People will always use the lowest cost technology which for some applications has been coal for thousands of years. But that doesn’t imply that coal was indispensable any more than obsidian is, which has also been used for thousands of years.
I don’t see why you couldn’t have made up the difference with charcoal, given the modest quantities involved, prior to 1700. It’s a reasonable lower-quality substitute. I will concede that the industrial revolution probably wouldn’t have occurred in Britain though, if they didn’t have large deposits of coal. And Europe’s demographic crisis would have continued until perhaps the late 1800s.
I’ve demonstrated that industrial scale textile production was established without the use of coal in c. 1810-40 in Lowell, MA.
I don’t want to be a dick though: we would have to lay out some serious historical energy budgeting to see whether I am (ha ha) blowing smoke. You might be right.
Actually my argument is that substitution elasticities are manageable. For metals, this is a reasonable though hardly airtight assumption (Nordhaus did the legwork here, IIRC). For coal-oil-natural-gas vs. biomass-wind-solar-hydro the assumption is more than a little heroic. Then there’s the chemical industry’s feedstock problem.
Charcoal. And plant genetics: in our world trees haven’t had too much of this, because of their plentiful supply and long maturation. In the other world, there would be a lot more interest in bamboo, etc.
FWIW, Tuckerfan built a 1800F - 2200F furnace powered by charcoal and a hair dryer. That’s hot enough to melt aluminum, copper (barely) and silver though not iron. But during the middle ages, the typical fuel for iron was charcoal.
The aggregate is [del]not what’s important.[/del] completely meaningless in the case where the cost of transportation makes impractical and cost prohibitive the transporting wood, such overland for longer distances such as the 20 to 25 km limit suggested in the quote above. All the uncut trees in Russia would not warm the poor in the 16th century London or fire the blacksmiths’ fires. Nor could continents of forests fuel Hollands development during or even prior to its Golden Age.
Without fossil fuels (including peat and coal) these two centers of growth in the pre-industrial ages would have had crippling energy shortages that would have been showstoppers. The growth of large cities in Western and Northern European cities was dependent on thermal heat for heating, cooking, blacksmiths, manufacturing bricks, etc. and could not have sustained as much population without fossil fuels.
You raise the question of why wouldn’t there simply be a switch to charcoal. It’s possible, but the cost had to be inexpensive enough to allow this, and transportation costs in the pre-industrial age would not have permitted this for these key centers back when they started using peat and coal. The easily-accessed coal was already exhausted in parts of English by the 13th century when they started mining. Peat was also a major source of energy for the Dutch about the same period. Shipping long distances was too expensive for wood as a thermal resource in the 13th and 14th centuries.
If fossil fuels had never existed, then the historical development of London and Holland would not have happened. Without this alternative, then these (and presumably other major cities, although I hadn’t read anything about other areas specifically) would have grown and developed at a lower rate.
The percentage of fossil fuels out of the total energy budget is low because the bulk of the thermal consumption was by farmers for heating and cooking. This can be seen by the percentage of the population which was rural and which were peasants. However, the economic and technical progress was occurring in the cities, which were more dependent on fossil fuels for part of their thermal needs. Remove fossil fuels and the very groups which are providing the advancements are the ones which would be the hardest hit. The dependence on fossil fuels occurred much earlier than the extensive sea trading
Jared Diamond, in Guns, Steel and Germs, makes a compelling case that technological development is not inevitable, but depends on various circumstances, as evidenced by the wheel not being used in the ancient Americas even though they apparently understood the concept. So much of the advancements in technology prior to the industrial revolution came because of cheap fossil fuels, it seems much more likely than not that things would not have progressed to in industrial revolution level of technology.
Scholars point out that among the factors allowing the Agricultural Revolution in England were such technical advances as better plows made by pig iron made by burning coal. While it’s possible that this may have occurred without fossil fuels, again it’s not necessarily the case. There are just so many things which were dependent on inexpensive fossil fuel, that it just seems to me unlikely that everything would have been invented without it.
Finding an example or two of how an industry could be recreated using water power is not a compelling argument that it would have developed naturally any more than pointing out that the wheel was widely used in the Old World so it could have been developed in the New World.
The case against nuclear is pretty clear. The Manhattan project cost the equivalent of US$20 billion dollars, something which an agricultural country with major cities only on the coasts and along major rivers would not be able to afford, even had the technology developed that far.
