Since we’re well beyond FQ, I thought I’d mention something on-topic but not factual. In the Stirling Novel “Conquistador” (which involves travel to an alternate timeline) they presuppose that getting all the elements to line up for the industrial revolution was incredibly unlikely.
I can’t find the exact quote, but they indicate it was something like flipping a coin a thousand times and having it come up heads each and every time.
I would not say quite to that extent, but the assumption that it was inevitable is also faulty IMHO.
But were they really? Were all of the pieces really there? All I see from Hero’s… device is a neat little spinning contraption doomed forever to operate at or at best slightly above atmospheric pressures, and requiring continuous tending and feeding of (cold) water that would greatly reduce the inefficiency of the… I hesitate to even call it a “system.” It’s only a “system” to the extent an open system is a “system.” Key pieces missing to make it genuinely useful would, I think, include at minimum an enclosure with a protruding shaft, a condenser, and a feed system to make it so that the steam is not wastefully bled off to atmosphere, but rather can be condensed and then redirected as a sub-cooled liquid back into the boiler drum.
ETA: Something else, on the general subject of math and engineering an industrial revolution: it’s notable that steam power as a practical technology preceded the mathematical and scientific framework to really explain it. By the time Carnot and Rankine arrived on the scene to put forward equations to describe the thermodynamic processes involved in the steam cycle, the industrial revolution and steam power were already well underway. Likewise, it was decades (maybe even closer to a century plus) before engineers had a good, scientific understanding of the kinds of quality in materials and manufacturing processes that were necessary to design and operate boilers in such a way as to keep them from exploding as a natural part of their lifecycle (and thus greatly abbreviating the livfecycles of any humans unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity).
All that to say, where steam engines are concerned, science lagged engineering, and the engineering itself was incredibly primitive by our standards. More like an art at first, and only gradually tending towards science by trial and error, at great cost in life.
By contrast, nuclear power saw the science and engineering needed to make systems functional developed relatively contemporaneous with one another, seeing a very rapid progression from “Hey, it turns out you can split Uranium atoms!” to “…and here’s how we can build bombs, design power plants, and launch ships capable of harnessing this newly discovered phenomenon.”
I’d add you need a society with rule of law and a right to property (including intellectual property) so .people feel confident that they will be able to collect the rewards from their efforts in developing new technology
By the time of WWII, the idea of technological development was well established. Governments expected to get results from research programs so they were willing to spend resources on them.
If technological development itself had been a new idea in the 1940’s, governments would have said “Interesting theory. But we have to focus on practical things while the war’s being fought. Maybe we can try out this ‘science research’ you’re proposing after we’ve won.”
It’s misleading to say that he invented the steam engine, as if there were only one. The engine he made worked very differently from Watt’s engine, and it was, in fact, nothing more than an interesting toy.
And yeah, the Greek philosophers were pretty useless and probably even harmful to the development of knowledge. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t real advances in ancient Greece-- It just means that it was people other than the philosophers who were making them.
Wasn’t that essentially Constantinople, which held on long enough to be trashed by a European culture reborn?
This is a key point. Nobody could rest on their laurels, Roman-Empire-like. There was a constant state of war with someone or other, and so military tech advanced, to the point where the castle defences of one era were useless in the next against gunpowder. Even before firearms, the progressively stronger armour of knights became more vulnerable to progressively stronger crossbows. (Remember, for example, Joan of Arc captured whin hit by a crossbow). All that military equipment created a big demand for metal.
Key points too. Building highly inefficient steam engines, making them more efficient, could only be done when the coal was right there. The first steam engines were basically a bellows - Steam inflated the pump piston, then the steam was vented to the outside. Fortunately these were pumps, so water supply - like fuel - was not a problem. But it was the ideal environment to experiment and then systematically attack the problem. Once an engine was designed that could be an efficient stand-alone power plant, it could run grain mills, looms, and eventually vehicles. Once coal could be mined and transported in bulk, it could fuel greater amounts of metal for more solid, reliable mechanicals.
But like everything to do with modern civilization, it was a synergy of factors. Windmills and waterwheel mills and town clocks had clockwork mechanisms and gears and clutches mostly of wood pegs and such well before metal mechanics made these ubiquitous in many devices. Hand-driven bellows, for small metalworks and pipe organs, hamster-wheel irrigation and cranes… they were applications waiting for better power tech to make them even more practical and scalable.
