
Why didn't the Romans invent the Internet? - edent
http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/01/why-didnt-the-romans-invent-the-internet/
======
ef4
I think the author is showing a bias common in technology circles: assuming
that the limiting factor is technological knowledge.

But history is full of examples of people who had all the necessary knowledge
and yet didn't execute. The ancient Greeks actually built toy steam engines.
So why didn't they launch an industrial revolution?

The limiting factors have much more to do with availability of capital than
raw scientific and engineering knowledge. You need the vast web of people with
specialized knowledge and tools that keep any technology running. Technology
as simple as a pencil has a mind-boggling array of underlying capital
requirements (see Leonard Read's classic essay "I, Pencil":
<http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html>)

Remember that even a skill like "reading & writing" made you an unusually
valuable specialist in a pre-Gutenberg world.

The true capital costs of a Roman semaphore internet are almost impossible to
guess. Given the myriad other demands on their capital, it's not at all
surprising they didn't try it.

~~~
cma
That's not why the Greeks didn't create an industrial revolution...

"The uselessness of the aeolipile is an excellent example of the vastly under-
appreciated role of materials in technological development."

The British had centralized government planning of materials science research
for use in cannons and other armaments. That paved the way too, not just a
pure invisible hand of the market.

~~~
jivatmanx
A lot of time passed between between the Greeks and British.

Near the end of the Roman Empire, the Romans faced a labor shortage and an
important economic system was implemented by Constantine, which would later be
copied by everyone else and dominate Western Europe until the Renaissance (It
began to decline after the Bubonic plague improved the labor bargaining power
of the less well off) . The system was called later called Feudalism, and
abolished private ownership of land.

I'd add another point, the Romans are a better comparison to the Greeks, as
they were closer in time. the Romans were far more centralized than the Greeks
- The Athenians were directly democratic - That it was hard to scale so the
Romans had an extensive system of laws.

In terms of overall scientific output there is no comparison, the Greeks were
greater by a massive margin.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Well, they did.

If you travel around Europe you will see all the towers that Romans used to
carry messages. Lots of them, specially in places like Spain or Greece with
lots of mountains. In other places like most of France such a tower is far
less useful as there are less differences in height.

Those towers were already being used before Romans took them, for example in
the North of Spain they would be used to alert from Viking Invasions from sea,
it will alert the "Castros". We are talking centuries before the Romans.

About complex messages being transmitted far away, look at the Silbo Gomero at
the Canary Islands, it was used before the Spanish conquered the Islands in
XVI century(we don't really now how much older than that was, but probably
centuries): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlZh9I1pxj0>

~~~
m_eiman
_for example in the North of Spain they would be used to alert from Viking
Invasions from sea, it will alert the "Castros". We are talking centuries
before the Romans._

... except the Vikings were well after the end of the Roman empire.

~~~
arethuza
Well after the end of the _Western_ Roman Empire - the Eastern Empire even had
Vikings and Saxons fighting for it in the form of the Varangian Guard:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard>

~~~
sbmassey
Well fine, but Byzantium never took Northern Spain, let alone 100's of years
after the Viking age.

------
fallous
The Roman "internet" was "roads." The extensive network of roads allowed for
much faster communication along with the ability to actually act on it with
speed.

Maybe Rome was the first Amazon.com ;)

------
brudgers
_"If the Romans had built a practical semaphore, not only would we all be
speaking Latin_ "

There is a reasonable argument that Spanish, French, Italian, _et cetera_ are
but dialects of Latin. It is only Euro-centrism which treats them as separate
languages while dumping diverse tongues into Chinese.

~~~
sltkr
> It is only Euro-centrism which treats them as separate languages while
> dumping diverse tongues into Chinese.

This couldn't be further from the truth; it is the Chinese government that
insists that all different Chinese languages are merely `dialects' of a common
Chinese tongue, based on a Soviet-era ideology of national unity.

China does recognize distinct languages like French, Italian and Spanish,
because it recognizes France, Italy and Spain as independent nations. This
view isn't inspired by Euro-centrism, but by the idea that China is an
indivisible nation while Europe clearly is not.

~~~
chimeracoder
> This view isn't inspired by Euro-centrism, but by the idea that China is an
> indivisible nation while Europe clearly is not.

Euro-centrism isn't the culprit here; it's the fixation on the arbitrary
concept of the nation-state that's responsible.

~~~
jivatmanx
The concept of the nation-state was created at the treaty of Westphalia to
solve some very specific problems and is a lot better than what came before.

