Quentin came in early to the factory workshop. He spent a good hour polishing the brass fittings on the steam excavators. It was 1921 and the smell of smoke and oil filled this industrial landscape, piled with grit and coal, and with new electric trams that fanned out along the city streets, accompanied by horse drawn carts and the the occasional automobile.
Quentin made some tea with bubbling hot water from a spigot on a steam shovel boiler that was just getting up to temperature. Like him, his father had been an engineer working on the older types of drag-line excavators. But now the new thing was the diesel engine and accompanying excavators that made use of hydraulic pistons rather than lines of steel rope.
It started with just the backhoe, a machine for quickly digging trenches. The management of big steam companies liked to ridicule these backhoes as toys they couldn't really move earth in anything like the quantity of established technology.
But Quentin has seen the way technology shifted over the years, and with the new diesel tractors and plows, he imagined a future where everything moved by hydraulic rams and ran on oil, and he thought that for steam power it was soon to be the end of an era.
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