]

[steam hissing]

[steam whistle blowing]

[train whistle blowing]

[engine chugging]