For the last 200 years or so, humans have been living in the epoch of power inwhich the heat engine has been the dominant device for converting heat to work and power. The development of the heat engine was for most of that time slow and chaotic and carried out mainly by poorly qualified practitioners who had no knowledge of basic theories of energy and energy conversion to mechanical work. In the field of engineering mechanics, drawings of early steam engines depict various, at times strange, inefficient mechanisms to convert steam power to mechanical power, such as the walking beam...