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Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

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Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#121

Post by WalterBright »

KineticLensman wrote: post #10
probably_wrong wrote: post #2

I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier (spoiler: poorly). Articles like this make me appreciate even more how little difference there is between us and humans thousands of years ago. I wouldn't have figured out how to make a working wheel, and I've seen one. I have no idea where I picked up the idea that "ancient civilizations were dumb", but t…

The "what would I try to invent?" question one is fascinating. If I found myself transported back to Roman times, I'd aim to make a lens. The Romans had glass so the raw material is there. With a lens you can fairly quickly go a telescope, which has immediate military application, so would perhaps be widely adopted. Astronomy might then follow, heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held b…

Paper, followed by a printing press. Look what happened in the century after Gutenberg.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#122

Post by WalterBright »

lkrubner wrote: post #30
KineticLensman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "what would I try to invent?" question one is fascinating. If I found myself transported back to Roman times, I'd aim to make a lens. The Romans had glass so the raw material is there. With a lens you can fairly quickly go a telescope, which has immediate military application, so would perhaps be widely adopted. Astronomy might then follow, heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held b…

The problem is with the assumption behind "which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms". In your scenario, who learns about microscopic organisms, and when? As a point of comparison, who discovered the existence of North America? Was it Christopher Columbus in 1492? Or was it the Vikings in 900 AD? Or was it some mix of people who first melded together in Beringia, somewhere around 20,000 BC?…

Interestingly, Edison realized that inventing a light bulb was not enough. He had to invent the power generation and distribution industry to make it usable.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#123

Post by dredmorbius »

Houshalter wrote: post #58
kartan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines was the abundance of slave/captive labor. Why do you want to create a complicated inefficient first version of a machine when you have cheap humans being to do the task?

Yes that's probably why the industrial revolution didn't happen. There's a good comment below that explains other societal reasons why the industrial revolution didn't happen, like the lack of contract law and investors. I also read a great theory once (but I can't find it again through google!) that the industrial revolution really required the invention of the cannon first. Building an efficient steam engine in rom…

Steam engines need fuel. There's no coal (to speak of) in Italy.

Europe's coal belt starts in Scotland, runs through England, into France (and a nubbin in northern Spain / Portugal), Germany, and Silesia.

Oddly enough, the first countries to industrialise were, in order, England (which wasn't busily falling to pieces and/or fighting off invaders), then (after they'd stopped falling to pieces and/or fighting off invaders) France and Germany. They remain the heart of the European economy, a century and a half later.

The third great set of coal deposits were in the United States, though that was a country that also had tremendous forests, more readily accessed (and frequently local to where energy was needed). Coal consumption didn't exceed wood as a fuel until the 1880s. The US also benefited from oil, and was the world's leading extractor of oil from the 1860s to the 1950s. Having first developed coal, iron, railroads, canals, and steamships, the US could usefully transport that oil from the remote rural regions in which it was found (Titusville, Pennsylvania, Ventura, California, Spindletop, Texas) to the urbanised regions (New York, Philadelphia, Boston) where it was used.

The bootstrapping of technology was itself a really interesting story -- gunpowder, metallurgy, iron, fuels, steel, electricity, and prime movers, most especially diesel and gas turbine engines. See Vaclav Smil (Energy in History) and Manfred Weissenbacher (Sources of Power) for more on this.

(The fourth coal belt is in China.)

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#124

Post by Retric »

lkrubner wrote: post #103
Retric wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One consideration is the Barring straight is very narrow compared to other ocean passages, so people may have regularly crossed each side without thinking 'new land'! From their perspective the map looks like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumpolar_peoples From their perspective North America is simply yet another settled area.

My whole point is that you don't know who "their" is. Please stop and think about who you mean when you use the word "their". Do you mean 1 person, or 2 people, or a 100, or a million? And the map you are linking to did not exist 20,000 years ago!

Their being the people who crossed from one side to another.

1 or 100,000 the point is people who made the crossing did not get a popup saying "achievement unlocked: new continent!" And then run around telling everyone about it.

Yes, European mapmakers did not known about such crossings, but being a very remote area in 1400's they probably never asked. And from an oral history perspective it would not be anything unusual because a 50 mile ocean crossing is just a regular thing to sea going populations.

Also, DNA evidence is going to be sketchy because it's really hard to say if someone migrated 400 years ago vs 600 years ago.

PS: I am not saying this 100% happened, but it seems very likely.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#125

Post by dredmorbius »

Someone wrote: post #99
taejo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard it said that the bicycle basically needed the car, despite seeming to be much simpler: accurate mass production of ball bearings, chain drives, and pneumatic tires were all driven by car manufacturing but needed for really practical bicycles.

