Historical Development of Prime Movers

The revolution was begun when the technology of the steam engine was invented by James Watt.
For power generation, three principal competitors are introduced in the field of production of mechanical power. They are the steam turbine plant, the diesel piston engine and the gasoline piston engine.
Steam turbines became the most important prime mover for power generation in the 19th century.
Because of this, new bulky and expensive steam generating equipment, the boiler, and the nuclear reactor, were introduced. They are intended to produce steam as an intermediate working fluid.
Later many other power generation systems were introduced. The example of such types of power generators is diesel plant. In many locations these machines started replacing bulky power plants for power generation.
Gasoline engines were used in the early days for aircraft propulsion. A device named the gas turbine was also introduced during that time, and it supplanted the use of superchargers based on piston engines.
The main development of the gas turbine started only after the Second World War. They were based on shaft power technology and were called turboprops. After some time the development of turbojet engines for aircraft usage started, and these are based on mass airflow rather than shaft output.

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