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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

#131

Post by bichiliad »

I'm reading a really good book on the history of steam power called "Fossil Capital"[0]. The thesis so far seems to be that access to — and need for — more portable energy like fossil fuels drove the ability to expand. This in turn induced more demand for energy as humans developed further and further away from places that traditionally provided energy in fixed places, like rivers that could power water wheels.

The book ties this into the roots of the idea of infinite growth, as well as the climate crisis. It's a little sad in that respect, but also genuinely fascinating if you like history.

[0]:https://www.versobooks.com/books/2002-fossil-capital

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

#132

Post by barry-cotter »

lettergram wrote: post #43
napier wrote: post #33

Quoted post unavailable.

Ah yes and during the enlightenment who led the charge? This is such a naive comment… look at what religious cultures used to do prior to the Rome converting or the Aztecs in the Americas — they’d literally sacrifice humans. That was the norm prior to the dark ages. During the dark ages, they developed a wealth of technology. The challenge more had to do with the plague, famines, raids from the nords / Muslims, etc A…

> prior to the Rome converting or the Aztecs in the Americas — they’d literally sacrifice humans.

Even if you would consider the Romans to engage in explicit ritual human sacrifice they just weren’t within five orders of magnitude of the Aztecs. We have less than ten attested instances of Roman human sacrifice ever. Human sacrifice was the irreducible core of the Aztec religion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_ancient_Rome#Hum...

> Human sacrifice in ancient Rome was rare but documented. After the Roman defeat at Cannae two Gauls and two Greeks were buried under the Forum Boarium, in a stone chamber "which had on a previous occasion [228 BC] also been polluted by human victims, a practice most repulsive to Roman feelings".[56] Livy avoids the word "sacrifice" in connection with this bloodless human life-offering; Plutarch does not. The rite was apparently repeated in 113 BC, preparatory to an invasion of Gaul. Its religious dimensions and purpose remain uncertain.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cul...

> What the Aztec priests were referring to was a cardinal Mesoamerican belief: that a great and continuing sacrifice by the gods sustains the Universe. A strong sense of indebtedness was connected with this worldview. Indeed, nextlahualli (debt-payment) was a commonly used metaphor for human sacrifice, and, as Bernardino de Sahagún reported, it was said that the victim was someone who "gave his service".

> Human sacrifice was in this sense the highest level of an entire panoply of offerings through which the Aztecs sought to repay their debt to the gods.

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

#133

Post by notahacker »

slightknack wrote: post #39
zabzonk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> quite a lot of mathematical development, plus considerable precision engineering Not sure the Wright brothers would be with you on this - neither were maths guys and their aircraft were hardly precision-built.

> He identified the four forces which act on a heavier-than-air flying vehicle: weight, lift, drag and thrust. [...] He also designed the first glider reliably reported to carry a human aloft. He correctly predicted that sustained flight would not occur until a lightweight engine was developed to provide adequate thrust and lift. The Wright brothers acknowledged his importance to the development of aviation. — https:…

> It's not every day you see an internal combustion engine on a kite.

Yup. The engine was more important than the understanding of the principles of propulsion too: even if the four forces had been identified by Aristotle, that wouldn't have been much use in achieving sustained powered flight to civilisations whose closest approximation of a propellor powered by a turbine engine was a waterwheel.

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

#134

Post by masswerk »

bambax wrote: post #127
masswerk wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would you want to use such a flimsy technology, if you have horses? There is no way an engine like this could outrun a lean and speedy chariot with two to four horses. Also, even a primitive mechanism like this may have encountered fatal problems with dirt, dust and sand. (Mind that steam locomotion was first tried for roads, which was a total failure because of the quality of roads, even in major city center…

That was answered in my comment? At first it would be much less useful than a horse, yes, but it would be so entertaining! And magical! Sell it to kings, make bets... Or accuse people of sorcery, have them burned...

