Fossil fuel-free industrial revolution

Could an industrial revolution happen without fossil fuels? No oil, coal, or natural gas. Would things like water power, wood, peat, etc be enough? Would a technologically advanced civilization even be possible?

Nah. If coal (well, charcoal) had never been used as a fuel, man would never have been able to make a fire hot enough to smelt iron, or even bronze. Without durable metals, no industry as we know it.

That not true. Early Iron and Steel work was made with Charcoal made from wood not fossil fuel (coal). The Brits cut down most of their forests to fuel the earliest parts of the industrial revolution.
To the Op, it is theoretically possible to have an industrial revolution sans fossil fuels, but it would be a much slower one and probably would not resemble the actual one very closely.

Jim

Well, exactly. It isn’t sustainable if you have to level your forests. The refined-metal goods a society can produce remain so rare that the elite keeps tight controls on them, likely limiting them to military applications like armor and spear-points and whatnot. They aren’t widely available enough to cause a “revolution”, rather they’ll be used to keep the elite in power.

Bryan, this is interesting. Have you studied the industrial revolution? I ask, because in my readings, this is not how it worked. Most Steel and manufacturing was occurring for mercantile interests not military. The Military benefited a lot from it and fossil fuels greatly accelerated the growth of industry and western militaries but the Industrial revolution was in Tool Making and Textiles, not Guns and Cannons.

Jim

Well, it worked that way because coal provided enough energy to be put to mercantile and military use. What the OP proposes is a world where energy is far harder to come by.

I’m not sure whether it’s fair to include peat in your list; it is, by some definitions, a fossil fuel; it takes a heck of a long time to form - admittedly not as long as coal, but certainly long enough to be comparable in human-usability terms; it’s a non-sustainable resource, just like coal.

Okay, but I was debating your original post, which was not correct.

It took Coal and Oil to fuel our rapid Industrial Revolution. We agree on this.

It is feasible that a slower Industrialization could have been based on Hydroelectric, tree farms and other organic fuels and wind power. It would have been far slower in my opinion and looked different. The Automobile would never have taken off, but Trains & Trolleys would probably have been the primary land transport. Perhaps Blimps would have been developed further.

Jim

Is there any remotely feasable path to get to nuclear power without fossil fuel, or is refining and enriching uranium simply too demanding of energy?

Long-range transmission of electricity, though, requires some kind of infrastructure involving thousands of miles of cables and whatnot. Water- and windmills were fine, putting the kinetic energy to use on site, but transmitting it elsewhere will be a huge problem unless you can crank out spools of wire by the ton, for starters. Energy generation would have to remain a strictly local phenomenon, but I guess those of us in the cities could burn horse dung, of which we’d have plenty since there’d be no cars, or spend our summers stockpiling wood, which would get progressively more difficult and expensive as the forests around the city get cut down.

Anyway, I thought “revolution” by definition required a widespread change. Compare the energy content in a ton of coal versus a ton of wood, and picture transporting the latter to your customers in a world where large cargo ships and locomotives are ten times as expensive to build and operate. At the very least, limiting shipping to wind power (because no wood-burning power plant could possibly carry enough fuel for a lengthy voyage) would limit international trade to Napoleonic levels.

Much like early smelters, you prepare Charcoal from wood. In the process of making charcoal you run the manufacturing plant and the charcoal is used to run the trains and Steam Ships. It isn’t great but it keeps industry moving forward.
The techniques get refined and the argricultural revolution probably takes off quicker then the industrial.
I think we basically agree.

Jim

I presume the OP’s scenario also rules out plastics, so I guess we’d never get to the information age.

I think there are ways to make Plastic without Fossil Fuels but I think you are correct there is no easy way. What Year’s technology do we need to achieve to meet the Op’s goal? Would the 1920’s be enough with maybe some advances in medical and agricultural areas?
We could argue that the first industrial revolution was fossil fuel free and the second was largely fossil fuel driven. As the First merge right into the second this doesn’t help us much. But by many criteria the "Industrial Revolution ended in the mid 1910’s or with WWI as a break. So if we go with that as the criteria, rather than achieving the modern technology, I think the results of the Industrial Revolution could largely be achieved without Fossil fuels.

Jim

At the very least, Jared Diamond might’ve gotten a Pulizter for Guns, Germs and Iron.

As a point of interest, the use of coke, a form of coal, dates back to the late 17th century. From the Wikipedia article, I read the following: “…in 1709, Abraham Darby set up a coke-fired blast furnace to produce cast iron. The ensuing availability of inexpensive iron was one of the factors leading to the European industrial revolution.” Deforestation had begun to be a serious problem in Europe even as far back as the Middle Ages.

But even so, I don’t think that the answer to the OP is necessarily “no.” As others have pointed out, iron smelting is possible even without fossil fuels, though limits on the availability of wood would have limited the overall amount of iron produced and increased its cost. However, it should be noted that iron is a commodity that’s routinely wasted, and has been for over a century. If refined iron were a much more expensive commodity, a great deal less would have been wasted, and much more would have been recycled or reused. Lack of availability would have been something of a brake on industrial advancement, but wouldn’t have prevented it altogether.

Here’s another perspective: the lack of iron might have limited the lethality of late 19th- and early-20th-century wars. It’s commonly thought that wars are great drivers of technological change and industrial advancement, but I wonder – doesn’t killing off millions of productive people negate much of that progress?

So here’s my take: there’s no reason to think industrialization absolutely required fossil fuels – but it would have been a much, much more gradual process. And maybe that would have been a good thing!

Another important aspect of the industrial revolution was pollution, particularly of the air - without the rich and plentiful energy source that was coal, as well as generally slowing things down, there would be less incentive for massively concentrated industrialisation; perhaps a more distributed model would have emerged.
A generally lower level of environmental pollution, more evenly distributed across the land, should translate to better health, longevity and productivity (or at least the potential for it); this might somewhat offset some of the disadvantages arising from the lack of fossil fuels.