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Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II (antonhowes.substack.com)
207 points by harscoat on July 15, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 304 comments



Environmental collapse and the price of steel!

I think people forget just how expensive metal was. Carpenters would lock up their saws because the blades were so precious. People knew how to make cheaper steel from coal for a long time, but it was regarded as an inferior product and avoided.

However, charcoal is labor intensive stuff to collect. By the 1700s, some cities in Europe had so depleted their available forests that they were forced to turn to inferior coal fired steel.

But after a few decades of being forced to produce crappy steel, they figured out ways to make it better. In the end, you had steel that was drastically cheaper than before. Cheap enough to build boilers.

I think people make the mistake of thinking the steam engine kicked off the industrial revolution. But I believe the spark was cheap metal. And they never would have had to switch to cheap metal if they hadn't completely depleted their environment.


Imagine if you were living in this period - England was constantly at war, the trees had all run out, and quality metal was nowhere to be found. You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

Also, if we wanted to go back even further, the true roots are probably the Enlightenment. Before Wilkinson and Watt and Darby could think to develop technology, they needed certain political rights that didn't exist to previous humans. The rights to privately acquire land, create corporations, sell across markets - things that lay people didn't have access to in earlier eras. And most importantly, courts that would enforce said rights for you!

And they needed double-entry bookkeeping! Perhaps one of the most underrated human inventions of all. Your wealth was no longer determined by how much stuff physically hoard, but by a record of entitlements.


Rights to privately acquire land, create corporations, and sell across markets were extant across different civilizations throughout history.

The Chola merchant guilds had formalized corporate structures that dissipated the risk of long voyages 2000 years ago. Seeing that the Romans traded with the Cholas, the Romans probably had corporate structures too.

Humans have been living in complex societies since the Bronze Age. It’s difficult to run a complex society without some sort of bureaucratic organization.


The problem is that (early) Medieval Europe has lost much of that.

Romans built blocks of dwelling houses 5-6 stories high, houses with central heating, and running water delivered to their cities (and wealthier homes) by systems of aqueducts and pipes, etc. These are things that we associate with 19th or even 20th century in large parts of Europe.

Sadly, their social institutions, even as famous as the republic, were also not practiced and even forgotten for long centuries. Much of the Enlightenment was fueled by re-reading and re-understanding of classic Greek and Roman works, which felt fresh and mind-expanding at the time.


> Sadly, their social institutions, even as famous as the republic, were also not practiced and even forgotten for long centuries.

I mean, the main social institutions that underpinned all the others in Rome were massive human trafficking and looting operations. The enlightened Greeks weren't any better.

My personal guess is that we would've had the industrial revolution thousands of years earlier if these groups we like to glorify in our history books would've laid off the enslaving, murder, and robbery.


Its hurts that people like you are here solely to make others throw out the baby with the bathwater. MLK JR was a baptist. Do i have to hate him because of the baptists' pro-life stance? JKF was a kennedy; do i have to hate the civil rights act because of his illgotten wealth?


On the one hand, you have a family that smuggled alcohol and a person who has religious views I don't hold. On the other hand you have people who, as a civilization, committed unapologetic genocide, rape, robbery, and founded their economic system on human trafficking . Personally I don't see how these are remotely comparable.

I'm not saying the Greeks and Romans didn't have any merits at all. Can we learn some things from them? Sure. Do we have to call them 'great,' and aspire to be like them? Absolutely not.


I would not undersell the late middle ages. It was a complex society with sophisticated economics and social structures. Just to pick one example European warfare was highly organized by the late 1400s and enabled them to found huge empires overseas.


Late middle ages / early Enlightenment, say, 14-15 centuries, were very cool in their special way, with very complex social structures. ThInge like the Hanseatic league, the great geographical discoveries and conquests, the beginning of modern science, the flourishing of arts — this all required highly advanced society, compared to, say, what Charlemagne or (imaginary) king Arthur would have.


The very concept of "the Middle Ages" in Europe tends to muddle our thinking.

Life in 700 AD was completely different from life in 1400 AD. Cities, population density, building styles, international trade, weapons and warfare, agricultural methods, secular institutions - almost nothing stayed the same.

People tend to even forget that the official definition of "the Middle Ages" stretches back into the Dark Age, where kings were more like chieftains, castles basically unknown, even most of the clergy struggled to read and write, and a typical member of the elite warrior class looked nothing like a stereotypical knight.


I'm not familiar with the Chola but one problem the Arab world had during this period was their equivalents of corporations dissolved upon the death of any of the principals. For a trade expedition that might last a year or two this is a perfectly sensible arrangement. But not for large mills or foundries requiring multiple principals to build and run and which might last decades and which can't be easily divided.


Another one is that ancient Mediterranean traders used what were essentially futures contracts to trade wheat and other grains.


We tend to underestimate how complex even pre Bronze Age kingdoms were. To rule them, our ancestors came up with an intricate way to let different combinations of symbols represent abstract thoughts.


> an intricate way to let different combinations of symbols represent abstract thoughts

I seem to find that this is still the best way to communicate.


So long as we keep updating the symbols from time to time, such that that they don't deviate too much from other means of communications.


Symbols are always lossy, they cannot be relied on even in the best case. I think what matters are the games we play with them.


I largely agree with this.

But I still think there was something unique about the legal entitlements in 17th century England that didn't really exist in previous eras. Previous versions of complex structures were still family oriented, or had to put up with local power brokers, or were a fiefdom unto themselves.

Like, you didn't see James Watt build a fort and hire goons to protect his assets. But that would have been a completely normal requirement of establishing an organization in the Roman world.


I'm having a really hard time understanding your observation, or how to apply it.

What was unique about legal entitlements 1600s England that wasn't in, say, 1600s Netherlands?

Like, why doesn't the Dutch East India Company count?

Or quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Mine#Free_miners :

> The organizational structure of Falun Mine created under the 1347 charter was advanced for its time. Free miners owned shares of the operation, proportional to their ownership of copper smelters. The structure was precursor to modern joint stock companies, and Stora Enso, the modern successor to the old mining company, is often referred to as the oldest joint stock company still operational in the world.[2]


I'm largely thinking about why the Industrial Revolution couldn't be cooked up during, like, the Roman period despite there being many places with a similar set of ingredients.

My point isn't that England was first or best at these things, but the chronology of these things coming first was essential for the puzzle pieces coming together.


You're walking very close to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

English is an unusual European language using "did" to express some negatives, like "I didn't want it" instead of "I want it not", and with a relatively insignificant gender system in the grammar.

Maybe that was part of the puzzle.

Or perhaps Anglicanism was part of the puzzle.

Or the wealth from colonial exploitation and slavery that was used to fund these projects.

For that matter, when Watt developed his steam engine, Scottish "colliers and salters [were] in a state of slavery and bondage" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Slavery_and... , so there's another puzzle piece. That surely seems like part of the legal entitlements you refer to, albeit in Scotland instead of England.

Or, as English people 150 years ago argued, the natural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and Scottish races -- a puzzle piece that biology has conclusively shown does not exist.

How do you know which puzzle piece is relevant enough to the puzzle, vs. a happenstance?


The travails of the early inventors in Britain are tragicomic in terms of the opposition they faced.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kay_(flying_shuttle)

Weavers rioted against his invention. He hardly collected any royalties from his invention in England, and departed for France persona non grata. The French manufacturers also did not pay royalties on the monopoly to the flying shuttle granted him. He died in poverty.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright

He lost a major patent case, which allowed competitors to use his inventions. He did make money because he owned mills himself rather than being a tinkerer like Kay.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hargreaves

He was run out of town because his spinning jenny put too many spinners out of work. He moved to the town that bought thread because they welcomed the lower prices. His patent survived but did not stop others from copying.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Crompton

Crompton could not afford to patent the spinning mule, so he open sourced it following promises from manufacturers to pay him a fee. The promises were broken. Crompton never made any money from his invention.

Then, as now, a patent is only worth one's ability to fund litigation.


If you read English literature from the mid-18th century there doesn't seem to have been a sense that they were in the late stages of humanity. People were adaptable and accustomed to tolerating hardships that would shock most of us. Yes, the large trees had mostly been cut down but they were able to import enough lumber for essential construction projects.


One of the most important, but that people forget very often. They needed to right to have strange ideas without being chased down and killed due to them.

The Europe science and engineering moved into England much before the economical activity, and as far as I can see, it was mostly because of that one. Some of the greatest minds of the time were literally chased outside of Italy during that move.

Also, it's a right that was missing from most of the world for about a millennium by that time.


The Europe science and engineering moved into England much before the economical activity

interesting- I haven’t heard of this view before. can you give some examples?


History of corporations: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40697762

(Paywalled, but you may be able to find a copy.)

Private land is almost as old as record history. So is selling across markets.

Double entry book keeping was invented in the late 15th century.

All of these existed for centuries before the steam engine.


I think your 15th century date is for a book describing double-entry bookkeeping, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Della_mercatura_e_del_mercante...

Regarding its invention, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping#Histo... says:

> The earliest extant accounting records that follow the modern double-entry system in Europe come from Amatino Manucci, a Florentine merchant at the end of the 13th century.

and lists precursors under "Other claimants".


England may have run out of trees but Canada hadn't.

Hell my own country didn't have any forests left by the 17th century and built ships from Baltic timber. For 300 years the entire world fed European industry with its natural resources. It is why God created Africa.


> You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

So which great invention is just around the corner now?


> at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

I wouldn't call the industrial revolution "the greatest moment of human progres". I would call it "the moment that sealed our fate". Climate change, un-renewable resources scarcity, biodiversity collapse, etc. We are headed at a breath-taking rate towards a planet that will be hardly inhabitable for us. We may only subsist as nomadic tribes only a few centuries from now.