Also note that the earliest canons had a tendency to fail (spectacularly) after a while. So again, war did drive the development of metallurgy necessary for serious pressure vessels, which obviously are needed to drive steam engines.
So a confluence of factors, but I’d say the biggest was coal.
Cannons failed spectacularly until they figured out how to build giant boring machines that eliminated the need for welds along one side. Then those machines made possible huge pipes in all sorts of applications, along with better boilers for steam engines, just in time for the industrial revolution.
The obvious answer is Capitalism. Before capitalism came along, scientific progress was made primarily by a handful of people who had the patronage of a church or a King. After capitalism showed up, everyone could profit from invention, and we set millions of minds to work inventing things. The ability to accrue capital allowed them to build big projects and start companies to manufacture them. Capitalism is what opened up the collective genius of mankind and greatly accelerated progress.
Another problem with the more distant past was that there just wasn’t enough people with free labor time to devote to learning, inventing, and trying out novel ideas. We needed to build wealth before we could really unleash the creative power of people, and capitalism did that.
The other problem isn’t economic, but has to do with precursor technology. Everything we build today is built on a foundation of tech that goes back thousands of years. Before you can mass produce, for instance, you need to develop interchangeable parts. Before we had that, even screws were handmade, and if you tried to replace a part on something with the part on another, it would require some kind of handwork to make them fit, because every object was unique.
And before you had interchangeable parts, you had to have precision machining. And before you had precision machining you had to have a source of power that wqsn’t a sloppy belt fed off a water wheel. And before you had that source of power you had to develop the science and the metallurgy to allow it. And so it goes, all the way down. You could take a thousand machines of various sorts to the distant past, and very shortly they would be rusted rubble and the people of the time would be utterly incapable of replacing them.
Then there’s raw population: The high tech lifestyle we have today requires supply chains of billions of people behind products. Cut the population in half, and we will revert to a lower-tech existence. If we got to a population under a billion like some radical environmentalists want, we’ll be back living 18th century lives. No chip fabs, no space travel, no satellite constellations, possibly no internet at all, lousy vehicles, etc. In the 10th century there just weren’t enough available man hours to maintain any kind of high tech society, even if it was handed to them.
We can argue this forever, depending on one’s definitions and timeframes, but I’d argue that the base on which the industrial revolution was built was mercantilism, with capitalism being the development that followed. For most of the 19th century, though, mercantilist politics and capitalistic policies intermingled in western governments. Marx, I understand, talked about capital but never capitalism.
If one wants to conflate capitalism with competition, then it certainly goes back to earlier times, as in my example about the competing European countries above. However, a capitalist system is not a necessary precursor for economic competition and innovation. That is found in quantity in ancient cultures.
Yup, that’s exactly what you want a weapon to be, boring. At least for your guys using it. They’re probably more exciting for the guys the business end is pointed at.
It seems like part of it is just the thinking of it. I would wager that many technologies were possible way before they it occurred to someone to realize them.
For example Jim Woodman and Julian Nott tested whether the Nazca people could have seen their famous lines from a hot air balloon. They built, and flew, a hot air balloon with local materials and ancient techniques.
“When Jim Woodman approached me with his idea that the people who created the Nazca lines could have seen them from hot air balloons I was intrigued but skeptical. Yet we successful flew in a balloon that could have been built by the Nazca people a thousand years ago. And while I do not see any evidence that the Nazca civilization did fly, it is beyond any doubt that they could have. And so could the ancient Egyptians, the Romans, the Vikings, any civilization. With just a loom and fire you can fly!
We might also consider that it may require capitalism, with its competitive economy that produces for profit, not need, and constantly seeks to expand, for those in dominant places in the economy, to devote time and energy to making labour more productive. So the question may not be “why and how the Industrial Revolution?” but “why and how capitalism?” Which may be defined in part by wage labour as the dominant form of production, that is, a system where land, etc. is owned by a small minority and a majority of the population has to work for wages for that minority.
Regarding coal, Andreas Malm in Fossil Capitalism argues a powerful motive for abandoning water power for coal was to move factories away from communities already settled near water power in order to end resistance to terrible wages and conditions.