The energy required to mining, extraction, and processing of the ore would have been beyond the ability to supply with charcoal and the processing requires chemicals such as ion-exchange resins, so unless the Professor can create a chemical industry out of thin air, there are just too many barriers.
Good correction on peat, TokyoBayer. Ignorance fought. Things aren’t looking too good for the technological optimists: we appear to have taken out the top 2 candidates for initiating an industrial revolution: Britain (who did it in this world) and the Netherlands (who is considered a top contender for the honor).
We are left with places with access to firewood via water and canals, as well as places needing less of the stuff: recall that Italy used about 1/4 that of Britain. If you permit me to grasp at straws though, I’ll note that James Watt invented his engine at the University of Glasgow -not London-, a locale that was situated the River Clyde, as well as the Monkland Canal, built in 1795 in order to access iron-ore and -er- coal mines located elsewhere…never mind.
Over in the US, there was technological development in the form of the cotton gin, good rivers, a willingness to invest in canals, and early textile industrialization in Lowell, MA whose blueprints were basically copied from the British textile industry, now running on the air where the coal used to be located. Still, methinks that would be candidate #3. The US had plentiful wood and water power.
Portugal?
I’m wondering whether a fission reactor has milder requirements than an A-Bomb. I know that fission reactors have occurred naturally though I see this took place 1.7 billion years ago.
To build a fission reactor you need some sort of moderator. This is usually either heavy water or graphite- and natural graphite doesn’t work, it has to be synthetic graphite almost completely free of even traces of boron; graphite is synthesized in electric-arc furnaces.
Even if you already knew exactly how to build an electric generator, doing it with only the technology base available in the sixteenth century would be a heroic task; inventing it in the first place might be impossible.
And you’d have to have a reason to build a fission reactor. Nuclear reactors aren’t mobile the way steam engines are. So their main use is going to be turning turbines and generating electricity.
But electricity is only useful if you’ve got an infrastructure set up to run on electricity. If you just went out and built a nuclear reactor, who would you sell your electricity to?
And as for setting up the infrastructure to use electricity, how are you going to convince people to do that before you have any means of generating electricity?
And even if you’re an incredible visionary who can see in your mind’s eye the entire electrical grid before it’s been built and are such a charismatic speaker that you’re able to sell people on your vision and convince them to build it on your say so, you come back to the issue of how you’re going to build it. How do you build the entire grid you need to operate your nuclear generated electric system when you won’t be able to use the system until after it’s build?
Aluminum production would be sufficient reason to build a nuclear reactor. Moreover, the initial electrical grid could be pretty small, enough to cover an industrial park.
That said, TokyoBayer has demolished London and Amsterdam: if he carpet bombs Paris, we lose the Enlightenment. And without that, my dreams of charcoal powered nukes and gerbil propelled automobiles will all be for naught.
There are sometimes you hope that you get a particular question. About the Manhattan Project
This was without the added burden of attempting to do everything with 16th century technology and without seam engines, which simply would be impossible. Read about the separation process here.
Sheesh, to be clear I never claimed that nukes could be built with 16th century technology. I claimed that Lowell showed that you can have industrialization grounded on hydro power (getting us up to 1840) and that theoretical physics wasn’t especially labor, capital or energy intensive until the 1930s-40s.
For completeness I’ll note that weapons grade uranium generally uses U235 shares above 85% (although 20% can be considered sufficient). Enriched uranium - Wikipedia In contrast nuclear power plants can use shares in the 4.4% range or less. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf13.html Presumably creating nuclear fuel is a little easier.
Not for the use of fossil fuels, but for their attitude toward the enlightenment. Here’s an interesting paper which argues that the Catholic influence was detrimental to
Interestingly, this same paper provides more information on the importance of coal in England (which had become more important than wood by 1620) and shows how the Continent was losing ground in metal production.
In the Continental America, it looks like coal played an important part in the newly developing metal industry.
Shipbuilding and metallurgy had a terrible affect on forests.
Going on
This was even with using coal for metallurgy. Without coal, the deforestation would have occurred sooner.
Basically, even with the discovery of forests in America, there wasn’t enough timber to support growth. Mines were a major problem, even in the 16th century in New Spain.
It’s conclusively shown that the world’s forest lands would not have supported an industrial revolution no matter where it occurred.