> And they needed double-entry bookkeeping! Perhaps one of the most underrated human inventions of all. Your wealth was no longer determined by how much stuff physically hoard, but by a record of entitlements.

Yet when you bring up a certain recent improvement to records of entitlement around here, you tend to get crucified. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


I don’t think this fits the evidence. At least for the 17thC. People in England did not know how to make good iron with coal, let alone steel, despite many decades of extraordinary government encouragement and special incentives - witness the many, many failed patents that had to be reissued from Sturtevant in 1612 all the way through to the 1660s and beyond.

Cities like London made the switch early on to using coal as a fuel over the course of 1570-1600, but this was for domestic use. Industrial use lagged many decades behind, with iron very much last - long after glassmaking, saltmaking, brewing, and even baking.

When the English iron industry struggled to adapt to rising fuel prices, the overwhelmimg response was just to import it from Sweden. And that was especially the case with the steel industry, which didn’t really take off in England until the breakthroughs of the mid-18thC (long after Newcomen or Savery).

If there’s evidence I’m missing, however, I’d very much like to know.


I think you are correct. Coal gave Britain a leg up as early as the 14th century but not for steel making. It's fungible though coal was being substituted for burning wood. Which means probably more wood to make steel. Also more land can be used as pasture.

Basically England was boosted by the energy input from coal.

One thing about Sweden for a long time. They had a lot of trees and very high quality iron ore. Which I think is the reason they were so powerful during that period. Sweden cut down all their trees to make steel.

When I think of steam engines I think also of simple franklin stoves and pressure cookers. People tried to make both of those long before steam engines. They are both much more efficient in terms of the amount of fuel consumed but the cost was too high for that to pencil out.


I'm specifically thinking of the period in the early 18th century with the Darby family.


Yup, I figured. Plausibly fits for Wilkinson and Watt (though I have my doubts). Doesn’t fit for Savery and Newcomen, the subject of my piece.


Railroads were widely deployed without steel. Serious railroad deployment started in 1830 [1], using cast and wrought iron. Not until the 1880s was steel available at low cost. It's amazing how far they got with crappy materials.

> But after a few decades of being forced to produce crappy steel, they figured out ways to make it better.

A Bessemer converter is very simple. It's basically a big iron vessel lined with bricks and mounted on a pivot so it can be tilted and poured. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Inputs are mostly coal, iron ore, and limestone, along with compressed air and some additives, but making good steel from those is tricky. The person who got this right, after about 10,000 tries, was Robert Mushet, who is mostly forgotten.[2]

Could that have been done earlier? Maybe. Probably not before analytical chemistry. The detailed composition of the inputs has a huge influence on what you get out in steelmaking. Before Mushet, the output from steelmaking was kind of random and often bad.

(1830 was when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway started operation. This was when railroads got out of beta and started changing the world. Before then, it was mostly one-off mine-haulage systems and prototypes. The Liverpool and Manchester finally got it right. They had regular service with multiple steam locomotives of a common design, double track lines, stations, signals, timetables, and tickets. At last, a production-ready product. This is what allowed the Industrial Revolution to scale.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railw...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Forester_Mushet


Sounds like energy production recently. While oil was cheap enough we had no reason to invest in cleaner tech. Even the threat of climate change isn’t enough. It’s only when oil gets real expensive that we invest in alternatives.


Imagine all of those minds that went into oil extraction and where else they could have been better spent over the years. I know turbines really leveraged computer models to achieve such stunning efficiency, but in all honesty I don't think it would have taken much past the 70s for us to have achieved nuclear / renewables at similar energy output as oil / gas at the same timeframe if we didn't have the shortcut available for so long.


A lot of very smart people went into nuclear up to the 80's. It didn't make much of a difference.

People severely underestimate the impact computers have on our society and the dynamism of the current day R&D. Even here on HN.


Oil extraction engineering has a pretty phenomenal return on investment. If oil sells at 100 dollars per barrel, that's 600 dollars per cubic meter. If you produce a cubic meter per second (1/200th of world production), that's 50 million dollars per day.

But certainly, nuclear or renewables could have been developed more and earlier.


The role of materials in technological innovation, and the technological prerequisites of those materials, is hugely underappreciated IMO.

Until roughly 8,000 years ago, the only materials available were those found in (near) finished form in nature: stone, wood, bone, grass and fibres, ceramics (requiring firing), concrete (typically also), and metals with low melting points.

There'd have been some glues / resins (bone, tree-sap, and a few other compounds).

A huge part of what creates impressions of times and periods over the past 400 or so years is the gradual introduction of new materials: glass, finished bricks, wrought iron, steel, and in the case of textiles, the emergence of synthetics beginning in the late 19th century (celluloid, viscose, and eventually Nylon and polyester).

The development of cheap high-quality steel, and later aluminium, titanium, and other difficult-to-produce metals, has had a huge impact.


I wonder if there is anything today that would need to come down (or up) in price to kick off a revolution. I've heard some argue that was decentralized payments online (cryptocurrency) but that hasn't led to much outside of speculation IMO.

The other thing I heard was battery technology. Just recently a podcast with Matthew Ball, he makes the argument that AR/VR/metaverse technology needs a breakthrough (in part) in battery technology. Right now the best system can run at half the performance you need for 30 minutes and gets really hot.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/matthew-ball/


I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at it.

Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money.

LCD screens did not produce as good of a picture quality as plasma or even HD CRT screens, but they were so cheap and light you can do things like replace signage.

Crypto is weird. Crypto is proving to not be any cheaper than what it supposed to be replacing (currency, securities). But if you think about what crypto is - it's really an escrow service that's so freaking cheap it's being used for dumb things like payments. But I think like how it took a couple decades for people to start figuring out what they could do with cheap steel, I think eventually crypto might genuinely start finding useful applications.


>I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at it.

I like this lens, although I'd stop short of saying it's "most" technology revolutions. Rather, it's a counterweight to the common perspective that revolutions are made of radical novelty; the reality is that both forces are important.

My favorite example of this is the home computer. When they came out, they barely did anything; in a world where a "computer" already meant (in some cases) a nice Unix system with editors and compilers and preemptive multitasking and all the sorts of things we still take for granted, they were more like Arduinos. Absolute rubbish. And yet, university researchers abandoned their mainframes in droves to do their data processing on silly little home PCs. Why? Because crappy though they were, they represented freedom. You didn't have to plead to be allowed time on one, or worse hand over your batch FORTRAN program on a giant stack of punched cards (don't drop them) to some overworked secretary in "data processing" and wait a whole business day to get your printout of "error on line 5". Buy a microcomputer, and your allocated time was 24h/day, and your data turnaround was instant. You could even write your thesis on one - bye bye typewriter!

Worse (i.e. cheaper) is better.


> Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money.

Am I missing something? It looks like hundreds of diesel-electric locomotives are more powerful than the most powerful steam engines ever made.

I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_locomotives then sorted by tractive effort/force and looked for the most powerful diesel and most powerful steam.

EMD SD70ACe-T4 - diesel-electric - 200,000 pounds-force (890 kN) starting, 175,000 pounds-force (778 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_SD90MAC (478 built)

GE AC6000CW - diesel-electric - 188,000 pounds-force (836 kN) starting; 166,000 pounds-force (738 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_AC6000CW (317 built)

by comparison:

Erie Class P-1 - steam - 176,256 pounds-force (784 kN) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplex_locomotive (10 built) ("high tractive effort, but low speed, about 10 mph, over short distances" .. "the Triplexes produced huge amounts of tractive effort (TE) that may have been the highest of any steam locomotives before or since").

XA Triplex - steam - 166,600 pounds-force (741 kN) compound - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-8-8-4 (1 built) ("unable to sustain a speed greater than five miles an hour, since the six cylinders could easily consume more steam than the boiler could produce")

Power isn't the only factor. Steam engines produce the most power when just starting, which helps explain why the most power steam engines were also so slow.

(Something like the Union Pacific Big Boy had less tractive force, at 135,375 lbf, much higher speeds, topping out at 80mph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Big_Boy)

Going back to your thesis, in researching this I came across the Kaufman Act, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufman_Act , which banned steam engines in New York city due to pollution problems. Originally it required electric propulsion, but was amended to allow diesel when that proved viable, and that in turn provided a stepping stone toward dieselization of US trains.

Diesel trains are not worse polluters than steam, so your thesis doesn't really seem applicable.


I assume they meant that the diesel trains were not as powerful when first implemented, but they were cheaper.

It fits with their other examples much better.


Except the Kaufman Act link points out that diesels were introduced in NYC because the didn't pollute like steam locomotives.

That doesn't fit OP's thesis at all.


Definitely not current diesel trains, but maybe gp is referring to when they were first introduced.


The sentence uses "Diesel trains are" and "steam trains of yore were" - past vs. present.

Take the 2-8-0, which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-0 comments:

> From its introduction in 1866 and well into the early 20th century, the 2-8-0 design was considered to be the ultimate heavy-freight locomotive. The 2-8-0's forte was starting and moving "impressive loads at unimpressive speeds" and its versatility gave the type its longevity. The practical limit of the design was reached in 1915, when it was realised that no further development was possible with a locomotive of this wheel arrangement. ...

> During World War II, 14 of these locomotives were equipped with superheaters, which raised their tractive effort from 28,777 lbf (128.0 kN) to 33,557 lbf (149.3 kN)

Then compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMC_E3 , a diesel from 1938 with "Tractive effort Starting: 56,500 lbf".

That's from time when people became convinced that diesel was better than steam. Why? Quoting https://www.american-rails.com/diesel.html

> This changed after General Motors successfully demonstrated the diesel's viability during testing of its FT freight design in 1939.

> The demonstrator set toured the country, convincing skeptic after skeptic that diesels were not only efficient and reliable but could also outperform the iron horse.

