131–140 of 158 posts
Also, the wheel is not very helpful without compact, step-free pathes.
Water wheel, spinning wheel, pottery wheel, grinding wheel (eg for wheat flour), ... seems useful.
Spinning, water, and grinding wheels all postdate the wheel-and-axel in transportation. It is thought that the transport wheel may have evolved from the potter's wheel.
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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.
> However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated. Well the very nature of the wheel itself probably helped with that - I wonder if that holds true for all transportation-related inventions?
The rig seems to be among the technologies lost during the middle ages.
The big hitch, as noted in James Burke's Connections, was how ships and sailing voyages were financed. A ship was a sufficiently sizeable investment, and financing sufficiently difficult to arrange, that conservative financiers opposed any radical explorations of such tomfoolery as them thar lateen-rigged newfangled boats.
As for other transportation innovations ... there mostly weren't any until quite modern times.
Once introduced, though, their advantages were immediately obvious, and they were adopted quickly throughout Europe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateen
Yes, you saw further advances in ships and navigation. Especially navigation -- position-taking and timekeeping were critical, and several innovations followed catastrophic losses of entire fleets run aground and shipwrecked into the 20th century -- see the Honda Point disaster in which seven US destroyers sailed at full speed into rocks just offshore the Santa Barbara coast in 1923.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Point_disaster
After the Lateen rig and excepting other ship designs, the major transport innovations were canals (major construction from the 1500s onward in Europe, though much earlier in China, and some earlier European/Mediterranean instances), the railroad (1825), steamship (1810s), safety bicycle (1870s), automobile (and truck and bus -- 1880s), and airplane (1900s). These all spread essentially instantly throughout the world wherever industrial capacity (and fuel) capable of producing such vehicles existed.
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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..
A horse was a major capital investment. And a donkey can't carry all that much weight -- a light adult, perhaps, but only just.
The US horse population in 1915 was 20 million, contrasting with about 100 million people. Keep in mind that most of those horses were in commercial use -- drayage, farm traction (a large combine would be drawn by 40 horses), etc.
Numbers for England/UK are harder to come by, but a Google Answers thread gives 3.3 million for late Victorian Britain, and 14 million in Europe in 1800, the latter against a human population of 203 million.
The typical person, or family, owned zero horses.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=144565
http://www.geohive.com/earth/his_history1.aspx
Though you raise an interesting question: what was ownership of draught animals throughout time, and how did that compare with bicycle sales in, say, the US, England, France, and Germany from 1880 - 1920 or so. Keeping in mind that mass private automobile ownership wasn't really a thing until the 1950s, even in the US.
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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 unu…
"1 or 100,000 the point is people who made the crossing did not get a popup saying 'achievement unlocked: new continent!'"
Yes, that is the point that I made above. The people had no idea.
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…
I would try to do math and finance earlier. I think calculus is usually underrated when people consider "most important inventions", and the idea of investing for fractional ownership in an enterprise turned out to be non-obvious but really really useful.
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The other issue with having most of your labour performed by slaves is that the slaves themselves generally don't have the motivation, or education, or chance of actually being taken seriously to propose even incremental process improvements.
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.
Not to mention that the parent said "generally".
> However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated. Well the very nature of the wheel itself probably helped with that - I wonder if that holds true for all transportation-related inventions?
Lateen sails took a particularly long time to spread. They had been introduced to the Mediterranean region as early as the 2nd century BC (and had been developed much earlier in China and Arabia), but were not brought into widespread use in European sailing ships until the 1400s. This is hugely significant as a lateen-rigged ship can sail far closer to the wind than a square-rigged ship, giving it much better maneuve…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The thing you can't recall in your second paragraph sounds like the sort of "chain of inventions" that James Burke used to explain on the old BBC series Connections . ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) ) See in particular episode 6 in the original 1978 series (just going by the summary on Wikipedia).
Is there any realistically conceivable alternate-history/universe where cable-suspended wheel-less trams (like [1][2][3] but closer to ground level) became the dominant method of transportation instead of huge roads and cars? It's something I've been musing on to incorporate into some fiction, inspired by all the recent news and discussions about self-driving cars and the prospect of shared fleets. [1] https://en.wik…
Without wheels or axles, there would be little to no electricity, or maybe it wouldn't have been invented at all.