For millennia, humans basically lived an agrarian lifestyle, until the past few hundred years when suddenly things skyrocketed upwards exponentially. There was very little difference in the lifestyle of 4000 BC to 3000 BC, or 500 AD to 1000 AD, but there’s an enormous difference between 1500 AD and 2000 AD.
So what I am wondering is, what things prevented this information/tech revolution from happening centuries or millennia earlier (or, conversely, why aren’t we, in 2023 AD, also still stuck in the same rut as the Middle Ages?) What prevented things from unfolding earlier so that the Internet, semiconductor chips, airplanes, lasers would exist in 600 AD?
[Just spitballing] A lot larger percentage of the work force was required just to stave off starvation before the Industrial Revolution. Centuries of agricultural innovation has to take place before any of that labor can be freed up for factories. Industry is initially labor intensive and requires high density populations to work the factories. Populations that still must be fed by widespread food sources often hundreds of miles away. Agricultural innovation was rather slow because the results are measured in years not days. And all the harder to measure those results when your hungry neighbors (or ambitious kings) keep trying to take your land away.
Those agrarian millennia were also exponential. Exponential growth always looks like that: Almost nothing for almost forever, until it suddenly goes super-quick quite recently. A millenium hence, our descendants will speak of the slow pace of progress of our time, because by comparison with their time, our pace will indeed be slow.
That’s an overgeneralization and a loaded word but gets to the heart of the issue. You can’t have a scientific revolution until the culture supports science, the scientific method, free inquiry without reprisals, experimentation rather than authority, and all the other stuff that categorized the enlightenment.
A deeper answer would involve volumes on individual cultures. The Greeks honored intellectual reasoning and had contempt for artisans. They allowed observations but didn’t have the credulity to sort out the nonsense. The Romans did good work in engineering but had contempt for intellectuals. And they lived steeped in a religious/superstitious society that saw omens in ordinary events. The Chinese shared some of these traits, honoring intellectuals and engineering, but didn’t have experimentation and free inquiry in a culture that looked to the past rather than the future.
To be honest, making the change in post-Renaissance western society took hundreds of years and faced repeated oppression and challenges. Many people today claim that the cultural change from Catholic-dominated societies to Protestant-dominated societies allowed the intellectual permission needed to form the new society. It’s a huge subject of debate these days and everybody not only has an opinion but defines industrial revolution/enlightenment/science/modernity differently so that their claims are hard to put up against one another.
The information revolution depends entirely on the industrial revolution. Whatever applies to the latter explains the former.
Touching on what Exapno wrote, the old system of conveying knowledge was based on scholasticism. The idea was that if you were seeking answers, you should look at what some revered ancient authority had to say on the subject. So there was no emphasis on learning new things; you were supposed to re-learn what was already known.
The idea of learning things through observation and experimentation was considered an inferior way of doing things. It wasn’t something that first-rate scholars did.
My theory is what eventually caused the shift was the discovery of the Americas. The existence of the Americas was something nobody could deny - and there was no record of them in any ancient authority. It was undeniable evidence that the old texts didn’t have all the answers.
FWIW, I once read that Archimedes came very close to discovering calculus, and if he had, maybe he would have given the science of the day a push that would have lead to a technical revolution much earlier.
For centuries after Archimedes closely missed discovering calculus engineers continued to build structures using knotted strings for measuring tools. It takes more than an underlying knowledge of mathematics to apply them in a revolutionary manner. There is much more infrastructure required to use tools, skills, and knowledge in a practical manner. The discovery of calculus wouldn’t have advanced the construction of printing presses which would have given science a much bigger push.
The industrial revolution could have happened fairly easily somewhere around 50 to 100 AD. Hero of Alexandria invented the steam engine, but unfortunately it didn’t occur to him to hook it up to a belt and do some actual work with it. Instead he just wrote down that it was an interesting toy.
All of the pieces were there. Unfortunately, he just didn’t make the connection. It leads to some interesting “what if” type of discussions.