Not simply because it was dirt cheap.

Stats at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_FT . The top speed of 95 mph is 15 mph higher than the Union Pacific Big Boy.

Note also "Steam locomotives could be built with fewer precious materials, and with less conflict with military needs.", which is yet another factor that OP's thesis didn't consider.

Did you catch things like "no further development was possible with a locomotive of this wheel arrangement" and from earlier "the six cylinders could easily consume more steam than the boiler could produce". These designs were pushing the limit of what steam could do, and diesel looked like it could pass those limits. And did.


While I don't think that cryptocurrency is about to kick off a technological revolution on par with the industrial revolution, it is important to note that the technological advancements that led to here weren't readily apparent when they were invented either, except to slightly zany visionaries. The invention of the automobile for instance was seen for a few decades as a rich person's toy. People usually have small minded views of the implications of new technology, because we look at them through the lenses of the world we live in now.

So of course cryptocurrency hasn't led to much beyond speculation. Not to say that it will lead to anything more, but it would be erroneous to discount that possibility off hand. At the very least IMO it will lead to a social revolution, of what magnitude I don't know.

Also I'd note, the industrial revolution really came to the dirty masses with the assembly line, not the invention of the steam engine or the automobile. So analogously with regard to cryptocurrencies, maybe they are the car in this scenario, and the real revolutionary technological advancement that leverages them has yet to be invented. Or, maybe not.

Personally, I think that much like the apparently dire state of the world at the dawn of the industrial revolution led directly to it, the things we think now of as symptoms of Armageddon are probably going to play a large and in hindsight constructive role in whatever comes next. Maybe climate change becomes a crash course in terraforming, or genetic and biome engineering. Trying to predict what happens next is a fools errand but these are fun possibilities to think about.


Better battery technology won't allow mobile device electronics to run cooler. We need more power efficient chips using the upcoming 3 nm process technology.


If robots were way cheaper it would change quite a bit.


> And they never would have had to switch to cheap metal if they hadn't completely depleted their environment.

I've always wondered why some fantasy stories seem to be perpetually locked in pre-industrial technology. This does seem like a plausible canonical explanation if they had fast replenishing resources due to magic.


And also price and availability of pit coal. In 1700 over 80% of the worlds coal was mined in Britain. (from wikipedia)


There's a big gap between 'inventing' a steam engine as a diagram in a book or table top novelty and physically creating one that can do more work than a horse or two, can work continuously, and is safe to use.

The technical advances of Newcomen and Watt also coincided with the ability to create boilers and pressure chambers that didn't explode (too often).


When we're talking about industrial revolution type of stuff, there is a whole train of dependencies that I suspect would have been difficult to speed up a lot. Maybe if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed though you could make arguments both ways given the Roman Empire as a slave society didn't necessarily need a lot of labor saving devices.

The genuine innovations that mostly just needed ideas and the will to put them into practice were probably more in realms like health/medicine. Even a lot of science, your hypothetical time traveler might have been "right" but in many cases would have no way to prove it.


The use of the word dependencies in this context is perfect.

Untangling the history of technological innovation is an adventure into dependency hell.


It could be a pretty nice 'coffee table book': a walk through history of inventions, with the dependencies of each one listed (to one or maybe two degrees only of course).

You could pick it up anywhere, read forwards; back from something specific (or forward, if you made it a doubly linked list?); or back from whatever 'the end' would be.


You might be interested in James Burke's TV Show Connections!

Which does this sort of thing for like 8 episodes. Go and learn why you can't have cars without swamp gasses!


Connections is also a book too!


It would be interesting to see if there's a way this dependency graph could be captured and saved for future generations in the event of civilisation collapsing. I suspect something like that would rapidly reduce the time it takes for society to rebuild because it wouldn't have to spend energy figuring out what doesn't work all over again as much.


Both of you might be interested to check out "How to Invent Everything" [1] - it's even got flowcharts the kind you mention at the end! [2]

[1] https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ [2] https://mohamadacma.com/content/images/2022/04/825235c6-665f...


Cheers for this, looks interesting!


Hell, even today if a CME or something wipes out our electronics we'll have to go way back to vacuum tubes or even simpler setups to restore our society since most modern electronics need modern electronics to be designed and manufactured.


You can make something as complicated as a 6502 processor with just electricity for furnaces, motors, and pumps, without using any electronics.

You’d have to go back to hand-cut Rubylith for the mask sets.

Hand made transistors are no problem, just more expensive.


People still do this stuff for fun too. So it's not some lost knowledge.

I wouldn't be surprised if some colleges taught this as part of a history of computers course.


Most Romans (excluding the salves who were not Romans despite being the majority in Rome) would have been better off with a good steam engine. However before you get to good you need to go through a lot of working toys that are not worth having. Tractors (tractors have replaced almost half historical human labor, with various automated spinning/weaving machines most of the rest - everything else done by humans, slaves or not is a footnote) are vastly better than slaves, but there is a reason when John Deere bought a tractor company in 1918 they wrote all their dealers something to the effect of the horse drawn plow will always be the backbone of the American farm - early tractors were not better than human labor in general.


Slavery was largely defunct for it's last ~250 years as serfdom-like systems took over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Byzantine_Empir...


That is true, but I don't think there is much evidence for people imagining steam engines for doing useful work prior to Thomas Savery (update: Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont appears to have preceded him by almost a century.) Admittedly, absence of evidence does not settle the issue, but AFAIK Leonardo never sketched one, even though he did propose a steam cannon. If he had conceived of a rotary steam engine, or the idea was 'in the air', how could he have resisted the appeal of a horseless carriage?

One technical point: Jerónimo's and Savery's pumps used pressurized steam, but Newcomen and Watt used it at atmospheric pressure. The latter, at least, was dead set against using pressurized steam on account of the risks it posed given the technology of the day (a well-founded concern, as it turned out.)


Hello, author here. I mention this in Part I to link to a prior piece specifically on Ayanz, as this is hugely misunderstood. Ayanz’s machine only used the expansive force of steam, while Savery’s used both atmospheric pressure and the expansive force of steam. This is an absolutely crucial distinction. They were not at all the same, and Ayanz’s populariser and biographer specifically noted the difference.


Two or three parts.

First understanding at least some level what is happening or some useful effect. Second having materials and resources(like fuel) to build it to exploit the effect. Third actually having a use for whole thing.

World and what was possible was just different back then. It is rather eye opening to remember how recent some things are. Like precision manufacturing such as metal lathe. Not that small parts were not done before, but it was all by hand...


Indeed. I’ll get to that in Part III (or IV if it’s too long). And it’s why I’ve tried to point out evidence of actual use rather than just the diagrams themselves (though those are at least a start when it comes to subsequent improvement). Safety is certainly a big issue, and Savery’s engines often struggled with it (for the expansive phase of operations). As you say, it’s about the “too often”!


Advances in manufacturing processes is often overlooked in the industrial age.


Exactly. This was a materials science problem rather than a limitation of coming up with a design for a steam engine.


This question reminded me of a show that I used to love watching, Connections with James Burke. I'm sure there are aspects that it is missing but it's a very well told story of what needed to come together for the invention of the steam engine.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68mfbf


Just 4 days ago Nature Genetics had a really cool perspective on why nobody else did the experiments on inheritance Gregor Mendel did: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01109-9


This seems interesting, but unfortunately I can't find the full text anywhere and I'm not about to pay $32 for an article.


If you check the article for libgen on Wikipedia you'll get the latest domain name for it.

Then, just copy and paste the title of the article you want to read into the libgen search bar and you're good to go.


Yeah, I checked that and Sci-Hub, but neither has this particular article unless I did something spectacularly wrong, and nothing came up with an internet search either.


The Greek philosoper Hero of Alexandria actually invented something close to a steam engine in the 1st century BE [1]. Whenever I think about "obvious" inventions which happened quite late in our civilization, I remember "The road not taken", a fantastic short story that plays with this idea. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...


So why did it not win? The answer.

Slaves. Slaves in the mines, slaves in the home, slave driving the rowboats and all services.

Labour was cheap and plenty, also intelligent - with entrenched "automation" like this, no inventions are actually needed. Which goes to show, that technology stratifyng society strangles itself, by producing a servant class outcompeting all technology. Give it a hundred years and the "natural" order of things seaps into relgion and culture such that to perform science is to dare the gods.

PS: There are tons of good alternate history .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt


Slaves might explain lack of interest in labour saving technology in general, but the steam engine in particular mostly excels at stuff which slaves couldn't do (high speed transport) or enabled production processes particularly well suited to slave labour (textile mills vs craft-textile production). The UK's Industrial Revolution began with slave-picked cotton being spun on machines attended by abundant unskilled labour and powered by watermills, a technology the Romans (and many other non-industrial civilisations) exploited with smaller scale machinery.

The Romans valued research and engineering highly enough to be way ahead of both contemporary and successor civilisations in many aspects of it and have people willing to document their pure research into steam (which as the article acknowledges, turned out to be at best orthogonal to the pure research that got us pistons and condensing engines), they just didn't have all the intermediate inventions like high quality iron, rail lines and spinning jennies to make large scale use of steam that the British did 1500 years later, the same level of demand and competition for new products etc etc. But the abundance of cheap labour was something they actually had in common with the British Empire; it's just the British Empire used it differently (and displaced even more cheap labour by killing off craft industries as a result)


> the steam engine in particular mostly excels at stuff which slaves couldn't do (high speed transport) or enabled production processes particularly well suited to slave labour (textile mills vs craft-textile production).

I think there’s a bit more to it: “high speed” is something which took a long time to be true. A lot of these things were simpler applications which seem to have big situational components: if you have literal tons of coal and ore to haul, plus relatively amenable terrain, but not competition from boats, iron to make rails and boilers, and a good source of fuel (coal or wood) steam engines are a great investment. Similarly, if you have fixed industrial demand and abundant fuel but not water power, stationary engines make sense.

