section_path: History/Early experiments
section_name: Early experiments
paragraph_text: Early experiments
  
  As noted, one recorded rudimentary steam-powered engine was the aeolipile described by Hero of Alexandria, a Hellenistic mathematician and engineer in Roman Egypt during the first century AD. In the following centuries, the few steam-powered engines known were, like the aeolipile, essentially experimental devices used by inventors to demonstrate the properties of steam.
  
  A rudimentary steam turbine device was described by Taqi al-Din in Ottoman Egypt in 1551 and by Giovanni Branca in Italy in 1629. The Spanish inventor Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont received patents in 1606 for 50 steam-powered inventions, including a water pump for draining inundated mines. Frenchman Denis Papin did some useful work on the steam digester in 1679, and first used a piston to raise weights in 1690.