Are these actually feasible with a large low-pressure steam engine of the sort that the Greeks could have actually constructed? Remember that the early real steam engines were only just powerful enough to slowly lift buckets of water.
[Edit] - good answers below - thanks! But I think the question of economic viability still stands. As pointed out elsewhere, a waterwheel is easy to construct and doesn't have ongoing fuel costs. A steam engine requires a reasonably well developed iron/steel working industry (including skilled artisans), which in turn requires a fair amount of iron ore and fuel to support smelting. The finished steam engine would require a lot of wood as fuel, or coal, which wasn't widely available in ancient Greece, or easily transportable without a lot of effort. Ancient Greek metallurgy was definitely not sophisticated enough to build a steam train and as for for building a railway 1) they could barely build graded roads and 2) they would have needed a phenomenal amount of mass-produced steel for the tracks.
Water hammer is a big lever that has a hammer on one side and a big bucket of water on the other side. Bucket gets filed by a water stream, gets heavier than the hammer and lifts it, and then at the lowest point (of the bucket) it is mounted in such way that the water spills and the hammer drops, resetting the machine. No precision technology needed, they could do it in stone age.
You can do the same thing with fireplace and water and it's certainly doable with ancient technology, but I'm not sure it's worth it when you have more running water than industry needs anyway.
Another thing they could do is Heron's steam turbine geared in such a way that it does useful work. Also not sure if it's worth it.
This trick (using low power to lift the hammer slowly and dropping it quickly) can be adapted to use any inefficient power source - hamster powered mills are possible ;)
Yes, because that work had been done at the time by even more underpowered devices, that is, by actual humans. You’re lucky if you get half a horsepower from a good human, so replacing them with low HP steam engines might still be worthwhile.
Are these actually feasible with a large low-pressure steam engine of the sort that the Greeks could have actually constructed? Remember that the early real steam engines were only just powerful enough to slowly lift buckets of water.
[Edit] - good answers below - thanks! But I think the question of economic viability still stands. As pointed out elsewhere, a waterwheel is easy to construct and doesn't have ongoing fuel costs. A steam engine requires a reasonably well developed iron/steel working industry (including skilled artisans), which in turn requires a fair amount of iron ore and fuel to support smelting. The finished steam engine would require a lot of wood as fuel, or coal, which wasn't widely available in ancient Greece, or easily transportable without a lot of effort. Ancient Greek metallurgy was definitely not sophisticated enough to build a steam train and as for for building a railway 1) they could barely build graded roads and 2) they would have needed a phenomenal amount of mass-produced steel for the tracks.