If you have different answers for enough of those points, it’s hard to justify the development - it took the Europeans a couple of centuries in starting in the 1600s, after their population already exceeded Rome’s, and as you mentioned they already had or started a lot of related technologies, too. An agrarian society, a hilly one, land without lots of easily available fuel, etc. might not have had it ever make sense or only after someone else has made multiple generations of technology development.


Slavery is a big part of the answer, but Hero's device can not be scaled up to do useful work without consuming vast quantities of fuel, even in comparison to the low standard of efficiency set by Newcomen's engine.


> with entrenched "automation" like this, no inventions are actually needed.

Which is why our word for the ultimate automaton--the "robot," comes from the Czech robotnik, or forced laborer/slave.


Isn't that kind of the other way around?

Ignoring the obvious moral question, in a primarily agrarian economy slave labor is useful because it's relatively easy to control and there is no need for specialization. OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you could have them.


>OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you could have them.

Really? Leaving aside the moral issues most associated with slavery specifically, there is a huge demand in modern industrialized society for all sorts of low cost human labor. If middle class-ish people in the West could hire more people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour many would absolutely do so.


> If middle class-ish people in the West could hire more people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour many would absolutely do so.

They absolutely could if there was any political desire to allow temporary low skilled immigration. In practice this doesn’t seem to be compatible with democracy. Singapore is not a shining light of labour rights or democracy but their government does have to pay attention to public opinion which is why they use less migrant labor than the Gulf monarchies.


Certainly. Once you're talking about a massive underclass with no real agency--whether literal slaves or not--there are all sorts of implications for the structure of that society. See SM Stirling's Draka books for example.


It's very unlikely that slaves would be able to cover any present-day jobs except very menial service tasks.

Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't even get as far as a taxi/truck driver, which is one of the least qualified jobs today.


This is actually completely incorrect. Slavery has and always will be profitable and it is still something being experienced by millions of people today.

>Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't even get as far as a taxi/truck driver

Again I see how one might expect this to be true but it isn't.

some industries where slavery is widespread:

- Sex work - ocean fishing - mining

I'm sure there are others


Slaves did many skilled labor jobs back in the day. In Uncle Tom's Cabin (a book you really should read, but beware the purpose was to make you pick up your gun and march, so if you have those tendencies...) on of the important slaves held a good factory job.

Of course most slaves were just hard labor, but they did hold other positions. I think you can find examples of slaves holding every position in society other than government leader.


> I think you can find examples of slaves holding every position in society other than government leader.

Even that one seems available:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokollu_Mehmed_Pasha


That you can find some examples of a tiny minority slaves doing some highly-skilled jobs does not contradict the statement that it's unlikely that slavery as an institution would be compatible with a modern economy, even ignoring the obvious moral evil it represents.

Also, just by the way, we ought to be able to talk without implying that other people have "those tendencies". There is simply no reasonable way a comment about the structure of an industrialized economy can be constructed as "having those tendencies". Appending "slavery = bad" to every comment is tiresome, there is such a thing as context.


I think the point is more that you can't give a slave a truck with a tank of gas and expect to see either again.


Sure you can - so long as you have a police force that will check up on things once in a while. Or at least you have convinced the slaves that the police force will catch them and life will be worse after they are caught.


Up to a point, sure.

But I think there is a point when it makes more sense to just pay the guy a wage, instead of running a big expensive police state controlling everything...


Depends on the scale of the slavery. Once it’s systemic you can even have slaves even enforcing the rules on each other (see military conscripts).


Those septic trucks in dubai are surely not driven by arabs.


Just because someone is born into poor circumstances without many options for upward mobility doesn't make them stupid. Furthermore, truck driver isn't a particularly low skill occupation. I couldn't drive an 18-wheeler. Can you? And something like taxi driving mostly seems low skill because most adults in industrialized society have been driving since they were relatively young.


It's not a reasonable interpretation of what I wrote that I'm implying they're stupid.


I think it is. That was pretty much the impression it gave me.


The skill was in having a map of London in your head.


What is slavery if not systematically, grossly under compensating someone for their work? Modern industrialised economies have plenty of tools to simulate the effects of slavery. Although without the fun stuff like whipping and other forms of gratuitous cruelty.

In its essence slavery is an exchange of labor deal where the buying party has it way better than the selling party.


> What is slavery if not systematically, grossly under compensating someone for their work?

No, it's the notion that you have second-class citizens or even non-citizens with limited legal rights enforced by the state, said limitations usually being in the realm of property rights, personal freedoms, etc. At least that is fairly easy to define, whereas "grossly under compensating someone" is a vastly more nebulous term (who decides what is and isn't "under-compensating"?)


Not even close!

At its essence slavery is complete ownership of another person. Whether or not you put that person to "work" is a separate issue.


> What is slavery if not systematically, grossly under compensating someone for their work?

Try starting with the textbook definitions. Pretty much the defining factor of being a slave is that you are owned by someone else and have to follow their orders. You can be highly compensated and still a slave (see the myriad of anecdotes about “kind” slave owners who paid them well).


Want to tell if you're being exploited or enslaved? Leave.

If a gang of armed men kidnap, brand, and return you, you're enslaved.


This begs a question: what technologies are inhibited by a looser definition of slavery? What inventions would arise if a global minimum wage was enforced?


Thank you for this book recommendation. Am reading it now and loving it! What other alternate history books are your favorites? (I'm holding my notepad ready.)


> Labour was cheap and plenty

That is a misconception. Slaves were expensive: one slave was about a soldier's pay for an entire year; and things made using manual labor, too, were very expensive - if you had to buy them, of course.


That's a different sort of steam engine. From the article:

> But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a machine that does the exact opposite, exploiting the apparent sucking power that occurs when hot steam is rapidly condensed with a spray of cold water. It’s the relative weight of the atmosphere, compared to the sudden vacuum from condensing steam, that does all the work.

This article connects that sort of engine to (among others) Hero of Alexandria’s temple doors, rather than the aeolipile, though suggests that it might have been known to "at least a few aeolipile-users" as a way to fill the aeolipile with water.


Thank you! It’s extremely gratifying to know that HN readers like yourself do actually go and read the posts. :D


Chris Robertson's "O One" has a British man present the Chinese Emperor (well, Emperor of the World, China having conquered the rest of the globe) with his primitive Analytical Engine, a machine which can perform arithmetic. The many human Computers employed in the Emperor's House of Computation are keen that this idea shouldn't go anywhere...


Please read both parts I and II. I specifically addressed various widely-held myths about Hero’s engines, and about aeolipiles.


I wonder what are the characteristics of that sort of engine. Like torque for one? How much power scaled up it could generate? How would you connect sensibly and efficiently anything to it? How to supply water to it for long enough duty cycle? Would this new gold water have effect on efficiency? etc.



Mr Wizard had a Hero's engine on an episode back in the 80's

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_NTifmG8TM


There is an absolutely fantastic book by Simon Winchester called The Perfectionists. He has a chapter on the steam engine-- the long and the short of it was it couldn't exist until they could precisely machine the bore and piston to adequate tolerances produce enough power without accidentally producing a bomb


Maybe for the Watt engine, but this does not apply to the Savery or Newcomen engines. (Though Part III, or perhaps IV, will have a few notes on some almost totally forgotten machine makers of the 1650s.


I looked in Part 1 and 2 and didn't see this point raised, which is a shame because it's one of my favorite stories of intertwined technological process.

An engine requires piston that move within a bore. To create the pressure that process has to be precise. This process was perfected in making cannons.

Why I like this story is that it embodies the unintended consequences that underlies so much of progress, like Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone while trying to create something for the deaf.

You see this with research now that's plagued with being goal-oriented. "What will you discover/prove/invent in the next 5-10 years?" Who can say?

Also, the steam engine and the internal combustion engine are directly the products of technology created for war to kill people.


Actually a Savery engine (the type of engine the OP's post starts off with) doesn't have a piston at all. And the Newcomen atmospheric engine didn't require a very precise fit to function either. It wasn't until Watt started the drive for more efficient engines that accurately boring the cylinder became important.


Exactly! Part III or IV will end up talking about boring techniques of the 1650s (long before the famous John Wilkinson methods), but that is precisely the thing with Savery engines - and indeed with Newcomen engines, which worked with pistons long before Wilkinson too!


> An engine requires piston that move within a bore. To create the pressure that process has to be precise. This process was perfected in making cannons.

There is speculation that the techniques for casting these cannons, was actually perfected in making church bells. Basically, if you turn a church bell on its side you have a primitive cannon. This may be one of the reasons that Europe was able to harness gunpowder more effectively and climb to dominance.


I'm reading a really good book on the history of steam power called "Fossil Capital"[0]. The thesis so far seems to be that access to — and need for — more portable energy like fossil fuels drove the ability to expand. This in turn induced more demand for energy as humans developed further and further away from places that traditionally provided energy in fixed places, like rivers that could power water wheels.

The book ties this into the roots of the idea of infinite growth, as well as the climate crisis. It's a little sad in that respect, but also genuinely fascinating if you like history.

[0]:https://www.versobooks.com/books/2002-fossil-capital


What I have always wondered about is why heavier-than-air flight was not invented earlier? Or put it this way: when was the folded paper (or your material here) airplane invented, and by whom? Then, why not make it bigger?


What amazes me about heavier than air flight is that it was invented all over the planet at virtually the same time by all kinds of unrelated people who had no connection or communication with or little knowledge of one another. Sure here in the US we ethnocentrically recite the Kitty Hawk event of the Wright Brothers as if it appeared in a vacuum out of nowhere. But in reality, heavier than air flight was invented simultaneously (by the standards of the time) at multiple places all over the world from New Zealand (March 1903) [1] to the USA (December 1903) [2]. It's as if human consciousness just exploded with a new-found ability to fly all over the earth all at once.