It's easy to knock things if you ignore why they were created or what existed
before them. Also, you can't abolish something if you don't have anything to
replace it with.

~~~
chimeracoder
Who's knocking anything or looking to abolish anything?

Being aware of the limitations and biases of one's own paradigm and cognizant
of the fact that it's an artificial construction is different from declaring
that it has no value.

------
zeteo
A more accurate title is "why didn't the Romans invent the optical telegraph".
The reason why the optical telegraph didn't become the Internet is very
simple: bandwidth. You need lots of spare bandwidth before you can consider
adding extra information to messages so as to create the various protocols
that the Internet is built on (Ethernet, TCP, IP, HTML etc.). That's not
something you're willing to do with a system that, even when perfected by the
French in the 19th century, could only transmit about 1 symbol / minute [1].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_telegraph#France>

------
blago
"Why didn't the romans invent the internet?"

Simply put you could't beat the bandwidth a messenger, traveling on a
transcontinental network of roads
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_Peutingeriana>), changing horses every
few hours. Semaphore communication would've been a lot slower. Oh, and it
wasn't any good for bringing things.

"Imagine what the world would be like if we'd had a 2,000 year head start on
the principles of the Internet?"

Most likely the same it is today. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages>
for reference.

I think the article is built on the false premise that the existence of
knowledge per se, guarantees it is going to be used. To paraphrase Kenneth
Clark (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilisation_(TV_series)>) you need a
flourishing civilization to utilize the knowledge you have. Western Europe
effectively UNLEARNED Roman knowledge and didn't "discover" it again for a
whole millenium. Although never forgotten, Eastern Europe (represented by the
Byzantine Empire) didn't have the scale or resources to take advantage of this
knowledge.

So there you have it, knowledge alone is not enough.

~~~
abecedarius
Bandwidth != latency.

That tabula Peutingeriana looks interesting -- thanks for the link.

------
mherdeg
There's a great early science fiction novel about the possible effect of
semaphore communication technology on the Roman empire — L. Sprague de Camp's
"Lest Darkness Fall", <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall>. In
the novel, de Camp argues that a time traveler with this technology (and
foreknowledge of history) could have prevented the Dark Ages.

------
zissou
The Romans were too busy inventing sanitation, medicine, education,
viniculture, public order, irrigation, roads, fresh-water systems and public
health.

So like others have said, infrastructure.

~~~
masklinn
> The Romans were too busy inventing […] medicine, education, viniculture

These three long predate romans:

* Imhotep is the first known physician (technically a polymath, but one of his specialties was medecine) in ~2600 BCE and we have his descriptions of a number of disease diagnosis and treatments

* There are traces of _formal_ education dating back to >1000BCE in ancient India and China, scribal education networks in ancient Egypt and middle-east.

* As for viticulture, while it spread _to Europe_ through Rome it predates Rome by millenia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wine> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viticulture>

~~~
userulluipeste
Although a lot of things were "not quite novel" in those times (as are not
nowadays), there were a lot of improvement and development to be done around
them (something valid today, too).

------
jacques_chester
It so happens that a blogger I host has written an alternate history novel set
in a late-Republic / early-Empire Rome that has undergone an industrial
revolution. She takes as her point of departure that Archimedes of Syracuse
was captured, and not killed, by the Romans.

[http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/22/the-past-is-a-
foreign...](http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/22/the-past-is-a-foreign-
country/)

I really must pester her to finish editing and get it published.

Edit: she says it's being considered by a publisher at the moment, but may go
under a psuedonym, so I've removed her name from this post.

~~~
chimeracoder
> I really must pester her to finish editing and get it published.

Yes, you do, because I want to read it, and I know several others who would
too.

~~~
jacques_chester
She posted some of the stuff that was cut out of her draft:

[http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/24/the-angel-bring-
laws-...](http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/09/24/the-angel-bring-laws-and-
gods-outtake-1/)

[http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/10/15/the-visit-bring-
laws-...](http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2010/10/15/the-visit-bring-laws-and-
gods-outtake-2/)

Some of the first link is quite NSFW. Take that as you will.

------
bdfh42
Visual telegraph systems became very popular around the coast of the UK
(particularly England) at a time when it was also possible to make money in
the commodity markets by knowing which ships were approaching port (and by
implication their cargo) before anyone else.

So one might suspect that rapid messaging systems became popular when there
was an economic case for them.

~~~
ovi256
Not only an economic case, but also being able to use your tech advantage
without being bullied by an established competitor. "Oh you're using this
weird contraption to outsmart me ? Cute, I'll use daggers in the hands of
assassins, whatever bailiffs use to enforce trumped up court orders, or
something of the kind." In other words, you need the protection of the law as
an upstart.

It can be argued that this was missing in the Roman world, while the economic
case existed and even the tech was known.

