@circuitsmith: In those days, instead of having an electrical bus that fed your machinery, you had a “mechanical bus” that provided rotational energy, as I see it.
Steam engines in those days couldn’t have made more than maybe 200 HP for a pretty big one (with the exception of locomotives), which seems pretty anemic to run all that machinery with all the parasitic losses inherent in all those drive belts, line shafts, etc. Though they were torque monsters.
I have this take on new technology: Just because you can…doesn’t mean you have too.
Pretty much any new technology goes through a ‘teething’ period before the bugs get worked out and refinements get made. Cars, computers, probably even candles and the wheel. (Computers could still use some refinement–I work on and with them for a living and could fill pages with ranting about various idiocies, but they’ve still come a long way)
RE: “Just because you can… doesn’t mean you have to.”, I totally agree. Does anyone need their car to be so freaking connected that you can access your home MP3 and video library, send emails, and probably even edit spreadsheets from your drivers’ seat? IMHO, no, though a friend does have a newer Audi that incorporates Google Street View into the nav system, which is kind of cool. I also think that while refinements like self-parking, collision radar, adaptive cruise control with automatic braking, and the newer systems that will even keep the car in the lane are maybe useful for elderly drivers and poor drivers in general. But they dumb down driving so much that it makes poor, inattentive drivers out of people. Until we have self-driving cars, people that are operating a car shouldn’t be excused from thinking and paying attention.
What’s next in the ‘‘just because we can’’ category ?
Joy stick steering ?
For cars and the general public, that is.
I know joy stick steering is out there on heavy equipment now.