Closer examination shows that like most human inventions, these breakthrough moments are the final incremental accumulation of ideas that were a long-time coming. In the case of flight, there were centuries of lighter than air flying methods based on buoyancy and displacement [3]. Then gradually an understanding of fixed wing aerodynamics evolved (e.g. the impressive work of people like George Cayley [4] and Otto Lilienthal [5]). It was the parallel development of combustion engines that made the Kitty Hawk and Waitohi moments eventually possible (which I think might really the answer to your question "why heavier-than-air flight was not invented earlier?"). While the invention of the steam engine gave rise to the entire industrial revolution, piston steam engines of the time were too heavy to power flight. The internal combustion engine was finally applied to the automobile by Karl Benz in 1885 [6] and within the relatively short span of 18 years had evolved to the point where powering an aerodynamic surface was feasible. Just 66 years later man walked on the moon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz


It’s pretty common that “breakthrough inventions” are arrived-at pretty much simultaneously by apparently disparate sources at approximately the same moment in time.

Consider the telephone, which is attributed to Alexander Graham Bell in most of the world and to Antonio Meucci in my native Italy. Or radio, which is broadly attributed to Marconi or Tesla. In hindsight it seems like one person triumphed upon others, but really if you look at it from their point of view they work with urgency and secrecy because they perceive themselves to be in neck-to-neck competition with their cohorts. They perceive their technological environ very differently from how we do ex post facto.


>which is attributed to Alexander Graham Bell in most of the world and to Antonio Meucci in my native Italy.

The US congress did vote a resolution that cleared the matter (in 2002, a bit late I would say):

https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/volume-148/iss...

But in this case Bell and Meucci weren't much disparate sources.


I’m honestly stunned because I had no idea this issue had been raised, much less addressed.


Yep, the US somehow cleared the matter, but Canada swiftly affirmed the opposite in a one liner:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_telephone

https://web.archive.org/web/20141222093046/http://www2.parl....


Agreed. Definitely makes you wonder about the fairness of intellectual property.


I think that what you say is probably true, but things like thermal-riding or slope-soaring gliders would have been very useful (for the military, if nothing else) before the invention of the IC engine.


As discussed further down, kites were indeed seen as useful for the military in the late 19th century. Wikipedia says[0]

> In the early 1890s, Captain B.F.S Baden-Powell ... developed his "Levitor" kite, a hexagonal-shaped kite intended to be used by the army in order to lift a man for aerial observation or for lifting large loads such as a wireless antenna.

A glider may not have been suitable for carrying an antenna, but aerial observation via glider is an idea that must have occurred to people in the army, even before the invention of the IC engine.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-lifting_kite


Big questions is getting those to air, what you actually do with them and then how to solve communicating from them. Just think of how very early WW1 planes were actually used.


At the speed armies moved back in the (say) 15th century, this would probably not been such a problem, but I take your point.


> who had no connection or communication with or little knowledge of one another

There was a large enthusiastic group of people working on heavier-than-air flight, with with meetings and newspaper publications. The Spectator has an article titled "Flying Motor-Cars" at https://archive.org/details/sim_spectator-uk_1901-08-31_87_3... which comments:

] The mechanical skill of the world, which is very great, greater perhaps than its originality in scientific investigation, is directing itself for the moment to two definite ends, — the construction of an efficient submarine boat, and the invention of a machine that can travel with at least two persons on board through the air.

That the Wright Brothers didn't know Pearse is besides the point - both drew from shared materials, and a lot of people were trying. Here's a couple of reports from the New York Times:

"TO FLY FROM PIKE'S PEAK.; W.F. Felts Tries His New Aeroplane at Different Altitudes. [Aug. 4, 1897] (followed soon by SNOWSTORM ON PIKE'S PEAK.; W. B. Felts Did Not Attempt His Aeroplane Flight Yesterday.)"

Or "EXPECTS TO BE ABLE TO FLY.; Prof. Bell Believes He Has Mastered the Two Great Difficulties of Aerial Navigation.". That's Alexander Graham Bell.

Your [4] even mentions 'The Wright brothers acknowledged [Cayley's] importance to the development of aviation'.

> here in the US we ethnocentrically recite the Kitty Hawk event of the Wright Brothers as if it appeared in a vacuum out of nowhere

Where do you get that impression?

Here's a children's book from the US about the Wright Brothers. https://archive.org/details/letsflywilburorv00roop/page/36/m...

] In 1896, when he was twenty-five years old, Orville was very sick with typhoid fever and almost died. Wilbur and Katharine cared for him. Wilbur read while sitting with Orville. He read about Otto Lilienthal, who was trying to fly. Lilienthal built gliders and had flown farther than anyone else in the world. But Otto Lilienthal had a gliding accident and died. The Wright brothers were saddened by this news because they admired Mr. Lilienthal and his attempts to fly.

] ... In England, France, the United States, and other countries, people were trying to unlock the mystery of flight.

] ... Wilbur learned all he could about flying. He took every book about it out of the Dayton library. Samuel Langley the head of the Smithsonian Institution, was trying to learn how to fly Wilbur decided to write the Smithsonian. A man there sent Wilbur information.

] The famous engineer Octave Chanute was also experimenting with gliders. Wilbur wrote him, too. Mr. Chanute quickly became a friend of the Wright brothers.

Hardly a vacuum!




It's pretty common for things like that to happen. There are many other cases. Calculus from Newton and Leipzig being another example. There is even a wikipedia page delving into the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

Basic hypothesis is that once enough precondition for an invention are there then the leap can be made.


I stared for a long time at your third sentence before I remembered that Leibniz is the correct name of the German mathematician you are referring to, and Leipzig is a German city (where, coincidentally, he was born).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leipzig


Haha Autocorrect I think. I indeed meant to write Leibniz. Pretty embarrassing considering my high school was named after him.


Heavier than air flight dates back at least 2500 years from bamboo helicopter toys in China, with various others through the 17th to 19th century, however the first manned, powered, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air craft wasn't until Whitehead, Wright et. al at the end of the 19th century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines#Primitiv...


Only the tough materials (stone, bones, metal, pottery) remain. I always wonder how many civilizations disappeared without a trace because they built their cities with wood.

Maybe a lot of devices were invented and reinvented many times and then forgotten because there wasn't a practical purpose for them at the moment.


My favorite example is the Antikythera mechanism. It is quite clear that this had not been a one-of-a-kind, but that there must have been (many) predecessors of this technology to arrive at the kind of workmanship and layout that doesn't show any marks of hesitation or corrections as in the sole example, we know of. And that we know of this example at all, is just by sheer luck.

Generally, we only know of landmark size applications of historical technology, which tend to be rare.


It probably wasn't as common as the slide rule was in the 50's but I'm pretty sure there were more of these and some predecessors as well. The chance that we have found the only example that ever existed for something so useful seems slim.


It's probably the case that foundations get invented pretty darn quick in a civilization that builds primarily with wood. Wood rots too fast in environments where (a) trees grow and (b) wood is in contact with the ground.

Midden heaps can also close the gap.


I often wonder the same. As someone with a hobby of making unpowered gliders from balsa wood and laminating sheets, I often wonder why such simple contraptions (I can make very nice gliders with around 20 pieces of wood and one sheet) weren't discovered using easily available woods and paper many centuries ago and extrapolated to bigger machines with fabric and wooden struts. Seems that the raw materials would have been available in Roman times and only very minimal amounts of theory (as opposed to trial and error tinkering) are required. Truly remarkable that gliding firebombs and the like were never invented for warfare.


> Truly remarkable that gliding firebombs and the like were never invented for warfare.

What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite#Military_applications

Steering is important though, you need to a) go up, b) go the right place, not back at you, c) come down, again not where you are.


I wonder how much people tried to develop ballistae projectiles, perhaps once they had bolts/darts they were good enough and longer range just wasn't necessary?


In most cases if your goal is just to get some explosives over a tall wall, a trebuchet or siege tower is probably sufficient. On the other hand, if you have a lot of gunpowder, a cannon is also pretty fine on its own without any need to go up-and-over.


Maybe because trial an error improvement isn't possible if you're actually flying the vehicle? Just a guess.


Solution: send your butler up in it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley


Yeah, I used to build toy gliders too - it's really easy, though with balsa of course, which would not have been available in western Europe during the Renaissance (so tough shit Leonardo) but there are other light-weight materials, which is what sparked my question.


Spruce was used in aviation through WWII.

Boeing was located in Seattle to be near wood supplies needed in aircraft fabrication. (Well, that and its founder was already in the lumber business.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Boeing


Aeroplanes rely on light and strong materials with a high power to weight ratio energy source. Without that it is difficult to make the physics work. The internal combustion engine made it more possible.


Those "simple contraptions" probably were invented, many times, at different places all over earth. Just for fun and as a hobby. No records were made because no one considered those things worthy. People just never thought big or never had the opportunity to.


Mind Eilmer of Malmesbury, first flight between 995 and 1010 CE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilmer_of_Malmesbury


P.S.: The story of Eilmer also hints at what may have been the real problem, which may have haunted early fliers, not so much flying/gliding, but safe landing.

Another thing is topography: Either you have (steep) local elevations as a natural starting point for gliding, but then there is usually not much of an open space to go for a real application. Or there are wide open spaces, but no natural elevations. (Mind Eilmer starting from a tower.) So, even if you know about the principles, there's not much application for human flight, rendering it rather for use as a toy. (There are hints for bird-shaped gliding toys in ancient Egypt. But was there really a human-flight scale application in an all flat landscape like this?)


