Nope. There’s an engineer on Youtube that got one that functioned up to 600 rpm. It’s a modified steam engine using gunpowder. LINK
There’s nothing particularly special about gunpowder. The only thing is that gunpowder was the earliest known substance that contained its own oxidant, so the combustion didn’t require external oxygen. You can run a steam engine on any sort of combustible material: coal, peat, wood, oil, baby seals, whatever.
Cite? I mean for the roman development of water powered industry. Not that I doubt you, I just find it fascinating. Thanks
Well, I’d argue that the primary change of the industrial revolution was sticking all of your production in one room and getting machines to do some of the work. While there are, of course, smaller-scale machines that home-based craftsmen used (looms, spinning wheels), you really start getting A) economies of scale, and B) efficient water/steam power when you combine it all. As I’ve said, water power was getting pretty well developed when steam came and trumped it. If we’re speculating a worst-case scenario - no coal, even - I think water manufactories would have improved to take their place. You’d still get some charcoal-based steam engines, but they’d be pricier than the equivalent coal. I think you’d get steam locomotives still, but the mobility of the middle class wouldn’t have taken off in quite the same way. So, you’d have a more stationary, but still industrialized society, with higher mobility for the rich. At some point, you’d get hydro and wind electricity, and it’s possible electric cars would have been bigger. But, everything has to move slower - even with earlier developments in hydro/wind/solar/whatever power, the simple fact of yanking such huge energy deposits from the earth would mean less industrialization. Still, I don’t think we’d be stuck in the dark ages. To my mind, the tipping point was getting a few people + machines to do most of the blue-collar labor, thus freeing up big chunks of the middle class to invent other things. That, I think, would still have happened.
Funny-- my very first thought upon seeing the thread was how much better off we’d probably be, on balance, without cheap plastics.
Wrong. Bakelite is a plastic. And it’s still in use today.
No, but we can extrapolate that plastics similar to the ones we use a lot of today could be cracked and synthesised from alternative sources like coal and plant material.
I’m inclined to believe they’d have occurred at more-or-less the same pace, only using alternatives. The driver of technology, IMO, is not availability of cheap oil, it’s increased population, and everything that flows from that.
Petroleum was not the primary driver for either of those dates - coal was.
I’m inclined to say “as far, possibly even further in some respects, like recycling and energy effeciency”, but it’s an unanswerable what-if, isn’t it, really?
IIRC, a good number deal of early steam engines were used as drop-in upgrades to water-powered mills/manufactories that suffered from unreliable water supplies and had cheap local coal available. Then people started building what were essentially water-powered mills with steam engines in places that had no rivers. The gradual evolution into steam-specific organisation took place over quite a long period, in the same way that it took people a while to figure out how to move from an optimal steam-powered layout to one which made best use of electric motors.
Personally I’d have thought that a no-oil scenario would be a heck of a lot dirtier and more complicated than a no-coal scenario. People embraced oil in large part because it was so much less filthy and inconvenient than coal.
Plastics were made from hemp around the 1940s or so. Video of a Ford made with hemp plastic body panels. Diesel engines were originally designed to be ran on coal dust or peanut oil. In the 1970s, GM built a Caddy powered by coal. In the 1930s, a company built a steam powered plane.
I don’t think that a lack of petroleum based fertilizers would be all that big of an issue, as modern organic farms are nearly as productive as are chemical fertilizer based farms. There would no doubt be some differences in terms of population size, and the amount of land being farmed, but the differences wouldn’t be too dramatic.
It is impossible to predict what things would be like, of course, but I think that we can make some educated guesses. A lot of research would have been poured into making things run more efficiently. When the British were still using wood for their primary source of fuel, the demand for glass was so high that conservation measures had to be put into place to protect forests so that their would be enough timber to build warships. The introduction of coal and the reverbatory furnace changed all that.
Sooner or later, we would come up with synthetic petroleum as we searched for better lubricants.
We’d also probably see things like solar furnaces in widespread use (there’s one in France used to melt iron) and better insulated homes. Blimps and zeppelins would probably play a heavy role in transportation. Hydrogen was being produced during the US Civil War, so that might have filled a lot of our energy needs. Acetylene might also be a popular energy source, as well.