Not purer iron. Pure iron is wrought iron, and the Romans already had that. But it’s too soft for use in a steam engine. Making their furnaces sufficiently hotter (by some 400C, IIRC) would get them cast iron but that isn’t purer. It has around 3% carbon dissolved in the iron.
I suppose they could have made a steam engine from cast iron, if they had it like the Chinese of the period did[sup]1[/sup]. But for really efficient engines, you need steel, which has about 1% carbon. The Romans actually could make steel in small quantities, but it was just a surface steel on a wrought iron object. This was fine for edged weapons, but would not have held the kinds of pressure needed for an efficient steam engine.
They could have made a steam engine, but they would have had to make it of bronze. It’d have been heavy and expensive.
[sup]1[/sup]As I understand it, the Chinese iron ore had significant amounts of phosphorus, which lowered the temperature needed to make cast iron by around 200C. So they didn’t have to get their furnaces as hot to make cast iron. Cast iron was not made in significant quantities in the West until the late Middle Ages.
I have my own theory of Roman technological stagnation: Roman numerals. Who could do math with those? They’re just for counting and recording information.
The Greeks, Persians, Indians, Babylonians - all of them produced pure and applied mathematicians to an extent. But not the Romans.
[ Nitpick ]
The cotton gin actually revitalized a dying slave industry. Prior to the gin, the separation of cotton from seeds was an extremely labor-intensive effort that required many slaves, but still tended to lose money. With the invention of the gin, seed separateing became (relatively) trivially easy–creating demand for more slaves to cultiuvarte and harvest more cotton.
In general, your point was correct. You simply happened to stumble onto the one unfortunate counter-example.
Have you seen the Greek and Babylonian numeric systems? Roman “numerals” were intutitively obvious compared the Greek numbering that relied upon the memorization of numeric values assigned to letters, three of which had dropped out of the Greek alphabet.
I am not sure that your assertion regarding Rome’s apparent failure to engage in pure mathematics and then attempt to apply it is accurate, but even if it is, the numbering system would not appear to be the problem.
Except for the Indians, none of those others had a numeral system that was any better adapted to calculation than Roman numerals. And the Romans, if they needed to do lots of calculations, used a counting board, which was a predecessor to the abacus. The main difference was that the counters on the counting board were just slid around on a flat surface rather than on wires. The board had lines to separate the units from the tens, the tens from the hundreds, etc. Some had grooves to help keep the counters in place.
But this is all besides the point. You don’t need even the most basic arithmetic to invent lots of things. Trial and error (which is how almost everything was invented before the 19th century, anyway) is perfectly adequate.
BTW, the abacus is usually credited to the Romans based on their use of counting boards. That’s a significant invention right there.
Well, yes. But that’s only after the coal nearer the surface had been exhausted. The last open-cast mine in this area, down the road from me, only shut down a decade ago.
There’s still plenty of coal in the ground below my hometown (incidentally, founded by the Romans, they’ve found remains of a villa with hypocaust here, extremely rare this far north) - you just need to dig down a few feet to start finding it, it’s just cheaper to buy it from overseas.
Of course, had the Romans started mining deeper for coal, this would have been ample impetus for them to start developing better technologies, too.
There is a formalism and methodology for adding and multiplying Roman Numerals, the same as we use the method of placing one number above the other and multiplying and carrying, column by column. It’s rarely taught or even demonstrated nowadays, though. Roman numerals may have been clumsy by comparuson with our “Indo-Arabic” system, but it WAS a [practical method of everyday mathematics.
You’re right.
I should have been referring to the Cotton Picking Machine, an offshoot of the McCormick Reaper of 1831. (I don’t think a truly effective cotton harvester was offered for sale until after the Civil War, but it was obviously coming once McCormick’s reapers were widely used. Cotton Pickers became cheaper & widespread in the early- to mid- 1900’s; some historians give this as one of the causes for a large migration of southern fieldhands (mostly black) to northern cities around that time.)
Interesting note: in an early patent dispute, McCormick’s International Harvester Company hired a young Illinois lawyer to fight their case: Abraham Lincoln (he lost).
The OPs friend may have been thinking of an imperial edict mandating that sons had to take up their fathers professions, thereby “freezing” everyone into their current social status. I can’t remember the exact edict but it was rather bad for the empire as it seriously impeded the hope of upward mobility. And THAT was bad because it impeded the ability of competent men to rise in power and it stagnated society.
The Romans may not have been true innovators, but they were de facto innovators in that they adopted many foreign inventions and then introduced them across all the lands under the Romans. The hypocaust mentioned above was first invented in India, but as far the Edinburgh folks were concerned, it was a Roman idea.
The Roman Empire was the triumph of the practical over the abstract. The Romans looked down on the Greeks as clever but lazy people who spent all day thinking of new ways to move a small rock rather than just bend over and pick it up.
Other way around. McCormick sued Manny and Company, claiming that they violated McCormick’s patent. Manny’s attorneys (which included Edwin Stanton, who would go on to become Lincoln’s Secretary of War) were worried that the case would be tried in Illinois, so they hired Lincoln as local counsel. It turned out the case was tried in Cincinatti instead, so they didn’t need him after all (and mocked him when he travelled to Cincinatti on his own expense to work on the case)
I’d be interested to know when the first patent laws were enacted. Without patent laws, an inventor won’t benefit nearly as much from any obvious improvements that would be easy to copy.
Regarding coal: my understanding was that raw coal out of the ground stinks and fumes excessively when burned. That it wasn’t desireable as a fuel until someone worked out that you could bake it in an airless oven to drive off most of the stinky volitiles and produce coke.
The Roman empire lacked many of the technological innovations which later made northern Europe productive: the horseshoe and horsecollar, the mouldboard plow, the fireplace with chimney, etc. The Romans had technology developed for the warmer Mediterranian climate, and to them Britainnia and Germania were snowbound wildernesses that were only habitable by barbarians.