User blog comment:Sparkly Venice/I've got an idea for a new timeline!/@comment-1375165-20150411021647

Sorry to burst your bubble but Hero's aeolipile is closer to a rocket than to the kind of steam engine that was used in the industrial revolution. I only mention this fact because it's a common misunderstanding in the history of science and technology; it's a completely understandable misinterpretation of information found online.

Something like the Watt Engine was not designed on the basis of the same physics as the aeolipile. Consider that the aeolipile just involved shooting steam out of nozzles while the first industrial steam engines used differences in pressure on each side of a piston; there is literally nothing in common but the effect (rotation) and the power source (steam heated by burning fuel), but that would be like comparing a steam engine to a nuclear reactor. Hero's engine uses the same physics as the reaction steam turbine but the inventions are unrelated since the reaction turbine was invented about a hundred years after the first industrial steam engines (e.g. Watt's or Newcomen's engines) and was almost certainly an evolution of earlier industrial designs rather than a copy of Hero's engine.

I would be happy to elaborate on anything that I've said here :)

Also, I'm curious where you got the idea that "the romans destroyed them ". I have never heard that interpretation of the history of the aeolipile.