But bicycles are useful on their own (possibly more so in a world where cars do not exist), so the existence of bicycles alone could easily have driven innovation. In fact, Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire for his son's tricycle and they were initially used for bicycles ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_Dunlop#Pneumatic_t... )

Bicycles are hugely useful -- they were the first mode of transport that was affordable to an ordinary person (though relatively about as expensive as a car today), and didn't require feeding, shoding, tackle, or stabling. With a bike, a person could move beyond 3 miles in an hour, or get to and from a railroad station allowing for much longer commutes, visits, or recreational travel.

As of the late 19th century, horses consumed about 25% of the grain production of the US. Much of that was to provide drayage of people and goods to and from railroad stations or train yards.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#126

Post by RbrtM »

dredmorbius wrote: post #125
Someone wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But bicycles are useful on their own (possibly more so in a world where cars do not exist), so the existence of bicycles alone could easily have driven innovation. In fact, Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire for his son's tricycle and they were initially used for bicycles ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_Dunlop#Pneumatic_t... )

Bicycles are hugely useful -- they were the first mode of transport that was affordable to an ordinary person (though relatively about as expensive as a car today), and didn't require feeding, shoding, tackle, or stabling. With a bike, a person could move beyond 3 miles in an hour, or get to and from a railroad station allowing for much longer commutes, visits, or recreational travel. As of the late 19th century, hor…

The first mode of transport affordable to an ordinary person was probably an animal like a donkey or an ox, etc..

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#127

Post by dredmorbius »

WalterBright wrote: post #120
HarryHirsch wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what you think. The nobility would usually sit in Rome or any other nice place and leave administration of their landholdings to a competent slave. Read Cato the Elder's Agri Cultura for details. Demotivation would be an issue for those slaves low on the food chain but not for every slave. For more contemporary examples, look no further than Daenerys' Dothraki handmaidens.

There's plenty of historical evidence that industrialization and slave labor do not mix (for example, the US North industrialized and the South did not). It's not so easy to draw firm conclusions from Roman society, because the historical record of that is a little thin. The Nazis employed slave labor, but they had a lot of trouble with sabotage and intentionally shoddy work. Game of Thrones is entirely fiction, and…

Contrasting: prison labour, concentration-camp labour, sweatshops, workhouses.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#128

Post by dredmorbius »

api wrote: post #61
kartan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines was the abundance of slave/captive labor. Why do you want to create a complicated inefficient first version of a machine when you have cheap humans being to do the task?

After initially being skeptical and disliking him for libertarian leaning political reasons, I've come around to wondering if John Maynard Keynes might have been even more right than we have imagined. Slave labor is kind of an extreme case of the paradox of thrift. Slaves have no disposable capital and they flood the labor market down to zero. Slavery is like a permanent deflationary spiral. There is just no reason t…

Alternatively, if the industrial revolution had been advanced by 1,000 years, we might be halfway through learning how long it takes to recover from fossil-fuel induced climate change.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#129

Post by dredmorbius »

summerdown2 wrote: post #77
lkrubner wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is with the assumption behind "which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms". In your scenario, who learns about microscopic organisms, and when? As a point of comparison, who discovered the existence of North America? Was it Christopher Columbus in 1492? Or was it the Vikings in 900 AD? Or was it some mix of people who first melded together in Beringia, somewhere around 20,000 BC?…

That's impressive, but the invention of sawmills didn't need to wait until the industrial revolution. I've just come back from The Netherlands, which had massive uses in wind powered technology in the 1500's, including windmill powered sawmills that led to the Dutch golden age because they could build boats faster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelis_Corneliszoon_van_Uitg...

The Dutch also benefitted by use of peat for heating and cooking fuel, which preserved their (scarce) lumber supply for shipbuilding. See Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power, Vaclav Smil, Energy in History.

Re: Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)

#130

Post by dredmorbius »

Hermel wrote: post #6

Also, the wheel is not very helpful without compact, step-free pathes.

This is being downvoted, but yes, that's a crucial element. For transportation, you hard, level, vegetation-free ground.

One of the sources I've been reading (probably Smil or Weissenbacher) looks at the regions in which wheeled vehicles might have originated.

They're generally suspected to have come out of the middle east (or present-day Ukraine / southern Russia), quite possibly being developed from potter's wheels.

Wheeled vehicles don't work in sandy ground because there's too much resistance. Pack animals (horses, camels, donkeys) are far more efficient. The wheel was lost in much of Arabia for a considerable period due to this, and even today, sand tracked and blown across highways is a problem for cars.

On grassy plains, you have the problems of both vegetation and mud / soft soil. On the American prairie, you can still find, a century and a half after their passage, the ruts left by wagon trains rolling across the soil.

Hilly or mountainous country, such as that of the Aztecs and Inca, isn't suitable for wheeled vehicles, especially if your roads have stairs (as Incan roads did). Again, human porters and animals can traverse these.

Even with suitable roads, overland travel was exceptionally slow and expensive in terms of animal power, drovers, and feed required. Ships and canals were vastly more efficient, and remained the best option until the advent of the railroad. Even that required high-quality Bessemer steel (1860s) to provide rails which could handle high loads and were resistant to splitting.

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