Well, this is an application: sell it to the king, accuse him of sorcery, have him burned. Become king (and ride horses.) ;-)

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

#135

Post by barry-cotter »

ghaff wrote: post #96
qsort wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

They absolutely could if there was any political desire to allow temporary low skilled immigration. In practice this doesn’t seem to be compatible with democracy. Singapore is not a shining light of labour rights or democracy but their government does have to pay attention to public opinion which is why they use less migrant labor than the Gulf monarchies.

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

#136

Post by napier »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #88
napier wrote: post #33

Quoted post unavailable.

I'm not sure what you're implying here. First, are you equating "tech tree development" with pure engineering? Because that sounds like a reductionist view on history given that human advancement in thinking stretches far beyond technical / practical innovations. And that surely arbitrarly didn't stop between 500-1500AD just because the Roman Empire dissolved either. Second, taking a eurocentristic perspective is a f…

The thread title refers to the steam engine, and yes, I’m referring solely to mechanical engineering and by extension the scientific method. In no way intending to discuss or disparage the myriad achievements of other formerly extant cultures of the world that took different paths to different destinations.

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

#137

Post by Beltalowda »

a_bonobo wrote: post #22

Just 4 days ago Nature Genetics had a really cool perspective on why nobody else did the experiments on inheritance Gregor Mendel did: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01109-9

This seems interesting, but unfortunately I can't find the full text anywhere and I'm not about to pay $32 for an article.

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

#138

Post by qsort »

ghaff wrote: post #129
qsort wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very unlikely that slaves would be able to cover any present-day jobs except very menial service tasks. Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't even get as far as a taxi/truck driver, which is one of the least qualified jobs today.

Just because someone is born into poor circumstances without many options for upward mobility doesn't make them stupid. Furthermore, truck driver isn't a particularly low skill occupation. I couldn't drive an 18-wheeler. Can you? And something like taxi driving mostly seems low skill because most adults in industrialized society have been driving since they were relatively young.

It's not a reasonable interpretation of what I wrote that I'm implying they're stupid.

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

#139

Post by napier »

barry-cotter wrote: post #132
lettergram wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes and during the enlightenment who led the charge? This is such a naive comment… look at what religious cultures used to do prior to the Rome converting or the Aztecs in the Americas — they’d literally sacrifice humans. That was the norm prior to the dark ages. During the dark ages, they developed a wealth of technology. The challenge more had to do with the plague, famines, raids from the nords / Muslims, etc A…

> prior to the Rome converting or the Aztecs in the Americas — they’d literally sacrifice humans. Even if you would consider the Romans to engage in explicit ritual human sacrifice they just weren’t within five orders of magnitude of the Aztecs. We have less than ten attested instances of Roman human sacrifice ever. Human sacrifice was the irreducible core of the Aztec religion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religi…

Interesting points, although I’m not sure what they have to do with European history or invention of the steam engine. I can only presume you’ve benefited from a level of liberal arts education that I sorely lack.

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

#140

Post by notahacker »

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #76
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...

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…

Slaves might explain lack of interest in labour saving technology in general, but the steam engine in particular mostly excels at stuff which slaves couldn't do (high speed transport) or enabled production processes particularly well suited to slave labour (textile mills vs craft-textile production). The UK's Industrial Revolution began with slave-picked cotton being spun on machines attended by abundant unskilled labour and powered by watermills, a technology the Romans (and many other non-industrial civilisations) exploited with smaller scale machinery.

The Romans valued research and engineering highly enough to be way ahead of both contemporary and successor civilisations in many aspects of it and have people willing to document their pure research into steam (which as the article acknowledges, turned out to be at best orthogonal to the pure research that got us pistons and condensing engines), they just didn't have all the intermediate inventions like high quality iron, rail lines and spinning jennies to make large scale use of steam that the British did 1500 years later, the same level of demand and competition for new products etc etc. But the abundance of cheap labour was something they actually had in common with the British Empire; it's just the British Empire used it differently (and displaced even more cheap labour by killing off craft industries as a result)

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