Annecdote time: I live in Lincoln, UK - to the East everything is flat as a pancake until you get to the Wolds, and to the west we have the similarly flat floodplain of the Trent river. In between, we have the very steep Lincolnshire Edge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Cliff) and the prospective aeronaut could have jumped off Lincoln Cathedral (https://lincolncathedral.com)- way back when the highest building in the world. So ideal for developing a useful glider.

And of course Lincolnshire is famous for being "bomber country" in WW2 - weather and geography helping to get the horribly overladen beasts airborn.


Probably because sustained heavier-than-air flight requires an engine. So same reason the car was not invented earlier - a coal-powered steam engine is too heavy.


Steam has other disadvantages.

It's quite good at steady-power output. Throttle response is poor.

Both automobiles and aircraft operate with quite variable power requirements. Though at least for long-range air travel, once the take-off / climb portion of flight has been completed, cruise is typically at a fairly constant setting.


I does not have to be "sustained" for more than a few minutes to be called a flight.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltaplane


Sure, but beside the point. There are many historical examples of heavier-than-air flight (kites, gliders etc.), but without means of self-propulsion it is not very practically useful.


Powered flight came about virtually the moment a high power-to-weight engine (based on aluminium and petrol fuel) existed.

Once rapid design-build-test cycles were practial, the initial Wright design rapidly shifted to a monocoque fuselage with forward wings and empennage, emerging within a decade.

In just over 30 years after the Wright's first powered flight, the DC-3, an aircraft still in commercial operation was flying. It has been described as the perfection of aircraft design, and the major elements of its design are still present on contemporary aircraft, though of course jet engines have largely replace reciprocating piston engines.

Major factors in successful powered or unpowered flight have been understanding aerodynamics (largely through experimentation and test flights, increasingly through modelling), materials (pre-industrial materials are poorly suited to human-scale aircraft or gliders), controls (both theory and interfaces), powerplants (on powered aircraft).

Ultralights, hang gliders, and sailplanes all benefit greatly from specific materials: Nylon for wings, aluminium for structural members, plastics, and steel for wires and cables. Instrumentation, navigation, communications, transponders (safety) and radar (collision detection) also factor in.

Virtually all of these are dependent on earlier stages of industrialisation: smelting of iron and aluminium, petroleum chemistry and textiles fabrication for Nylon and plastics, earlier aviation engineering for general flight handling and control theory, electronics for instrumentation, radio, and radar, plus domain knowledge from other fields such as physics (instrumentation, controls, etc.).

TL;DR: Prerequisites and path dependencies.


>Powered flight came about virtually the moment a high power-to-weight engine (based on aluminium and petrol fuel) existed.

The only thing I would change is that this makes it seem like powered flight was waiting on the engine, when it was waiting on the plane.

One thing that struck me at the Museum of Flight in Seattle is how far advanced IC technology was while the Wright brothers were gliding in wooden contraptions. They had turbocharged v12 diesel engines and Benz was already making aluminum engines for cars before the Wright brothers made their first attempt.

I found it fascinating how as soon as flight was demonstrated, it only took a few years to go from a wooden prototype to a sophisticated machine with a very complex engine.

Bonus pic of some of those early engines https://i.imgur.com/mENnuHH.png


Or rather, that development of the plane was waiting on the engine. The Wright brothers did all of their iteration and experimentation on relatively flat terrain flying close to the ground, which is how they were able to survive at least eight major crashes (and probably more minor ones.) Without an engine this kind of iterative experimentation seems almost impossible: you’d need to launch from a height, which means the first minor failure probably kills you and destroys the prototype.

And of course even if you survive the iterative development process, all you’ve got is a (largely) useless glider until the engine comes along and you can commercialize it.


See the Caproni Transaero from 1921, with eight engines and nine wings it’s right from the time you are talking about - putting engines on a fixed wing solid plane body is possible but sufficient understanding of flight is still missing.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uYn6fyGNg7c


Excellent example. And a beautiful failure to boot.


Could have used a rocket? They've been around for ages.

It seems to me that for flight the construction materials (silk, bamboo, string, glue - what the early WW1-era aircraft were made from) and the propulsion (solid-fuel rocket) have been around for over a thousand years.


Rockets require suitable fuels.

The original Chinese designs relied on gunpowder. This is self-oxydising and burns rapidly, but has a comparatively low power density, roughly 1/10th that of liquid petroleum fuels.

Liquid fuel such as alcohol and oil existed, but the notion let alone the availability of oxidizers didn't until the early 19th century. The first use of liquid oxygen in rockets didn't occur until 1926, by Robert Goddard.

Hypergolics or solid rocket motors would have been other options, but both are still pretty advanced. I've no idea how likely they'd have been.

One of the more viable solid fuels might have been rocket candy, made of sugar and usually potassium nitrate as an oxidizer. Both would have been available.

Demonstration here: https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=12fR9neVnS8

Whether or not that would generate sufficiently strong and reliable thrust for a steampunk JATO launch, I'm not sure.


Yes, but no...

Rocket does have the trust ratio needed. But then there is questions of burn time and control. So you could get up there, with some risk. But not stay there for very long time.

Short googling for solid fuel rockets seem that longest burn times are less than 3 minutes... And that is best case scenario with 20th/21st century technology...


But once you are up there you are up there, and professinal glider pilots can stay up there for ever, using thermals etc.


My suspicion is that a lot of the basics of glider flight were a lot easlier to discover / develop with powered aircraft. Given the relatively low power-output, and reliability, of early engines, many early aircraft might be considered (intermittently) powered gliders.

It could still have been possible to work things out based on JATO launch, though the hang-glider approach of low sand-dune testing / training would probably have been safer and a better overall option.

Powered aviation also helped drive and prove materials design enhancements and general aviation theory, controls, avionics, etc., all of which transfer well to gliders, but would very likely have been far more difficult to develop in a a glider-only regime.


Actually many gliders, such as thosed used by the nascent Luftwaffe when they were banned from real aircraft used things like rubber bands and human towing to launch, and I can remember ground-based winches being used to launch RAF cadet planes when I was a kid.


I'm not arguing that ground-launching gliders isn't possible.

I'm saying that having an airworthy craft once you're off the ground takes some doing, and it's probably easier to get there if you're experimenting with powered craft.

The early powered heavier-than-air craft were not especially aeronautically sound. But with the ability to perform design-build-test cycles, and not kill overly many pilots in the process, once engines existed design progressed rapidly.

Getting from the Wright Flyer to a modern sailplane would have been far more challenging without engines.


Sailplane is basically more wing, isn't it? I don't see how that needs an engine in its past, but I could understand material constraints.


Imagine you have no idea about aeronautics, controls, lift, thrust, where lift exists, how it works, etc., etc. You have no idea how to actually fly the thing.

Or land it.

So you build your best guess at what a working glider might be. You don't have robotics or radio to remotely control it, so someone's got to fly the thing.

You build a kite flinger and/or ramp or rail to toss it off the side of a building or cliff or whatever.

And then you hope, desperately, that you weren't too terribly mistaken about a great many things.

Franz Reichelt wasn't quite building airplanes, but he turned out to have misjudged his own competence in a somewhat similar manner:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/franz-reichelt

Now consider the same situation, except that you've at least got a motor to buy your way out of design and/or piloting errors, at least a little bit.

Under which of those scenarios do you think actual useful design might have progressed faster?

Keep in mind that people have had the notion of flying with wing-like contraptions dating to the ancient Greeks (see the legend of Icarus). There were numerous inventors who threw themselves off hills or cliffs with various attempts. Lack of power, and the frequent short professional career track of such inventors tended to stymie progress.

Successful gliders and sailplanes almost entirely postdated powered heavier-than-air flight. The first designs appeared after WWI, and practical use didn't appear until the 1930s. My understanding is that popularity of recreational gliding didn't emerge until the 1950s or 1960s, again benefiting from aeronautical engineering, materials, radios, much better knowledge of aircraft operation, controls, and instrumentation.

Glide ratio is one measure of aerodynamic efficiency and sophistication. Early 1930s gliders achieved about a 1:17 ratio. Most modern gliders exceed 1:30, and the best 1:50 or more. This expresses altitude loss per unit foreward travel (e.g., 1 meter loss for 30 meters forward flight).

Google's Ngram viewer is a somewhat fickle guide, but suggests an initial spike in mentions in the late 1930s / 1940s, again in the 1950s, then a third in the 1970s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sailplane&year...

Adding in "glider" (multiplied 10x) still lags "aeroplane" by decades.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28sailplane%2...

There may have been earlier terminology used, and "glider" has other meanings which might confound matches, but at least for "sailplane", the trend line lags "aeroplane" and "airplane" considerably. (I've multiplied "sailplane" results 100x in this plot):

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28sailplane%2...


Paper airplanes were around for centuries. Nobody knew how they worked.


Nobody knew how penecilin worked when it was first discovered (we now know it inhibits the growth of the bacterial cell wall) but that did not stop people using it, to good effect. Similar for many other discoveries/inventions.


More generally: technology (engineering) delivers results. Understanding why it does so is not required, and often comes quite late.

If you want explanation, that's a role of science, though it's often preceded by a very long period of systematic observation.

One striking example is geology, which has existed since at least the 17th century, but which didn't formally adopt its central organising and explanatory principle, of plate tectonics, until 1965. Biology (evolution and DNA), physics (celestial mechanics, particle physics, reletivity, and quantum theory), and chemistry (periodic table and electron orbitals) also come to mind.

Thermodynamics arose out of work with steam engines, and eventually developed to the point that the theoretical understanding and equations began driving, rather than being driven by, engineering accomplishments. Electrical engineering is another example where modern developments required understanding of, and calculations based on, circuit and field theory, rather than just more lab experimentation. (I'm hazy on details here, though this is my general understanding.)

