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

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

#91

Post by scythe »

josefx wrote: post #41
napier wrote: post #33

Quoted post unavailable.

Interesting, how did the Roman Empire suppress advanced civilizations developing in China and America? Assuming that Asian cultures outside of the influence of the Roman Empire already had nuclear weapons, how did the Empire survive their incursions? When do you presume will the descendants of advanced south American cultures return from Mars to punish us for what we did to the environment?

The Americans were disconnected from advancements in the rest of the world, and even worse, from each other. Ancient Greece inherited iron smelting from Anatolia and formal legal codes from Babylon. The Islamic development of chemistry benefited greatly from the Roman development of glass, and the Italians learned math from Fibonacci who was schooled in Algeria. The printing press was first developed in Korea and may have influenced the developments all the way across Eurasia by Gutenberg.

But to this day, there is no land transport connection between North and South America! Corn eventually made it from South to North America, but the potato was stuck in Peru until the Spaniards showed up on very nice boats.

China was doing great until Mongke Khan showed up.

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

#92

Post by stareatgoats »

Thorentis wrote: post #87
stareatgoats wrote: post #79

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…

I reject the idea that patent and IP law would have made these developments occur sooner. In fact, I blame the slow down in technological development partly on patent and IP law. You think the rapid development seen during the industrial revolution could have happened if people were at litigious as they are now? The ability to create derivative inventions is essential to progress.

Your perspective on patents seems colored by the relative recent advent of patent trolls and the use of litigation to stifle innovation and competition. I suggest you look at the situation in England around 300 years ago and compare to the feudal system that was the rule elsewhere at the time - everything had to be approved by the king or the nobility, who had vested interests in land owning and serf systems. This social order was the real inhibitor of technological progress that England was the first country the liberate itself from.

Laws that protected the IP rights of inventors were absolutely crucial to that process.

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

#93

Post by clarionbell »

napier wrote: post #33

Quoted post unavailable.

Wow, you should present your findings to historians. I'm sure they enjoy a good laugh.

But seriously, I know that you have been fed this line by various popular media, most of us were, and I don't blame you for it. Still, you should try to think about it a bit.

Like, how many of those "RESET BUTTON" cases can you name? When they happened? How come rest of the world didn't make any separate progress? How is it that those same zealots founded almost all universities in Europe etc..

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

#94

Post by clarionbell »

andrepd wrote: post #35
napier wrote: post #33

Quoted post unavailable.

Absolutely. Christian monks in particular were a force of strong obscurantism, from the 300s when they gained power in the Roman Empire and for the millennium that followed. The picture we have in our minds of the scholar monk copying the Greek classics was only really true starting with the 1200s, not earlier.

Monks gained power in Roman empire? Can you name some?

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

#95

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

cletus wrote: post #72

I looked in Part 1 and 2 and didn't see this point raised, which is a shame because it's one of my favorite stories of intertwined technological process. An engine requires piston that move within a bore. To create the pressure that process has to be precise. This process was perfected in making cannons. Why I like this story is that it embodies the unintended consequences that underlies so much of progress, like Ale…

> An engine requires piston that move within a bore. To create the pressure that process has to be precise. This process was perfected in making cannons.

There is speculation that the techniques for casting these cannons, was actually perfected in making church bells. Basically, if you turn a church bell on its side you have a primitive cannon. This may be one of the reasons that Europe was able to harness gunpowder more effectively and climb to dominance.

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

#96

Post by ghaff »

qsort wrote: post #85
qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why did it not win? The answer. Slaves. Slaves in the mines, slaves in the home, slave driving the rowboats and all services. Labour was cheap and plenty, also intelligent - with entrenched "automation" like this, no inventions are actually needed. Which goes to show, that technology stratifyng society strangles itself, by producing a servant class outcompeting all technology. Give it a hundred years and the "natu…

Isn't that kind of the other way around? Ignoring the obvious moral question, in a primarily agrarian economy slave labor is useful because it's relatively easy to control and there is no need for specialization. OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you could have them.

>OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you could have them.

Really? Leaving aside the moral issues most associated with slavery specifically, there is a huge demand in modern industrialized society for all sorts of low cost human labor. If middle class-ish people in the West could hire more people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour many would absolutely do so.

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

#97

Post by qubex »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #38
zabzonk wrote: post #2

What I have always wondered about is why heavier-than-air flight was not invented earlier? Or put it this way: when was the folded paper (or your material here) airplane invented, and by whom? Then, why not make it bigger?

What amazes me about heavier than air flight is that it was invented all over the planet at virtually the same time by all kinds of unrelated people who had no connection or communication with or little knowledge of one another. Sure here in the US we ethnocentrically recite the Kitty Hawk event of the Wright Brothers as if it appeared in a vacuum out of nowhere. But in reality, heavier than air flight was invented s…

It’s pretty common that “breakthrough inventions” are arrived-at pretty much simultaneously by apparently disparate sources at approximately the same moment in time.

Consider the telephone, which is attributed to Alexander Graham Bell in most of the world and to Antonio Meucci in my native Italy. Or radio, which is broadly attributed to Marconi or Tesla. In hindsight it seems like one person triumphed upon others, but really if you look at it from their point of view they work with urgency and secrecy because they perceive themselves to be in neck-to-neck competition with their cohorts. They perceive their technological environ very differently from how we do ex post facto.

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

#98

Post by Ekaros »

terhechte wrote: post #40

The Greek philosoper Hero of Alexandria actually invented something close to a steam engine in the 1st century BE [1]. Whenever I think about "obvious" inventions which happened quite late in our civilization, I remember "The road not taken", a fantastic short story that plays with this idea. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...

I wonder what are the characteristics of that sort of engine. Like torque for one? How much power scaled up it could generate? How would you connect sensibly and efficiently anything to it? How to supply water to it for long enough duty cycle? Would this new gold water have effect on efficiency? etc.

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

#99

Post by ghaff »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #58

There's a big gap between 'inventing' a steam engine as a diagram in a book or table top novelty and physically creating one that can do more work than a horse or two, can work continuously, and is safe to use. The technical advances of Newcomen and Watt also coincided with the ability to create boilers and pressure chambers that didn't explode (too often).

When we're talking about industrial revolution type of stuff, there is a whole train of dependencies that I suspect would have been difficult to speed up a lot. Maybe if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed though you could make arguments both ways given the Roman Empire as a slave society didn't necessarily need a lot of labor saving devices.

The genuine innovations that mostly just needed ideas and the will to put them into practice were probably more in realms like health/medicine. Even a lot of science, your hypothetical time traveler might have been "right" but in many cases would have no way to prove it.

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

#100

Post by mannykannot »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #58

There's a big gap between 'inventing' a steam engine as a diagram in a book or table top novelty and physically creating one that can do more work than a horse or two, can work continuously, and is safe to use. The technical advances of Newcomen and Watt also coincided with the ability to create boilers and pressure chambers that didn't explode (too often).

That is true, but I don't think there is much evidence for people imagining steam engines for doing useful work prior to Thomas Savery (update: Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont appears to have preceded him by almost a century.) Admittedly, absence of evidence does not settle the issue, but AFAIK Leonardo never sketched one, even though he did propose a steam cannon. If he had conceived of a rotary steam engine, or the idea was 'in the air', how could he have resisted the appeal of a horseless carriage?

One technical point: Jerónimo's and Savery's pumps used pressurized steam, but Newcomen and Watt used it at atmospheric pressure. The latter, at least, was dead set against using pressurized steam on account of the risks it posed given the technology of the day (a well-founded concern, as it turned out.)

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