Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
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Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
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Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
#2No post body was provided.
Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
#3> So why did it then take almost another half a century, even with the increasingly widespread understanding of atmospheric pressure and vacuums, for a widely-adopted and practical atmospheric engine like Thomas Savery’s to appear?
> The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked on thermometers, weather-glasses, egg incubators, solar-activated fountains, and perpetual motion machines. But because people so rarely try to improve or invent things, the low-hanging fruit can be left on the tree for decades or even centuries.
Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
#4> So why did it then take almost another half a century, even with the increasingly widespread understanding of atmospheric pressure and vacuums, for a widely-adopted and practical atmospheric engine like Thomas Savery’s to appear? > The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all…
I thought the other reason was the availability of cheap labor (including slavery).
Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
#5Often multiple inventors arrive at the same idea at almost the same time, for example Edison and Swan for the light bulb, Meucci and Bell (among others) for the telephone, Tesla and Marconi for radio, the Wrights and many others for the airplane etc. possibly because the technological and social level of society has reached a certain point in its development when the "time is ripe" for a given invention. As Charles Fort put it:
> A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.
Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
#6I think the reason is best described by Factorio.
Yes, with a lot of spaghetti belts and manual crafting, you can make late-stage products. But to do it well, in a way that transcends merely being able to make a handful of items, you need a huge underlying economy. You end up having to re-arrange your whole factory, or you need to clear new land, which means you need to spend some time on diversions like improved military.
Translated to the real world, it means you need to rearrange a large amount of the social system (slaves/serfdom) as well as creating markets for a bunch of inputs that build higher and higher in your tech tree.
Still a good question though, I don't mean to say things had to happen just as they did.
Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
#7So who uses that newsletter subscribe popup with no intuitive way to close it besides substack? Just so I know to avoid them.
[I know where to click and I know there are technical workarounds probably, I just don't want to give them my eyeballs.]
Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
#8Often multiple inventors arrive at the same idea at almost the same time, for example Edison and Swan for the light bulb, Meucci and Bell (among others) for the telephone, Tesla and Marconi for radio, the Wrights and many others for the airplane etc. possibly because the technological and social level of society has reached a certain point in its development when the "time is ripe" for a given invention. As Charles F…
Not sure I buy that. I've never found users (culture) knows what it wants next. In software, users will suggest incremental improvements but never a whole new tool.
I think it's steam-engine-time, when the steam engine arrives. And gets successfully marketed.
Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
#9The follow up was recently discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467
Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
#10This reminds me of James Burke Connections. That show often showed how many different and surprising dependencies there are on the path to any given invention. My favorite example is how the internal combustion engine needed an invention from perfume bottles to spray a good mist of fuel/air-mixture into the cylinder. Might have taken longer to invent ICE if that wasn't already readily available.
I really hope that someone remakes a modern version of Connections.