Electric don’t fly planes. Nor does steam.
That’s true enough.
So planes wouldn’t have been as important as they were, as early on as they were. Instead airships would have remained the predominant form of air transport until 1960, instead of 1930 as they were in the real world. And rockets and missiles would have become the primary military aerial arsenal. Or maybe not.
Once again, it’s hard to know what impact that would actually have on world history. Given that airships really were the predominant aerial unit up until the 1930s, and given that both steam and electric work just fine for them, I don’t think the absence of heavier than air aircraft would have made much difference at all to overall world history, especially compared with the geopolitical variation likely in our alternative history.
With the military concentrating on rocketry instead of aircraft we may even have advanced to our present aviation level even faster.
That’s the fascinating thing about this alternative history speculation. You can construct logical arguments that lead almost anywhere you like.
I’d dispute that. After the failure of airships to make an impact in WWI vs. the success of planes in the same, I think they were already done for, for everything except transatlantic flight. And that’s not where the initial major developments in research were. E.G - given that airships were fairly easy to spot or even sound out, would radar be developed as soon as it was? Without the IC to drive diesel subs and generate their electricity, would sonar have been developed at the same rate? What about the developments in computation to drive same?
Again, I’d dispute that. “worked”, yes, “worked fine”, we can’t say - all the later airships were IC, AFAIK. I’d be hesitant to trust my life to a hydrogen bag hung over an external combustion unit, anyway.
I’m not convinced that one would develop jet aircraft easily if heavier-than-air aircraft aren’t already in existence, or fueled them easily even if you had. Even rocket planes like the Komet grew out of the airplane development effort in WWII, a war that would not ever have been fought without the IC engine. Steam tanks aren’t going to cut it. WWI might even have ended in stalemate without the tank.
I know. Fun, isn’t it?
You’re right that they were doomed in our world because of the competition with planes, but they were still the major (substitute “a major” if it makes you happier) player up until the 30s. Without competition I see no reason why they wouldn’t have continued longer and taken up much of the commercial operations of the airplane.
This is what I was thinking when I said that the military would concentrate on rocketry. And with rockets the need for radar is, if anything, more vital.
I really don’t know enough of the history of sonar to speculate… but that won’t stop me.
Given that most sonar has been used for depth measurement and shoal hunting, I would say yeah, it would. Or at least fast to within a couple of decades.
Once again, our alternative world is really so divergent that we can construct a chain of argument to lead wherever we want.
I’ll say that the use of rocketry and the need for weather prediction for the vulnerable airships would place more emphasis on radar development, not less. Couple that with the increased dependence on electrics and ultimately electronics for motors, resource scarcity demanding greater efficiency, and a greater need for global telecommunications (and associated cryptography) in our diffuse industrial world. I can now construct a pretty good case that we would have seen more and earlier progress in computational science.
Insofar as there were electric and steam powered airships, and they worked fine, and insofar as their is no massive impediment to such beasts, I’ll contend they are at least a viable alternative.
Given the physical distance and the shielding between the engine and the bag, if the two ever come into contact there has already been a massive catastrophe. IOW it’s like worrying that your petrol tank is slung behind half a dozen electric spark generators. True, but rather irrelevant in the case they ever come into contact.
My reasoning is that Hargraves and co. had already demonstrated that HTA gliders were practical. And there was at least one somewhat successful attempt to put a steam engine in one. So we can say for sure that gliders would be built and that people were going to try to power those gliders once the had a suitable power source.
Without airplanes it seems inevitable that the military would turn to rockets. I say inevitable because they were already going that way prior to the IR, and there are physical and practical limits to artillery that pretty much demand rocketry if you don’t have planes.
We also know that the first jet planes were literally just rockets built around airframes
So we combine those three facts and it seems inevitable that someone in our alternative world is going to strap a rocket to their glider. We have our alternative Wright brothers. Maybe 50 years later, but we have them. And as with the Wrights, once we have one successful flight the rest will just follow.
But planes themselves were an inevitable result of people strapping engines to gliders. There’s no obvious reason a lack of fossil fuels would impede the likes of Hargraves, so we’d still have gliders. And 50 years of the military developing rockets rather than planes and I think it reasonable that we would have a suitable rocket engine.