I would also ask why the industrial/information revolution could not have happened millions of years earlier. Avians, direct descendants of dinosaurs, could have developed technology (modern birds have a long life span, and use tools). I know it’s understood that humans are the apex of evolution, but I’m just not sure that’s necessarily true. I don’t mean to hijack this thread, so I’ll back off if @Velocity doesn’t think this comment is relevant to the OP.
Marx rarely used the term “capitalism,” preferring instead “the capitalist mode of production.” The emphasis is on the way a society produces its goods and services, since these must be produced before they can be traded, sold or consumed. Merchant capital and financial capital–credit and interest–predate productive capital, but are dependent on other modes of production, such as feudalism and slavery, for the goods they trade and consume. Competition is only part of Marx’s definition of the capitalist mode of production. Again, wage labour is also crucial to his definition. And he argued that we can find elements of various modes of production in many periods: we still have slavery today, just as there was wage labour in ancient Rome. But the key to understanding an economy is the dominant form in which goods and services are produced and distributed. In Marx’s view. YMMV.
That may be the worst definition of Capitalism I have ever heard. ‘Wage labor’ has pretty much been the case for every worker going back to ancient Greece, if they weren’t slaves. And powerful people owned large chunks of land long before capitalism ever showed up. In fact, Capitalism freed serfs from their servitude, and gave non-elites a chance to rise to the level of their ability. The gap between the rich and poor went WAY down under capitalism. Before then, you were either one of the powerful, or you were scrabbling to survive as a peasant or serf. Capitalism freed the masses.
The real definition of Capitalism is a system where the means of production and trade are held by the citizens instead of by the government. To enable it, it requires private property rights and freedom to seek your own ends and profit or lose from your decisions, freedom of speech, etc. The Enlightenment enabled capitalism.
Before capitalism, if you had a good idea you kept it to yourself. If you tried to profit from your ideas, the state would smack you down. If you wanted to be a scientist or a philosopher, you had better hope you inherited power and station, or you had a powerful benefactor. People born into poverty almost always died in poverty. And by ‘poverty’ we’re talking about standards of living that would make the poor today in the west look wealthy.
I’ve wondered this too and from what I know a few things were factors:
the scientific revolution of a few centuries before gave birth to math and physics necessary for engineering
the agricultural revolution in Britain in the 17th & 18th century led to a labor surplus since there were fewer farmers needed. The labor surplus ended up working in factories.
I think Britain started running out of wood to use for energy and had to switch to the use of coal
The rise of empiricism and the scientific method and the rejection of knowledge through religious revelation (ie the enlightenment)
The failure off SETI seems to me powerful evidence that advanced industrial civilization requires an incredibly rare confluence of many coincidences.
To makes a useful steam engine, you need every one of lots of critical parts to be available at the same time and place… Some, like belts, have been mentioned earlier in the thread, but there must be others.
Not to derail things too much, but I would consider the prime failure of SETI be be incredibly narrow minded thinking on the part of the proponents and a wilful disregard of physics. One thing it has not done is indicate the lack of other technologically advanced species in the galaxy. It has indicated that there are none at essentially the same point of technological development as we are (to within say a hundred years in history) that are within a few light years (at best) of us. After that we get into the twilight zone of assuming that ET has found a way around speed of light constraints.
To put it in the context of the OP, life on the Earth is about 3.5 of billion years old. Of that, the last 600 million years have included multicellular lifeforms, and we have had a technological capability of doing a SETI like search of a few decades. In the history of the Earth, that does indeed suggest that we are a very very rare confluence of circumstances. But the question becomes whether it is unlikely, or just takes place in a very small time window, making it very unlikely to be observed, even if very likely. Given the major events punctuating the history of life on the Earth and disturbing the progress of evolution, we could weeble wobble the timeline around by a few hundred million years just by choosing different asteroids to impact, and not really make much difference in the broad result. The first technologically advances critters might be descended from a very different lineage to us given different accidents of history.
Given the manner in which we have mined out all the easy coal, oil and gas, we have already put a big spoke in the wheel of the next species to come along, if they need to climb the same ladder. Given enough geological time things may reset. The say, few thousand year, climb from stone tools to now is a very short window in the overall history of the Earth.