There are practices which existed for many thousands of years before a deep understanding was achieved: fermentation, fire, firing ceramics, glassmaking, smelting metals, and many agricultural practices. Doing and understanding are separate undertakings.


Chemistry has only lately really become tractable, now that we can simulate appreciable quantities of matter in a computer and our simulations have become accurate enough to for instance reliably predict how certain molecules will orient themselves spatially (including folding).


However, this blundering about approach only works if almost anything could have worked and so you just keep trying until you hit upon it.

You can discover that eating one of the dozen types of plants growing on the hillside nearby treats toothache without any overarching theory about how that could work, just try eating stuff and see what happens - but you aren't going to invent the LED lamp this way.

Example: When we put a cable on the bottom of the ocean these days it's optical fibre rather than electrical. But, even with optical fibre, even the best stuff we can make, this will need amplifying for long distances or it's pretty awful. One thing you could do would be to choose reconstructing amplifiers when making the cable. So e.g. you decide this cable is Protocol X at 100Gb/s, you make amplifiers which can reconstruct a Protocol X signal at 100Gb/s and "boost" it, splice those in along the distance of the cable, and drop the whole lot into the ocean. However, somebody is going to invent 500Gb/s Protocol X+ and if you want to upgrade you will need to send teams down to the ocean floor to replace those amplifiers. Ouch.

In principle individual photons are travelling along the fibre, and physics doesn't say we can't just have one photon in => two photons out to boost this without needing to reconstruct the signal at all. There should be some way to build a device which does this, an Optical Amplifier, and it would be OK if this is quite expensive since it's saving you that enormous expense by allowing you to upgrade to 500 Gb/s X+ or to 10Tb/s XXX or whatever other future protocols just involve sending photons down a fibre without trying to upgrade equipment at the bottom of the ocean. But... how?

Turns out scientists can guess exactly how that should work if it's possible, and then direct the experiments, trying out only the handful of things which actually might work instead of just groping about at random. My alma mater was one of the places figuring out how to do this in the 1980s, they were still really proud of that when I studied there a decade later. Erbium Doped Fibre Amplifiers are the result.


I think that your fundamental premise is wrong: there've been a large number of ancient / preindustrial inventions which were not obvious, which were terrifically surprising, or which required a tremendous amount of skill or craft to accomplish. It'd be interesting to come up with a catalogue of these....

Your transoceanic cable example is an interesting one, as the first electrical / telegraph cables greatly expanded the understanding of electric fields and interactions with the environment, especially in salt-water.

I'm also wondering if there's some sort of frontier between the "just blundering around" approach --- mass parallel experimentation --- and "requires a substantive theoretical understanding". To take your LED example, LEDs are the inverse of the photoelectric effect (and apparent PV panels will emit photons when a charge is applied to them). Electroluminescence dates to 1907, whilst the first LEDs were developed in the 1960s. There were earlier similar phenomena such as chemoluminescence (including numerous examples of bioluminescence) which might have suggested the possibility.

I'm agreeing in part, disagreeing in part, and wondering if there might be a more robust or systematic way of distinguishing limits of both methods.


Yeah, something more systematic would be good.

Sometimes it's surprising what nobody was interested in inventing. I think Grace Hopper is really important because people were resistant to the idea that programming the computer involved boring mindless steps which could be done by a machine and so of course instead of hand writing the program in machine code you should write a higher level language and have the machine translate that. It's incredible now, but this very idea was once an important invention and yet her superiors were not enthusiastic.


There's an inherent resistance to change, even where it provides improvement.

Bernhard J. Stein's *Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1937) is a fascinating read in this regard:

https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag...

As Markdown: https://rentry.co/szi3g

I'd heard of it via Isaac Asimov who mentions it in his biography and a few other contexts. Asimov was Stern's research assistant, and incorporated the ideas into several of his own stories.


It's not that simple. Lots of things that are discovered are discovered when the goal was something else entirely. The number of accidental inventions is very large and it isn't rare at all that the accidental invention (or, more appropriately named, accidental discovery) is of much more value to society than the original goal was.


Also, a lot of empirical progress in ML didn't happen until people stopped worrying about explainability and theoretical guarantees. Remember when NNs were unfashionable?


Self-imposed unnecessary limitations are a frequent inhibitor of technical progress.

Though I've had my concerns for what the growth in solution-without-explanation (or understanding) that ML is generating.


my impression is that mostly NNs made progress when compute got really cheap.


This is really interesting and I had never considered it before. Would you happen to know any books or articles that tell the history leading up to the wright brothers but focusing on those kind of questions and theories?


Although the mathematics is quite complex (Newton, Bernoulli, Navier-Stokes) the history happens fairly quickly as the mathematics appears. Bernoulli published in 1738, Cayley designed the fixed-wing aircraft in 1799. From that point it was mostly a matter of finding ways to increase thrust / reduce weight through better engine design to achieve useful flight time / lift.


But the gliding (of larger birds) was observed for millennia. I think people had a pretty good idea about the possibility.


Kites are prehistorical. You can't really get earlier than that, unless we find some pre-human primates making them.

(parent edited)

> Then, why not make it bigger?

To what end? They were lifting bombs on kites as early as the 7th century, as well as humans as novelties (and punishments - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Huangtou).

If you want a lift a human to do something, you also need some better steering and safe landing, and those require more reliable engineering besides just the basic lift possibility.


Kind of supports my question - if tethered kites, why not untethered ones (i.e. aircraft)? And man-lifting kites have, of course been a thing for ages.


Reliable steering requires aerodynamics requires quite a lot of mathematical development, plus considerable precision engineering. And it's extremely dangerous, a lot of people did die trying to make steerable kites.


> quite a lot of mathematical development, plus considerable precision engineering

Not sure the Wright brothers would be with you on this - neither were maths guys and their aircraft were hardly precision-built.


The Wrights did extensive experimentation, on both models an full-sized prototypes. They built the first wind tunnel and developed calculations for lift and propeller thrust.

They also practiced fairly rapid design iteration, trying out ideas and adapting to actual experience. What they arrived at worked, though it was far from ideal and doesn't much resemble modern aircraft (beyond the notion of wings and the rough principles of control surfaces). Once other designers / engineers entered the field, and with more reliable engines, further iteration advanced rapidly.

Military aircraft played a significant role in WWI, only a decade after the Wright's first powered flight.


> He identified the four forces which act on a heavier-than-air flying vehicle: weight, lift, drag and thrust. [...] He also designed the first glider reliably reported to carry a human aloft. He correctly predicted that sustained flight would not occur until a lightweight engine was developed to provide adequate thrust and lift. The Wright brothers acknowledged his importance to the development of aviation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley

I think by the time the Wright brothers came around, the general theory for powered flight was in place. The Wright Flyer was precision engineered, compared to most 'kites' that came before it. It's not every day you see an internal combustion engine on a kite.


> It's not every day you see an internal combustion engine on a kite.

Yup. The engine was more important than the understanding of the principles of propulsion too: even if the four forces had been identified by Aristotle, that wouldn't have been much use in achieving sustained powered flight to civilisations whose closest approximation of a propellor powered by a turbine engine was a waterwheel.


And what, there's nobody between Archimedes and the Wright Brothers I could have been referring to? Whatever...



Fantastic question, which is some way down on my to-do list after the steam engine. The discussion this prompted is a real goldmine, so thank you.


In European culture, there's the myth of Icarus, whose wings failed in flight. I wonder if there's a real-life basis for this tradition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus


Michael faraday invented the motor in the 1820s. Successive refinements to the motor and the gas engine and electricity distribution projects led to electrification, the motor car and the powered airplane as an immediate consequence.


They lacked the physics theory to make planes stable enough to carry a load, and nobody wants to experiment throwing themselves out over a cliff with prototype wings that will likely get them killed.


> nobody wants to experiment throwing themselves out over a cliff with prototype wings that will likely get them killed.

Actually, not a few people did exactly that! If they had used a scaled-up paper plane, they might have lived. Or think of a modern hang-glider, but made from bamboo and silk.


He wasn't testing wings, but you make me think of this poor, brave man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Eiffel_Tower_ju...


You didn't need to throw yourself off a cliff though. Just think of something like Jockey's Ridge.


I mean, an improvement, but that just means that you'll be killed when your wings half work (enough to lift you into the air high enough that the fall will kill you) rather than when your wings don't work at all.


The boomerang is quite old.


> Hero [Hero of Alexandria, 10-70 AD] even suggested a mechanical use for the effect. By setting a fire on a hollow, airtight altar, the heated air within would flow down a tube into a sphere full of water, which in turn would be pushed up another tube into a hanging bucket. The bucket, when sufficiently heavy with water, would then pull on a rope to open some temple doors. Crucially, when the fire was extinguished, Hero noted that the cooling of the air in the altar would draw the water back into the sphere again, lighten the bucket, and so allow the doors to be closed by a counterweight.

Put the contraption on a chariot, use the ropes to turn the wheels instead of "temple doors" (!) and voilà: you have an auto-mobile.

Even if it's much less practical than using a horse, it's amazing that in almost 2000 years, nobody thought of making that for its sheer entertainment value -- or even to convince people that ghosts exist!


But why would you want to use such a flimsy technology, if you have horses?

There is no way an engine like this could outrun a lean and speedy chariot with two to four horses. Also, even a primitive mechanism like this may have encountered fatal problems with dirt, dust and sand. (Mind that steam locomotion was first tried for roads, which was a total failure because of the quality of roads, even in major city centers like London.)


