WALDOBORO, Maine — Walk around Charlie Chiarchiaro’s big garage, and you'll find a sort of technology time capsule.

Next to a treadmill built for farm animals to power pumps or tools is a huge French steam engine with gleaming wood and a copper boiler. Next to that is a Sterling Cycle engine from the late 1800s coupled to a piston-driven water pump. Start burning paper in the firebox, and the heat begins to move the mechanism that drives the pump.

Close by is a shimmering, chrome parabolic dish, made to direct the heat from sunlight to power a much smaller pump, on the same principle.

Chiarchiaro knows the history, the science, and the mechanics of all of them. Old engines, of many sorts, have been his passion and his life’s work.

"I would say my adult life, but also going back to when

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