Summary of text [comment] page 80

[For those trained in psychoanalysis, please do not blow a gasket.

I am only letting off a little steam.

After all, valves and boilers function like Freud’s ‘unconscious’. But, they know not what they do.

Three interscoping forms describe an engine that powers a locomotive.

On the content level, steam is produced. The ancient Greeks had a toy that spun from the emission of steam. They never thought to turn it into an engine. The mechanical philosophers of the West did, around 2000 years later.

They did so by altering the steam’s situation. The pressure of the steam could force a piston to move. Valves were necessary to do this. One valve opened to let water in. That valve shut and the piston moved from volume produced by steam. Then another valve opened to release the steam.

The valves, then, operated in the normal context of ‘moving a piston’. The moving piston then could be used for work.]