Steam in action
Description
Almost extinct....
The Steam Locomotive: only in reserves, such as museum lines, can she still be seen alive. In the better reserves, her biotope is also cherished: the round shed, the turntable, the water column. Some 600,000 steam locomotives were built worldwide between 1804 and 1988, the first in England and the last in China.
Now the steam locomotive is extinct, apart from an occasional narrow gauge line in China and a sugar factory here and there in Indonesia. The steam locomotive is old-fashioned and dirty - but it is unfair to judge a machine whose development stopped in the 1930s with today's technology. Attempts to revive the iron horse don't want to get off the ground properly - perhaps vested interests play a bigger role in this than considerations of a technical nature.
What the steam locomotive looked like in real life, Mr Pruissen shows in a few films he recorded. In between and during the films, he talks about the development of the locomotive, a development that started from feeling and in which science only came into play later. The films were shot in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly in countries behind the Iron Curtain. Because the steam locomotive was attributed great strategic importance, it happened quite often that the filmmaker ended up at the police station. In the GDR, he was confronted with the Stasi (the secret service). Mr Pruissen will also talk about that in between, and you can see his Stasi file
10.30:00 Reception with coffee
11:00 Lecture by Mr A.J.W. Pruissen
11:45 Pause
12:15 Continuation of lecture with concluding discussion
12:45 End of meeting
Speaker(s)
Ton Pruissen is a former secretary of Histechnica.
Location
Science Centre, Mijnbouwstraat 120, Delft
Organiser
History of Technology
Histechnica
Name and contact details for information
Further information from L.A. Hissink at the e-mail address below.