There are lots of applications for heat engines that don't involve mobility: grinding wheat to flour, threshing and winnowing wheat, fulling cloth, sewing cloth together, hammering hot iron or annealed cold bronze, blowing the bellows on a forge or bloomery, sawing wood, turning wood or stone on a lathe, weaving cloth, spinning thread, playing music, crushing ore, grinding a new edge on a knife or axe with a grindstone, turning a potter's wheel, writing, kneading bread, calculating, and, as mentioned, raising water (from a well, from a river, into your fields, into a tower, into a salt pond, or out of a mine or swamp). All of these are things that people were already doing before Heron, in many cases devoting their lives to them, but steam power was not applied to some of them until less than a century ago.

In medieval times we can add turning metal on a lathe and winding crossbows.

Think of the most common German surnames, which are all occupational: Müller (grinding wheat), Schmidt (hammering iron), Schneider (sewing cloth), Fischer (catching fish), Weber (weaving cloth), Meyer (owning land), Wagner (making wagon wheels), Becker (baking bread), Schulz (herding peasants), Hoffmann (organizing the court), Schäfer (herding sheep), Koch (cooking food), Bauer (farming), and Richter (judging). This is a somewhat skewed sampling of occupations of men in Germany at the late-medieval or early-modern time surnames were imposed. If you were a Schmidt or a Weber you could expect to spend decades doing hard, physical labor every day, in a fixed physical location, labor that is now mostly done by steam.


I think Napoleon snickered at the first steam ships. Something about requiring precisely-controlled fire on a warship. But I bet the ancient Greeks would have killed to add a wheel to their quinqueremes.


That was answered in my comment? At first it would be much less useful than a horse, yes, but it would be so entertaining! And magical!

Sell it to kings, make bets...

Or accuse people of sorcery, have them burned...


Well, this is an application: sell it to the king, accuse him of sorcery, have him burned. Become king (and ride horses.) ;-)


It’s not discussed in the article, but the magic of steam in the 16th century was expressly investigated by Robert Fludd. As a mystical philosopher, he was attacked by the more scientific types of his time. This probably set back the steam engine. But clearly, he was really on to something!! Don’t discount the weird, I guess, is the takeaway.


Well-noticed! I used one of Fludd’s illustrations, but I ran out of space writing about Drebbel, which took us up to c.1607. Fludd will feature VERY heavily in Part III. Fludd eventually became totally obsessed with the inverted flask experiment - and recent historiography suggests he wasn’t seen as a crank, but actually highly respected at the time.


Nice! Thanks to the Ritman library in Amsterdam, I have access to a lot of Fludd’s published books (with fun marginalia etc…) but a fair amount of his work doesn’t seem to have been translated. (Maybe you’ve found otherwise?)

Descartes and Mersenne present a early conflicted aversion to the occult/esoteric/natural magic (eg, topics like resonance). I presume that certain ideas became somewhat taboo. This is one reason why it may have taken so long for the concept of resonance to be adopted widely in the sciences (see Buchanan 2019 in Nature “Going into resonance”)


Ah nice. Yes, I’m not aware of full translations, though I often have to translate things myself (with a bit of help). In this particular case for Fludd I mainly used secondary literature on his use of the inverted flask experiment and (spoilers) weatherglasses, which also sometimes translate some significant sections.

Very interesting on resonance - I’ll check that out. I seem to recall there was a PhD thesis I skim-read that was all about the relationship between music and weatherglasses in Fludd’s thought.


Not sure what conclusion the author will come to as an answer to the question in the title (part III is still to come). But if it doesn't include the liberation of inventors (i.e. the protection of intellectual property through patents) and the legal framework for "anyone" to profit from their inventions then I'll be disappointed.

As his story indicates so far it was not for the want of ingenuity that the industrial revolution did not occur before, but the social framework for transforming the society in the way that the industrial revolution did was simply not at hand. Primarily because the decisionmakers that held the power were tied to another mode of production, usually involving fleecing peasants.

That the industrial revolution needed the steam engine goes without saying. But the steam engine without the industrial revolution was a mere party trick.


I reject the idea that patent and IP law would have made these developments occur sooner. In fact, I blame the slow down in technological development partly on patent and IP law. You think the rapid development seen during the industrial revolution could have happened if people were at litigious as they are now? The ability to create derivative inventions is essential to progress.


Your perspective on patents seems colored by the relative recent advent of patent trolls and the use of litigation to stifle innovation and competition. I suggest you look at the situation in England around 300 years ago and compare to the feudal system that was the rule elsewhere at the time - everything had to be approved by the king or the nobility, who had vested interests in land owning and serf systems. This social order was the real inhibitor of technological progress that England was the first country the liberate itself from.

Laws that protected the IP rights of inventors were absolutely crucial to that process.


Check out the Wright brothers patent war at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war


Thanks that was interesting. But I'm not sure if there is a point related to the discussion in there or if this is just a tangential piece of trivia?


It's an example of how the patent system will present legal hurdles to inventors. Not just opportunities.


If you follow what those industrial pioneers were up to, you will find them at least at litigious as people are today. They certainly protected their patents and inventions with teeth and claws


I have written very extensively on the evolution of the early patent system - I actually have a not-yet-completed, so far 9-part series on the context of the Statute of Monopolies - but you’ll be in for something of a surprise in Part III. (Spoiler: the most generous ever English patents was seemingly granted to an early steam engine in the 1660s but to little effect)


OK thanks that sounds interesting, will keep a lookout!


Mind that the article mentions a Dutch patent from 1598.

On the other hand, the development of the steam engine and its application is partly grounded in Trevithick's fierce rejection of existing patents (hence high steam pressure) and also in the rather loose enforcements of the Stephenson patents.


> You say the anthill is the result of the amazing collaboration of all the ants in the colony, but look here is an ant that goes off doing nothing. What say you now?

I say the big picture is that the steam engine was developed within a legal system that in general protected IP rights, at least respected them on a completely different level than before. Granted there are more pieces to the puzzle, but let's not forget one of the most important pieces.


Which meant that we would be still stuck with the Newcomen atmospheric engine as the settled technology?

High steam pressure isn't just about a wandering ant, but about the major step in the development of the steam engine, opening the technology to all kinds of applications, beyond just pumping.


Interestingly, we don't seem to understand each other. It could be me. No matter, have a nice day.


I've often thought we could have had integrated circuits shortly after the invention of photography. 150 years earlier! It would make an interesting steampunk world with steam and hydraulics and CPUs.


Only as in "ability to replicate that alien technology".

In the same way, all materials and construction techniques for 1896 Marconi radio receiver were available in Ancient Greece.


The theoretical stack required for successful IC design very much guarantees it wouldn't remain at steampunk.


Remember, 'integrated' meant initially just 'more than one component'. It would start with poster-sized wiring diagrams, switch elements, photosensitive spots etc. As it got smaller and more circuit elements were added the math may have progressed with it.


It's more than the math. It requires modern understanding of electromagnetism and material science accounting for semiconductors. From that things like practical electric motors/generators and plethora other technologies become essentially a corollary.


You might find these comments interesting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17371343


If you write that up, please send me the link (I’m the OP)


Why did you think that? We didn't have transistors until the 1960s.


Well, integrated circuits started as just 'more than one component' on the same device. So a sensor and a switch perhaps. Or a resistor network. Etc. Start there and you rapidly improve (just like it happened later)


A practical steam engine requires a high level of ferrous metallurgy. Samuel Clemens lost his brother to a boiler explosion on a steamer. It was a common occurrence in those days.


Access to machining and steel production at scale. Steam power was known in antiquity.


Silly me, I saw that title and I genuinely thought this: "it's gonna be some ingeniously titled PR puff cunningly contrived to get me to read about what was behind Valve's decision to rename their 'Source' game engine to 'Steam Engine'.


For another take on this story, please check out my blog series on the Age of Steam: https://technicshistory.com/the-age-of-steam/


I have a similar question: why did the jet engine take so (relatively) long, since it's basically a turbo charger with an integrated combustion chamber. The answer, as with the steam engine is the materials science needed to be done first.


Arguably, the steam engine is a form of artificial intelligence. At least with Watt’s engine, the “governor” plays an essential information processing role in modulating the pressure. Sensing and reacting to keep a measured value in an optimal range is pretty much the definition of AI (see Norvig’s definition of intelligence). Autopilot is another example of non-computational AI (autopilot was invented in 1914).


One thing I’ll be mentioning in Part III, as I ran out of space in this one: Drebbel in the 1610s applied his insights into perpetual motion to invent a self-regulating oven/furnace. Using mercury rather than water to trap air in a tube, much like the inverted flask I described, rising temperatures would raise a float sitting on the mercury that would then close the aperture for the air feeding the oven’s flame.


Really nice. Looking forward to it!

I went to the world’s oldest continuously operated library today, in Verona. Since 517. Wow.

Saw a copy of Ars Magna Sciendi, from Kirscher.


No, a control cycle is not AI. Otherwise a dam with an overflow relief is AI too and it has been around much longer than a couple of hundred years.


Then, I would propose that we refer to computational AI and noncomputational AI. Because a control cycle is absolutely what AI is—and yes, it is much older than we think. See Chapter 1 of “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach”


No it’s not, otherwise we wouldn’t have a new term for what a thermostat has been doing forever.

Just look at the Wikipedia definition for a basic start on artificial intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence


Um, no. First: thermostats haven’t been around forever (they were popularized by Mark Honeywell in 1906, of Honeywell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_C._Honeywell). Second: autopilot wasn’t invented until 1914 (before computers). Third: the Wikipedia article you refer to totally aligns with what I’m claiming:

“An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. Any system that has goal-directed behavior can be analyzed as an intelligent agent: something as simple as a thermostat, as complex as a human being, as well as large systems such as firms, biomes or nations. The intelligent agent paradigm became widely accepted during the 1990s, and currently serves as the definition of the field.”


Cybernetics. That's the term you're looking for, not AI. The governor is a control system.


I’d love to try to see a definition of AI that doesn’t completely overlap with Cybernetics. How do you define AI?


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