It seems like this is the answer. I mean, yeah, the steam engine could have happened way back then or it could not have been invented until next year, but all along, there have been improvements and exponential growth, right? Whatever happens, when future generations look back 1,000 years, they will be asking the same question.
Conversely, I’d love to read about scientific discoveries that were almost missed, like penicillin (in my understanding). Not the point of this thread though, obviously.
I read a history of glass that stated, unsurprisingly, that the answer is glass. The creation of optical grade glass allowed for microscopes and telescopes. This allowed us to investigate the world beyond our sight. The creation of glass chemical equipment allowed us to begin experimenting with the physical world and create new substances. The author mentions how the middle-east was the leader in glass technology until the Mongols invaded and destroyed the industry. This let Europe catch up and pass the Persians on this front and take the technological lead. So I’d say that the tech revolution could have happened a little earlier, but it would have required some luck in letting key discoveries and connections occur. And it still would have required the prior existence of the urban environment to allow for enough “free time” for experimentation.
And that’s also one reason why China ended up falling behind. For centuries, China was ahead of the rest of the world in terms of technology, but they just weren’t any good with glass, so they couldn’t make the leap forward Europe did during the Renaissance.
Those are pretty sweeping statements. Do you have any basis for that? Because my understanding is that the Greeks did indeed engineer and that Romans didn’t have contempt against intellectuals.
I nod in affirmation to both posts. But to unpack this distinction itself into a slope of gradual change instead of an either/or – I don’t know about your educational experiences, but through most of elementary school in the 1960s, “education” consisted of learning what the Correct Answers were, in order to spew them back out onto a test. We were not taught to do our own inquiry, formulate our own models of what we would consider real, and then set forth to verify them with repeatable experimentation.
Several of my grandparents and great-grandparents never got beyond elementary school.
If we concede* that before you can really urge people to be broad-thinking theorists and researchers in their own right, you have to give them a set of fundamentals to use as established axiomatic truths, then it makes sense that it took a long time before enough of the population had the basic elementary education and were appropriate candidates for considering scientific inquiry.
I don’t, fully, by the way – I think kindergarteners and 2nd graders should be encouraged to do original thinking and learn how to express it in words and argue in favor of their own precepts and viewpoints – but society as a whole has needed a broad base of people who knew the basics more than it needed kids questioning instead of obeying rules.
Agreed. The Antikythera device cannot have been a one off device. They must have been produced in some volume. And there must have been similar, lesser devices. But, technology was a lousy business model BC. A high tech proprietary computer for an elitist buyer. No supporting consumer market. Bummer!
Also, there were simple solutions to complex problems. Like the Romans needed to solve cube root problems for torque in throwing machines. It didn’t require equations, they just used a counting board to calculate cubes and created a table. Took a while, but once you had the table who needed math.
The major market prior to the 1600s was slaves. In that economy there was no market for labor saving devices.
Probably the proximal event was the spread of printing technology. There was a huge consumer information market. Once a gillion bibles were sold there was a need for information to feed the presses. Discovery created it.
Not much need or much use for technological innovation in slave economies: if you want more production, just get out the knout. See also feudal and tributary economies. A gross oversimplification, of course, but how labour and production of wealth are organized are important things to consider.
I think the invention of the printing press was a huge step. Before that knowledge had to be conveyed orally or with books that had to be transcribed by hand. Once knowledge could be stored and transmitted a lot more easily, it was easier to build up a storehouse of it. Without the printing press, would Newton’s Principia have become widely distributed? Would he have even been able to put it together if he hadn’t had access to the works of Galileo, Kepler, and Copernicus? Even as far back as Galileo, would he have been able to build the telescopes he did without printed materials?
The Romans and Greeks took steps in that direction. As mentioned above, the Greeks had rudimentary steam engines. The Romans used water power for some industrial applications, notably grinding grain:
Would an early adaption by the West of the Chinese invention of the printing press with movable letters have caused an earlier scientific/industrial revolution? Or in another scenario, if China had had a similar science-minded tradition from antiquity like Europe had, would such a tradition combined with a boom of printed books in China have created a technical revolution in Asia?