Sci-fi fan, mechanically inclined, college grad in Art Education. James Rumsey was a shirttail relative who invented the steamboat in 1789, used a watertube boiler and a hydrojet. My father was a machinist who built the gene gun for shooting DNA into seeds. Steam power is not obsolete, just ignored for autos because it had a few drawbacks, which are solved in a hybrid, just as the drawbacks of plug-in electric cars are solved by using a steam driven generator to make them a hybrid.