Looking to our laurels
In the early 1880s Charles Parsons thought there might be value in a steam turbine that expanded high-pressure steam by small increments, through many stages of alternating rotating and stationary circular arrays of blades or vanes. At that time, the advanced state of railroad and steamship technologies guaranteed the availability of a population of founders, machinists and other specialists, ready to produce the experimental engines Parsons needed to achieve success. By 1908 a total of one million horsepower-worth