~~~
rmc
And you think at the start of the Industrial Revolution there was a perfect
rule of law in UK & France? There were lots of thugs back then too.

------
adventured
The lack of a proto-internet by the Greeks and or Romans was as much a
sociocultural issue as it was technological.

The author seems to ignore the basic requirements for the technology to exist
to begin with (a mistake Orwell made in 1984 for example). It is my opinion
that an unfree society would not have invented the Internet.

~~~
edent
Although it's hard to argue about what a theoretical unfree society would have
accomplished, we know the USSR had the M-40 system in the early 1950s. That
was a full duplex radio data network for missile defence. Whether that would
have morphed into the civilian Internet in the same way ARPANET did is
impossible to say.

Which basic technology - other than the telescope - was missing from the
Roman's knowledge that would have enabled a proto-Inernet?

------
Isamu
I recommend reading

Data Communications - The First 2500 Years G.J. Holzmann Proc. IFIP World
Computer Congress, Hamburg Germany, August 1994, (Invited paper).
<http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/hamburg94b.pdf>

The book:

The Early History of Data Networks G.J. Holzmann and B. Pehrson IEEE Computer
Society Press, Los Alamitos CA, (John Wiley & Sons), October 1994.

The basic ideas of relaying, encoding, separation of control/data information,
error control, flow and rate control go back surprisingly far.

------
meric
"The Great Wall of China had a network of high towers where news of attacks or
raids could be passed down the wall by means of lighting a signal fire"
<http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-signal-tower.htm>

~~~
userulluipeste
That was also in the Europe too, both before Romans and of course also in
their times. Current time Romania's Transylvania for example (Dacia in the
Roman's time), is one of the places that was situated at the edge of the Roman
Empire. Because of the risk of eastern invasions (migration from east happened
all the time), it had an efficient system of fire/smoke outposts signaling the
presence of possible enemies over Carpathians, long outside the Roman
territory.

------
Kaivo
An interesting read on the subject, very detailed and it goes as far as the
first letters and the beginning of writing: The Information by James Gleick.
[1] In a chapter, he explains how the transmission of messages worked with
towers, the limitation they had, the different things they tried. For
instance, he explains how they used a cross with moving branch and each
position of the branches would mean a letter, but also how it was difficult to
implement and how it eventually evolved.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information:_A_History,_a_T...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information:_A_History,_a_Theory,_a_Flood)

------
easy_rider
I'm guessing the reliability of the message transfer, and the consistency of
its contents declined with the increase of distance. It's like the kids game
where you whisper something into someone's ear, which is passed along the same
way along the line, and you find the end-receiver wound up with a completely
different message.

That's probably why they sent our messengers with wax-sealed letters. If they
were to build and use such an important infrastructure, it would surely mainly
be used for military/political purposes. The criticality of those messages
would inherently demand that the message would be delivered in an unaltered
state.

~~~
jstanley
"it would surely mainly be used for military/political purposes"

in the same way that roads were built for military purposes, and the Arpanet
was built for military purposes?

------
mode80
In a thousand years someone will speculate about why the people of today
didn't just build and exploit [x]. Stop messing around and go build [x].

------
abecedarius
It seems a more plausible invention in the Hellenistic kingdoms Rome disrupted
and conquered. They made expensive and farsighted infrastructure innovations
like the library and lighthouse of Alexandria. (The lighthouse beacon could be
seen from ships 30 miles out, according to _The Forgotten Revolution_.)

------
moondowner
For anyone more interested in this topic, read "The Information", fascinating
book.

[http://boingboing.net/2012/03/06/gleicks-masterpiece-
the.htm...](http://boingboing.net/2012/03/06/gleicks-masterpiece-the.html)

------
ctdonath
_If only..._

Give examples.

~~~
ctdonath
If only...wifi hardware manufacturers included ad-hoc network configuration an
aggressive default. To wit: any time another device was in range, spare
bandwidth would be applied to augmenting regular planned network connections
with an on-the-fly spontaneous network. Various complaints could be addressed
with ease on a per case basis, but point is the norm would be applying unused
capacity.

Wasn't included initially because there wasn't enough expected ubiquity to be
feasible. Now that everything but my toaster has wifi support, we could have
something approaching a robust free universal Internet not beholden to
backbones and pricy data plans.

~~~
TillE
Wifi's range is too short to make a large mesh network genuinely feasible.
Even in densely populated cities you're going to have gaps where you need to
cross a street. That'd require directional antennae and a huge amount of
deliberate effort and maintenance to hook up a large area.

Must have longer omnidirectional range and some degree of wall penetration.
I'm not sure if that's possible within reasonable FCC limits of frequency and
power.

