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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

#261

Post by mike_hock »

legitster wrote: post #174
legitster wrote: post #145

Environmental collapse and the price of steel! I think people forget just how expensive metal was. Carpenters would lock up their saws because the blades were so precious. People knew how to make cheaper steel from coal for a long time, but it was regarded as an inferior product and avoided. However, charcoal is labor intensive stuff to collect. By the 1700s, some cities in Europe had so depleted their available fore…

Imagine if you were living in this period - England was constantly at war, the trees had all run out, and quality metal was nowhere to be found. You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress. Also, if we wanted to go back even further, the true roots are probably the Enlightenment. Before Wilkinson and Watt and Darby could think to develop technology…

> You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

So which great invention is just around the corner now?

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

#262

Post by ttyprintk »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #59

I've often thought we could have had integrated circuits shortly after the invention of photography. 150 years earlier! It would make an interesting steampunk world with steam and hydraulics and CPUs.

You might find these comments interesting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17371343

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

#263

Post by dTal »

legitster wrote: post #196
bko wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is anything today that would need to come down (or up) in price to kick off a revolution. I've heard some argue that was decentralized payments online (cryptocurrency) but that hasn't led to much outside of speculation IMO. The other thing I heard was battery technology. Just recently a podcast with Matthew Ball, he makes the argument that AR/VR/metaverse technology needs a breakthrough (in part) in…

I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at it. Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money. LCD screens did not produce as good of a picture quali…

>I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at it.

I like this lens, although I'd stop short of saying it's "most" technology revolutions. Rather, it's a counterweight to the common perspective that revolutions are made of radical novelty; the reality is that both forces are important.

My favorite example of this is the home computer. When they came out, they barely did anything; in a world where a "computer" already meant (in some cases) a nice Unix system with editors and compilers and preemptive multitasking and all the sorts of things we still take for granted, they were more like Arduinos. Absolute rubbish. And yet, university researchers abandoned their mainframes in droves to do their data processing on silly little home PCs. Why? Because crappy though they were, they represented freedom. You didn't have to plead to be allowed time on one, or worse hand over your batch FORTRAN program on a giant stack of punched cards (don't drop them) to some overworked secretary in "data processing" and wait a whole business day to get your printout of "error on line 5". Buy a microcomputer, and your allocated time was 24h/day, and your data turnaround was instant. You could even write your thesis on one - bye bye typewriter!

Worse (i.e. cheaper) is better.

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

#264

Post by [deleted] »

OJFord wrote: post #154
visiblink wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of the word dependencies in this context is perfect. Untangling the history of technological innovation is an adventure into dependency hell.

It could be a pretty nice 'coffee table book': a walk through history of inventions, with the dependencies of each one listed (to one or maybe two degrees only of course). You could pick it up anywhere, read forwards; back from something specific (or forward, if you made it a doubly linked list?); or back from whatever 'the end' would be.

[deleted]

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

#265

Post by andrepd »

clarionbell wrote: post #94
andrepd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They = Christians in general, not a monk in particular.

After the proclamation of Christianity as the official religion of the empire, it took only a few years/decades before Christians were on a full-blown iconoclastic campaign of destruction of so-called "pagan" religion, and all non-Christian culture in general. This meant murder and forced conversions, but also destruction of patrimony: libraries burned, temples razed, schools closed, statues smashed, etc.

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

#266

Post by BurningFrog »

bluGill wrote: post #222
BurningFrog wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is more that you can't give a slave a truck with a tank of gas and expect to see either again.

Sure you can - so long as you have a police force that will check up on things once in a while. Or at least you have convinced the slaves that the police force will catch them and life will be worse after they are caught.

Up to a point, sure.

But I think there is a point when it makes more sense to just pay the guy a wage, instead of running a big expensive police state controlling everything...

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

#267

Post by betwixthewires »

bko wrote: post #178
legitster wrote: post #145

Environmental collapse and the price of steel! I think people forget just how expensive metal was. Carpenters would lock up their saws because the blades were so precious. People knew how to make cheaper steel from coal for a long time, but it was regarded as an inferior product and avoided. However, charcoal is labor intensive stuff to collect. By the 1700s, some cities in Europe had so depleted their available fore…

I wonder if there is anything today that would need to come down (or up) in price to kick off a revolution. I've heard some argue that was decentralized payments online (cryptocurrency) but that hasn't led to much outside of speculation IMO. The other thing I heard was battery technology. Just recently a podcast with Matthew Ball, he makes the argument that AR/VR/metaverse technology needs a breakthrough (in part) in…

While I don't think that cryptocurrency is about to kick off a technological revolution on par with the industrial revolution, it is important to note that the technological advancements that led to here weren't readily apparent when they were invented either, except to slightly zany visionaries. The invention of the automobile for instance was seen for a few decades as a rich person's toy. People usually have small minded views of the implications of new technology, because we look at them through the lenses of the world we live in now.

So of course cryptocurrency hasn't led to much beyond speculation. Not to say that it will lead to anything more, but it would be erroneous to discount that possibility off hand. At the very least IMO it will lead to a social revolution, of what magnitude I don't know.

Also I'd note, the industrial revolution really came to the dirty masses with the assembly line, not the invention of the steam engine or the automobile. So analogously with regard to cryptocurrencies, maybe they are the car in this scenario, and the real revolutionary technological advancement that leverages them has yet to be invented. Or, maybe not.

Personally, I think that much like the apparently dire state of the world at the dawn of the industrial revolution led directly to it, the things we think now of as symptoms of Armageddon are probably going to play a large and in hindsight constructive role in whatever comes next. Maybe climate change becomes a crash course in terraforming, or genetic and biome engineering. Trying to predict what happens next is a fools errand but these are fun possibilities to think about.

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

#268

Post by grog454 »

legitster wrote: post #174
legitster wrote: post #145

Environmental collapse and the price of steel! I think people forget just how expensive metal was. Carpenters would lock up their saws because the blades were so precious. People knew how to make cheaper steel from coal for a long time, but it was regarded as an inferior product and avoided. However, charcoal is labor intensive stuff to collect. By the 1700s, some cities in Europe had so depleted their available fore…

Imagine if you were living in this period - England was constantly at war, the trees had all run out, and quality metal was nowhere to be found. You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress. Also, if we wanted to go back even further, the true roots are probably the Enlightenment. Before Wilkinson and Watt and Darby could think to develop technology…

> And they needed double-entry bookkeeping! Perhaps one of the most underrated human inventions of all. Your wealth was no longer determined by how much stuff physically hoard, but by a record of entitlements.

Yet when you bring up a certain recent improvement to records of entitlement around here, you tend to get crucified. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#269

Post by dr_dshiv »

Arguably, the steam engine is a form of artificial intelligence. At least with Watt’s engine, the “governor” plays an essential information processing role in modulating the pressure. Sensing and reacting to keep a measured value in an optimal range is pretty much the definition of AI (see Norvig’s definition of intelligence). Autopilot is another example of non-computational AI (autopilot was invented in 1914).

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

#270

Post by Salgat »

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).

Exactly. This was a materials science problem rather than a limitation of coming up with a design for a steam engine.
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