Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

Remember, 'integrated' meant initially just 'more than one component'. It would start with poster-sized wiring diagrams, switch elements, photosensitive spots etc. As it got smaller and more circuit elements were added the math may have progressed with it.

It’s not discussed in the article, but the magic of steam in the 16th century was expressly investigated by Robert Fludd. As a mystical philosopher, he was attacked by the more scientific types of his time. This probably set back the steam engine. But clearly, he was really on to something!! Don’t discount the weird, I guess, is the takeaway.

Could have used a rocket? They've been around for ages.

It seems to me that for flight the construction materials (silk, bamboo, string, glue - what the early WW1-era aircraft were made from) and the propulsion (solid-fuel rocket) have been around for over a thousand years.

However, this blundering about approach only works if almost anything could have worked and so you just keep trying until you hit upon it.

You can discover that eating one of the dozen types of plants growing on the hillside nearby treats toothache without any overarching theory about how that could work, just try eating stuff and see what happens - but you aren't going to invent the LED lamp this way.

Example: When we put a cable on the bottom of the ocean these days it's optical fibre rather than electrical. But, even with optical fibre, even the best stuff we can make, this will need amplifying for long distances or it's pretty awful. One thing you could do would be to choose reconstructing amplifiers when making the cable. So e.g. you decide this cable is Protocol X at 100Gb/s, you make amplifiers which can reconstruct a Protocol X signal at 100Gb/s and "boost" it, splice those in along the distance of the cable, and drop the whole lot into the ocean. However, somebody is going to invent 500Gb/s Protocol X+ and if you want to upgrade you will need to send teams down to the ocean floor to replace those amplifiers. Ouch.

In principle individual photons are travelling along the fibre, and physics doesn't say we can't just have one photon in => two photons out to boost this without needing to reconstruct the signal at all. There should be some way to build a device which does this, an Optical Amplifier, and it would be OK if this is quite expensive since it's saving you that enormous expense by allowing you to upgrade to 500 Gb/s X+ or to 10Tb/s XXX or whatever other future protocols just involve sending photons down a fibre without trying to upgrade equipment at the bottom of the ocean. But... how?

Turns out scientists can guess exactly how that should work if it's possible, and then direct the experiments, trying out only the handful of things which actually might work instead of just groping about at random. My alma mater was one of the places figuring out how to do this in the 1980s, they were still really proud of that when I studied there a decade later. Erbium Doped Fibre Amplifiers are the result.

Not sure what conclusion the author will come to as an answer to the question in the title (part III is still to come). But if it doesn't include the liberation of inventors (i.e. the protection of intellectual property through patents) and the legal framework for "anyone" to profit from their inventions then I'll be disappointed.

As his story indicates so far it was not for the want of ingenuity that the industrial revolution did not occur before, but the social framework for transforming the society in the way that the industrial revolution did was simply not at hand. Primarily because the decisionmakers that held the power were tied to another mode of production, usually involving fleecing peasants.

That the industrial revolution needed the steam engine goes without saying. But the steam engine without the industrial revolution was a mere party trick.