Talk:Pyrophone

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external combustion?

From the article: The pyrophone is similar to the steam calliope, but the difference is that in the calliope the combustion is external to the resonant cavity, whereas the pyrophone is an internal combustion instrument.

Does anyone know what is meant by a calliope being an external combustion instrument? It doesn't seem like there would necessarily be any combustion.-Crunchy Numbers 20:51, 10 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Those calliopes powered by steam would require a boiler heated by an extermal flame. --Hugh7 08:11, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'd call that misleading: the article is written as if the combustion exhaust powered calliopes, which is not true as far as I know or can see in the calliope article. LionsPhil (talk) 12:28, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

It's standard terminology for anyone familiar with steam engines or hot air engines. And in fact calliopes are powered by the combustion exhaust. What happens is that the heat energy from the combustion exhaust is transferred to the boiler water turning it to pressurised steam which is then used to create sound energy. -- Derek Ross | Talk 23:06, 5 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Detail?

Can we have some more information about how they work/ed? Is/was there a pilot light in each tube and the keys sent a squirt of fuel? or a steady/constant amount of fuel and the keys added fire/a spark? The picture seems to show a secondary tube for each note. --Hugh7 08:11, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There is a pilot light, or a piezo or some method of ignition. Sparkplugs work. As for fuel, you are generally opening a port that's part of a regulated pressure manifold. So every hole gets fuel at the same pressure. You could have everything dumping fuel at the same rate, and ignite and extinguish to produce the tone, but that's just pointlessly dangerous, regardless of the awesomeness of premise. As for the secondary tubes, who knows. I haven't read that book. Could be some weird helmholtz thing. --76.251.81.145 (talk) 04:59, 1 January 2008 (UTC)some guy[reply]