The naval shipworm helped bring about the Industrial Revolution
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Re: The naval shipworm helped bring about the Industrial Revolution
#2I didn't realize Boulton & Watt, a steam engine manufacturing firm founded in 1775, was a beneficiary of a war between Great Britain and Thirteen Colonies that also broke in 1775. Military-industrial complex indeed!
Re: The naval shipworm helped bring about the Industrial Revolution
#3More readable link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1344404814256504832.html
Re: The naval shipworm helped bring about the Industrial Revolution
#4Some of this was covered in Connections series.
Re: The naval shipworm helped bring about the Industrial Revolution
#5I didn't realize Boulton & Watt, a steam engine manufacturing firm founded in 1775, was a beneficiary of a war between Great Britain and Thirteen Colonies that also broke in 1775. Military-industrial complex indeed!
The Modern MIC might be a new concept for Americans, but some of the largest and most successful European companies have a history of starting off for conducting trade but rapidly engaging in warfare and everything that comes with that (eg the East India Company, which literally collected Tax from lands larger than England at certain times in its life). Modern engineering practice could not have existed without the funding from Warring nations, and so on. The Industrial Revolutions and many of the institutions and professions that we take for granted today could not have been possible if Nations didn’t spend so much resources making war on each other. It’s sobering but a fascinating perspective of human progress.
Re: The naval shipworm helped bring about the Industrial Revolution
#6Neat story, but god do I often hate the modern internet.
Who the hell thinks that Twitter is the right sort of medium for this type of information sharing? (Give me simple white pages of black barely formatted text and animated gifs any day of the week over this twitter abortion of story telling.)
Re: The naval shipworm helped bring about the Industrial Revolution
#7> References in Greek texts from the 4th century BC are IMO suggestive of early voyages to the coast of West Africa, the nearest navigable mangrove forests (unless shipworm managed to somehow get carried across the Sinai isthmus)
Simon Winchester discusses how Cape Bojador [1] was impassible until 1443 (in his book Atlantic [2]) so it is unlikely that early voyages reached any further south along the coast of West Africa. During Roman times there were indeed canals to the Red Sea [3] and a robust international trade system as outlined in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Bojador
[2] http://www.simonwinchester.com/atlantic
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_of_the_Pharaohs
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periplus_of_the_Erythraean_Sea
Re: The naval shipworm helped bring about the Industrial Revolution
#8More readable link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1344404814256504832.html
Thank you for this -- I don't understand why anyone would think a long string of tweets is a good way to communicate this kind of information.
Re: The naval shipworm helped bring about the Industrial Revolution
#9Neat story, but god do I often hate the modern internet. Who the hell thinks that Twitter is the right sort of medium for this type of information sharing? (Give me simple white pages of black barely formatted text and animated gifs any day of the week over this twitter abortion of story telling.)
I agree with you except about the animated gifs. Who wouldn't, at least on this extremely text-oriented site? But one goes to war with the internet one has.
Twitter is unique in its intense back-and-forthness and the opportunity to broadcast to a large audience, especially for anyone of prominence or standing. That plus network effects has made it the default for people who have an interesting line of thought to share.
That it's not the 'right' medium for this is related to why people do it anyway: the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The spontaneity of the platform makes it easy to reel off what one is thinking or has just figured out. To make a blog post would be more work and wouldn't reach nearly the audience.
Weaknesses and strengths are often conjoined like this. When something gets used in a way that it isn't particularly suited for, there's a lot of vitality in that—otherwise the activation energy wouldn't be enough to overcome the downside. It's interesting that this unsuitable medium gets by far the most usage for thinking out loud by influential people. The alternative is not a more suitable medium—it's not hearing about e.g. the historical influence of obscure clams in the first place.
I do think there's something to mourn, though. In the first years of Twitter the founders were incredible at following and adopting the inventions that the community itself came up with (e.g. hashtags) for developing the medium. That genius approach eventually died and got replaced with top-down design, which led to a mess. I assume this was crucifixion on the cross of growth-at-all-costs, but who can say. I hope I live to see the civilizational shift in which we start optimizing for quality rather than quantity. That will be interesting.
Re: The naval shipworm helped bring about the Industrial Revolution
#10I wonder which had more of an impact... this or the Spinning Wheel