IOW I’m not proposing a route to the jet plane via IC planes or even through warfare. I’m simply assuming that we allow our alternative wrights to use the first suitable engine available: the rocket.
Frankly I think our alternative history is too divergent to even imagine the world wars happening. The whole world is too radically different due to the with industrial colonies alone.
If Germany didn’t have industrial colonies they would never have been in a position to fight WWI as the very latest radical divergence point. And if they did have large tropical colonies then the world history diverged much earlier than WWI, which seems likely.
But more realistically the entire relationship between colonies and colonisers would have been totally different. The need for skilled labour in the industrial colonies would mean much more white dispersion to the tropical colonies. The colonies provided essentials, not just luxuries, so the colnies owuld need to be kept socially and militarily secure. The locals would either be treated more equally to keep them on side, or ruthlessly repressed. If treated well the presence of industry in the colonies would lead to more utilisation of local labour and inevitably a much closer economic parity between Europe and the colonies. If repressed the development of such apartheid states could lead to all sorts of interesting outcomes
So where do the great industrial revolution philosophers fit into this? Mill, Marx, even Darwin? Do they still develop the same philosophies? Does society still progress down the same track? Is war even feasible when one country can isolate another’s industries? Does Britain’s naval dominance allow her to continue as a superpower for this very reason?
It would be a very strange world, and we just couldn’t predict the geopolitical consequences.
A fascinating debate, and one that could keep a good hard sci-fi writer busy for a year or three. I might even have a crack at it some time in the future. Essentially what we’re talking about is technological development in a world where energy is considerably more expensive, and energy sources are low density.
I’m pretty well convinced that the Industrial Revolution(s) would have proceeded on time, but with rather different emphasis. Energy efficiency would have been much more of a priority. Early wood-and-charcoal fueled steam wouldn’t have displaced wind and water but instead have developed side by side with it, improvements in bearings and metal gears and beltless power transmission all being incorporated into wind and water mills. Canal networks would have been the best low-speed mass transport for freight, although whether growing fodder for a towpath horse or canola oil for a diesel engine (see below) would be more economical is an interesting question. Shipping would have continued to be sail-driven, with engines serving only for manoeuvring in-harbour. Wave propelled boats would also likely have been developed early - the technology is actually very simple.
On engines - there were once a wide variety of IC engines operating on cycles somewhere between diesel and Otto, and burning everything between gasoline and vegetable oil. You can run a diesel on almost anything combustible that can be finely divided and sprayed into a cylinder - the first diesel was designed to run on coal dust and they can be modified to run on vegetable oil or even butter. Otto cycle engines can can be run from charcoal gas generated directly from charcoal by a unit small enough to fit to a vehicle, just, but I suspect the diesel would have become the IC engine of preference. Not that I expect widespread private motor vehicle ownership to have caught on very quickly, if at all. With only non-fossil fuels, the bicycle would have been the short-range vehicle of preference, just as it was in China until a few years ago. Freight would have gone by canal and possibly rail, with final short-range distribution by diesel truck.
Initial electrification involved a lot of home generating which in colder latitudes would also have put out plenty of useful heat. With biomass fuel at a premium, home electricity generation with the waste heat going into space heating and hot water could easily double or triple fuel efficiency compared with the centralised generation we use today. This is an idea that is being revitalised today in the form of combined heat-and-power (CHP).
Diesel aero engines have been used successfully in passenger aircraft and airships and vegetable oils are just as energy-dense as liquid hydrocarbon fuels. I’d guess that the canola-oil diesel airship would have been viable, but still expensive and may have been limited to luxury or niche uses.
Steam engines would still have had their place simply because of the extreme fuel flexibility of external combustion - you can burn sawdust, fruit pits, straw, nutshells and animal fat to raise steam, and in the absence of fossil fuels we undoubtedly would have.
Speculating about the various aspects of this would take a while - the fuel costs of steel, aluminium, and even concrete might have been too prohibitive to make them general building materials and we’d have been restricted to low-rise construction of wood, brick and stone. Other energy-intensive processes such as ammonia synthesis and the whole chlor-alkali industry might have been replaced with e.g. widescale composting, including composting of sewerage. When you can’t make cheap ammonium nitrate, urine suddenly becomes too valuable to flush into the sea.