Ohio River steamboat boiler explosions

First federal research contract (1830s), Franklin Institute grant; used to extend the "codes follow disasters" arc backward in time.

It turns out the first research contract ever given by the federal government was in the 1830s, because a steam boiler on one of the steamboats on the Ohio River blew up and killed a hundred people or so. Congress gave a grant to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia to try to figure out why the boilers were blowing up. They still blow up — not as often, but sometimes the consequences are more catastrophic than they used to be.

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The first federal research contract (1836, Franklin Institute) — origin of materials engineering science. Used to establish the deep-historical lineage of pressure vessel safety regulation.

To give you an example, the very first research contract ever given by the federal government was given around 1836 to the Franklin Institute, to figure out why the cast-iron boilers in the river boats on the Ohio River were blowing up and killing people. We hadn't gone past the Mississippi in 1836 — we were still on this side of the Mississippi. No one understood why. We didn't have fracture mechanics, we didn't know about toughness, we barely knew about strength of materials in 1836.

First federal research contract (Franklin Institute, 1830s) — origin point for engineering codes. Used to mark the historical transition from heuristic "make it a little smaller each time until it fails" practice to written design rules.

I want to get into some of the engineering codes now, as opposed to Hammurabi's code and the Hippocratic Oath and Magna Carta. A lot of the codes we have go back to the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The first research contract ever given by the federal government was given in the 1830s. It was given to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to figure out why steamships on the Ohio River were every now and then blowing up, exploding, and killing a bunch of people. Congress wasn't happy, so they gave some money to the Franklin Institute to study why these things were blowing up.

It was a shoe factory down here in Brockton, Massachusetts — a boiler blew up, kapow, around 1905 or so — and the ASME decided we're getting tired of this. The first research contract ever led by the US government was in 1836 or so. Some steamboat on the Ohio River blew up, and Congress actually appropriated some money for someone to go and figure out why these boilers were blowing up and killing people. So pressurized boilers — the Barlow formula, sigma equals PR over T, pressure radius over thickness — those types of equations were around. The boiler and pressure vessel code is the world code today. Mainland China doesn't use it because they don't want to spend sixteen thousand dollars to purchase a code; they basically have their own codes that copy it, and they don't care about copyrights.